“Gangnam Style” passed two billion views this week. The Economist puts in perspective the time spent watching the music video:
At 4:12 minutes, that equates to more than 140m hours, or more than 16,000 years. What other achievements were forgone in the time spent watching a sideways shuffle and air lasso?
Beinart detects one:
Even as public tolerance for most other forms of bigotry declines, hostility to Muslims has actually grown, despite the winding down of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the rise may be partially due to the end of those wars. After 9/11, George W. Bush told Americans that although we were fighting “bad Muslims” (al-Qaeda) “good Muslims”—who constituted the large majority—would embrace our invasions.
It hasn’t worked out that way. My hunch is that faced with the realization that many Iraqis and Afghans hated America’s occupation of their countries, Democrats have been more likely to blame the U.S. for starting those wars in the first place. According to polls, large majorities of Democrats now see both Iraq and Afghanistan as mistakes. Republicans don’t. For Republicans, I suspect, America’s problems in Iraq and Afghanistan say less about us than about them. They prove that Bush was wrong: Most Muslims really are our enemy. Otherwise, why would they oppose our efforts to make them free.
The agency is looking for an intrepid software developer to create a sarcasm detector for social media. Mary Beth Quirk sums it up thus:
Basically, the Secret Service would love it if someone would explain the Internet so it doesn’t go around arresting sarcastic people with itchy social media trigger fingers.
Another thing that sounds a bit weird?
The software will have the “functionality to send notifications to users.” Because that wouldn’t freak someone out to get a popup window from the Secret Service just being like, “Hey, did you mean that like, for real? Or are you being sarcastic? Thanks, juuust checking in!”
But Jesse Singal doubts they’ll come up with anything:
One study from 2011 (PDF) used tweets that had been specifically hashtagged #sarcasm or #sarcastic, stripped those hashtags, and then dumped them into a virtual pile with a bunch of other straightforwardly positive and negative tweets. At their best performance, the computer programs the researchers used could only correctly separate sarcastic from non-sarcastic tweets about 65 percent of the time — and this was in a rather controlled setting.
Bing Liu, a University of Illinois at Chicago computer scientist who authored a book about sentiment analysis (that is, extracting emotional context from text), expressed skepticism that anyone yet has a good handle on this problem. “I am not aware that anyone has a satisfactory algorithm or system that can detect sarcastic sentences,” he said in an email. And the stuff the Secret Service would be looking at would be a particularly uphill battle: “In discussions about politics [sarcasm] is fairly common and very hard to deal with because it often requires some background knowledge which computers are not good at.”
Star Wars could just be two hours of Lupita Nyong’o holding a lightsaber like it was an Oscar. pic.twitter.com/HwKBlVYPFF
— MTV(other) (@MTVother) June 2, 2014
Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave Oscar winner) and Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones) have been cast in the next Star Wars movie:
That’s hardly gender parity — with Carrie Fisher and newcomer Daisy Ridley the only other females currently announced — but it’s certainly a substantial and necessary improvement for a traditionally boys-heavy franchise entering the post Hunger Games universe. Thus far, the only significant female Star Wars characters in six episodes have been a princess and a queen — but Abrams has a solid reputation for strong, well-drawn female characters, from Felicity to Alias to Fringe.
Alyssa is thrilled:
Beyond the simple joy of getting to see Nyong’o and Christie together on the big screen, there is also something exciting about the fact that these particular actresses are taking their first steps into this particular world.
Because Nyong’o made her international reputation in a socially significant historical drama, she easily could have been stuck there, relegated to playing characters whose experience of abuse is their most salient characteristic. That she is joining “Star Wars” instead, and has optioned Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel “Americanah,” a contemporary story about Nigerian immigrants who return home, suggests that Nyong’o will not let herself be limited to stories about the American past. Instead, she will stake out territory for herself that stretches from a galaxy far, far away to a part of the present with which many American audiences are unfamiliar.
This makes Nyong’o the first black woman to appear in a Star Wars film, while the entire franchise has only featured two black characters (Lando Calrissian and Mace Windu). Alex Abad-Santos notes why there’s no excuse for this:
There aren’t any rules or constrictions about race or gender in galaxies far, far away. And at the heart of it, Star Wars revolves around an allegory about an outsider.
Other sci-fi/fantasy/superhero franchises have traditionally challenged the way we’ve thought about and perceived race. Perhaps there’s no better example than Star Wars’s rival franchise: Star Trek. Characters like Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) and Sulu (George Takei) contributed to a vision of the future in which positions of power aren’t solely held by whites. Star Wars, on the other hand, has more ewoks with speaking roles in Return of the Jedi than it does black characters with speaking roles in the entire franchise.
Update from a reader:
You’ll probably get a deluge of emails from Star Wars geeks, but I hope I’m not halfway down the pile. There is at least one other black character in Star Wars: Quarsh Panaka, from Episode 1. He was Padme Amidala’s head of security. He’s a minor, supporting character, but he does have a speaking role.
Another:
Lupita Nyong’o won’t be “the first black woman to appear in a Star Wars film.” That honor goes to Femi Taylor, who portrayed the green-skinned Oola in Return of the Jedi. An understandable mistake!
Corn examines them:
Hillary Clinton’s shift from declaimer of Big Finance shenanigans to collaborator with Goldman—the firm has donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation—prompts an obvious question: Can the former secretary of state cultivate populist cred while hobnobbing with Goldman and pocketing money from it and other Wall Street firms? Last year, she gave two paid speeches to Goldman Sachs audiences. (Her customary fee is $200,000 a speech.) …
If Hillary does decide to seek a return to the White House, can she straddle the line? Assail the excesses of Wall Street piracy and tout the necessity of economic fair play yet still accept the embrace, generosity, and meeting rooms of Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street players? During her speech, she offered a good summation of populism, remarking “working with my husband and daughter at our foundation, our motto is ‘We’re all in this together,’ which we totally believe.” Yet her association with Goldman might cause some to wonder how firmly she holds this belief—and how serious she is about reining in those robber barons.
Judis, for one, doesn’t foresee a populist uprising anytime soon:
Why did movements against economic inequality flourish in the past, but not now? Some people on the left blame the President. If only Obama had taken a stronger stand against what Theodore Roosevelt called “the malefactors of great wealth,” the logic goes, he could have roused the country to action and prevented the rise of the Tea Party. That argument seemed persuasive to me four years ago, but no longer. If you compare the circumstances in which the older challenges to inequality took place with those now, you discover that something important has been missing and would have been missing regardless of whether Obama had sounded the tocsin. For all the talk today about stagnant wages and the long-term unemployed, today’s foot soldiers of a movement remain significantly more invested in the status quo than those who embraced populist agitators Sockless Jerry Simpson or Huey Long.
As part of a $60 billion federal aid package for states hit by 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, New York and New Jersey are getting nearly $1 billion to protect their coastlines, particularly in and around Manhattan. Katie Valentine looks at where that money is going:
The $920 million is being distributed to resilience projects that were decided upon through a federal competition called Rebuild by Design. The competition awarded money to six projects, with the largest chunk going to a project called “the Big U,” which aims to build a 10-mile protective barrier around lower Manhattan. The point of the barrier, which will be composed of levees and berms, will be to protect the region from storm surge and flooding, but the project’s creators — architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group — are also focusing on the utility and aesthetics of the wall, factoring in greenspace and protective walls that would be “decorated by neighborhood artists” into their proposal. …
Another of the winning Rebuild by Design projects will install breakwaters, or partially submerged barriers, off the south shore of Staten Island.
The “Living Breakwaters” will dull the severity of storm surge and create new habitat for fish, oysters and lobsters. The proposal also plans on building a network of “water hubs” on the shore near the breakwaters. These would act as recreational parks, providing opportunities for kayaking and other activities in the calm water created by the breakwaters, along with providing space for birdwatching and outdoor classrooms and labs.
Justin Davidson breaks down how much of that cash is going to each project:
The keeper of the purse strings was Shaun Donovan, the Obama administration’s housing secretary and Sandy reconstruction czar, who recently became budget chief — and it was Donovan who popped up yesterday to announce the awards: $355 million for those lower Manhattan berms, designed by the Danish architecture firm BIG and its partners; $230 million for a full package of strategies to protect Hoboken, from a team led by the Dutch firm OMA; $60 million for those Staten Island reefs; $20 million for a plan to safeguard the Hunts Point Market — and so on.
Even with all that promised money, pushing some of these projects closer to reality won’t be easy. In Hoboken, public funds will need to leverage a much larger pile of private investment, which makes the plan vulnerable to economic fluctuations. The Manhattan project, a multi-stage piece of green riverside infrastructure, will mean whipping together a fractious choir of bureaucrats, community boards, the Army Corps of Engineers, activists, obstructionists, NIMBYites, and environmentalists. Still, Henk Ovink, the tireless Dutch water management expert who runs the program, claims to relish the obstacles.
(Video of the “Big U” via Rebuild by Design)
An Oregon school district is providing prophylactics to sixth-graders:
Gervais is a town of about 2,500 people north of Salem, near Woodburn. Superintendent Rick Hensel said he and the board are concerned about teen pregnancy because nine students got pregnant this year, including one middle-school girl. That added up to about 5 percent of the girls in grades six through 12 in the small school district.
Marcotte endorses the plan:
The fear, of course, is that obtaining a condom will inspire kids to go looking for sex, much like discovering the ring of power sent Frodo on a multimovie trek to Mordor. But while it’s easy to overrate the erotic powers of a condom in theory, an extensive research project involving nearly 10,000 women and teenage girls in St. Louis found that giving women access to free contraception did not compel them to seek out new sexual partners. It did, however, significantly lower the rates of unintended childbirth and abortion. The American Academy of Pediatrics concurs, arguing that while condom access does not increase rates of sexual activity, it does increase rates of condom use for kids who do have sex.
Several hearing-impaired readers share their stories:
I read your thoughtful piece about transgender issues and Laverne Cox and then scrolled down and see “The Dilemma of Deafness.” I actually said out loud, “Nooo!”
The first part that made me say that: “Ellie could join their world, the hearing world, if she received cochlear implants.” The post does go on to say that “implants don’t work perfectly,” but that’s an understatement at best. They’re wildly variable. And that is frequently where the resistance comes in, rather than the common notion that deaf people would just prefer to be deaf.
For work, I keep an eye on any news related to deafness. So I see a whole lot of those cochlear implant activation and miracle hearing aid stories. They often have something like, “And he could hear the birds!” That sentence has an obvious translation; people who can hear read it and think that the deaf person can hear, you know, birds. The trilling and chirping, the lovely musicality and cheer that is birdsong. Wow, that’s awesome! Technology is the best.
But I’ve had a very active interest in this subject for a long time – I lost my hearing at age 13 – and whenever this comes up in a conversation I press further. What does that mean, exactly, to “hear the birds”?
For example, one person I talked to told me that she was laying in bed one morning, turned on her cochlear implant, and heard this horrible racket. She was alarmed and woke up her (hearing) husband, who listened and said he didn’t hear anything weird. Yet the racket persisted! Loud, annoying, like some sort of broken machinery … how could her husband not hear it? This went on for a while until they figured out she was hearing the birds outside.
She was thrilled – she could hear the birds! And that’s definitely a reliable use for cochlear implants: hearing noise, knowing when something is making a sound. They can be really good for knowing when a car is coming, for example.
But they are simply not the equivalent of glasses. When you have terrible vision, and you see a tree as a green undifferentiated mass, and then you put on your new glasses and suddenly you can see each individual leaf, it’s amazing and wonderful and what you’re seeing is equivalent to what someone with perfect vision can see.
With a cochlear implant, it’s activated and the green undifferentiated mass may stay a green undifferentiated mass. Or it may be a pulsing, neon-green mass that hurts your eyes. Or it may even have leaves – just about 50 times bigger than regular leaves, and black. Or it may be a pretty good approximation of an actual tree, but it just will not be the same tree that other people see. So when you see things like, “He could hear birds!” or “She could hear water!”, please keep that in mind.
Another sighs, “Why are some members of the Deaf community making this an either/or choice? (For that matter, why is the hearing community?)”:
I have experienced “hearingism” by this faction of the Deaf culture because I am late deafened and spent much of my life in the hearing world. Having experienced both worlds, I know for a fact that, as unfair as it is, the inability to hear and understand speech negatively impacts an individual’s ability to find and maintain gainful employment, get promotions, and receive critical information that affects one’s health and safety.
I love American Sign Language, but I have become hesitant to work on improving it because of I’ve experienced ASL snobbishness. We cochlear implant wearers can be the bridge group that strengthens the awareness of ASL in the hearing world, but this will not happen if the ASL Deaf extremists take an openly hostile stance.
The reality is this: the vast majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents. Most of these parents will, for the reasons I mentioned, choose to implant their children. They want their offspring to have every opportunity for success in the world. But here is the catch, which many in the Deaf community do not seem to grasp: Cochlear implant recipients are deaf! We will not, at least in the near future, be true “hearing people.” Reach out to us, Deaf community; embrace us; fully share your expressive and unique language and forgive us our often clumsy attempts at expressing ourselves when we do sign.
In my opinion, the hostile attitude towards cochlear implants and those who have them gains nothing and will pave the way for the extinction of ASL and Deaf culture.
Another takes a darker view:
I am completely deaf in one ear and a bit impaired in the other; nonetheless, I have always managed to function in the hearing world. My state has a combined deaf/hard-of-hearing state agency (woefully underfunded) on which I served as a volunteer board member for several years. I encountered this “deaf culture” thinking early and often, and it still perplexes me.
Sure, folks who are deaf have nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of, and their creation of a “deaf culture” is not only natural, but surely a source of happiness and community for so very many. But the truth is that deafness is a profound disability. We evolved hearing for vital reasons, as have nearly all animals. If we could cure all deafness tomorrow, would we not, even if “deaf culture” disappeared as a consequence?
The biggest tragedy that I encountered during my service was when a deaf couple would have a deaf baby because of a shared genetic defect, and then deliberately choose not to give the helpless baby a cochlear implant so that he or she could grow up deaf. I found it appalling. Language acquisition with a cochlear implant is like all language acquisition – easier for babies and small children than for adolescents or adults. So the parents who deny their babies this opportunity to live a hearing life are making an essentially irreversible decision. To deny that opportunity to one’s own child strikes me as the most foolish sort of pride, and perhaps even spite.
In an analysis of autocratic exits since 1948, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz find that popular revolts have become much more common than coups and tend to have better outcomes:
The proportion of autocrats ousted via coup — which accounted for as much as half of all autocrat ousters in the 1960s and ‘70s, for example — has fallen to less than 10 percent in the last decade. Revolts have now overtaken coups as the most common way in which autocrats exit from power.
So why does this trend matter? The way that an autocrat exits office affects the political trajectory of a country. The underwhelming performance of democracy in the wake of the Arab Awakening and pessimism about Ukraine’s future after President Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster have led some to claim that people-powered revolutions are overrated. While it is true that autocratic ousters lead to democratization only 20 percent of the time, our research shows that the prospects for democracy are actually highest when ousters occur via revolt.
These findings, they argue, have implications for how the West should go about supporting democratization:
In the past, the West has worked with political opposition or local democracy advocates, including by publicly backing opposition movements to enhance their domestic legitimacy (as was the course in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, in South Korea under Syngman Rhee, and in Chile under Augusto Pinochet). This strategy may have limited applicability in today’s environment. By offering overt support for the political opposition in many autocracies, Western countries would risk undermining local pro-democracy efforts.
Instead, the United States will have to pay more attention to public sentiment in autocratic countries. It must put forth greater effort to neutralize anti-Western attitudes and frame U.S. cooperation with autocracies in ways that highlight the benefits to the local population. Another effective strategy would be to leverage the rising threat of the masses through indirect engagement. For example, sustained international media attention to regime abuses increases the likelihood that autocrats will avoid actions that could breed public discontent or elicit domestic backlash.
In addition, autocrats are likely to be attuned to the public perception of their legitimacy, which, even in autocracies, is largely shaped by citizens’ views of procedural fairness. Efforts to publicize government failures to comply with their own legal system, to track the unjust application of laws (including the use of tax collectors or health inspectors to shut down the opposition), or to criticize new legislation that threatens domestic rights could be particularly effective.
(Photo: A protester displays a defaced portrait of ousted president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali outside the Tunisian prime ministers office on January 24, 2011 in Tunis, Tunisia. Protesters from the countryside and the hamlet of Sidi Bouzid, the town where the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ started, walked through the night to descend on the prime minister’s office, where they tore down razor wire barricades. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
Citing the work of the French artist JR, Julian Stallabrass offers a highbrow defense of the selfie:
It would be easy to slip into seeing the instantly shared photographic self-portrait, along with snaps of things bought and consumed, as a register of a complete surrender to commercial image culture: the preening necessary to emulate commodified beauty ideals, the apeing of celebrities, the internalising of values of professional self-presentation, the erasure of experience and memory through an obsession with moment-to-moment recording, and the distribution of the results on websites that mine images and metadata for commercial value.
Yet the daily practice of photography gives people detailed knowledge about the way standard images of beauty and fame are produced; they learn considerable sophistication in the making of images and scepticism about their effects. The artifice of commercial imagery is understood through practical emulation. Most selfies are pastiche and many tip into parody. With this increase in awareness potentially comes a shift in power: from the paparazzi to their prey; and from the uncles, corporate and otherwise, to their nieces and nephews.
Despite appearances, the digital image is much more complex than a snapshot: it is an amalgam of processed visual data, descriptive tags and the particular social network into which it is launched. One group of activists in Pakistan has used JR-style portraits of children, greatly magnified and laid out on the ground, to bring home to drone operators that they are killing individuals. When circumstances allow, the digital image can swiftly be turned to more radical uses than recording a night out with friends.
The Dish covered that Pakistan project here. Previous Dish on selfies here, here, and here.
(Photo of JR’s work at Somerset House, London, by Julian Stallabrass)
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