Kolkata, India, 12 pm
The Fifth Amendment Doesn’t Cover Your Fingertips
Marcia Hoffman worries that Apple’s fingerprint-ID iPhone will make it difficult for owners to invoke the right against self-incrimination. Why? Because while people can’t be forced to share information such as PINs, they can be compelled to provide fingerprints:
Take this hypothetical example coined by the Supreme Court: If the police demand that you give them the key to a lockbox that happens to contain incriminating evidence, turning over the key wouldn’t be testimonial if it’s just a physical act that doesn’t reveal anything you know. However, if the police try to force you to divulge the combination to a wall safe, your response would reveal the contents of your mind — and so would implicate the Fifth Amendment. (If you’ve written down the combination on a piece of paper and the police demand that you give it to them, that may be a different story.)
The important feature about PINs and passwords is that they’re generally something we know (unless we forget them, of course). These memory-based authenticators are the type of fact that benefit from strong Fifth Amendment protection should the government try to make us turn them over against our will. Indeed, last year a federal appeals court held that a man could not be forced by the government to decrypt data. But if we move toward authentication systems based solely on physical tokens or biometrics — things we have or things we are, rather than things we remember — the government could demand that we produce them without implicating anything we know. Which would make it less likely that a valid privilege against self-incrimination would apply.
Is It “Street Art” If It’s Legal?
RJ Rushmore wonders how online coverage of street art blurs boundaries between “art placed in public space without permission” and perfectly legal “contemporary muralism”:
[I]f you think that “street art” means art placed in public space without permission, it’s pretty clear that street art blogs are not the place to go looking for street art online. But why is that? …
Huge murals captured in the perfect light by professional photographers look great on blogs, regardless of how they look in person. Stickers and wheatpastes captured with an iPhone that look like crap on blogs can stop you in your tracks on the street. And on the street, the work is confronting you, so you’re going to look at it whether it’s Swoon or Mr. Brainwash or someone you’ve never heard of. Online, if you’re like most viewers and see a headline for a blog post along the lines of “Some guy you’ve never heard of who does wheatpastes in a city you’ve never been to,” you’re maybe not so likely to read that post. This may be one reason why street art blogs and general art and culture blogs that cover street art have shifted from covering street art to covering contemporary muralism under the guise of covering street art. …
Or maybe street art just doesn’t mean the same thing that it once did. Maybe mural festivals and the ease of finding legal walls has elevated the genre. Artists can spend days on a mural without worrying about police rather than sneaking around at night and working as quickly as possible. With plentiful legal walls, maybe some artists don’t see the need for working illegally anymore. Can the same goals be achieved at a legal wall as at an illegal spot? I don’t think so, but some may disagree with me.
(Hat tip: Hyperallergic. Photo of Mr. Brainwash’s work by Flickr user Matt From London)
Enough With The Flashcards
At least according to Ben Orlin, a teacher who wants less memorization in education:
Memorization has enjoyed a surge of defenders recently. They argue that memorization exercises the brain and even fuels deep insights. They say our haste to purge old-school skills-driven teaching from our schools has stranded a generation of students upriver without a paddle. They recommend new apps aiming to make drills fun instead of tedious. Most of all, they complain that rote learning has become taboo, rather than accepted as a healthy part of a balanced scholastic diet.
Certainly, knowledge matters. A head full of facts – even memorized facts – is better than an empty one. But facts enter our heads through many paths – some well-paved, some treacherous.
After pointing to several of those paths, Orlin outlines better ways for “students [to] learn facts, rather than memorize them”:
For example, suppose we’re learning that Maryland fought with the Union during the Civil War. We could invent a mnemonic, like “Maryland starts with ‘marry,’ and a marriage is a union” – cheesy, but fine. Or we could build on other facts. For example, Maryland borders D.C., so if it had seceded, the American capital would have been surrounded by foreign territory. For exactly that reason, Lincoln worked hard to keep Maryland on the side of the North.
What separates memorization from learning is a sense of meaning. When you memorize a fact, it’s arbitrary, interchangeable–it makes no difference to you whether sine of π/2 is one, zero, or a million. But when you learn a fact, it’s bound to others by a web of logic. It could be no other way.
Real Beauty Stays With You
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah draws a distinction between the “pretty” and the “beautiful”:
I think Kant was right in that beauty is a word that belongs to sensation. It has to strike the senses, whether it’s the ear or the eye. And I think he was right in that it’s connected to pleasure in the sensory experience and the desire to return to the experience. But what is merely pleasurable is pretty. Beauty has an element of that thing that makes you want to come back, that engages you cognitively. It’s this combination of the power to attract the senses and then its being rewarding to think about the experience that you’re having that makes for real beauty.
(Photo by Martin Klimas. More from his “Rapid Bloom” series here.)
When Talking Is The Best Medicine
Christian Jarrett notes a new meta-analysis that indicates most mental health patients prefer psychotherapy to medication:
Kathryn McHugh and her colleagues identified 34 relevant peer-reviewed studies up to August 2011 involving 90,483 people, in which the participants were asked to indicate a straight preference between psychotherapy or drugs. Half the studies involved patients awaiting treatment, the others involved participants who were asked to indicate their preference if they were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. The researchers had hoped to study preferences among patients with a diverse range of diagnoses but they were restricted by the available literature – 65 per cent studies pertained to depression with the remainder mostly involving anxiety disorders.
Overall, 75 per cent of participants stated a preference for psychotherapy over drugs. Stated differently, participants were three times as likely to state that they preferred psychological treatment rather than medication. The preference for therapy remained but was slightly lower (69 per cent) when focusing just on treatment-seeking patients, and when focusing only on studies that looked at depression (70 per cent). Desire for psychotherapy was stronger in studies that involved more women or younger participants.
Just For Kicks
The Mystery of Flying Kicks is a short documentary that explores why, exactly, people toss sneakers over power lines (aka “shoefiti”):
A quick list of claims people make about what it actually means: A sign that someone has lost his virginity, a bullying tactic, a mafia signal to the police, code for where to buy drugs, a mark of gang territory, a tribute to fallen gang members, a graffiti-like practice to mark your street, “total bullshit,” a sign that, in a given neighborhood, “people can do whatever they feel like and there’s no recognition of law or decency,” something done by food-service employees when they graduate to a better job, or a way to get rid of old shoes that are too beat up to give away.
A Disease That Can Spread Through Facebook
Lauren Dimon revisits an apparent outbreak of mass hysteria two years ago, when more than a dozen young women in western New York reported mysterious spasms and tics. After a battery of medical and environmental tests, one high-school student was confirmed to have Tourette’s Syndrome, while the rest, who were classmates, were thought to have unconsciously modeled their illnesses after her. Dimon zeroes in on the only non-student to catch the disease, a 36-year-old woman named Marge who apparently learned of the illness through Facebook:
[Sociologist Robert] Bartholomew said that it’s not unheard of for one or two adults to be affected, but he cannot recall any cases like Marge’s, in which the adults were not intimately involved with the children suffering from the malady. Marge said that she knew about what was going on in town mainly through Facebook postings.
Catching an illness through Facebook sounds wonky. But the contagion of hysteria relies, among many things, upon the unconscious interpretation of what is suggested to us. Fitzsimmons did not even have to be in physical contact with the other girls to “catch” their disease. Marge encapsulates the power of social media to penetrate and trigger actions of the unconscious mind. She marks “a historical shift in terms of the trigger for people being affected and sucked into these cases,” Bartholomew said.
According to Bartholomew, there is “potential for a far greater or global episode, unless we quickly understand how social media is, for the first time, acting as the primary vector or agent of spread for conversion disorder.” He believes that epidemics spread by social media are “inevitable” and that “it’s just a matter of time before we see outbreaks that are not just confined to a single school or factory or even region, but covering a disperse geographical area and causing real social and economic harm.”
Face Of The Day
Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi listens to a journalist’s question during the conference hall of the Hungarian foreign ministry in Budapest during her international press conference on September 13, 2013. The Nobel Peace prize-winning guest is on her second station of her visit for three eastern European countries, Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic. By Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images.
When Tipping Could Be An Insult, Ctd
History professor Stephen Mihm traces the aristocratic origins of tipping in America:
Strange as it may seem, tipping wasn’t customary in the U.S. before the Civil War. According to Kerry Segrave, author of a book on the custom’s curious history, tipping originated within the elaborate play of manners of the European aristocracy. To tip someone was as much about establishing a hierarchy between superior and inferior as it was about compensating a waiter, valet or servant. Giving a tip was a power play, and accepting one was a sign of servility. Such affectations didn’t sit well with Americans.
Nonetheless, sometime in the Gilded Age tipping came to America. At the time, critics blamed wily European waiters who had immigrated; others simply pointed to the influx of immigrants — people whom one letter writer to the Times described as “the scum and carrion of Europe’s southern borders, where begging is an art.” Sneaky foreigners had lured the good-natured, big-hearted American people into tipping — or so the story went.
In reality, the culprits were wealthy Americans, who traveled to Europe in the late 19th century. They aped the aristocrats they met, and sometimes went farther by out-tipping Europeans, prompting complaints that the American nouveaux riches were spoiling the servants. When these travelers came home, they showed off their newfound sophistication by leaving generous tips for waiters, porters and others. The practice spread down the culinary food chain, as middle-class Americans imitated their social superiors.
