“nyt”
10 posts under this tag.
For the longest time back in Mexico I had this idea of turning one of the rooms in the house into a media room but I could never explain, let alone convince, anyone else in the house. I was thus happily surprised with this article in the NYT on how pimped up, hi-tech rec rooms are coming into their own. The encroachment of media—technology mediated culture—on our civilization, and particularly our generation, is nothing short of amazing.
The Fowlers worked with Ms. Kole’s firm to transform their den with a wide-screen TV, pool table, loungy furniture and a workstation with computers. “It’s so different than when I was growing up,” said Ms. Fowler. “I never wanted to be caught dead at home.”
Dana Cuff, a professor of architecture and urban planning at U.C.L.A., sees several factors behind teenagers’ willingness to stay home. “There is a rise in home technology, all your friends are online, and there are far fewer safe, interesting public spaces to hang out in,” she said. “All of these things come together, and parents start creating houses within houses for their teens.”
There’s been a recent, unnacounted-for change in me regarding architecture. Never having so much as glanced at it before, I now found it supremely soothing, liberating—it suddenly seems the most important thing in the world. This computer mockup of the Louvre Abu Dhabi with its canopy of light, for instance, has had me transfixed all day. See NYT’s feature, The Louvre’s Art: Priceless. The Louvre’s Name: Expensive.
When I was 8 years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died. The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.
Dear old Grandma June. A compelling lack of evidence for any sort of Higher Power may have steered my mind toward atheism, but she put the heathen in my heart.
<insert wry, sad smile here>
 Something made me cry in Harriet Brown’s One Spoonful at a Time —a long, personal story on anorexia from last week’s New York Times. I’ve been unbelievably emotional these days but blame it rather on it being a superbly written account (“The rough days were predictable only in the sense that they kept coming.”) by an extremely intelligent, rational, and honest mother trying to cure her daughter’s anorexia —and that it manages to be a fairly deep, scientific intro into the eating disorder (“Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry.”) while still being punctuated at every paragraph with raw, emotional portraits of desperation (“I woke with my heart pounding, full of rage and hatred for Not-Kitty, the demon who lived on air, who wore my daughter’s face and spoke with her voice.”) and hope.
In what is to date my longest translation I’ve put the story into Spanish: Una Cucharada a la vez. Please pass it along to someone who might need to read it.
Ah, the ever-recurring techno-myth: a dirt-cheap educational contraption to revolutionize third world children’s education. I can’t even remember when I heard about it first. I was thrilled though, enthused. But then with the undelivering years went my excitement. For one thing, the deployment plan is based almost entirely on governments, which is a nonstarter. More importantly, there might be better options. Cellphones are already a phenomenal worldwide success, even in the poorest countries, and that’s because they’re tangibly, immediately useful. A recent Economist article, Splitting the Digital Divide, mentions other less obvious but intriguing options.
And yet, reading yesterday’s New York Times article, For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate (yup, there’s been some price adjustment), made me think again of the amazing possibilities that can unfold from a personal mobile computer in the hands of a child. Blame it on Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond AgeAM with its amazing book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer —every self-learner’s wet dream.
At any rate, it seems to me that (save actual existence and deployment) the crucial factor for success will be software and so, for what it’s worth, here’s a promise: If and when Negroponte’s brainchild ever sees daylight, I shall stop whatever I’m doing, for three months, to develop mindblowing educational software for it. There, I said it.
I feel — numb. Distant. Detached. Separate. Futile. Tepid. Coward. Been on a media breakdownELZR for too many days now—ScrubsWP, NausicaaWP, The Economist, The New York Times, porn, (Ben Shneiderman’s) interface design articles, Wired, (so many) books. Unprecedented amounts of physical exercise sprinkled throughout (bizarre, I know). Much been thought, outcomes uncertain (to put it hopefully).
Only 30 pages into Finite and Infinite GamesAM I think it’s the best book I’ve read. ”Seriousness,” it says, ”is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.” Been far too serious in my life lately. Too scared.
Stupid death won’t go away. Seems my (maternal) grandfather has lung cancer—most likely metastatic. Brutal prognosis. He’s been staying here at home and I’ve been escaping it all—so far away. So serious.
And yet I’m hopeful now. I can never force myself to post something until I’m hopeful. Until I’ve a plan. Until I’m back. (Too scary otherwise.)
Gonna play.
Being a FeynmanWP groupie myself, his offhand mention in lonelygirl15’s NYT article piqued my interest and today I found that particular clip when she talks about him. BreeWP counts Surely You’re Joking Mr. FeynmanAM as one of her favorite books (I do too) and introduces the physicist with her trademark, inane teentalk we’ve all come to love and hate: “one of the smartest physicist ever, Richard Feynman… he’s really smart, like… Einstein-smart, like Newton-smart, like professor calculus smart.” But any comparison, of course, is in this case an understatement: Feynman was smart as in “as in Feynman-smart.”
And I am, because it really, really, really is true: YouTube’s lonelygirl15 is the birth of a new art form.
How Gibsonian (or Laughing-man-esque) the whole video-cult esoterica was, don’t you think? (Though no one would have predicted that we would become obsessed with a (fictional) chirpy teen.) Danah boyd has some interesting things to say and the New York Time’s article on the memebomb is outstanding (but would some link love really kill them?).
Muhammad Waqar, Avi Wolfman-Arent, Yiran Xia, Victoria Sandoval, Jacqueline Orellana-Flores, Elizabeth Packer, Ramona Singh, Anuja Shah, Mayra Ramos, Emily-Kate Hannapel, Natasha Perez, Samir Paul, Ekta Taneja, Linden Vongsathorn, Michael Tsai, Nardos Teklebrahan, Matiwos Wondwosen…
I went to [my daughter Natalie’s] high school graduation Monday and a United Nations meeting broke out..
..If there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world’s greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.
This influx of brainy and brawny immigrants is our oil well—one that never runs dry. It is an endless source of renewable human energy and creativity. Congress ought to stop debating gay marriage and finally give us a framework to maintain a free flow of legal immigration..
It is hard to watch a graduation like this and not think about our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan—the Taliban, Islamo-totalitarians like bin Laden and Zarqawi, and the retrograde regimes that support them. Their whole mind-set is about how to purify their world from “the other,” from diversity, from “infidels.” With enough brutality, they may win in Iraq. I still hope not.
But they will never win the future—because as soon as their oil wells run dry, their societies will be as barren, bland and unproductive as their deserts.
Our oil wells, by contrast, will still be pumping. They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, in the Blair commencement book:
Yueyang Li, Kenia Lopez-Reyes, Lucy Fromyer, Raya Steinberg, Zahra Gordon, Sreva Ghosh, Juan-Jesus Louis, Yendil Furcal, Yenusa Eke, Sofonias Frezghi, Yohanes Dejen, Edra Comegys-Brisbane, Yoel Castillio-Ortiz, Elijah Zuares, Placido Zelaya, Mimi Zou. And Jessica Smith.
I love Friedman. This is one of his best pieces ever.
Artificial Intelligence is 50 years old this summer, to celebrate here’s an interesting New York Times article on computer models: Maybe We Should Leave That Up to the Computer.
Here some highlights:
“As long as you have some history and some quantifiable data from past experiences,” Mr. Snijders claims, a simple formula will soon outperform a professional’s decision-making skills.
Something researchers have known for decades: that mathematical models generally make more accurate predictions than humans do. Studies have shown that models can better predict, for example, the success or failure of a business start-up, the likelihood of recidivism and parole violation, and future performance in graduate school.
They also trump humans at making various medical diagnoses, picking the winning dogs at the racetrack and competing in online auctions. Computer-based decision-making has also grown increasingly popular in credit scoring, the insurance industry and some corners of Wall Street.
The algorithms behind so-called quant funds, he said, act with ” much greater depth of data than the human mind can. They can encapsulate experience that managers may not have.”
Other cherished decision aids, like meeting in person and poring over dossiers, are of equally dubious value when it comes to making more accurate choices, some studies have found, with face-to-face interviews actually degrading the quality of an eventual decision.
“People’s overconfidence in their ability to read someone in a half-an-hour interview is quite astounding,” said Michael A. Bishop, an associate professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University who studies the social implications of these models.
Max H. Bazerman, a professor at Harvard Business School, wonders how many managerial decisions can actually be modeled. “The vast majority of decisions that we make in professional life don’t have this quality,” he said.
He agrees that models can make better decisions about credit card applications and college admissions, he said, “but there are many decisions that are much more unique, where that database doesn’t exist. I’m as skeptical about human intuition as these folks, but it’s not only a computer model that we replace it with. Sometimes it’s thinking more clearly.”
Many in the field of computer-assisted decision-making still refer to the debacle of Long Term Capital Management, a highflying hedge fund that counted several Nobel laureates among its founders. Its algorithms initially mastered the obscure worlds of arbitrage and derivatives with remarkable skill, until the devaluation of the Russian ruble in 1998 sent the fund into a tailspin.
Mark E. Nissen, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who has been studying computer-vs.-human procurement, sees a fundamental shift under way, with humans becoming increasingly peripheral in making routine decisions, concentrating instead on designing ever-better models.
By making smart use of computer models’ advantages, ” you’ll become like the crafty A student who doesn’t work that hard but gets mostly right answers, rather than the really hard-working student who gets lots of wrong answers and as a result gets C’s.”
“Quant fund” is a keeper word, remember it.
As for the eeriest applied A.I. example I’ve heard lately:
A French company, Poseidon Technologies, sells underwater vision systems for swimming pools that function as lifeguard assistants, issuing alerts when people are drowning, and the system has saved lives in Europe.
There are also 7 interesting eemadges on the topic.
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