An Album Of Thoughts

I Disclose ... Nothing

2012-01-23T07:27:00.003-05:00

This article, including and all images, is for the sole use of the author and may contain certain confidential and/or overprivileged information, pertaining to reporting conducted under the supervision and direction of the author and/or her collection of dolls, as well as is the property of the author and her mother, and are otherwise protected from disclosure.

This story does not represent in any way the policies, positions, or opinions of the publisher, myself, my editor, my boyfriend, my brother, my friends, my lawyers or my dog. Don’t quote me on that. Don’t quote me on anything. Ever. For external use only. For a limited time only.

Unauthorized review, tweeting, blogging, tumblring, liking, redistributing of any such information contained within this article and/or its image(s) for profit and without written permission is strictly prohibited. Violators will be executed. This article is void where prohibited.

Sentences are limited if sneezing, sniffling, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, hirsutism, crying spells, slurred speech, unexplained reverse aging develops. If this story begins to smoke, step away immediately. That is not normal. You are on fire. Read only with proper ventilation. Avoid extreme temperatures and store in a cool, dry place. Text may contain explicit materials some readers may find objectionable. Keep away from pets and small children. Are you really still reading this? Thanks, Mom. All rights reserved.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is unintentional and purely coincidental. Please read at your own risk. Please do not bend, fold, mutilate or spindle. Story is provided as it without any warranties. Reader assumes full responsibility. This is an equal opportunity story. Avoid contact with eyes and skin, and avoid inhaling fumes. Safety goggles may be required during use. Smoking this story could be hazardous to your health.

This story is gluten free. If ingested, and if you smell burned toast, consult a physician. Contents may settle during shipment. Use only as directed. Do not read while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Freshest if read before date on paper. Contains a substantial amount of non-active ingredients.

No animals harmed during the making of this article. Except one and that was a terrible tragedy. R.I.P. Pickles. Colors may, in time, fade. All rights reserved. Other restrictions may apply. Do not remove this disclaimer under penalty of law. Terms are subject to change without notice.

(Via The New York Times)

Rise Of The Cyborg Journalist

2012-01-22T09:57:00.000-05:00

Reporters, prepare to "augment" yourselves, or get marginalized.

One can expect to see an explosion in social media metrics tools that are purpose-built for the publishing industry, for content-centric businesses. The existent technologies, which are designed for radically different businesses that sell goods or services, typically catering to the B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) business models.

For instance, they do not tell publishers, "What exactly caused an article to go viral? Was it timely content that created a new trend? The guest author and her accompanying network? A particularly influential commenter? A confluence of factors?"

The arrival of these tech offerings will allow publishers to embrace a data-driven approach to editorial decision-making. And the growing reliance on data in newsrooms, in turn, will give birth to a completely new breed of journalists.

The cyborg journalist.

A cyborg journalist is one who has a keen nose for news and a sharp eye for raw data. He or she arrives at editorial decisions upon taking into consideration a combination of predictive analytics (which will tell them how a story will perform), real-time metrics (which will tell them how a story performed)—and old school intuition.

(Via Media Shift)

The Money Is On The Wall

2012-01-20T14:13:00.002-05:00

Companies like Facebook do not make any goods. They offer a service by letting users create content that they can then, share with their social circles.

It is hence, a social content creation service. That is the equivalent of a newspaper company allowing its readers to amble into its printing presses, anytime, and create newspapers for their friends, hyper custom-made publications that cater to very, very narrow slivers of readers.

Facebook offers this gratis. Yet, it makes pots of gold. And how does it?

To continue the newspaper analogy, it is in on the walls of the printing facility where the money is. As hordes of people rush in and out of a busy printing house, with copies of their little newspapers clutched under their arms, they are exposed to scores of ads plastered of the walls.

Facebook charges its advertisers, who are the makers and sellers of goods, to post ads in places that are hard to miss—the walls.

(Via OWNI.eu)

People Analytics

2012-01-15T09:34:00.000-05:00

Some may say that a data-driven approach to human resources has a chill to it.

But a growing number of companies are trying to apply a data-driven approach to the unpredictable world of human interactions.

Google is at the leading edge of this approach to management.

In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers—across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns.

Does this mean performance evaluations will be more objective, more impartial, and free of biases and prejudices? Not necessarily, considering that the "variables" are still human.

(Via The New York Times)

What Is Crowdsourcing, Again?

2012-01-12T14:08:00.000-05:00

For those not in the know, this is a visual definition of the corporate strategy of “tapping into the wisdom of the crowd.”

Technicolor Fear

2012-01-02T18:20:00.001-05:00

Whatever its form, a power loom or a typewriter, no new technology has ever won unambiguous and unalloyed praise in its time. It has tended to polarize its users, spitting them into opposing camps of the enthusiasts, apologists, and critics.

If today, there are worries about the thought-fragmenting effects of the Internet, in the heyday of the electronic era, the television was perceived as an “idiot box,” often prodded by oppositionists for its brain-enfeebling power, its pernicious effects on the human mind.

Today, more than ever, there is agreement on the idea that technology is a life-enhancing force. It is regarded as indispensable, portable, entertaining, vital, interactive, deft, beauteous—but certainly not frightful. An iPhone, or a high-definition screen, or an ultrabook, do not (yet) make us edgy, or fill us with a sense of foreboding.

But, turn the clock back to the 1980s, to the twilight years of the analog age, when the scope of digital devices, at least, to those outside of the scientific and technological disciplines, were clocks and calculators, when the cathode-ray tube was the centerpiece of the American living room, the Trimline telephone drew cachet, when the Cold War was cooling off, when eco-consciousness had not awakened.

“White Noise” by Don DeLillo, a notable postmodern literary work, demonstrates how the technology of the time stirred contradictory emotions of awe, hope, confusion, gloom, doom.

Jack Gladney, founder of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill, a scholar of immense renown, lives with his fifth wife, Babette, and their four kids and stepchildren (Wilder, Steffie, Denise, Heinrich) in a calm Midwestern town, “not smack in the path of history and its contaminations.” Babette, a woman of “careless dignity,” without “the guile for conspiracies of the body,” is one he takes complete joy in, deeply cherishing her as a soul mate and a domestic partner.

Far-removed from urban density and its allied anxieties, their lives are fulfilling, struggle-free, and unhurried, awash with brightly packaged consumer bounty from large supermarkets with diagonal parking. Like their neighbors, and their neighbor’s neighbors, they are encircled by a dense matrix of “waves and radiation” emanating from the fluorescent screens, radios, microwaves, radiators.

“For most people there are two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.” The hold of the television over the lives of people and the human consciousness is total; its grip, python-like, tight and unrelenting. An instrument of mass media, it is both a reflector and refractor of mass culture that ignites latent desires, kindles passions, embeds cultural codes, stokes deep-seated fears.

For a couple that believes in the power of corporations to manufacture fear and that of the television to amplify and disseminate it, they seem to be afflicted by the worst case of it. Jack and Babette harbor an existential secret. “Who will die first?” is a question that makes Jack wake up in cold sweat at “odd-numbered hours” of the night and Babette forget things, but which neither confronts till an “airborne toxic event” intervenes.

In their relentless silent ruminations about death, they imagine it to be an indeterminate state, bathed in “white noise,” a reference to the hotchpotch of broadcast waves—raw, nerve-grating, and uniform. Life is Technicolor. Death is white.

On a cold winter morning, the rupture of a train car carrying a deadly, déjà vu-inducing chemical effluent releases a “black billowing cloud,” forcing the family to evacuate to safety. A pit stop for gas exposes Jack to the noxious mass, moving across the sky “like a death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings.” The encounter pries lose his dormant dread. He is “tentatively scheduled to die,” he is callously told by a SIMUVAC (short for “simulation evacuation”) worker, on the basis of a computer’s diagnosis. “It won’t happen tomorrow, or the next day, but it is in the works.”

A knowledge that should have sounded as nothing more than obvious, instead, rattles his very core. But, it also throws into the open a shattering truth, hitherto unknown to him. His spouse, his pillar of strength, someone whom he thought “might muse on death,” confesses to not only privately obsessing over it herself, but also having taken an unsavory route to rid herself of her dire “condition.”

Babette sees life in a tabloid ad that reads: “FEAR OF DEATH?” She signs up to be a test subject in a covert, if dubious, R&D project to develop a highly experimental “psychopharmaceutical” drug codenamed Dylar that would eradicate the fear of death. In lieu for an uninterrupted supply of it, she offers her supplier, in a manner of “capitalist transaction,” “her body.” The little white “flying saucer-shaped” pills, with a “polymer membrane” and a “laser-drilled hole” sadly, fail.

Technology, DeLillo highlights, is a two-edged sword, a malaise and a panacea in one. “It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other.” Jack’s colleague and friend Murray J. Siskind, a pop culture maven, is the voice of Socratic reason, who suggests Jack an antidote. “You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out,” he tells paternalistically.

A despondent Jack, quivering with desperation like jelly on a saucer, is a believer in Dylar’s potency. He scavenges the kitchen garbage pail in hopes of finding even a single discarded tablet, but to no avail. Driven to the edge, he ferrets out its dopey maker, shoots him in a shabby motel at the edge of town, gets himself shot in the process, and then, drives the injured pair to a nun-run clinical facility.

In the end, however, no one is in control—but destiny.

Poultry, Nothing Paltry

2011-12-31T17:05:00.002-05:00

If you discount the pterodactyl, the largest flying creature to have traversed our skies, then, the ostrich would be the largest avian species we know.

As a tween, I had seen a flock of them in the wild, in the dust-swept Swazi savannah. Their long, slender necks, stooped as if in humility, the birds ambled with poise, across the narrow African country road. Our gleaming white Ford Cortina halted deferentially, to allow them passage.

They crossed my path, once again.

The sight of shiny off-white ovals, the size of a rugby ball, in a posh farmer's market in Manhattan, caught my attention. Drawn to them by their sheer dimension, M and I eased through the crowds of holiday shoppers to the booth to investigate.

On a handwoven basket lay half a dozen ostrich eggs, solid, sturdy, and confident. Their finely pitted surfaces, pronounced by a light sheen, made them a tactile delight. Roughly three pounds in weight, and eight times the area of a hen egg, there is clearly nothing paltry about this poultry. Their shells pose a formidable resistance to cracking, I hear, needing the aid of a hammer.

I do not have the heart to make one into an omelette. A few days earlier, however, we had bought a pack of half dozen duck eggs on a whim, and deviled them.

If eggs could represent the solar system, then, ostrich eggs would represent Jupiter; chicken eggs, the Earth; and quail eggs, the Moon. Duck eggs would stand in for Mars.

Though only slightly larger than regular chicken eggs, they felt sturdier. The yolk, denser, offered resistance to scooping, clinging to the inner membrane of the matte shell with a strong grip. In taste, it was creamier, smoother.

E-Borrowers, Beware

2011-12-29T16:35:00.000-05:00

Publishers are turning away from lending e-books to libraries, a policy that is resulting in lost sales, both for them and their authors.

E-books, unlike, printed books, last forever, and because they don’t decay, they don’t compel libraries to order new copies to replace the old. An opportunity for a sale is hence, lost.

When the borrowing and the return of a e-book is as easy as the flipping of a switch, there is no incentive for a reader to purchase a copy of it from a bookstore. With a paper book, however, one would much rather buy a title than have to face the inconvenience of making a return trip to the library. The reader’s inconvenience, therefore, becomes the publisher’s opportunity to make a buck.

Plus, a single copy can, in theory, be in circulation at any given time, among unlimited patrons. Why would a library need to order any more than a solitary copy in that case? Another opportunity for a sale is again, lost.

(Via The New York Times)

News Isn't Static, Literally

2011-12-27T16:42:00.000-05:00

The business model of journalism is in a state of flux. But so also is the craft.

[…] we are in the midst of a transformative shift in the craft of journalism. Text-only stories, the kind your parents found in their morning newspapers and characterized by the classic inverted pyramid (most important stuff at the top, least important stuff at the bottom) could eventually go the way of 45-rpm records.

The MP3 of journalism may be the "live blog," which relies on the merging of platforms and weaving of text with video, audio, external links to other articles (including those of rival news organizations), blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, and whatever other useful information is available.

It doesn't matter if information originates from a New York Times article, a tweet from an eyewitness on the scene, or someone offering astute commentary and curating links, a video shot by a protester or produced by a team at CNN.Because in the live-blog format disparate platforms become irrelevant, and the walls between these separate silos of content simply dissolve.

—Adam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at N.Y.U.

(Via Fast Company)

A Sweet Financier

2011-12-22T15:47:00.000-05:00

You’d have to be a slightly unusual person, or be obsessed with finance to think of naming a patisserie, “Financier.” Either way, you’d be an unvarnished original.

But it turns out, “Financier,” isn’t after all, such an out-of-the-way name. A confection of French origins, it is a soft, moist almond cake, traditionally baked in the shape of a gold bar. As a casual patron, I can say that their pastries are every bit one's money’s worth.

Earth-Like, But Not Quite

2011-12-21T11:00:00.000-05:00

Kepler, the spacecraft-bound observatory that was launched into orbit to detect the presence of any Earth-like planets outside our solar system, has brought astronomers glad tidings.

Earlier this month, it spotted Kepler 22b, an overgrown Earth, of sorts, shimmering with the possibility of life. In its favor, are its location, in the so-called "Goldilocks zone”—a region around a star that is neither too frigid nor too scalding—and a pleasant surface temperature of 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

More recently, it came upon a pair of Earth-sized planets orbiting the star system Kepler 20, about 950 light years away from us. The delight is that they are almost Earth-like in their dimensions. Unfortunately, unlike Kepler 22b, they are a little too close to their star, almost wrapped around it, to have a habitable climate.

The two new planets, Kepler 20e and Kepler 20f, are far outside the Goldilocks zone — so close to the star, termed Kepler 20, that one of them is roasting at up to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit—and thus unlivable.

Kepler 20e, the closer and hotter planet, is also the smaller — about 6,900 miles across, or slightly smaller than Venus — and it resides about 5 million miles from its star. The more distant planet, Kepler 20f, also broiling at around 800 degrees, is 10 million miles out from its star. It is 8,200 miles in diameter, about the size of Earth. The two planets are presumed to be rocky orbs that formed in the outskirts of their planetary system and then migrated inward.

(Via The New York Times)

Is Viral Marketing Overrated?

2011-12-20T11:44:00.001-05:00

A Harvard study that looked into the path of the spread of social contagion through social networks, found that a friend’s power to influence another’s taste, is about nil.

When it comes to taste, “peer influence is virtually nonexistent,” said Kevin Lewis, a Harvard sociology graduate student who co-authored the study.

What implication does this finding have for the business value of social media, for viral marketing? It is difficult to gauge what preferences have been influenced.

“What we look to measure in social media marketing are things like social sharing” [a social media analyst] said. “You track what’s being passed around social networks and measure surface indicators such as likes and retweets.”

(Via WIRED)

Java, Through The Ages

2011-12-18T12:26:00.000-05:00

The designs for a series of coffee tumblers by Norwegian designer Katrine Austgulen. The first is inspired by Gothic; the second, by the Renaissance; the third by India; and the fourth by Classical Greece.

Bravo!

It Takes Two To Tango

2011-12-10T16:46:00.000-05:00

This post is the manifestation of an utterly tired mind. And it's mortifying to declare that it's mine. But what's important, here, is that it stemmed an insignificant reflection on a listless advertising copy.

This ad, for a Kindle device, had appeared in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

It reads: "In the time it takes to skim the bestseller list, you can wirelessly download an entire book." I have a rebuttal to this copy: "To know what I would like to download, I first have to skim the bestseller list."

It follows, therefore, that one cannot do without the other.

High-Culture Greets High-Tech

2011-12-02T14:57:00.000-05:00

The neighborhood around the Lincoln Center, which I find to be one of the most elegant sections of Manhattan, blends the performing arts and the high-tech in a fine mix.

The Grand Stair, a short flight of shallow steps, with comfortably wide treads, have embedded in them, computerized, L.E.D. text displays that blink on and off, the names of the program highlights of each Lincoln Center venue.

I shot this on a recent evening, just as the twilight was setting in.

Henry Moore's "Reclining Figure" floats on a pool on the North Plaza of the Lincoln Center.

A Dry Soda Fountain

2011-11-27T12:31:00.000-05:00

Global soft drink giant Coca-Cola has partnered with a London-based studio to create an enormous installation of a digital waterfall at a shopping mall in Quito, Ecuador. At 52-feet tall, it's being hailed at the largest interactive screen ever, and provides both an interactive and an immersive experience.

This technology … mimics the look of liquid sluicing down right before viewers’ eyes. The shape shifting “water” falls down in phosphorescent bursts that evoke undreamed-of colors, as well as good old carbonated caramel.

Sounds like a dry soda fountain?

[…] the digital waterfall is highly responsive, and it reacts in real-time. Users stand inside of a hub area facing the screen, and their motions are captured and mirrored back at them in negative space on the vertical stream, with water gushing by on either side.

What’s more, it tells a story—that it’s a waterfall that wishes to play with you.

(Via Fast Company)

Apples On Broadway

2011-11-26T11:16:00.000-05:00

On an island, at the busy intersection of 63rd Street and Dante Park, stands an unsteadily steady pile of green apples that appear to have tumbled out of a giant cart, somewhere along Broadway. A lone raven sits on its peak, as if zealously guarding it from greedy onlookers.

I walk past this off-beat bronze sculpture by Peter Woytuk titled the " The Falling Apples," on my way to work.

Could we instill more dynamism into this fruity piece, I thought? Convert each apple into little spherical fountains that would release sprays of synthetic cider, infusing the surrounding air with a warm, holiday scent.

The Grand Clock Above

2011-11-25T09:22:00.000-05:00

No tourist comes to New York City for its history. And most New Yorkers certainly don’t have the leisure to glance up from their palm-held hyperconnectivity, to appreciate the Big Apple’s rich architectural jewels, which happen to surround them.

One a recent blustery evening, as M and I walked down from Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, the magnificent façade of the Grand Central Terminal, accosted us. We stopped in our tracks, and I whipped out my camera.

The grand ornate clock, instinctively reminded me of the pair of gargoyles that stare down at Paris, from their high perch atop the Norte Dame. A work of Gilded Age New York, it has, according to Wikipedia, the largest collection of Tiffany glass.

Gobble! Gobble! Gobble!

2011-11-24T21:42:00.001-05:00

M, P, P, G, Z, Q, and myself sat around our little squarish table for our Thanksgiving dinner. We didn't have the customary turkey, but a beautifully roasted chicken, which we had with a side of creamed spinach. Through out the day, we nibbled on tidbits.

Cilantro-spiced chicken sausages, with roasted onion rings.

Seasoned tomatoes tossed in olive oil, served on sourdough, with wedges of brie on the side.

The Sound Of Silence

2011-11-21T11:59:00.001-05:00

When I was offered a job in Roswell, New Mexico, I should’ve taken it. If the newspaper job didn't work out, I could have always spent time ruminating over unexplained phenomenon, an interest of mine. The dessert reaches of New Mexico and that of Nevada have been a shrine for mystery buffs for decades.

Take the Taos Hum. For years, some residents and visitors in the small city of Taos have been puzzled by a mysterious and faint, low-frequency hum in the desert air. Oddly, only about two percent of Taos residents report hearing the sound. Whether described as a whir, hum, or buzz, no one has yet been able to locate its source.

Selling Bad Grammar

2011-11-20T21:46:00.001-05:00

I found this sign plastered on a food vendor selling Tibetan momos. There is no telling precisely what it's trying to convey. There are, however, a couple of ways of interpreting this.

1. So far, they've been passing off water as soup to their customers. But from the first of December, they promise to make amends and sell soup.

2. Their soup, thus far, has been so watery and dilute (with the two in the ratio of 95 percent and five percent) that their customers took it to be hot water. Come the first of December, however, they they're will change the proportion such that the new concoction is slightly thicker and hopefully more palatable.

To Gain Some, You Lose Some

2011-11-15T16:14:00.001-05:00

Amazon.com sells the Kindle Fire for $199. And the cost of producing one tablet is $209.63.

Why does Amazon sell a product at a loss? Because, for Amazon, the Fire is a book store, and a movie theater, and a record shop. And (of course) Amazon is the one selling books, movies and records.

Once you're inside Amazon's ecosystem, there are a whole bunch of ways they can make money off you. You buy Amazon's books, movies, and music. You buy Amazon's apps. You see Amazon's ads. There's no Apple store on an Amazon device. You're locked in.

This is the model printer manufacturers often use. You can buy a decent printer for $40 — less than it costs to produce. That's because printer companies make all their money selling ink cartridges to go in the printers.

Unlike, say, Apple, Amazon didn't start out as a computer company. For Amazon, the computer is simply a means to an end.

(Via NPR)

McSpirituality In India

2011-11-13T17:17:00.000-05:00

While in theinner sanctum of a temple in an ashram in India, a 30-something woman istransported through time, to “the wormhole of the Absolute.” She is in a place ofindeterminate dimension, outside her body and outside the Earth, neitherdark nor lit.

Suddenly, the universe unravels all of its mysteries to her. She hasentered God, she realizes, but not in a “gross, physical way, not like she wasstuck in a chunk of God’s thigh muscle.”

This is oneamong the many spiritual encounters Elizabeth Gilbert describes in herbestselling book, “Eat, Pray, Love.” After a bitter and protracted divorce, anda passionate love affair gone sour, Gilbert set off on a yearlong voyage ofself-discovery and spiritual awakening across three countries—Italy, India, Indonesia.

During thefirst leg of her journey, in Italy,she pursues pleasure, declaring a “double major” in—eating and speakingItalian—with a “concentration on gelato.” Oddly, however, one doesn’t get toeat much of the sumptuous Italian fares, vicariously through her. Mentions offood are few and far between.

In a colloquiallanguage that is exaggeratedly puerile (Bolognais described as “P-R-E-T-T-Y,” and written exactly such) and occasionallydownright grammatically incorrect, (“evening twilight,” “whole entiresemester”) she bores the reader with her inane fascination with the Italianlanguage. She takes a break from that only to fill page after page with X-rays ofher mental landscape.

She goes to India next, insearch of God, who decides not to reveal to her the easy way. Her mind wrestleswith meditation and her body revolts against the singing of Sanskrit hymns. Thediscipline of the spiritual facility in the remote village, where she takes upresidency for four months, crushes her till, one day, it quite unexpectedly—andquite joltingly—rejuvenates her.

At 4:15 a.m., one dawn, she jumps out of herdormitory window, miraculously falls on a “concrete sidewalk” intact, brushesthe dust off her, and ambles off in the dark to the temple meditation hall. There, she discovers she canmagically do what she had struggled with for so long—chant a very difficult, tongue-twister of an ego-eatingmantra.

Her stories of McSpirituality do not make one ruminate, but snort in exasperation. On anotheroccasion, when she had fallen into a pool of despondency formed byself-loathing, she had heard “a lion roaring from with [her] chest” in a voiceso loud that was actually forced to “clamp [her] hand over her mouth,” leastthe decibels shook the foundations of the building, and raze it to theground.

In an all-too-obviousmimicry of the lighthearted, chatty, girlish voice of the popular Britishwriter Sophie Kinsella, known for her hilarious “Shopaholic” series, shefumbles, for she drapes it around a sober topic like spirituality—and notshopping. Her humor fails to elicit laughter, only taking on a dippy, inane,and farcical flavor.

Gilbert inflicts the worst pain when she assumes she is regaling with her coruscating wit. On theactivation of the divine energy within her, she felt, she writes, it was “ridingup her,” “rumbl[ing] like a diesel engine in low gear.”

Reader, try tostay away from this book unless you want to get a laugh just from Gilbert's idiotic solipsistic babble and spiritual claptrap.

Age Matters

2011-11-08T09:05:00.000-05:00

If you are a block of cheese, a bottle of wine or whiskey, and a violin, age matters. Last summer, the world’s leading producer of luxury Scotch whiskey, Chivas Brothers, launched “The Age Matters” campaign, prompted by a research finding.

It’d found that consumers globally were woefully ignorant about the what the “age statement” of a Scotch whiskey signified. Most drinkers believed it referred to the quality. It doesn't.

First off, Scotch whiskey is whiskey made in Scotland.

Regulations require anything bearing the label “Scotch” to be distilled in Scotland, and matured for a minimum of three years in oak casks, among other, more specific criteria.

An age statement on the bottle, in the form of a number, must reflect the age of the youngest Scotch whiskey used to produce that product.

(Via PopSop)

Writing Without Drafts

2011-11-05T16:00:00.002-04:00

In the film “Amadeus,” Mozart’s wife, Constanze, tells Antonio Salieri that can’t leave the portfolio of her husband's manuscripts with him because she came to meet him without his knowledge. In the course of her conversation with him, it’s revealed that Mozart only made “fair copies.”

Salieri: Are you sure you can’t leave that music, and come back again? I have other things you might like.

Constanze: That’s very tempting, but it’s impossible, I’m afraid. Wolfi would be frantic if he found those were missing. You see, they’re all originals.

Salieri: Originals?

Constanze: Yes.

Salieri: These are originals?

Constanze: Yes, Sir. He doesn’t make copies.

Shakespeare is also said to have rarely revised his work. His penmanship bore no sign of the Bard’s hard literary toil. Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar and author of “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,” writes:

Shakespeare was reputed to have written with such amazing confidence—in a world of goose-quill pens and lamp-black ink—that even his first drafts were fair copies.

In reality, however, his “obsessive fiddling,” led to “literally thousands of tiny changes,” which he didn’t let the world know about.

He evidently had a stake in hiding all of the hard work that went into his apparent fluency. His was a culture that prized what the famous Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione called sprezzatura, that is, nonchalance. Castiglione understood that the only way to achieve this nonchalance—in writing as in dancing or riding or telling jokes—was through fantastically painstaking revisions that all had to be carefully concealed. (Via The Wall Street Journal)

Nothing But A URL

2011-11-02T09:53:00.001-04:00

(Via AdWeek )

In Quest Of God

2011-10-24T18:10:00.000-04:00

In 1514, Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish priest, put forward an Earth-shattering idea: The Earth and the other planets revolved around the Sun, and not the other way around. In turning a 1,500-year-old wisdom on its head, he did not merely shock, but also committed a theological crime.

Even as the new picture of the cosmos begrudgingly took hold, people fervently hoped that our Sun was at the center of the 400 billion stars in our own galaxy. It turned out we were in the “galactic boondocks.”

They tenaciously clung to the idea, next, that, at least, our galaxy was the seat of the universe. That too, was wishful thinking. The universe has no core in the sense of three-dimensional space, and the Milky Way is certainly not at it, being one among a staggering swarm of 170 billion galaxies.

Those who would have liked to hear that we were at the center of time, so to speak, suffered more crushing disappointment when the Earth’s age was determined to be 4,500 million years, which by implication meant that humankind has been around for an “instant of geological time.”

The Big Bang, believed to have taken place 15,000 million years ago, came as a sharp blow to those who knew that God created the Earth on October 23, in 4004 B.C., a Sunday, the date pinned down, in the 17th century, by the head of the Church of Ireland, the archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. Charles Darwin’s ground-breaking work showed we had evolved from the interaction of organic molecules swimming in a primordial soup—another bummer to most theologians.

As science has progressively clarified (or obfuscated, depending on one’s philosophy) our position in the universe, it has steadily dented our “geocentric arrogance.”

In “The Varieties of Scientific Experiences,” an edited collection of a series of talks delivered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning astrophysicist Carl Sagan, at the prestigious Giffords Lectures, in 1985, he expressed that, even today, the “Copernican battle” is still being fought silently, at the level of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The search for intelligent life elsewhere, is one of the few instances where both a positive and a negative outcome would be a win-win. Should our radio telescopes, one day, pick up a signal from space, the answer to the eternal question, “Are we alone?” would have been found. If not, it would confirm that intelligent life is indeed rare, and be an occasion for a bash for proponents of the view that there is no one smarter than us in the entire universe.

The cacophonous medley of (analog) television broadcasts that escape the terrestrial boundaries, are, in theory, detectable in our cosmic backyard. And in the event that we are contacted, it is likely to be from beings vastly superior to ourselves, because, “if they’re even a little bit behind us, they can’t communicate at all.”

For any civilization to be able to beam waves from across hundreds of light years away, let alone travel through interstellar space, they would have to have crossed a high technological threshold. Sagan does not rule out the possibility that we have been visited in the past, but dismisses U.F.O. sightings as elaborate hoaxes.

A good patch to shine the celestial flashlight, he believes, is in the solar exurbs, in the vicinity of the four methane-rich gas giants. Titan, the largest of the Saturnian moons, blanketed with a dense organic gruel, broken up by lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, could possibly be a fertile crucible for life.

His approach to the existence of God is neither one of flat denial, blind embrace, or derisive snigger, and pithily summed thus: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Neither is it evidence of presence.” He regards as “naïve” the concept of God as an omnipotent being, portrayed as “an outsize, light-skinned male, with a long white beard,” sitting on a capacious throne in the sky.

Rather, he doffs his hat to the version of God as proposed by Albert Einstein and Baruch Spinoza, as the totality of the laws (Newtonian gravitation, quantum mechanics, unified field theory etc.) that keep the universe running with “unexpected regularity.” That the principles of physics apply uniformly, everywhere from Milan to the Antarctica to a distant quasar, represents a power far greater than us.

Science and religion, he maintains, are not antithetical to each other. Science is “informed worship.” To those who offer as “proofs” of God’s existence, the facts that we have are imbued with a consciousness at some stage of gestation, we have religious experiences, we are moral beings, he asks, as to why God did not leave more concrete evidence?

For instance, he could have embedded Maxwell’s Laws into Egyptian hieroglyphics—cryptic codes that would have been indecipherable to the ancients, but could have been cracked now. Or, perhaps, an even more striking, hard-to-miss sign like emblazoning the Ten Commandments on the lunar surface, each spread across 10 kilometers, for future space probes to bump into? Or, suspend a gigantic crucifix in the Earth’s orbit?

He does not critique any religious thought harshly. His gripe with Western theology, however, is that God is depicted as the “God of a tiny world,” cripplingly narrow and too limiting.

This book is lively, in its style, but intense in the ideas it conveys.

Invention Versus Innovation

2011-10-12T12:17:00.001-04:00

When I think of the word "inventor," the first person who jumps to mind is Caractacus Potts, the droll inventor of the 1968 musical "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." He invents to amuse himself and his children, often with a scant regard for the commercial viability of his inventions.

An awful lot of confusion persists about the precise meaning of "invention" and "innovation." All ambiguity should fade away upon reading this:

[Invention] generates new ideas, patents, prototypes, designs, breakthrough experiments, and working models. Much of the basic research done in R&D labs in corporations and at universities is the invention process. It is research for the sake of building knowledge, which is certainly important, but not done with thought of commercialization.

However, it's innovation that transforms these inventions into commercial products, services, and businesses. When a need is identified and a product or service is developed to meet that need, you have an innovation.

People talk about the "invention" of the lightbulb or the "invention" of the iPhone, when in fact neither Thomas Edison nor Steve Jobs were inventors. They both used existing technology in new ways with an eye toward a big market for the result. They were innovators.

(Via BusinessWeek)

Doing Away With Dot-Coms?

2011-10-09T14:16:00.000-04:00

We've become creatures of such strong digital habits that we reflexively type .com or .net, as suffixes for Web addresses. For the record, there’re presently 22 of them, though we may not be familiar with all of them.

But get ready to adjust to and adapt. More are on their way.

The agency that regulates the digital real estate, i.e. Internet’s zoning board, plans to introduce a new batch of “generic top level domain,” (gTLD), which will end in brand names such as .hitachi, .motorola, etc. Quirky? They may go live as early as 2013. But there's little reason to be worried. The .com won't disappear overnight.

(Via BBC)

2045: Man And Machine Merge

2011-10-08T13:19:00.000-04:00

2045—That is the year futurist Raymond Kurzweil predicts we will reach the "technological singularity," the point at which humans merge with machines. He believes we are approaching a moment when computers will not just become intelligent, but outstrip human intelligence.

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence.

From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer.

Since the intellectual capabilities of such an super-intelligent entity would be difficult to read and assess, the technological singularity is seen as an "intellectual event horizon," beyond which the future becomes difficult to see or predict.

(Via TIME)

She

2011-10-07T11:40:00.001-04:00

Lost in a roomful of strangers, from the rear rows of the crowded classroom, I watched distractedly, the suited and scarfed professor project a series of PowerPoint slides on the white screen. His voice, filtered through her stupor, sounded a monotonous drone.

Suddenly, I sat bolt upright. The podium was now occupied by his colleague, by her. I knew, in theory, he’d introduced her, but hadn’t heard him. Her name, hence, hadn’t registered on my mental radar. Only she had.

She’d grabbed her attention only to distract it, to scatter it, to blow it away. When she spoke I heard her intently, but didn’t listen to her. At that instant, she mattered far more than her lecture did.

Once out of the program, I wondered if she should have stayed back.

Print Is Not Dead

2011-09-24T21:07:00.000-04:00

Like me, if you happen to live in the Western hemisphere, you're likely to read the obituaries of newspapers in ... newspapers. But you'd be wrong to think that everywhere, the print media are taking their last breaths.

In much of the world, the mass media are flourishing. Newspaper circulation rose globally by 6% between 2005 and 2009, helped by particularly strong demand in places like India, where 110m papers are now sold daily. But those global figures mask a sharp decline in readership in rich countries. Over the past decade, throughout the West, people have been giving up newspapers.

(Via The Economist)

A Curious Start-Up

2011-09-20T15:32:00.000-04:00

Photo: TNW

Should Qriously, a London-based start-up become a force to reckon with, it may pose a challenge to the consumer research giant Nielsen. What it offers is a tool to measure public sentiment in real-time by "replacing mobile ads with short, targeted questions" at its users. It gauges the consumers' response to say, a new product ("Do you like the new Gatorade ad?"), or a tech development (Was buying Skype a win or fail for Microsoft?). While it may not yet have the capability to provide "in-depth research," it has its pluses.

[...] Qriously has some critical advantages in being real-time and, by being on mobile devices, has location options so granular that answers can be gathered even from one street.

Clients pay per answer.

(Via The Guardian)

Monster Sentences

2011-09-15T17:22:00.000-04:00

In this age of Lilliputian literature, whose defining feature is little sentences, it's heartening to read of sentences so long that they swell into entire books. Some works that have “labyrinthine sentences” are:

"Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age" (1964) by Bohumil Hrabal’s has a 117-page-long sentence.

"The Gates of Paradise" (1960) by the Polish novelist Jerzy Andrzejewski consists of two sentences; one 158-page run-on and the other, a mere five words long.

Molly Bloom’s monologue from "Ulysses" (1922) is 36 pages wide. Jonathan Coe’s novel

"The Rotters’ Club" (2001) has a 33-page, single-sentence section. (The BBC has reported that at 13,955 words, it is the longest sentence ever written in English.)

French novelist Mathias Énard’s "Zone" (2008), just published in an English translation, has a 517-page-long sentence.

(Via The New York Times)

Feasting On An RSS Diet

2011-09-12T06:14:00.000-04:00

As I sift through my RSS feeds every morning, I rarely find myself savoring what I see in my clogged inbox (which is perhaps why I made this e-card in the first place.) When one has to race through 1,000 items, coughed up by 43 subscriptions, as I do, there is very little time for anything besides catching one’s breath.

When first out, RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, provided an easy way for making media content more portable. They still do. But what's changed, in the meanwhile, however, is the volume of that output. Where it once used to be a manageable stream, now, it's a formidable deluge that's very hard to keep pace with. And each time one glides from one tab to the next to check on the newest RSS entry, it corrodes one's concentration.

A new study, published in Science this week, imaged human brains and watched them try to multitask as subjects performed a set of variously interrupted tasks. They saw that our brains can divide resources fairly easily for two tasks, but have a much harder time juggling three or more. (Via Ars Technica)

That being the case, there is no such thing as efficient multitasking. But regardless of the impact of the feeds on the reader's ability to focus, high-traffic media outlets stand to gain from them by asking advertisers to sponsor their RSS feeds.

A call for sponsorship from a design blog.

Here’s what you get: A short sponsorship post about your company/service/product at the beginning of the week. Since this is not an ad but an actual post, it will reach people using an RSS reader as well as regular visitors to the site. (Via SwissMiss)

War On The Social Web

2011-09-11T09:57:00.000-04:00

A tally of the five giant social network platforms (Google+, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn) in terms of functionality.

(Via Mashable)

On A Tail Spin

2011-09-09T08:16:00.002-04:00

The Digital Age has spawned new business models, some of which sound more interesting than the rest. I set out to explore one with an Alice in Wonderland aura to it: “The Long Tail.”

The bestial-sounding semantic tassel was coined by WIRED magazine's Chris Anderson, to describe the seismic shifts in the media industry.

Consider Lulu, the self-publishing platform that allows anyone—anyone—to publish a book, whether good, bad, or middling.

It’s in effect, one giant undiscerning publisher that has enabled niche authors, whose works would never have seen the light of day in the 20th century, to serve niche audiences. In short, the digital media marketplace exists to cater to the “long tail” of the bulk of the niche authors.

This will have a deleterious effect on writers, and not just cause paper books to wither away. "Will writers be able to make a living and continue writing in the digital era?” asks Ewan Morrison in The Guardian story "Are Books Dead, And Can Authors Survive"?

The short answer is, no. For one, publishers have severely cut back on author advances.

To ask whether International Man Booker prize-winner Philip Roth could have written 24 novels and the award-winning American trilogy without advances is like asking if Michelangelo could have painted the Sistine Chapel without the patronage of Pope Julius II. The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart.

Unlike in analog publishing houses, which focused on promoting a few “bestsellers,” today, Internet firms like Amazon.com sell less of more items.

Rather than selling, say, 13m copies of one “Harry Potter” book, a long tail provider can make the same profits by selling 13m different "obscure", "failed'" and "niche" books.

And that's no fun for the writer either.

The recent enthusiasm for the long-tail market does, however, obscure a very basic economic fact: very few writers and independent publishers can survive in the long tail. Amazon can sell millions of books by obscure authors, while at the same time those authors, when they get their Amazon receipts, will see that they have sold only five books in a year.

(Via The Guardian)

Product This, And Product That

2011-09-08T19:11:00.001-04:00

There are a bit too many words in the marketing field that begin with the word “product”—“product class,” “product line,” “product mix,” and a few others. Understandably, they can create confusion for the non-business person, who then, resorts to using these words loosely and interchangeably.

I’m not being snob when I say this, but my inner editor will simply not permit me that sort of a freewheeling approach to language. Besides, at the time I was dabbling in marketing theories, it was important for me to gain an understanding of these terms. To that effect, I’d created this simple chart.

A “product class” (or a product category) is a group or range of remotely related products that may serve as substitutes for each other because they fulfill the same need. A narrow product category for modes of transport would include cars, pickups, vans, motorcycles. A broad set would have aircraft, ships, hovercrafts … and spacecraft?

A “product line” is a group of closely related products that are made by the same company. The “depth” of the product line refers to the number of different products offered in a single product line.

Take the luxury carmaker BMW. It offers these "product lines": "3 Series," "5 Series," "7 Series," "Z" (driven by Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in "Goldeneye".) as well as the "X" line. The "3 Series" in turn, has a range of sedans, coupes, convertibles, station wagons. All of the product lines offered by a firm make up its “product mix."

In the case of BMW, BMW is its only "brand", unlike in the case of FritoLay, which has many distinct brands.

Hot Off (Your Backyard) Press

2011-09-04T13:15:00.001-04:00

In the blog-saturated digital culture of today, polluted by the noisy, and often meaningless outpouring of just about everyone’s consciousness, print is perceived as passé, old, and dead.

Not so soon.

Perhaps as a backlash against the etherealness and intangibleness of online self-publishing platforms—this one included—there is a quiet, but powerful surge of interest in making handcrafted magazines, or just zines as they're called.

"It just feels good to make something by hand," says Jenna Wortham [technology writer for The New York Times who edits] Girl Crush [a zine].“At the end of the day, though, you can describe a blog post, but you can't recreate it. It's really neat to hold something in your hand that you actually created."

Online craft mecca Etsy currently has nearly 50,000 distinct handmade publications listed for sale, approximately 3,000 of which are self-defined as zines.

What makes a publication a zine?

A zine must be self-published and handmade. It's often published in small enough quantities that its creator can personally keep track of everyone who has it. It's self-funded and sold either at a loss or only to recoup the cost of production. It eschews advertising, though some zinesters will promote other zines in their pages. And a zine follows its own schedule.

So it appears that blog posts will run parallel with backyard publishing.

(Via TIME)

Reading The Kitchen Table

2011-09-02T16:19:00.000-04:00

The newspaper 2.0 is going to be a sleek, shiny slab that can be well be passed around the kitchen table. The New York Times Co.'s R&D Lab, a "skunkworks project for a news institution," has been trying using Microsoft Surface technology to envision the future of newspaper paper.

It'll be on the top of a table, or a desk. (So that breaks down "desktop" to its very literal sense.)

[This concept] re-imagines the old “around the breakfast table” reading of the paper. You’ll notice that, in the demo, news is both highly personal and highly social — and that the line between “consumer” and “news consumer” is a thin one. Ads look pretty much the way we’re used to them looking, but they’re also integrated into the tabletop flow of information.

We’re used to thinking of “the news” as its own category, as something to be consumed primarily during commutes or during post-work relaxation in the evening.

The prototypes on display at the R&D Lab consider how news can be used, in particular, in the home, woven into the intimate contexts of the morning coffee, the family dinner, the daily getting-ready routine. They explore what it means to brush your teeth with the Times.

(Via Neiman Journalism Lab)

Ring The Bell, And It's Done

2011-08-31T06:17:00.000-04:00

You could say that Bellstrike is a vending machine that pops out Web sites. It's a new Web-based service that lets non-profits launch a professional Web site, in no time, at all.

But it goes beyond just being a static Web site. Bellstrike lets a non-profit accept donations, send out donation receipts, get the word out on social media channels and offers the possibility to maintain a blog. All that at no monthly cost. If someone does makes an online donation, Bellstrike takes 9.5% of the total amount and covers all transaction fees.

Some non-profits I know, could definitely go this wonderful source for all their Web site woes.

Lost, And Never Found

2011-08-30T22:22:00.000-04:00

A drone can peer down from 50 miles fromup the sky, and spot a tank. A wiretap put on a phone can relay a confidential conversationto an outside party. Deleted text messages are not erased. Digital malpracticeswith curious nautical names such as “spear phishing” and “whaling” can ambush anunsuspecting hard drive.

This is the world we now live in.

In a climate of high-tech crime and “C.S.I.”-stylegee-whiz crime-solving techniques, where is the place for private detectives àla Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot? It’s not in the pages of today’s novels, forsure.

The era of the refined, pipe-smokinggentleman, who solved mysteries and murders by his sharp logical deductionabilities, is behind us. And the days of the solidly good detective fiction areon a serious decline as well.

But I’m glad one such book was hidingon my very bookshelf. “The Galton Case,” a vintage, hardboiled crime fictionseries by Ross Macdonald, featuring private eye Lew Archer, first published in1959. Somehow, when I think of American crime fiction writers, I draw a blank. The only names that I associate with that genre are British names.

The slender paperback, with a blood-redcover—only befitting the genre—was a fast and entertaining read. Set in 1950s California,in the old money town of Santa Teresa (thefictional version of Santa Barbara),the story doesn’t begin with a crime. Itkicks off with a seemingly futile search.

Nearly 20 years after the scion of the Galtonfamily drops out of sight after a family feud, his mother, now arailroad widow, in the twilight of her years, wants to know what happened to her son.Around the same time that the family lawyer engages Archer to investigate hisdisappearance, his own butler is stabbed to death.

That leads him to the decapitatedremains of Anthony Galton, who was killed by a San Francisco gang during the depths of thedepression. That case nearly falls into his lap only to wriggle out into athicker plot. A young man in his early 20s, surfaces, claiming to be Anthony’sson. Promptly reunited with his trusting—and elated—grandmother after a lightvetting, his accent and spellings begin to poke holes into his putativeidentity. Archer’s services are next hired by the estate physician to do a meticulousbackground check on John.

This book helped refresh my adorationfor old-fashioned detective work with simple tools such as a magnifying glass,a dustpan, a pair of gloves, a robust black telephone, a newspaper punched withholes, enormous teletype machines, disguises, and so on.

My belief is that solving crimes in the19^th and 20^th centuries called for a far stronger nativeintelligence, astuteness, and expansive mindset than is demanded in today’spush-button era, which thus, endows it with an irrepressible charm.

Over the years, the cadre of private eyes has shrunk immeasurably. Technology has sloughed off the non-law enforcement crime solvers to obscure corners. But a new breed of pet detectives is fast coming up. Please chew on that.

When Emma Met Lily

2011-08-29T09:05:00.000-04:00

Each time I return a book to its shelf after having read it, I am suffused with a wonderful feeling of accomplishment. And that joy is all the more multiplied in regards to literary masterpieces.

I’m proud to say that my literary diet, in the recent few months, has included among fiction and non-fiction writing, two classics: “The House of Mirth” and “Madame Bovary.”

Toot the trumpet.

Given that the protagonist of both these novels is a woman and that they both delve into the complex interplay among romance, marriage, and money, they lend themselves to a tally, albeit to an amateurish one.

“Madame Bovary,” written by Gustave Flaubert, in the mid-19th century, is set in a small French provincial outpost near the town of Rouen, in Normandy. Published nearly 50 years later, in 1905, “The House of Mirth,” by Edith Wharton takes place in the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York.

Both Flaubert’s heroine, Emma Bovary and that of Wharton, Lily Bart, are beautiful, elegant, and educated women, who like to be surrounded by expensive damask, ornate Boulle clocks, fashionable attires, crystal chandeliers, and other accoutrements of a luxurious lifestyle. And there perhaps, their likeness ends.

Lily, a mild-mannered, jeune fille à marier, aspires for social ascendancy by way of a fine marriage to a wealthy, well-placed bachelor. Emma, on the other hand, is an ill-tempered and coldhearted married woman, who dreams ardently of a flight from the dull monotony of her marital life with a man, who in her eyes is coarse, dull, and witless. While Lily cherishes a man of both letters and affluence, all Emma seeks is lurid lust.

Neither could cut their petticoats according to their cloths, making frequent extravagant purchases that were beyond what their purses would permit. But where Lily racked up big bills mostly by mingling with the card-playing, pomade-scented grandees and stylishly-coiffured ladies, who hosted splendiferous soirées, Emma’s expenses weren't ratcheted up by her association with high society per se, but by her adulterous affairs.

She squandered her husband’s income in buying lavish gifts for her beaus, in arranging secrets trysts, in grooming herself, and in keeping a tastefully decorated home that were well above her station in life. Flaubert tells his readers when his Léon Dupuis "could not pay all the expenses himself, she would liberally make up the difference, which happened almost every time."

When her cash flow ebbed, she began buying on credit. She signed one promissory note after another and failed to make good on her surmounting loans. Lily’s money troubles weren't so much the creation of her greed as they were the result of her misplaced trust on her friend’s husband, a Wall Street financier, via whom she’d invested in the stock market.

Not that either of these women can be faulted for their absolute lack of knowledge of money matters, but it can be argued that it certainly exacerbated the effects of their poor life decisions. Emma’s profligacy eventually raised the Bovary household’s debt-to-income ratio to such a frightening level that it led her home to be seized. Lily, no less better off, became easy prey to her lascivious creditor, who offered to relieve her off her financial burden in lieu of sexual favors.

One would expect a woman who’d fallen into a debt quicksand to rein in her expenses. But no, Emma pursued her carnal pleasures with more ferocity than ever before, even entreating both her lovers to lend her cash. None obliged. When all doors slammed on her face, as a last ditch effort, she seduced the tax collector into helping her out of her woes.

A woman possessed of far greater self-respect, when Lily learned that she owed money, not only did she curtail her expenses dramatically, but also did all she could to recoup that sum, including working as a milliner.

Unable to cope with the prospect of being exposed as a defaulter—and a fallen woman—she took her life by consuming arsenic. Lily committed a suicide as well so as not to compromise her scruples. Where one died an honorable pauper, the other rendered her husband and her little girl, paupers, leaving them emotionally shattered and in penury.

Wharton’s heroine is someone reader comes to feel sympathetic toward, even respect. Flaubert clearly didn’t want his audience to regard his lead character as such.

Rocked By A Tremblor

2011-08-23T07:11:00.000-04:00

M shares her thoughts on today's earthquake.

Today’s earthquake didn't quite scare me. Neither am I rattled by the thought of an earthquake hitting New York City.

The whole thing surprised me a bit: there we were, regaled by near-fall weather, a lot of Sun mingled with the perfect breeze, the sky cloudless, the humidity gone, and only a small fan whirring in the room.

And then, the ground shook. At first I thought the neighbor’s baby was thumping on the floor in play.

But the shaking seemed to grow into something more than a baby-thump within seconds. I felt a little jolt under my feet as I was sitting on a chair, working on my laptop. T screamed, “It’s an earthquake!” I nonchalantly dismissed her proposition. Can’t be an earthquake in Brooklyn (though three years ago, a tornado had jauntily salsa’d right across our apartment), I thought.

Nonetheless, in my incredulity I followed T down the stairs and out into the street, half hoping to go back up again soon.

People had gathered outside. That was the earthquake protocol: to get out of the house, the office building and stand under the naked sky, lest a building, a man-made structure, fall on us and pulverize our bones.

After a few minutes, we went back up again, up the stairs, and T was visibly shaken. I desperately wished I was shaken too so I could join her in the feeling, but I honestly didn’t feel a strand of fear on me.

What to do? Sometimes the proper feeling simply eludes us.

Lastly, T and I both got busy checking for updates on what got dramatized by the media as the mild quake that spooked millions.

Now there is talk of the aftershock, which like Godot might never come.

Voting With Pocketbooks

2011-08-23T06:20:00.000-04:00

Since it began in 2009, Kickstarter has helped creative types (artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers etc.) to raise more than $75 million for 10,626 “creative projects” 813,205 “backers.” The start-up receives over 1500 proposals a week on an average, 40% of which are however, rejected.

So could you raise money for your prom dress through Kickstarter? Er, let's see. Succeeding on Kickstarter is actually easier than it sounds.

First, users must define a specific “project,” which is finite and specific.

Second, Kickstarter isn’t for handouts. It encourages—indeed, it mandates—an exchange of value. Creators must offer “rewards” to their backers: written notes of thanks, custom T-shirts, handmade objects.

Finally, to add some marketplace discipline to the process, project makers must pick a target dollar amount and a deadline. If they fall short of the goal, they get nothing.

Kickstarter is as much about unlocking creators’ marketing potential as their creative potential. The company takes a cut—5 percent—of the money raised on successful projects.

(Via The New York Times)

Magical Media To Be Diversified

2011-08-17T11:06:00.012-04:00

The final war at Hogwarts is over. What now? In a fun piece in Foreign Policy magazine, human rights wonks Tom Malinowski, Sarah Holewinski, and Tammy Schultz spell out a set of insanely witty yet well researched policy recommendations on the work of stabilizing the post-Voldemort magical world.

They assess that of the "four pillars of post-conflict reconstruction—security, governance and participation, urgent social and economic needs, and justice and reconciliation"—the magical world will face no difficulties on only one front: social and economic needs.

After all, with the proper application of scouring, mending, and engorgement charms, much of the physical damage wrought by the war can be repaired, and food can be multiplied to meet the needs of the population. But with respect to the other imperatives, critical challenges remain.

Here is the bit I found the most interesting.

A single wizarding newspaper—the Daily Prophet—cannot maintain its independence and hold government officials accountable when it has no competition (especially given the rumor, first published in the tabloid the Quibbler, that the Prophet may soon be bought by dark wizard Rupert Murdoch).

New media should also be promoted in the magical world. Right now, for example, wizards and witches stay in touch by sending letters of any length by the slow, reliable method of owl post. A new system could be developed employing faster, lighter sparrows, which could distribute shorter messages—say under 140 characters—to larger numbers of people.

[…] the Ministry of Magic must become more transparent to the public and press. Fewer documents should be protected by the Fidelius Charm, and the budget of the Department of Mysteries should be declassified. Too much secrecy will only invite more WizenLeaks scandals.

(Via Foreign Policy)

Collect Less. Think More.

2011-08-14T16:20:00.005-04:00

Even though we're staring into the future, technologically, at the intellectual level, we've regressed to the Middle Ages, an epoch marked by blind faith, intellectual lethargy, and the absence of a spirit of inquiry, notes Neal Gabler, in an excellent op-ed in The New York Times.

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy.

Thanks largely to the Internet, we have more information than ever, but the flow of truly breath-taking intellectual ideas has dwindled to a trickle. What’s more, even the greatest innovations of our times, lack gravity and grandeur as they once did.

No idea, hypothesis, or theory, is as paradigm-shifting as these: “the medium is the message,” “the feminine mystique,” “the Big Bang theory,” “the end of history.” These ideas were famous in themselves.

It’s not that the great minds of today are any less intellectually inferior to their predecessor, but they don’t care enough about ideas that aren’t instant money-spinners.

Gabler puts it this way:

In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

In the past, information gathering was only a means to an end.

We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful—into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas.

Now, we collect information for the sake of collection. Moreover, the very action of finding and collecting is so energy sapping that we’re left with little time to mull over what we've collected.

We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn't have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

Paperless Receipts

2011-08-08T16:15:00.000-04:00

Yet another item that the Internet will be rendering as detritus, along with newspapers, road maps, music CDs, is the paper receipt.

Major retailers, including Whole Foods Market, Nordstrom, Gap Inc. (which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic), Anthropologie, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, have begun offering electronic versions of receipts, either e-mailed or uploaded to password-protected Web sites. And more and more customers, the retailers report, are opting for paperless.

(Via The New York Times)

The Trouble With Twitter

2011-08-04T21:59:00.000-04:00

In an insightful piece, curator Maria Popova, points out that the two greatest pitfalls of Twitter are "correction" and "attribution."

As the micro-blogging platform "evolves into a tool of serious journalism, disaster reporting, human rights activism, and other issues of very palpable real-life impact," at present, it doesn't allow a way for correcting an erroneous tweet, once released.

We need to invent a way to either correct core text in tweets retroactively, or to append correctional tweets to the original tweet so that everyone who retweeted it or otherwise linked to it gets an instant update of the correction.

Further, she writes, “if information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape, then it is a form of creative labor in and of itself.” And such a form of labor should be credited just as literary works, photography, film-making, and other creative talent is rewarded.

We have clearly defined systems for what’s right or wrong in terms of crediting creative labor in “text” (or image, or video), from image rights to literary citations. But we don’t have the same ethical principles for sources of discovery. In a culture of “information overload,” though, it’s through these very nodes in the information ecosystem, these human sense-makers, that this very text or image or video finds its way into our scope of attention.

(Via Neiman Journalism Lab)

Wiping Your Hands On Dough

2011-08-03T12:54:00.006-04:00

If you skim through Suzanne Von Drachenfels book, “The Art of the Table,” and then, stretch your mind wide enough, you’ll see that a dining napkin has something in common with an electronic gadget.

With the passage of time, both have shrunk in size.

Over the course of its nearly 3,000-year evolutionary timeline, this table accessory has been a ball of sticky flour, a flappy counterpane, a parquet of fabric, a tile of soft paper, and for a period—extinct.

A jaw-dropper, the napkin has lineally descended from a lump of dough. After meals, ancient Spartans sat around to roll and knead a lump of dough they called “apomagdalie,” against the table, a custom that later, led to the use of sliced bread as wipes.

Napkins made of cloth, entered into circulation during the reign of the Romans. A people with a large appetite for gladiatorial sports, who delighted at the sight of a blood-splattered arena, they didn’t however, it appears, enjoy the sight of gastronomic stains on their imperial togas and Centurion uniforms. They were, thus, careful to drape a “mappae,” a largish sheet, over the edge of couches lest they were soiled by sauce spillages and food morsels. With the smaller, handkerchief-like “sudaria,” they’d mop the sweat off their brows.

In the early Middle Ages, table manners took a beating. Whatever version of napkin that had hitherto been around, abruptly disappeared. Hands and mouths were cleaned at any surface that was readily available. (Thankfully) dining civility made a comeback, in the 1500s, on the threshold of the Renaissance. It returned in a supersize splendor: the table was laid with not one, but three pieces of capacious cloth, each about the size of curtains, measuring 4 to 6 feet in length and 5 feet in width. That was the napkin, at its glory.

With the turning of the clock forward, it’s gotten progressively smaller, though it was, by no means, small.

In the 17th century, by which time the napkin had become a norm, they were still king-sized. 35 by 45 square inches, they were nearly as large as today’s bath towels. They still absorbed the atrocity of the callous wiping of palms, greasy with lard, cream, drippings; dusty with breads crumbs; dripping with water.

The acceptance of the fork in the 18th century by all classes of society brought neatness to dining and thus, reduced the size of the napkin to roughly 30 by 36 square inches.

Fast forwarding to 2011: Those at Applebee’s are two-ply paper napkins that stop at 15 by 17 square inches.

Tracking Book Babble

2011-08-03T06:26:00.000-04:00

Don't let this cute logo fool you. It isn't that of a new cupcake factory in town.

CoverCake, a service that tracks online chat about books, has launched a Web-based dashboard that provides dedicated social media analytics for books—just books. Targeted at publishers and authors, its features will measure the impact of promotion, publicity, and social media campaigns by studying the conversations they generate.

If you want to see 10,000 Facebook comments about a specific book, CoverCake likely already has them.

While I am on the topic of social media monitoring tools, I might as well squeeze in another name that's of value to media folks. Newsbeat, a newsroom version of Chartbeat, takes the pulse of news sites.

It shows, among other parameters (1) How many people are on a given site at any given moment and (2) a color-coded traffic chart that gives a breakdown of the volume of traffic generated via different social media platforms. For Twitter, Facebook, and e-mails, it uses purple bars, orange for direct traffic, green for search engines, and blue for other sites.

(Via ReadWriteWeb)

The Web Is Shrinking

2011-08-02T06:33:00.000-04:00

Facebook is quietly phagocytizing all the time we spend on the Internet. The hours spent on the social network giant have gone up exponentially at the expense of all non-Facebook sites.

That is not a useful development.

(Via Business Insider)

A Geographical Wikipedia

2011-08-01T09:55:00.000-04:00

Voice of America’s “Behind the Wall” initiative is an interesting crowdmapping project that yokes together the democracy of citizen journalism with the rigor and accuracy of mainstream journalistic reporting.

Crowdmaps are location-based citizen reports featuring videos, photos, and other user-generated content that are plotted on a map so that one knows the exact location of any incident. It is a "geographical version of Wikipedia."

Unlike real-time reporting that emanates from social networking sites, the information, here, is "verified either by non-profits or a network of local citizens."

One of the main problems that social networking faces when it comes to reporting real-time news is the ease with which the rumor-mill kicks into overdrive. It’s very easy for people sitting at home, on their computers, to throw out a few rumors into the twitterverse and, before you know it, it’s being retweeted and accepted as the truth.

So far, the project has produced three crowdmaps—for Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen—documenting the political unrest in the Middle East. But this technique can be used for gathering other kinds of crowdsourced information as well.

(Via TNW)

Google+. A Trojan Horse?

2011-07-30T06:39:00.000-04:00

A WIRED blog has described Google+ as "half Trojan horse and half battering ram," forewarning users that it's more than a "database of profile pages."

Social networks don’t work that way any more, just as PCs aren't stuck with sorting and saving local files in folders.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter aren’t just providing you with the digital equivalent of your mailing address, but also your driver’s license, passport, car keys and credit cards.

What's in store for Google+ in the future?

Right now, it’s easy to share links, pictures, location and videos on Google+. Soon, it’ll be equally easy to share maps, office documents, news, and shopping deals.

At O’Reilly Radar, Edd Dumbill offers a helpful anatomy of social networks’ new functions:

Identity. Authenticating you as a user, and storing information about you.
Sharing. Access rights over content.
Notification. Informing users of changes to content or contacts’ content.
Annotation. Commenting on content.
Communication. Direct interaction among members of the system.

(Via WIRED)

A Heart That Ticks, Not Throbs

2011-07-29T00:04:00.009-04:00

This is a part of my narrative writing exercise, in which I attempted to interpret the storyline of an animated short.

Day breaks in the land of cogs and wheels and nuts and bolts. Stirred by the sweet scent of a rose, a gentleman, in a pair of breeches, rides out into the country. As darkness gathers, like a gallant knight, mounted on a stallion—albeit a mechanical one—he crests the slope of a wooded hillock.

And there, he lays eyes on a delicate young woman wandering in the meadows under the halo of a pale, moonlit sky. His sees her and his heart surges with romance. He presents her with a flower, plucked from the pristine soil, not by his own hands, but by the hoof of his four-footed carrier.

By nightfall, they'd fallen completely in love, and they set off for their new life. The crack of dawn sees the couple scudding across a flaming-orange horizon in a balloon-like craft that leaves, in its wake, a fat contrail of noxious fumes.

They enter a smoggy airspace populated with all manner of bizarre aerial transportation, from blimps to blunderbusses to monocycles, all powered by carbon dioxide-emitting engines. A congested skyline, pierced with turrets, towers, spires, belches coils of dense smoke into the air.

Below, a big city, enveloped in heavy soot and grime—reminiscent of the dirty cloud that draped Victorian England during the Industrial Revolution—gasps and pants. Motors hum away. Factories sigh.

The woman stares goggle—eyed at her new surroundings. It is a machine world, she has arrived into, she realizes, where rod-like tree branches gather rust, get rickety, and fall to the ground; butterflies whir their blade-like wings; dogs scamper about wound-up by their masters’ keys.

It is, in short, no place for anything organic.

Back home, the flower—a souvenir the couple had brought back with them from the forests—wilts. Callously, the man tosses it out, and replaces with what is, a more botanical contraption, and less a plant. Deeply saddened, the woman goes in search of it.

At the bottom of an underground scrap yard, buried under layers of industrial refuse, she finds it, and takes a whiff of its petals. Its fragrance, now turned into a toxic vapor, proves fatal for her.

By the time this bitter realization strikes her beau, it is too late, and all he can do is to invent love, that will tick away, with clockwork precision. Alas, genuine love, human love, is a casualty of this malevolently mechanistic place.

“The Invention of Love,” an animated short by Andrey Shushkov, is a cautionary tale of the sad consequences of humanity’s ravenous hunger for technological progress.

Translated In Class

2011-07-24T17:25:00.003-04:00

Recently, I had the opportunity of sitting in a classroom where the professor was offering lessons in the foundations of English writing, to a batch of mostly immigrant students. This passage is what I produced as part of my classwork, wherein I describe a scene from the film "Lost in Translation."

As the train snakes along a picturesque route hugging a coastline, a young woman stares out the window at the still countryside. The cone of a snow-capped mountain stares vacantly back at her, from the distance. Her travel companion, a robust headphone, grips her ears. At the Kyoto station, an eerily deserted platform greets her. She is the only passenger to disembark.

From behind the pylon of a Shinto temple, she spies on a knot of schoolgirls huddled together in a soft, girly chatter. There is a faint gong of a bell. Into her field of vision rolls a silent marriage party, whose women are dressed in black kimonos. She notices them from the corner of her eye. Something stirs in her. She daintily makes her way across a shady, lotus-strewn pond that expands into a featureless, frozen field of white.

Her journey radiates a certain starkness, a certain stillness that abundantly conveys the traveler’s sense of her loneliness, even intensifies it. While she is a part of her alien environment, she is not present in it. Yet will this be the foreign soil where she finds happiness?

Is There Social Dirt On You?

2011-07-22T19:15:00.000-04:00

Prior to hiring, large companies typically run background checks on prospective employees to see if the have any criminal record, a past of pulling off bank heists, embezzling money, being highway thugs and the like. They conduct searches on Google and LinkedIn.

But now, they’re going a step further than that. They’re requiring candidates to pass a “a social media background check.”

A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years. Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.

Less than third of that information comes from the social platform giants such as Facebook and Twitter. The rest, from grubbing social dirt elsewhere on the Internet, in places such as Tumblr, Yahoo! user groups, e-commerce sites, bulletin boards, and even Craigslist. Plus, there are photos and videos on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Yfrog.

(via The New York Times)

Burgers, Fries, And Predictability

2011-07-21T20:56:00.000-04:00

The economic argument behind branding, from Charles Wheelan’s "Naked Economics: Undressing A Dismal Science," is an interesting one.

McDonald’s “golden arches” have as much to do with information as they do with hamburgers. Every McDonald’s hamburger tastes the same, whether it is sold in Mexico City or Moscow or Cincinnati. That is more a mere curiosity; it is at the heart of the company’s success. Suppose you are driving along Interstate 80 outside of Omaha, having never been in the state of Nebraska, when you see a McDonald’s. Immediately, you know all kinds of things about the restaurant. You know that it will be clean, safe an inexpensive. You know that it will have a working bathroom. You know that it will be open seven days a week. You know all of these things before you get out of the car in a state you’ve never been in.

Compare that to the billboard advertising Chuck’s Big Burger. Chuck’s may offer one of the best burgers west of the Mississippi. Or it might be a likely spot for nation’s next E. coli outbreak. How would you know? If you lived in Omaha, then you might be familiar with Chuck’s reputation. If you are like millions of other people, even those who find fast-food unappealing, you will still seek out the “golden arches” because you know what lies beneath them. McDonald’s sells hamburgers, fries and more importantly, predictability.

This idea underlies the concept of “branding” whereby companies spend enormous sums to build an identity for their products. Branding solves a problem for the consumer. How do you select products whose quality or safety you can determine only after you use them (and sometimes, not even then)?

Modern business requires that that we conduct major transactions with people whom we’ve never met before. Branding helps to provide an element of trust that is necessary for a complex economy to function.

The Iconic Sandwich

2011-07-11T22:14:00.007-04:00

Ask me to describe a hamburger, and I’ll indulge by saying that it’s a patty of meat served between two semi-spheres of bun. It’ll be a compact, if colorless, answer, but also an incomplete one. It won’t occur to me to qualify it as a sandwich.

I guess, for most folks, a hamburger is just that—a hamburger. This circular snack has acquired such an iconic status that it strains one to even conceive of it as one among the many types of sandwiches there are—a fact I realized only after reading the wonderfully written book, “The Hamburger: A History,” by Josh Ozersky.

There’s another, and perhaps a more obvious reality that also escapes me. It’s that I can’t envision a time in America before the Golden Arches. Yet, this global powerhouse and its gustatory-industrial product, hasn’t been around forever.

In the mid-1850s, when German immigrants began arriving by the shiploads, they found the “Hamburg steak,” a dish familiar to them, already available in New York City’s freestanding food vendors. This is to say that they didn’t bring the recipe with them from the German port city of Hamburg, after which the hamburger takes it name. It preceded them.

By the close of that century, Hamburg steaks (“minced or scraped beefsteaks, jazzed up with onions, a little nutmeg, and served with gravy) were old hat, eaten both at home, in their discount form, and in restaurants in their luxe versions. Delmonico’s, New York City’s first fine-dining restaurant, listed it as its “most expensive item at 10 cents, twice the price of roast beef, pork chops, or a veal cutlet.”

Though immensely popular in the 19th century, for reasons best known to history, it shrank from America’s collective plate until it “retreated forever into tinfoil trays and a few furtive, dismal Pennsylvania roadhouses.”

The 1920s was an intensely lively decade, bursting on the one end, with the cultural pyrotechnics of sensual jazz and the literary prowess of the likes of Scott Fitzgerald, and on the other, with the entrepreneurial fervor of ambitious men with grandiose dreams and the rumbling of the assembly line.

It was in this climate that Edgar Waldo “Billy” Ingram, the “Henry Ford of hamburgers,” founded White Castle, America’s first burger chain, in 1916. But he wouldn’t have done it without the culinary chutzpa of a fry cook named Walter Anderson.

Up until then, a plethora of meat-filled sandwiches were palmed off as hamburgers—but none were, in the sense they've come to be known today. He was the first to use a specialized bun instead of sliced bread, to cook the meat on a very hot (500 degrees Fahrenheit) grill, and to press down on the patty with a customized spatula made of high-strength steel.

“A hamburger” Ozersky writes, is “defined by its being served on a bun. No, there is no doubt: on any kind of semantic or platonic level, no bun = no burger.”

An ace marketer, with an “evangelical zeal for uniformity,” and a love for mechanization, Ingram created the “template for all fast-food restaurants” in the world. He saw to it that every one in his chain of gothic-turreted, gleaming white restaurants efficiently cranked out the same product: little square burgers.

Still, despite its initial growth, White Castle couldn’t conquer the world, its growth limited by its founder’s abhorrence of the very business strategy that is the secret of McDonald’s enduring success.

The two McDonald’s brothers may well have invented of the “Model T" of the food business,” but it was Ray Kroc, an irascible but brilliant businessman, who turned the company into a universally recognized brand. He was a franchising evangelist. The concept worked marvelously because it conflated the “incentive of personal ownership” with the “managerial talents of big business.”

The milieu of the 1950s was conducive to McDonald’s expansion. Inspired by Germany’s Autobahn, President Dwight Eisenhower passed the Federal Highway Act in 1956. A system of sturdy new roads sprang up. This gave a huge fillip to auto companies. Automotive tailfins appeared. People were mobile. They moved out to affordable homes in the suburbs where they sat around their television sets. Backyard barbecues were social affairs. Drive-ins became haunts of the young. Space-age designs of Googie architecture. In all of this, the hamburger was a part. It was the “most mobile, the efficient, and satisfying sandwich ever devised,” convenient for holding with one hand, and dialing the steering wheel with the other.

The next time I buy a hamburger, I’ll remember to remember its bun-bound story.

Remembering To Forget

2011-07-03T17:59:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the digital revolution, our biological memories don't have to remember much. External memories—e-mails, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blog posts—do that for us. And they forget nothing.

But is that necessarily good?

In "Delete:The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age," Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford's Internet Institute, urges us to hit the “delete” button oftener.

Take Google. It’s the 21^st-century version of what H.G. Wells, had in the 1930s, envisioned— a “world brain.” It's an omniscient entity, with the perfect memory that stores all information about everyone. Mayer-Schönberger's point is that a comprehensive memory is as much a curse as a boon.

In "Delete," he imagines a sad little story of two friends meeting after not seeing each other for years. John and Jane arrange to go for coffee at an old haunt to reminisce. But Jane can't quite remember the name of the cafe. So she has a brainwave – she'll check through her old emails to John. As she looks for the cafe address, she stumbles across an exchange with him that poisons her attitude to him. Instead of forgiving and forgetting, she is overwhelmed with old resentment and, quite possibly, won't turn up for that coffee.

How can we make forgetting a little easier? By setting an expiration date on digital documents and storage devices such as cameras, cell phone, computers. When that date is reached, it will automatically be deleted.

(Via The Guardian)

Forget The Tablet. Think Quantum.

2011-07-03T14:31:00.005-04:00

D-Wave processor chip (Photo: D-Wave Systems Inc.)

Popular technology columnists have an almost fetishistic obsession with reporting up-to-the-minute buzz on silicon chip-run, computing devises. Presently, it is tablets, cloud computing, and smart phones that are the apple (pun intended) of their collective eyes, with an askance glance cast in the direction of laptops, and desktops—-gadgets, which not too long ago, had their undivided attention.

Still, we do read about them, off and on.

But what we almost certainly never get to hear about is quantum computing, an esoteric field, currently in its infancy. At maturity, it promises to truly bring about a … quantum leap … in Charles Babbage’s invention, birthing a machine, unfathomably more powerful than any computer we know today.

Quantum computing is based on a branch of physics known as quantum mechanics. At its heart, is the concept of the “Many Worlds Interpretation,” which posits that for every event, there is not one, but many outcomes, and that each one of these happens. It dismisses the notion of reality as a single history, but innumerable ones, each of which is realized.

To borrow from Rivka Galchen's feature "Dream Machine," in The New Yorker:

Quantum mechanics states that particles can be in two places at once, a quality called superimposition; that two particles can be related, or “entangled” such that they can coordinate their properties, regardless of their distance in space; and time; and that when we look at particles, we unavoidably alter them.

Which is perhaps, why, it’s intolerably odd even to physicists. However, scientists, although indifferent to the truth or falsehood of this idea as a description of the universe, are now working to build a quantum computing machine.

A classical computer, which transforms an input into an output through nothing more than the manipulation of binary bits, units of information that can either be zero or one.

A quantum computer uses qubits instead of bits. Each qubit (pronounced: Q-bit) can be zero or one, like a bit, but a qubit can be zero and one—the quantum mechanical quirk known as superimposition.

Very, very recently, the future of computation was born. Oddly, no drum roll was heard (or maybe, it was kept deliberately inaudible.)

D-Wave Systems, a British Columbia-based company, released D-Wave One, the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer, the equivalent of Edison’s light bulb in the computing world. D-Wave One uses a 128-qubit chip set, which makes it mighty.

Lockheed Martin was its first buyer. When can we buys ours? Probably not immediately down the road.

Who Uses Social Networks?

2011-07-02T21:03:00.000-04:00

Findings of a research by Pew Internet & American Life Project, a project of the Pew Research Center, indicate:

Of all social networking sites, Twitter is the least utilized network, with just 13% of users participating in it. Facebook has the highest usage at 92%, MySpace at 29%, and LinkedIn at 18%.
The average age of the Facebook user is 38, that of Twitter is 33, and that of LinkedIn is 40.
LinkedIn is the only social network that has more men than women.Twitter, on the other hand has more woman than men, making up 64% of the total users.
African-American users have the lowest presence on LinkedIn making up only 2% of the total users.
The highest saturation of African-Americans is on MySpace with 16% of the total users.Hispanic users are not prominent on social networking services either. LinkedIn is comprised of only 4% Hispanics.
LinkedIn is far and away the most saturated site when it comes to white users who make up a whopping 85% of the user base.

On iCloud Nine

2011-06-12T23:02:00.000-04:00

iCloud, the new service from Apple, will enable one to access one’s digital chattel (documents, videos, photos, e-books, calendar, e-mail etc.) from any portable, company-approved device. Which is perhaps another way of saying that it'll upstage the computer.

Heretofore, one’s computer was like the Sun in a private digital solar system around which all other devices orbited and depended for data (through increasingly arcane synchronization rituals). Conceptually, iCloud collapses this solar system into a single celestial body accessible, anywhere, anytime by whatever piece of gear happens to be in your hand. (Via FMRL)

Er, but you can't access the data with "whatever piece of gear happens to be in your hand." That's the most obvious cloud over the iCloud.

In a crucial way, Apple’s ascension to the cloud is a step backward, since material stored on iCloud will only be accessible with an Apple-branded device (or a Windows computer, since a lot of Windows users own iPods). If you want to look at photos on your iPad and Macbook, no problem. If you want to see them on your Android phone, though, tough luck. (Via NYRB)

That said, iCloud promises to make life easier. God forbid, were one’s cache of downloaded music via iTunes, to get wiped out, one needn't bawl over lost tracks. Currently, short of buying them all over again, there’s no way of getting them back. With iCloud, it’ll be possible to retrieve them in a jiffy.

Thank You For The Music

2011-06-12T10:36:00.039-04:00

The greater the clarity of sound, the superior it is, is a notion that is taken as gospel truth. So is the one that progress in acoustics is the ability to record and reproduce sound, which is free of distortions, is more distinct, taut, and precise.

In the pecking order of audio-storage gadgets, the lineup, in descending order of standing is thus: The various desktop and mobile apps, the compact disc, the cassette, the eight-track cartridge, the vinyl record, and the phonograph cylinder.

Standing where we are today, one can only envision the future of musical sound to be further crystalline, with shining, chiseled edges. The faintest hint that the electronic embellishments from popular music would be sieved off will likely cease to make it popular.

But, hold on.

Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “A Visit From The Goon Squad,” impels one to rethink that notion.

Around the time that futurists have forecast the emergence of an inter-planetary Internet, a manned mission to Mars, a geo-engineered climate reversal, analog musicians, with their Colosseum-size orgy of mixing consoles, will make a comeback. Belting out digitally-unadulterated old favorites will be vogue again. Everything old will be new again. There will be a return to the innocence of the wobbly percussion of a bongo, of a vocalist singing solo, with nothing but just a slide guitar.

Egan’s book does not belong to the sci-fi shelf. Yet, one gets a peek into the future of the rock music industry (as well as slices of its present and recent past) through the interstices of the lives of its many characters.

The fates of musicians will be decided by a new demographic, the toddlers, or “pointers,” so named possibly because of their habit of “pointing” at devices and getting myriad tasks accomplished. It will be a cleaner world. Tattoos, body piercings, four-letter words, and drugs, will have met their demise. Everyone, without an exception, will be wired and be carrying a “handset,” a multipurpose mobile device akin to the types we see on the market today, but degrees more versatile. Employees will work without paper and desks.

People will communicate 24/7 via “Ts,” an infernal brand of texting that has omits vowels entirely. The art of writing will have undergone an almost unrecognizable change. Narratives will be pared down textually and will be laid out as visually-tantalizing infographics. It is here that Egan, a ace literary experimenter, makes a literary PowerPoint presentation to the reader.

Plotted as a social graph, the novel’s two nodes would be Bennie Salazar, a rock musician-turned-record label exec, and his assistant Sasha, and to which all other lives are linked. Like gaseous molecules in motion in an enclosed chamber, they intersect with theirs, interface with theirs, and fork out, only to cross paths at a later time. Most, if not all, of these characters are defined by their peculiarities that range from an innocuous, if eyebrow-knitting idiosyncrasy, to a serious criminal transgression.

Sasha has been a kleptomaniac since her teens. Bennie is in the habit spraying insecticide under his armpits, and drinking coffee sprinkled with gold flakes. La Doll, the publicist for whom his first wife, Stephanie, works, has a darkly comic public relations disaster of her own, when a design flaw in a hip lighting fixture she conceived scalded the heads of celebrity guests she’d assembled at a New Year’s Eve party. Left penniless and socially and professionally ostracized after a jail sentence, she takes up a gig of repairing the image of a genocidal leader of an undisclosed nationality.

Stephanie’s brother, Jules, is a celebrity reporter, who pounces on a naïve actress in the middle of an interview. The ailing lead guitarist of a once heavy hitter band wishes to be forever etched in the hearts of his fans by undertaking a concert your that’ll kill him.

The book doesn't have a single, broad plot, but a string of mini-yarns, which like the multiple pockets of a carpenter pant, are autonomous, yet part of the body of the same fabric. A solid good read, enough to induce one to muse upon its subtext, days after one has clicked the book off.

Created By The People, For The People

2011-06-10T09:26:00.000-04:00

My grand uncle was a member of the hallowed committee, which in 1947, drafted the constitution of the world’s largest democracy, India. It was an elite body that operated behind grand oak doors and marble colonnades, invisible and inaccessible to the public.

Which was good, given the context.

But take Ireland’s next constitution. Much like in the direct democracy of classical Athens, every digitally-empowered citizenry will have a voice in its creation.

The crowdsourcing follows a national forum last year where 950 randomly selected people spent a day discussing the constitution. If the committee has its way, the draft bill, due to be ready at the end of July, will be put to a referendum without any changes imposed by parliament – so it will genuinely be a document by the people, for the people.

(Via The Guardian)

Skim. Skip. Skim. Click.

2011-06-05T15:37:00.000-04:00

As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books, as the time we spend exchanging bite-sized text messages crowds out the time we spend composing sentences and paragraphs, as the time we spend hopping across links crowds out the time we devote to quite reflection and contemplation, the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart.

This is how we read online: We “power browse” and “power scan.”

[In 2006, a researcher who studied the pattern of eye movements in people who read online found] that “the vast majority skimmed the text quickly, their eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F.

— From “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr.

What's Spear Phishing?

2011-06-04T15:32:00.000-04:00

A former roommate of mine had attended college in Spearfish, South Dakota. And now, I've come across an identical and nautical sounding digital malpractice called "spear phishing."

... A rapidly proliferating form of fraud that comes with a familiar face: messages that seem to be from co-workers, friends or family members, customized to trick you into letting your guard down online.

[The most common targets of spear phishing] were government agencies and senior managers and executives; the phishing of such big game is commonly referred to as “whaling.”

(Via The New York Times)

Nomadic Food Retailers

2011-06-03T16:48:00.000-04:00

New trends are the wellspring of new businesses. The mobile-dining phenomenon in New York City has birthed a new cadre of entrepreneurs, who design branded, artistic, food-trucks.

[Shanghai Stainless Product & Design Company on Gerry Street in Brooklyn], has fabricated trucks for some of the headliners of roaming specialty food, including All American Diner, Korilla BBQ, Red Hook Lobster Pound, Treats Truck, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream and Wafels & Dinges, as well as four members of the Rickshaw fleet — in all, some 30 mobile food factories since 2008. In addition, the company turns out about 60 food carts each year.

Thanks to the growth of mobile-food industry, the initial capital needed to launch a new food business has whittled down from say, $500,000 to $100,000.

(Via The New York Times)

Paying With Your Phone

2011-06-03T12:38:00.000-04:00

When I use the word "pay phone," I don't mean the iconic red, public telephone boxes in the U.K. I'm using it in the sense of a phone that can pay.

Google is among the first out of the gate in the attempt to make leather wallets go the way of the typewriter.

The technology giant introduced Google Wallet, a mobile application that will allow consumers to wave their cellphones at a retailer’s terminal to make a payment instead of using a credit card.

(Via The New York Times)

Creative Writing Meets Business

2011-05-30T10:27:00.000-04:00

Groupon's mega success as an Internet business hinges on creative writing.

The great achievement of Groupon—a blend of “group” and “coupon”—is to have reformulated spam into something benign, even ingratiating.

And, it has on its payroll, not employees with the suffix M.B.A., but a wide spectrum of creative writers.

[Groupon] offers discounts on products and services, something that Internet start-up companies have tried to develop as a business model many times before, with minimal success. Groupon’s breakthrough sprang not just from the deals but from an ingredient that was both unlikely and ephemeral: words.

“We’re mixing business with art and creating our own voice,” says Aaron With, Groupon’s editor in chief, who works at a lead singer as well.

(Via The New York Times)

Data Is The New Coal

2011-05-24T22:04:00.000-04:00

According to a report published by the consulting firm McKinsey, “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity,” data is a vital raw material of the information economy, much as coal and iron ore were in the Industrial Revolution.

The next stage of innovation will exploit Internet-scale data sets to discover new businesses and predict consumer behavior and market shifts.

To mine them, to sift through them, to analyze them:

The U.S. will need 140,000 to 190,000 more people with “deep analytical” skills, typically experts in statistical methods and data-analysis technologies. The nation will also need 1.5 million more data-literate managers. The report points to the need for a sweeping change in business to adapt a new way of managing and making decisions that relies more on data analysis.

(Via The New York Times)

Hype, Without The Bite

2011-05-12T09:18:00.000-04:00

Photo: Via Future Journalism Project

According to a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which examined the route taken by online news consumers to arrive at their destinations, the role of Twitter was minuscule.

Of the top 21 sites for which there were data, Twitter showed up as referring links to just nine. And for all, but one of those nine, Twitter sent only about 1% of total traffic.

(Via Journalism.org)

Cloud-Based Laptop

2011-05-12T07:29:00.000-04:00

The Chromebook promises to start in an astonishing seven seconds.

Chromebook will look like a laptop, only it won't have any software programs or storage space. The only thing it has is a Web browser, from which you will be able to access your e-mail (from Gmail or other online mail services), calendar (Google calendar), documents (most likely from Google Docs), social networks (like Facebook) and any other web-based service. (Via ReadWriteWeb)

Reaching For The Stars

2011-05-11T11:04:00.004-04:00

Reaching for the stars—that’s what Project Icarus is about. It's about traveling to the stars, literally, and not in the imagination. Started in 2009, it’s an ambitious five-year study into sending an unmanned spacecraft to an “interstellar destination”—that is, to another star.

The two-stage fusion powered Daedalus interstellar spacecraft
(Photo: Adrian Mann via Discovery News)

The nearest star, a binary system named Alpha Centauri, is 4.4 light years away.

How long will that take?

Using current technology, a one-way trip to the Alpha Centauri system would take approximately 75,000 years. To put this in perspective, that's about one hundred and fifty times the amount of time that has passed since Columbus discovered America.

But Icarus is designed to do so in 100 years.

Traveling that distance would require the Icarus craft to have an inconceivably sturdy propulsion system, powered by Helium-3, a rare isotope found on the moon and the gas giants.

[So] the spacecraft construction would necessarily take place in space … A large scale space-based infrastructure would then be needed, which would most likely use a wide range of solar powered systems.

But, there is also another dimension to this epic timescale.

Because Icarus is tasked with designing an interstellar mission that would reach the target solar system in under one hundred years, this fact in itself raises yet more remarkable challenges—specifically the creation of an organization that could endure for that length of time.

The Anatomy Of Grief

2011-05-05T12:17:00.002-04:00

Concealed in the book's cover art
is her husband's name, John.

Joan Didion “sits down to dinner” on the evening of December 30, 2003, and “life” as she “knows it ends.”

Her husband of 40 years, John Geoffrey Dunne, dies of a sudden, massive cardiac arrest on their dinner table, in mid-speech, at a time when their daughter, Quintana, was lying unconscious in an ICU bed.

In her attempt to cope with the loss, in the year that follows, Didion meticulously deconstructed the sequence of events that led to it, which she captured in her deeply stirring book “The Year Of Magical Thinking.”

In turning the clock backwards, as it were, she goes into such minute and graphical clinical details as the degree of the occlusion of his coronary arteries, the chemical names and the precise doze of the life-saving drugs injected by the EMS crew to resuscitate his failed organs, the time of pronouncement of his death.

In furnishing these pieces of piercing information, she consulted a motley assortment of poetry, medical journals, post-mortem reports, doctors’ accounts. “Information was control,” she had known all along, but it when it came to it, she realized she couldn't “control” the outcome of life, she writes.

It is her photo-realistic clarity, her anatomical dissection of her anguish, done with a pointed lexical scalpel that, at times, renders the narrative too heart-wrenching, even psychologically disturbing to read through.

What she describes as her “magical thinking,” is, in essence, an irrational belief that took hold of her in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s demise, but which, ironically, manifested itself, on the surface, as a calm, rational behavior.

While to the outside world, she was being the “cool customer,” she had, on the inside, all but taken leave of the power of logical reasoning. She had sanctioned his autopsy, convinced it would unearth the cause of his ailment, as possibly “something simple,” and that it would enable doctors to fix the problem, and bring him back to life. “How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes,” she wrote.

Throughout the book, but more so in the later half, she journeys back and forth between her recollection of the harrowing moments immediately preceding the tragedy, and the happy distant memories of her time with Mr. Dunne and their girl, together.

A slim book, with a little over 200 pages, it is definitely not for the faint-hearted. I could’ve finished reading it in a single sweep. But I couldn't. I’d read a few pages, take a deep breath, and come back to them the next day or so.

Stick Food From Mr. Q's Grill

2011-05-04T12:28:00.002-04:00

The other night, this is what I had for dinner—about 10 chicken-on-sticks. Not far from my place, in Brooklyn, only two blocks away is a newly-opened skewer place called "Mr. Q's Grill." It’s a very small, cozy eatery, with space for no more than four tables and pub chairs. The menu features an assortment of savory skewers, all unbeatably priced at $1. The meats are tender, succulent, and well-spiced, just the way I love it.

The Neural Networks Behind Buying

2011-04-19T16:20:00.013-04:00

If the marketplace looks flooded now, imagine what it might look like if every product that was ever released were to head to the store shelves.

Startlingly, however, as many as 8 of the 10 products rolled out in the U.S. stumble and fall soon after launch. Per the IXP Marketing Group, globally, of the roughly 21,000 new brands are introduced worldwide a year, the bulk slip into oblivion even before it gets a serious dekko.

So who is to tell whether a new product will fly or flop?

Traditional marketers use an assortment of tools such as focus groups, opinion polling, surveys, individual interviews, to gauge whether an unborn good (or service) will be at least, viable, if not a smashing success.

In his book, “Buyolgy” brand maven Martin Lindstrom, teases out the reasons why “companies are woefully bad at predicting how we as consumers will respond to their products.”

Through an unlikely marriage of “science and marketing,” he demonstrates that the traditional marketing research toolbox cannot extrapolate with accuracy, what will tickle the customers’ fancy. Because how we say we feel about a product may not translate into how we actually behave around it, consumer research is often not the best weathervane of our genuine likes and dislikes.

These methods do not get it, he says, since they barely scratch the surface of a consumer’s conscious mind, and don’t manage to go any deeper. Reality, however, is a bit more complicated. Unbeknown to a purchaser, there is a multitude of subconscious forces” that propels him or her to buy (or not).

“Neuromarketing,” an emergent field in marketing is a far more accurate reader of the “thoughts, feelings, motivations, needs, and desires of consumers,” and can illuminate our “seemingly irrational” buying habits.

In a revolutionary, $7 million, never-done-before, and the largest ever neuromarketing study that drew 2,081 volunteers from five countries: America, Germany (because it’s the most advanced country in the world as far as neuromarketing is concerned), England, Japan (because there’s no tougher place in the world than Japan to launch a new product), and China, Lindstrom and his team, comprising 200 researchers, 10 professors and doctors, and an ethics committee, set out to uncork some of the mysteries of why we buy, what we buy, through a series of experiments spread over three years.

“If you think of the brain as a house, any and all previous experiments were based on looking through a single window, but our wide ranging study promised to cast its gaze through as many windows, cracks, floorboards, attic windows, and mouse holes we could find,” Lindstrom writes.

For analysis, the research relied on a mix of 102 fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans and 1,979 SST (Steady State Typography, which is the advanced version of electroencephalograph)—two of the world’s most expensive and cutting-edge brain-scanning machines.

Some of the questions he sought to answer were: How effective is product placement? Are brand logos as powerful as believed to be? Does subliminal advertising exist? Does religion play any part in what we pick up? Does sex sell?

A staggering 15 billion cigarettes are sold every day—that’s 100 million cigarettes a minute. The number sounds all the more jarring when juxtaposed with fact that cigarette boxes come with clear warning labels on the fronts, sides, and backs, spelling out the hazards of smoking. Lindstrom’s findings revealed that far from deterring smokers, they, in fact, fanned a desire to smoke, by activating a region of the brain known as “the craving spot.” Who knew?

The rationale behind embedding a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses (in “Top Gun”) or the USA TODAY newspaper (in “Minority Report”) or Aston Martin (in a James Bond film) is to etch the product in the moviegoers’ memory. If they remember it, they are likely to buy it, so marketing theory goes.

Though product placement did not exist in its present incarnation until the mid-1980s onward, it certainly is not new. “Even the pioneering Lumière brothers, two of the world’s first filmmakers, included several appearances of Lever’s sunlight soap in their early short films. Turns out, they had an associate on staff who moonlighted as a publicist for Lever Brothers (now Unilever).”

Today, it’s become a riotous affair. Take Sylvester Stallone’s 2001 “Driven.” It managed to cram in 103 brands in 117 minutes, almost inflicting visual assault on viewers.

Lindstrom sought to ascertain the efficacy of product placement by studying a sample of “American Idol” watchers. Which of the show’s three main sponsors— AT&T, (formerly Cingular Wireless), the Ford Motor Company, and Coca-Cola, each of whom forks over an estimated $26 million annually to have their brands featured in one of the highest-rated shows in television history—was the most successful in placing their products? He found that Coca-Cola did the best while Ford did the worst.

The results revealed that products placements do well only when they are seamlessly woven into the fabric of a movie plot or a television program. If not, they are regurgitated as “white noise,” and “instantaneously forgotten.”

Researchers generally agree that it takes as little as 2.5 seconds to make a purchasing. In another eye-opening study, Lindstrom got to the root of why in the first place, we are tempted to own an iPod when see a fellow subway rider listening to one? Why do tears well up in our eyes when we see a heroine in a movie weep?

Blame the “mirror neurons,” a cluster of neural network that makes us “unwittingly imitate other people’s behavior,” which is a “huge factor in why we buy the things we do.”

Lindstrom predicts, soon, more and more companies will be “trading in their pencils for SST caps.” But the path to that shining future runs through a dark forest of resistance. The word “neuromarketing” has a sinister aura about it, evoking images of Orwellian mind control by dirty politicos, “corrupt governments,” and “crooked advertisers.”

But he assures that “neuromarketing is a tool—like a hammer. Yes—in the wrong hands, it can be used to bludgeon someone over the head, but that is not its purpose, and it doesn’t mean that hammers should be banned, or seized, or embargoed.”

Statistics Goes Sexy

2011-04-10T15:41:00.000-04:00

“Statistics is now the sexiest subject around,” says Dr. Hans Rosling, a professor of international health at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and founder of Gapminder, a data visualization non-profit focusing on issues of global health.

In our data-saturated world, "visual analytics," is fast growing into a field, one which has an entertainment value as well as is a marketing vehicle.

In an uncharted world of boundless data, information designers are our new navigators.

They are computer scientists, statisticians, graphic designers, producers and cartographers who map entire oceans of data and turn them into innovative visual displays, like rich graphs and charts, that help both companies and consumers cut through the clutter. These gurus of visual analytics are making interactive data synonymous with attractive data.

(Via The New York Times)

Moved By Junk Mail

2011-04-10T09:59:00.005-04:00

It’s a safe bet that I won’t be moved by junk mail, if at all, I open one. Who is, anyway?

The envelope from Amnesty International that came last week, appeared no different from the many in its league: fairly thick, with a garden-variety postage stamp, and a typewritten address on it.

Amnesty International logo

M brought it to me, half-opened, reading aloud the contents of the four-page-long direct mailer inside. And as she shuffled the pages, she found within them a few stationery articles: a sheet of personal return address labels, a sticker, a little card made of recycled paper. None of these were fancy, not by a long shot. Yet I was sold on the message.

At the conscious level, I don’t know what about all this stirred me. Maybe it was the subtle gesture of sending a little gift, before asking for a pledge. At any rate, an inner voice galvanized me into taking action, into sending the non-profit a modest donation.

I don't take marketing baits that easily. But I certainly do take good causes seriously. And sending money to Amnesty International seemed like one.

The Sleepless Elite

2011-04-09T15:45:00.000-04:00

The "sleepless elite"—

The headline of an interesting feature on "natural short sleepers," people who are "night owls and early birds simultaneously." It caught my fancy, because I, typically, sleep little.

For a small group of people—perhaps just 1% to 3% of the population—sleep is a waste of time. They typically turn in well after midnight, then get up just a few hours later and barrel through the day without needing to take naps or load up on caffeine.

They are also energetic, outgoing, optimistic and ambitious, according to the few researchers who have studied them. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Leonardo da Vinci were too busy to sleep much, according to historical accounts.

(Via The Wall Street Journal)

One Analog Day

2011-04-09T13:33:00.018-04:00

As I nursed my customary morning cup of coffee, I did what I usually do. I made the obligatory stops at Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. I checked my e-mails, and skimmed the news. And then, I powered off my laptop, closing it shut like a briefcase—something I can’t imagine on doing other days.

I took out one of the three notebooks (merely, three) I have, grabbed a pen, opened a book, locked myself in a room and began writing by … hand. Within a matter of a few hours, I’d filled 960 lines with my penmanship, my hand progressively steadying the more I wrote. I’d become a Medieval scribe; my room, a scriptorium.

That was the strange effect on me, of Nicholas Carr’s book, "The Shallows." I’d barely alighted on the prologue, when I felt I’d had a Vulcan mind meld with Carr. For a change, the statement “Oh, I can relate to that!” was imbued with a heartfelt genuineness.

A bit of the book's text in my handwriting

Plunking down to handwrite may seem like a foolish, quixotic activity, in today’s day and age, but my goal was to see the effect of a disconnection from the Net, with its myriad addictive distractions.

No sooner than I shut the Dell up, the world around me quietened. An invisible hum subsided. Though I wasn’t able to immediately submerge in what I was doing, I did, however, instantly sense that I had moved, from the mental equivalent of New York City to Bedford, a quite, green, hamlet, north of the city.

Distance gave me clarity. As the hours away from the Web grew longer, my mind decelerated into a state of pleasant languor, giving me the opportunity to reflect on what the Net has been really doing to me, all along.

It would dilute my concentration, scatter my thoughts, and leave my mind in sixes and sevens, like a ransacked room. It also renders me testy, impatient, and a recluse. All of this takes place on a deep, subconscious level, on a track parallel to the conscious plane, wherein, I’m convinced, I’m working at a furious pace, with intense attention.

As I write this, I have slid back into my old habit. I am staring at the screen, waiting for the arrival of new stimulation.

Classical Music Goes 3D

2011-04-04T15:47:00.000-04:00

[Sir Simon Rattle] Britain's most celebrated conductor is aiming to reach new audiences by screening 3D concerts in hundreds of cinemas across the world, including 140 in Britain. The technology aims to give cinemagoers the sensation of not only sitting in the front rows but right among the orchestra, offering close-ups of the virtuoso players.

Cineworld and Empire are among the UK cinema chains that will show the Berlin Philharmonic concert on 9 May, under the watchful eye of other orchestras. (Via The Guardian)

These cine-concerts, if successful, will not only raise the profile of classical music, but will also provide funding to the arts.

Not Standing Straight, But At Ease

2011-04-03T20:15:00.003-04:00

I was working on a review of an LGBT-themed documentary, and I remembered this weird incident.

A few summers ago, I and my inamorata, were visiting an Indian family in their suburban New Jersey home. It was a blazing June day. The sunlight was hot in our faces. Hot dogs were barbequing lazily on their neighbor’s grille. On a folding table next to it, were arrayed Styrofoam cups, paper plates, plastic silverware.

Their kids were happily splashing about in a blue inflatable swimming pool. The cool lawns, drenched from the water hose, offered a respite from the blaring Sun, directly overhead. The adults sat around in deck chairs, in a semi-circle, a few feet away, gabbing.

As we walked barefoot to help ourselves to the food, our host whisked the two of aside, in a conspiratorial manner, while his wife looked on suspiciously in our direction.

“Listen,” he began, “I’ve told everyone you’re related. Just make sure no one finds out you’re lesbians.”

That, to me, was nothing short of a mild admonishment. At a minimum, it conveyed a signal that if one wished to mingle with the straight set, then, they’d better be straight—or at least, pretend to be one.

Facebook 101 For Seniors

2011-04-03T15:47:00.000-04:00

At the Bronx branch of the New York Public Library, folks in their 50s are offered a course on how to navigate Facebook. Some advice they're imparted are:

Don’t friend somebody you don’t know.

People are doing that all the time.

Don’t announce on Facebook that you are leaving home, or you may get robbed.

I've seen people announce what credit card they use.

Only write about the barbecue you’re planning if you want 1,000 people to show up.
Don’t “poke” people — it’s annoying.

It's a nuisance.

If you’re 54 years old, don’t post a profile picture taken when you were 17.

I've known a toupee-wearing, doddering old man to post a profile photograph from his salad days.

(Via The New York Times)

The Magic Number

2011-04-02T15:47:00.000-04:00

Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar has found out that the human brain can handle about 147 friends, and no more. Which makes me wonder how people manage to keep up with their 5,000 "friends" on Facebook? They don't.

147.8 … and it is the size of the average human being's social network of friends, as predicted by the size of the average human brain.

Also, what’s interesting is:

The volume of an [individual’s] "orbitomedial prefrontal cortex" correlates well with the size of a person's circle of friends.

So the bigger that region, the wider one's social circle.

(Via The Wall Street Journal)

The Republic Of Facebook

2011-03-31T12:10:00.000-04:00

Does the Facebook comment service spell the end of trolling—defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums? Well, if it doesn't altogether spell the end, it certainly does put a spanner in the works of anonymous commenters.

There is a dark flip side to this.

Facebook has already accumulated a remarkable amount of data—and not just about its users’ online, but their real-world activities: messages, pictures, calendars, likes and dislikes, even shopping. Now it is adding their opinions too. The result is a giant step towards Facebook becoming, in effect, the repository of identity for much of the internet. If governments did that, the result would be outrage. (Via The Economist)

I don't think power, in any form, should be centralized in any one entity.

From One To A Few

2011-03-29T11:49:00.000-04:00

Group messaging could be “the next big thing in social media,” some are predicting.

This year GroupMe, a “group messaging” service, said it had given away 2,500 grilled-cheese sandwiches over the five days of the [South by South West] festival. GroupMe defeated several lookalikes—including Beluga, which Facebook has just bought—to win the festival’s Breakout Digital Trend award. It also handled more than 2m messages a day relating to SXSW—a huge boost to its traffic that must work out at thousands of new users per sandwich, a pretty good return on investment.

Group messaging represents a step back from broadcasting. It preserves some measure of intimacy and exclusivity.

(Via The Economist)

Me To TumblrBot: Do You Copy?

2011-03-27T11:46:00.035-04:00

TumblrBot

For those of who don’t know you who TumblrBot is, well, it’s the pan-gendered bot of the very, very, popular short-form blogging site called Tumblr.

Soon after someone opens a Tumblr blog, it’s customary for everyone to get a short welcome note from the master itself.

TumblrBot: “Where would you most like to visit on your planet?

AM: How nice of you to pose this question, TumblrBot. The truth is, this isn’t my planet. I’m originally from Uranus. And if you don’t believe me, you can ask my mother.

I came away from the frigorific world, some years ago. Back home, many years ago, I used to render my services as an informant to the planet-wide information stream.

I’ll tell you what I do now. I collect photos, in a tiny place called "Picture Book." Do tell me what you think of it.

Indian, By Clichés

2011-03-25T13:31:00.025-04:00

A teaspoon of sequins on the dust jacket,
and you'd have pure kitsch.

Boiled down to a crude and simplistic, 35-word theory about writing, the best of creative non-fiction pieces rely on meticulous fact-finding, and memorable works of fiction, rely, above all, on a fecund imagination.

And some works, such as Amit Dasgupta’s “Indian by Choice,” rely on neither. It falls neither here, not there, but occupies a distinct slot, all of its own.

More a comic book than a graphic novel, really, it tells a story only as unpredictable as a song-and-dance extravaganza in a Bollywood film.

The plot takes off at 37,000 feet in the air, inside the cabin on an Air-India flight from Chicago’s O’Hare airport, bound for New Delhi.

Mandy, the hero, of whom we know nothing else except that he was born and raised in Chicago and that he “is as American as they come—hot dogs, french fries, baseball, and the love of all things American, especially, blonde,” is begrudgingly traveling to India for the very first time, to attend a cousin’s wedding.

And that sets the scene for the endless loop of jarring stereotypes about second generation Indian-Americans (whom he, describes confusingly as “American born desi” and “American born desi Indian”) as well as the worst clichés about India, which riddle the rest of the pages.

Mandy—the truncated, anglicized version of Mandeep—harbors a deep loathing for everything Indian, which he wears on his sleeves. He garnishes nearly every utterance on India, with it, with the relish of one sprinkling freshly-chopped cilantro on a Moroccan tagine.

Here’s a taste: “My current view is that India is for Indians and well, we are definitely not Indians.” He tells the Indian immigration officer, “The visa says six months. I plan to get out in four weeks.” Yet for all so-called “Americanisms,” he tosses out a word that is almost never spoken by Americans: “airhostess.”

One can surmise that Dasgupta’s window into Indian-American youngsters, and American lifestyle, at large, is a series of flashy Bollywood productions, whose archetypal foreign-born hero, has been a whisky-guzzling, white-women chasing, good-for-nothing schmuck, with an incongruous name like Johnny or Peter, and who eats a chicken drumstick with a fork and a knife.

Mandy doesn’t cease to kvetch about India. But that’s not what paints his character as unauthentic. Like the star of the old Hindi cinema, Dasgupta’s lead character is jaw-droppingly ignorant, laughably infantile, and boorishly insensitive. In his first letter home, he writes, telling of the airplane’s slight “technical snag,” and hints that his family in America would’ve certainly considered suing the airlines for delay. This, one gathers, is Dasgupta’s riff on the U.S. being a litigious country.

His snapshot of the other side—Indian culture—draws guffaws as well. When the groom tells Mandy that he’s had an arranged match, befuddled, Mandy asks if he’s getting hitched to his childhood bride. Most people can speak in a relatively informed manner about the place where they live. Somehow, Mandy doesn’t deliver on that front either.

Corny dialogues, with an exaggerated puerility of language, abound. The text is presented through callouts that are sometimes, misaligned, making it difficult for the reader to follow the conversational threads.

One hopes that in penning his next novel, the writer will spend some time educating himself about his subject matter. Dasgupta, a serving Indian diplomat, is a literary poor cousin of Vikas Swarup, the Indian diplomat whose debut novel was made into the blockbuster “Slumdog Millionaire.”

A Seller Of Colors

2011-03-22T21:07:00.014-04:00

If keeping up with Indian festivals year round, is a mark of my Indianness, then, I’m certainly not Indian. I find it hard to track the nation’s endless festival loop, and to observe them.

But then, there are many ways of being an Indian, say, by posting India-related news, which are, what I would call, not the usual cultural suspects—faces of urchins in grimy clothes cavorting on the streets, a temple pylon plastered with a hideously, grammatically deformed sign, or a skinny rickshaw-puller trudging through a dingy alley.

I'm posting this, because this is a happy photo, one that brightens up your mood, uplifts you. A seller arrays powdered colors that sit like little pyramids in large stainless steel bowls.

Now, You Know Why It's Called A Cash Register

2011-03-21T18:02:00.008-04:00

(Photo: Zizzybaloobah via Flickr)

Although I haven’t noticed it in the fast-food places in my neighborhood—probably because they’re invariably packed—several establishments have some variation of the sign “Your meal is free if you don’t get a receipt,” affixed to a wall around the order counters.

It understandably puzzles a lot of folks.

Famished customers can’t wait to grab their paper bag and dash and sit down and eat. Waiting for a sales receipt to crawl out of the till, isn’t in their best interest at that moment.

It is, however, in that of the restaurants. When a customer doesn’t take a receipt, the cash register sees it as a non-event and that in turn, doesn’t get go down in the company’s ledgers as a completed transaction. This, despite that a payment has been made.

So where does the money go? Maybe, it swirled to the floor, got swept up by a pant bottom, and out of the eatery. But more often than not, the clerk on duty is faulted for its disappearance.

Cash registers were first invented for a reason—to prevent embezzlement by employees. Keeping a tab on every movement of every cashier is nearly impossible. So managements—unbeknown to customers—delegate a bit of bookkeeping functions to them, as well as reward them for doing their job for them, to see to it that their sales are “registered.”

That might explain why “cash registers” are so named.

There’s another clever little practice that we don’t stop to ponder about. It’s why price tags end in $1.49, $2.99, or $3.99, instead of $1, $2, or $3.

Historically, odd pricing was a device to make sure that no one swiped a bill when the manager was looking the other way. An amount like $10.49 forced the cashier to draw a penny change. The need to access it forced the clerk to ring up the sale—such that the tray would slide open, with the all-too-familiar “ringing” sound. (Most drawers are programmed to not open until a sale is recorded).

Brave Love In An English Village

2011-03-12T20:06:00.009-05:00

A plot, be that of a movie, or a novel, which, like a gaudy Bollywood production, has a bit of everything—a hero, a damsel in distress, romance, honor killing, violence, family feud—would make a tawdry creative product, cluttered and messy. Well, it might, in the hands of a dilettante author, or a novice director.

Surprisingly, Helen Simonson’s debut fiction, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” has all of these elements, all stewed into a refined literary curry that tells an unusual love story, between two unlikely soul mates in the charming, fictional English village of Edgecombe St. Mary.

Major Earnest Pettigrew, a tweedy retired officer of the British army, begins an intense, but gentlemanly courtship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, an intelligent, bold and fiery Pakistani Muslim woman, who runs a local mart.

The 68-year-old widower’s mildly reclusive country living gets a pleasant shot of an emotional energy drink when Mrs. Ali arrives at his doorstep to collect newspaper money. Over cups of tea, their extremely private friendship flowers over their mutual passion for books, a loathing of bigotry and a respect for traditional values.

When their respective families collide—by sheer accident—the latter’s cultural chasm is exposed. The social gap between the major’s son, Roger, a posh investment banker in London, and Mrs. Ali’s nephew, Abdul Wahid, a devout, troubled young man, couldn’t be wider.

Their obvious lack of cordially, is emblematic of the deep-seated xenophobic sentiments that pervade this otherwise perfect white community. But neither dithers in their resolve to be with one another. At 58, Mrs. Ali is unafraid to elicit the ire of her extended family by her sexual unorthodoxy; neither is the major fearful of ruffling the feathers of many, in his none too ecumenical community.

It is a testament to the major’s blue-blooded pedigree that he didn’t judge Mrs. Ali by her mere standing in the Edgecombe St. Mary society. Major Pettigrew is no doubt attracted to the beautiful woman that Mrs. Ali is, with a cascade of black hair, chiseled features and a well-contoured figure, but it’s her inner sophistication, her habit of voracious reading and progressive outlook that he connects with.

A man of true honor and integrity, his character demonstrates that true patriotism, unlike jingoistic fervor, is accommodating and tolerant of other faiths and ethnicities. If one loves oneself, one needn’t necessarily have to hate another. The major’s “last stand” is to marry Mrs. Ali in a small, private ceremony, reluctantly attended by the vicar and few others of his circle.

Having read this book, I find myself asking the question, how would such an act of brave love be received in a pristine, predominantly white, American suburb. As one who is somewhat familiar with waspish communities in the East Coast, I think, it’d be regarded as less of an egregious affair. Unlike in Simonson’s setting, where the wedding is altogether boycotted by the vicar’s wife, in the United States, the couple would’ve had the blessing of the local parish. The event would’ve arched fewer eyebrows.

Stories of South Asian immigrants, narrated by second-generation immigrants, tend to be of a predictable mold, which somewhat erodes their novelty to a reader belonging to the same community. This book’s dashingly uncommon take on the theme of racial diversity, in my view, is tied to the fact that the writer is a non-immigrant. Simonson was born in England and spent her teenage years in a small village in East Sussex.

Weeding Out Drivel

2011-02-25T08:55:00.000-05:00

Google has embarked on a quiet, but vigorous drive to weed out "low-quality sites" from search results, a change, which will affect 11.8% of queries.

[...] sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

Those who need to be nervous are "content farms" and those engaging in unethical SEO practices such as "keyboard stuffing" and "link farms." Those "content farms" are companies like Demand Media, Examiner.com and Yahoo’s Associated Content. It is time these sites got a hard knock.

(Via The Wall Street Journal)

Up, Up—To The Moon

2011-02-25T06:48:00.000-05:00

In the British comedy "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines," (1965) set in 1910, Lord Rawnsley, an English newspaper magnate, sponsors a London to Paris air race from and offers a prize of £10,000 to the winner of the Daily Post contest. But his only grumble against it was this: “The trouble with these international affairs is they attract foreigners.”

Just a little over years later, a search engine magnate—yes, Google—has announced that it’ll be sponsoring an “unprecedented competition” of a far grander proportion: A race to send robots to the Moon.

The Google Lunar X Prize Foundation has received 29 entries from 17 countries, each competing for the $30 million prize. The winner is projected to emerge by 2015.

The Google Lunar X Prize could do the same thing for the commercial space industry that the $25,000 Orteig Prize—claimed by Charles Lindburgh for piloting the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic in 1927—did for the aviation industry 80 years ago.

If NASA isn't ready to return to the Moon, I suppose, a private firm should give it a shot.

(Via The Daily)

Out Of The Box, In To The World

2011-02-14T22:40:00.010-05:00

I can't sufficiently express the delight I took in reading Emma Donoghue’s darkly moving novel, “Room,” whose narrator—and hero—is an adorable little boy named Jack.

He emerges into the world at the age of five, from a dank, windowless, soundproof room, where he and his mother—unbeknownst to him—had been held captive for seven years by their kidnapper.

He grew up in an eleven by eleven cell, ignorant of the existence of a vast world outside of the “Room.” He had spoken with no one, but his "Ma."

In this book, Donoghue has told a phenomenal story, so incredulously well that it’s easy to forget that the storyteller isn’t a genuine kid.

The recounting of incidents by Jack affirms one theme, over and over again: a solid bond between a mother and a child that far surpasses industrial glue in strength.

After their escape, to grapple with loneliness, from not having his “Ma” beside him, he carries with him, at all times, her broken tooth. To him, it’s a surrogate for the emotional safety and comfort that she provides. He writes poignantly, "I put Tooth back in my mouth for a suck. He doesn’t taste like Ma."

Slipping and sliding, he takes a day at a time, making new discoveries about objects and phenomena that we take for granted—from rain to people to metallic cutlery to shopping malls. And while he’s at it, he’s filled with awe, brimming with equal parts marvel, unease, fear, and thrill. His take on the world is truly imaginative, magical, infinitely cute. He describes a globe he sees at his grandma’s place as a “stature of the world”; dew “as a kind of sweat that happens at night.”

Like Pinocchio, were Jack to leap out of the pages, and become a flesh-and-blood boy, he would have the goodness of nature to melt the heart of an ogre. In a sequel, I can imagine him growing up to be a fabulously well-read, perspicacious, sentimental, and a responsible young man. Perhaps gay, too.

Goryfying International Politics

2011-02-14T09:17:00.000-05:00

Some disciplines, simply by default, never allow for wacky, out-of-the-box thinking and are hence, often academically terrifying. International Politics is one of them. I should know. I studied it.

Well, I would have labored under that notion had I not found out about Daniel Drezner's new book, "Theories of International Politics and Zombies." It sounds weirdly wonderful.

Over to Drezner.

I love my field—but I worry about its descent into scholasticism for its own sake. Applying international-relations theory to a zombie-infested world was a way of affectionately but satirically tweaking the field's strictures.

[...] it became clear that the ability of standard international-relations paradigms to adequately analyze threats is eroding. Most theories are state-centric, but interstate conflict is on the wane.
But the field has been slow to adapt to the plethora of asymmetric threats that we now face.

(Via Chronicle of Higher Education)

Family Of Toys

2011-02-10T22:01:00.000-05:00

January 7, 2010. It was a snowy afternoon. Rocky, mythree-inch-long hamster, a member of the Zhu-Zhu Pet family of toys, arrived ina bright yellow parcel, from the land of Hamsterdam.

P, holding G, in her lap.

Pooh Bear.

P, in a blue bonnet.

Professor Calculus.

My little lamb.

G, the No. 1 Teacher, is a round-faced angel.

Press Print To Manufacture

2011-02-10T07:32:00.000-05:00

In the book, "The Third Wave," the futurist Alvin Toffler predicted that consumers would come to exercise much greater control over the products they consumed, thereby becoming “prosumers.” Back in 1980, when the book was published, that was a science fiction plot. From today’s perspective, it seems terrifically prescient—and a science fact—thanks to a gee-whiz technology called 3D printing.

First you call up a blueprint on your computer screen and tinker with its shape and colour where necessary. Then you press print. A machine nearby whirrs into life and builds up the object gradually, either by depositing material from a nozzle, or by selectively solidifying a thin layer of plastic or metal dust using tiny drops of glue or a tightly focused beam. Products are thus built up by progressively adding material, one layer at a time: hence the technology’s other name, additive manufacturing. Eventually the object in question—a spare part for your car, a lampshade, a violin—pops out. The beauty of the technology is that it does not need to happen in a factory.

To the business world, the implications of this development are many.

Will this cut the cost of producing a good? Yes.

But getting rid of production lines.

Will this give rise to mass customization? Yes.

For all kinds of products, from shoes to spectacles to kitchenware.

Will this give a fillip to innovation? Yes.

By reducing the barriers to entry for manufacturing, 3D printing should also promote innovation. If you can design a shape on a computer, you can turn it into an object.

Is it exorbitantly expensive? Not quite.

A basic 3D printer, also known as a fabricator or “fabber”, now costs less than a laser printer did in 1985.

Will this eliminate the need for factories? Not yet.

At the moment the process is possible only with certain materials (plastics, resins and metals) and with a precision of around a tenth of a millimetre. As with computing in the late 1970s, it is currently the preserve of hobbyists and workers in a few academic and industrial niches.

Will this decentralize business completely? It might.

Will this do away with the need for outsourcing? It might.

3D printing will undermine the advantage of low-cost, low-wage countries and thus repatriate manufacturing capacity to the rich world.

(Via The Economist)

Candy Floss Lady

2011-02-06T09:25:00.000-05:00

One doesn't see candy floss that often in winters. So the other day, on descending into a subway station in Brooklyn, when I saw this woman, standing with an umbrella of sugary balls, I asked her if I could click a quick snap. She graciously allowed me to take it.Well, this is New York City, friendly, not rude.

Diplomatic Communique

2011-02-03T20:04:00.000-05:00

My e-mail to Amit Dasgupta.

Concerning the “rooting for one company over another as not being kosher, ethically, or professionally,” let me explain what I had meant. Our situations couldn’t be more different. I don’t work for the Indian government, or an Indian concern.

I have worked for American companies, and in theory, should I work for the government, it would be for the government of the United States, in which case, I would still be rooting for Boeing, or GE, or Starbucks.

Now, when I work for a company, I work for it. My loyalties lie there. I may have a beef with it (maybe, because my chair doesn’t swivel as much as I’d like it to), but I root for that company say, in a football game. I would also wear my company’s T-shirt with pride.

Further, as an M.B.A. candidate, it is but normal for one to hold strong opinions about the corporate practices of various corporations. It is expected, in fact, (IF you are bright.)

I, for one, support American Airlines’ “Rainbow Team.” Why? As a gay woman, I want to express solidarity with agencies and corporations, who are LGBT-friendly. Certainly, when I look at a firm, I DO want to know, if it has gay-friendly policies and what kind of benefits it offers to domestic partners.

I know folks who can turn down offers only on grounds that the company’s colossal waste of paper doesn’t agree with his or her personal philosophy of eco-friendliness. And such folks are applauded here, and not demonized for being “unethical” or “unprofessional.” It doesn’t imply that one is financially corrupt.

We have our own share of corrupt politicians, with their pork-barrel schemes, CFOs who cook the books, but on the whole, our people here, the traffic cop, the grocer, the superintendent of parks and rec, are not dishonest folks.