There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Church removes 'scary crucifix'
Topic: Society
7:11 am EST, Jan 8, 2009
A large sculpture of Christ on the cross has been removed from outside a church in West Sussex after its vicar said it was "scaring young children."
The Reverend Ewen Souter said the 10ft crucifix was "a horrifying depiction of pain and suffering" which was also "putting people off."
From last year, Errol Morris:
Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?
From the archive:
When an individual died, the female relatives were responsible for dismembering the body. They would remove the brain, arms and feet, strip the muscle from the limbs and open the chest and abdomen to remove the internal organs. Those that died of kuru were highly regarded as sources of food, because they had layers of fat which resembled pork. It was primarily the Fore women who took part in this ritual. Often they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives. Among the tribe, it was, therefore, women, children and the elderly who most often became infected.
Also:
Muslims in western India have been observing a bizarre ritual -- they've been throwing their young children off a tall building to improve their health.
Finally:
The settlers are calling their compound "House of Peace," but are also considering "Martyrs’ Peak."
The trailer for Gary Hustwit's new film is now available.
Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.
Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?
This book will force you to think about your relationships with technology, and to more carefully watch those around you and their uses of different devices.
Indeed, it will make you think about the machines around you in a profound way; how do these things really make you feel?
Also from Hustwit:
Typography is not simply a frou-frou debate over aesthetics orchestrated by a hidden coterie of graphic-design nerds.
From last year, but not from Hustwit:
“Design stupidly produces more things, and for years I’ve spoken about the importance of living with fewer things. But my position is a little ambiguous.”
The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be.
The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press is over.
The job of the next decade is mostly going to be taking the raw revolutionary capability that's now apparent and really seeing what we can do with it.
See also:
The trick is to make people think that a certain paradigm is inevitable, and they had better give in.
And this:
Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old.
From a year ago:
Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. Some confess it sheepishly, and some announce it proudly. For some it is just a practical matter of fact, the equivalent of not keeping a horse on West 87th Street or Avenue A. Still, I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.
From the archive:
Gibson shows us a country that has drifted dangerously from its governing principles, evoking a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when, as one character puts it, "grown-ups still ran things."
From nearly two (or three) years ago:
Time Trumpet was a six-episode television comedy series which aired on BBC Two during Summer 2006. The satirical series "looked back" on events of the first 30 years of the 21st century from the perspective of a nostalgia show in the year 2031 ...
The science of shopping | The way the brain buys | The Economist
Topic: Business
10:30 pm EST, Jan 7, 2009
The idea is to boost "dwell time."
Traditionally retailers measure "footfall," as the number of people entering a store is known, but those numbers say nothing about where people go and how long they spend there. But nowadays, a ubiquitous piece of technology can fill the gap: the mobile phone. Path Intelligence (*), a British company working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tracked people’s phones at Gunwharf Quays, a large retail and leisure centre in Portsmouth -- not by monitoring calls, but by plotting the positions of handsets as they transmit automatically to cellular networks. It found that when dwell time rose 1% sales rose 1.3%.
Technology will also begin to identify customers’ emotions. Often a customer struggling to decide which of two items is best ends up not buying either. A third "decoy" item, which is not quite as good as the other two, can make the choice easier and more pleasurable.
(*) Consider:
The FootPath technology is the only system available on the market today that can gather information on shopper paths continuously and accurately.
Noooooo problem ... don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... that's what you want ... that's what you NEED ... Buy my shit! Buy it -- give me money! Don't worry about the consequences ... there's no consequences. If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.
Brain reward circuitry responds to drug and sexual cues presented outside awareness. The results underscore the sensitivity of the brain to “unseen” reward signals and may represent the brain's primordial signature for desire.
Finally:
The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals" everything is made of chemicals.
How the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web but failed.
Topic: Media
10:30 pm EST, Jan 7, 2009
Jack Shafer, at Slate:
So intense was the industry's devotion to videotex and so rampant its paranoia that some other medium would usurp its place in the media constellation that the American Newspaper Publishers Association lobbied Congress in 1980 to prevent AT&T from launching its own "electronic yellow pages." Washington Post CEO Katharine Graham, then chair of the ANPA, and other publishers met with Senator Robert Packwood to discuss the legislation that would free AT&T to start its service.
As the Wall Street Journal would later report, Packwood said to the publishers, "What you're really worried about is an electronic Yellow Pages that will destroy your advertising base, isn't it?"
Graham's response: "You're damn right it is."
... By the early to mid-1990s, the publishers were pretty sure that proprietary online services were the next wave, but if you remember having used one, you know how badly they sucked.
What if The New York Times goes out of business -- like, this May?
Abe Rosenthal often said he couldn’t imagine a world without The Times. Perhaps we should start. At some point soon -- sooner than most of us think -- the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist.
For a time, the fluff helped underwrite the foreign bureaus, enterprise reporting, and endless five-part Pulitzer Prize aspirants. But it has gradually hollowed out journalism’s brand, by making the newspaper feel disposable.
"News" is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend consuming news and how our social consciousness is defined by how much we think we know about people we'll never meet and places we'll never go, and how it makes us feel as if we’re part of something big. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness.
Have you seen Season Five of The Wire?
In the "smoking lounge" on the loading dock outside the Baltimore Sun, City Editor Augustus "Gus" Haynes talks about layoff rumors with veteran police reporter Roger Twigg and City general assignment reporter Bill Zorzi.
Haynes, Phelps, Metro Editor Steven Luxenberg and a dozen other editors gather in Managing Editor Thomas Klebanow's office as he runs the metro budget meeting. Phelps and Luxenberg admit that they're chasing the Daily Record on the story on MTA cutbacks but blame their lack of a transportation reporter. Klebanow scolds their inability to do more with less.
At the newspaper bar, Haynes and the team celebrate a job well done. Gutierrez is happy with her contributing line and to be working for the Sun. But Templeton, obviously dissatisfied, has his sights set on the Times or the Post.
Too much of the economic commentary I’ve been reading seems to assume that once a burst of deficit spending turns the economy around we can quickly go back to business as usual.
In fact, however, things can’t just go back to the way they were before the current crisis.
Something new could come along to fuel private demand, perhaps by generating a boom in business investment. But this boom would have to be enormous ...
A more plausible route to sustained recovery would be a drastic reduction in the US trade deficit. But it will probably be a long time before the trade deficit comes down enough to make up for the bursting of the housing bubble.
It may take a lot longer than many people think before the US economy is ready to live without bubbles.
From a year ago, Eric Janszen:
That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function.
From last month, Peter Schiff:
I think the only sectors of the US economy that are going to improve are going to be those that are related to exports -- manufacturing, mining, energy, agriculture, commodities-related businesses. I think the slowdown in the global economy will be short-lived. But I think the US depression is going to be with us for a long time.
If you think this is great news, you are doing it wrong.
Did you read the part about the 30% price hike on the songs that most people buy the most?
Under the earlier deal with EMI, each buyer could decide whether to pay more (30% more) to have Apple "leave out" the DRM. Now they have determined that it's better for everyone if buyers aren't burdened with that confusing decision. Instead, everyone will (usually) pay the higher price.
The market analysts that blurbed for this article pretend to be hopeful about the reduction in price for the neglected back-catalog items. This is a charade; Apple and/or the labels get to set the thresholds that define the boundaries between the 0.69, 0.99 and 1.29 categories.
Steve Jobs may be underweight, but he knows how to run a business. This new agreement is a margin-positive change for Apple. In other words, under the new plan, customers will be paying more for less total product.
Brad Stone was inclined to put a positive spin on this, writing that "the majority of songs will drop to 69 cents beginning in April." By "majority" he means the bulk of crap that no one wants any more, if anyone ever wanted it at all.
In a typical example of the Magician's Choice, the magician will ask a spectator to make an apparently free choice among several items. No matter what choices the spectator makes, the magician ends up with the item which he wanted the spectator to choose.
When Chris Anderson talks about the long tail, there's a reason why he focuses on Rhapsody and not iTunes. People who want to rummage around in the "long tail" (i.e., back catalog) are more likely to choose a subscription service.
In 2006, according to Anderson, the top 100 artists represented ~35% of sales volume at iTunes. The definition of the $1.29 category is probably more like the top 5,000 tracks, which might encompass 60-75% of the sales volume. Then you have 20-30% of volume at the $0.99 price point, and just 5-10% of volume in the $0.69 category. Depending upon how much the price hike drives down unit sales, they might define the $0.99 bin somewhat more expansively. But don't expect anything in the Billboard 100 to be in the $0.69 bin.
Real demand has been falling sharply for years now, whether you look at units sold or minutes listened. Raising (most) prices by 30% in the face of the weakest consumer confidence in the history of recorded music might not be the end of the world, but it certainly isn't Great News. It isn't even Good News.
Last month, the music industry pulled out its stun guns, aka PR flacks, to bring you the following breaking news:
In a stunning turn of events, the US music industry has ceased its long-time litigation strategy of suing individual P2P file-swappers.
Earlier today, Apple briefly summoned the world's attention to bring you the following incredible (!!!) news flash:
Apple said it would begin selling song downloads from all four major music companies without the anticopying measures that have been part of its iTunes store since it opened in 2003. It will also move away from its insistence on pricing songs at 99 cents.
In other words, Apple's software engineers are so distraught over Steve Jobs' failing health that they have resorted to spinning the deletion of annoying source code as a major product innovation.
Does this sound familiar? Let John Markoff take you back:
Long assailed within the computer industry for routinely adding too many features to its software programs, Microsoft will tacitly acknowledge that criticism today when it starts a Web marketing campaign for its new Office XP software suite that ridicules its notorious Office help system.
The Clippy campaign, which will cost about $500,000, also includes a Web-site-based computer game in which irate users, many of whom have long found the paper clip program annoying to the point of distraction, will finally be able to retaliate by shooting virtual staples, tacks and rubber bands at the animated Clippy figure.
The story behind the story, of course, is that the "music industry" -- by which I mean the cartel engaged in organized trafficking in an artificially scarce form of antique "performance capture" -- is an industry in decline, and the major players are desperate to stanch the flow of attention to other "new" (and more participatory) media. Regardless of these late-stage efforts, the decline, which is both inevitable and inexorable, may be viewed as a leading indicator of a broader, long-term phase shift in celebrity culture.
From the archive:
The trick is to make people think that a certain paradigm is inevitable, and they had better give in.
Also:
Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.
In this case, what's unsustainable is not just the artificial scarcity of individual captured performances, but rather of the underlying capture technology, not to mention the performance itself.
Finally:
But for everyone, surely, ... this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.
People say that obesity is an epidemic in America, but I’m determined not to become part of the problem. My foolproof system involves just nine easy steps.
Step 3: Get rid of your “fat clothes.” Keeping your closet stocked with unflattering garments will only distract you from your quest for a slender body. To complete this step, shred or burn everything in your closet, including any hangers or shelving that a fat person may have touched. Refrain from donating anything to charity, as this could cause underprivileged people to become obese, which would be unsavory and possibly even illegal.
From the archive:
He wore a crisp dress shirt the color of mint ice cream and a color-coordinated tie, which made him look like an insurance claims adjustor.
Also, two on foolproofing:
“I am trying to design a foolproof plan to prevent any negative externalities,” she said.
Unfortunately, these so-called experts wash out as soon as times change because their foolproof strategies crash and burn.
