JEREMY FLETCHER and Alejandra Lillo, designers at Graft, an architecture and design firm based in Berlin, Beijing and Los Angeles, were working out a dialogue between voyeurism and exhibitionism, they said, when they designed the swooping, shiny white interiors of the W Downtown, a glass-walled condominium tower to be built in 2009 in Manhattan’s financial district.
Not only will the building’s glass walls allow W residents to see, and be seen by, passers-by on the street below, but Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Lillo have created peekaboo features within each apartment, like a window between the kitchen and the bedroom, and a bathroom that’s a glass cube, allowing residents to expose themselves to their roommates and family members, too. The idea, Mr. Fletcher said, was to frame and exhibit the intimate details of life, or at least ones that would be aesthetically pleasing, “like your silhouette in the shower.”
“We are creating stages for people to perform on in some way, but it’s a very scripted and considered display,” he said. “Cooking could be a display, for example, with your partner watching you from the bedroom.”
He talked about tuning the privacy of each room, using shades or scrims to have larger or smaller openings, as you would change the aperture of a camera. “So if you don’t want your partner to see you shaving your legs in the shower,” he said, “you can pull the shade.”
Like the clothes Marc Jacobs designed for his own label and for Vuitton this fall — skirts bunched into the waistbands of pantyhose at the back, see-through dresses with bras and panties sewn onto them — Graft’s peekaboo interiors are a sly commentary on a culture that continues to find new ways to display ever more intimate, and mundane, details of domestic life. In a YouTube world, one’s home is no longer one’s private retreat: it’s just a container for the webcam.
In New York City, where the streetscape is being systematically remade by glassy towers like the W, which have been spreading like kudzu in the seven years since the first two terrarium-like Richard Meier buildings went up on the West Side Highway, the lives of the inhabitants are increasingly on exhibit, like the performance art wherein the artists “live” in a gallery for 24 hours and you get to watch them napping or brushing their teeth.
It’s not always a pretty picture.
In September, Curbed, the feisty New York City real estate blog, posted a photograph of a newly completed, glass-walled condo building on East 13th Street. You could see right into the apartments, which looked most like messy dorm rooms. It was a grubby retort to the marketing hoo-ha that surrounds these now ubiquitous buildings and trumpets a sleekly attractive lifestyle accessorized by midcentury modern furniture and designer clothing. There were unmade beds jammed right up against the glass, mangled paper Venetian shades, a towel over a chair.
Accompanying the photo was a report of a sighting of a guy in boxer shorts doing push-ups. “Doesn’t the first condo association meeting need to include a window coverings workshop?” the post wondered plaintively.
City life has always been to some degree a public performance, and one of its pleasures is the opportunity to catch a glimpse of other habitats, to watch the movie of others’ lives through a half-drawn curtain, as Jimmy Stewart did in “Rear Window.” But in the same way overheard phone conversations used to be tantalizing until cellphone use reached saturation point — “I’m on 14th and Fifth,” bellows the guy into his Bluetooth, and your ear — ogling other people’s apartments is no longer so appealing, and holds about the same narrative punch as the inane muffin video (homemade by some teenager in his kitchen) my daughter watches over and over on YouTube.
Indeed, the computer is an eerie (or dull, depending on your point of view) twin to the glass apartment, the Facebook profile page with its status updates its closest emotional kin — Mary is asleep! Jim is working hard! Lucy has “friended” John! There is a behavioral connection between the unconsciously “for show” lives of those living in glass condos and the consciously “for show” lives of those spending more and more of their time online, where domestic activities are recorded in achingly specific detail. The result is a cultural confusion about private and public.
Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and the director of the M.I.T. Initiative on Technology and Self, sees the glass towers as expressions of “a turning point in form.”
“There is real confusion about intimacy and solitude,” said Professor Turkle, who for more than two decades has been studying computers and the people who love them. “Are we alone in these buildings, facing the anonymity of the city, or are we connected to the city? What do we show and what do we hide?
“That mirrors what happens when we’re on the computer, on our networks in Facebook. We are no longer able to distinguish when we are together and nurtured and when we are alone and isolated. I can be in intimate contact with 300 people on e-mail, but when I look up from my computer I feel bereft. I haven’t heard a voice, touched a hand, for hours or days. I think people are no longer certain where the self resides.”
These buildings, she suggested, tell a story of anxiety, not exhibitionism.
Jeffrey Cole, the director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, has been researching teenagers and their digital communities, where the glass house metaphor feels most urgent, and most dangerous.
“My experience is that teenagers, and teenage girls especially, don’t know that on Facebook they’re living in a glass house,” Professor Cole said. “They are lulled into a feeling that in their networks it’s just them and their friends who only have their best interests at heart. And who will always have their best interests at heart. They have very little sense of permanent record. I think essentially we have no privacy, or we have fewer and fewer areas we can retreat safely into.”
The open plan interiors and glassy walls of Modernist architecture were the expression of an urban culture relaxing, said Winifred Gallagher, the author of “House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live.” Pointing to Modernism’s first moments in the beginning of the 20th century, she said, “All of a sudden, we didn’t want to be private and cut off.” As it comes around again, Ms. Gallagher notes the same message, but with a wrinkle:
“New York City used to be a city of steel grates and bars on the window. It was a very unsafe place. Today, the city is spectacularly safe. Glass tells that story. Philip Johnson’s glass house used to be something you could only have in New Canaan. Now it’s something you can have in the city. Of course, there’s always the thought, how comfortable are you with the predator looking in your window? There’s something similar going on with the Internet, the idea of connecting to your ‘neighborhood,’ and maybe not knowing all you should about who’s there with you.”
In the 1970s, the psychologist Irwin Altman studied how people developed relationships by using a method of “openings and closings,” as he put it the other day.
“They gradually open themselves up, at very superficial levels of their personalities, and carefully move on to more intimate areas,” he said, as if opening doors in a house. He described his theory of privacy regulation: that in order to balance the times individuals feel exposed, or open, they need to have times when they are closed and alone.
“One of the ways they do this is in their homes,” Mr. Altman said. “Our living rooms are our public rooms, where we show our best selves, our best things, showing off what’s of value to us and what we treasure. And then there are places like bedrooms that are off limits, and only the people who know us intimately are allowed access.”
If a society as a whole has been “open” 24/7, it stands to reason it is due for a bit of a shutdown. Maybe that’s why the architect Costas Kondylis switched the plan for a 31-story condominium in the East 60s from all glass to limestone. Glass, he said, turned out to be “too much of a déjà vu kind of thing.”
Correction: November 11, 2007
An article last Sunday about the recent de-emphasis of privacy in architectural design misidentified the program headed by Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who commented on the significance of glass towers. She is the director of the M.I.T. Initiative on Technology and Self; she is not the director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society, though she is a member.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Monday, December 3, 2007
Japan Hunts the Humpback. Now Comes the Backlash. By ANDREW C. REVKIN November 25, 2007
THE ritual has been the same for nearly 20 years. Japan, while adhering to a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling, has sent sturdy ships to Antarctic waters and, more recently, parts of the Pacific Ocean to kill hundreds of whales in the name of scientific research.
Vessels from the groups Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace tail and harass the whaling fleet, while strong protests are lodged by environmental groups, many marine biologists, and officials from the United States, Australia and other countries. But this year those complaints have intensified, largely because Japan has added a new animal to its planned harvest of more than 1,400 whales from seven species — the humpback, Megaptera novaeangliae.
Japan hopes to kill 50 of these endangered whales, which have long held a place in the public’s imagination with their other-worldly songs, habit of rocketing their 30-plus tons out of the sea and migrations of up to 10,000 miles a year. Melville once described the humpback as “the most gamesome and lighthearted of all the whales.”
Whaling nearly wiped it out, reducing the humpback’s numbers to perhaps a 1,000 by the mid-1960s. Today, estimates put the total at roughly 30,000. They are considered at high risk of extinction by the World Conservation Union.
“Humpbacks are some of the most wonderful and mysterious creatures in the ocean, with the longest vocalization produced by any animal, including humans, with their bouts of song that last up to 23 hours,” said David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and author of a forthcoming book on whale songs and science.
“We still do not know why they need to sing so extensively, and we ought to leave these whales alone for enough years to find out,” he said.
Once a top target of whalers because they swim close to shore, the humpback is now the centerpiece of another enterprise, whale watching, which by some measures is a billion-dollar-a-year business, making it larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than commercial whaling was even at its peak.
There is some thought among foes of whaling that Japan picked this marquee species intentionally to test the resolve of anti-whaling nations and groups.
“If there’s no reaction to this, my suspicion is they’ll expand the hunt quickly,” said Roger Payne, one of the biologists who first documented the low, resonant, ocean-spanning song of the species, and who is president of a whale conservation group, Ocean Alliance.
The director general of Japan’s Institute for Cetacean Research, Minoru Morimoto, has defended the program, saying, “Japan’s research is a long-term scientific program that is obtaining biological and ecosystem information required for proper management.”
(There is no ban or limit on such harvests, even though most of the meat is sold commercially in Japan.)
The Japan Whaling Association, a private group representing the whaling operations, has described complaints as cultural imperialism on its Web site, whaling.jp:
“Asking Japan to abandon this part of its culture,” the association says, “would compare to Australians being asked to stop eating meat pies, Americans being asked to stop eating hamburgers and the English being asked to go without fish and chips.”
Vessels from the groups Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace tail and harass the whaling fleet, while strong protests are lodged by environmental groups, many marine biologists, and officials from the United States, Australia and other countries. But this year those complaints have intensified, largely because Japan has added a new animal to its planned harvest of more than 1,400 whales from seven species — the humpback, Megaptera novaeangliae.
Japan hopes to kill 50 of these endangered whales, which have long held a place in the public’s imagination with their other-worldly songs, habit of rocketing their 30-plus tons out of the sea and migrations of up to 10,000 miles a year. Melville once described the humpback as “the most gamesome and lighthearted of all the whales.”
Whaling nearly wiped it out, reducing the humpback’s numbers to perhaps a 1,000 by the mid-1960s. Today, estimates put the total at roughly 30,000. They are considered at high risk of extinction by the World Conservation Union.
“Humpbacks are some of the most wonderful and mysterious creatures in the ocean, with the longest vocalization produced by any animal, including humans, with their bouts of song that last up to 23 hours,” said David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and author of a forthcoming book on whale songs and science.
“We still do not know why they need to sing so extensively, and we ought to leave these whales alone for enough years to find out,” he said.
Once a top target of whalers because they swim close to shore, the humpback is now the centerpiece of another enterprise, whale watching, which by some measures is a billion-dollar-a-year business, making it larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than commercial whaling was even at its peak.
There is some thought among foes of whaling that Japan picked this marquee species intentionally to test the resolve of anti-whaling nations and groups.
“If there’s no reaction to this, my suspicion is they’ll expand the hunt quickly,” said Roger Payne, one of the biologists who first documented the low, resonant, ocean-spanning song of the species, and who is president of a whale conservation group, Ocean Alliance.
The director general of Japan’s Institute for Cetacean Research, Minoru Morimoto, has defended the program, saying, “Japan’s research is a long-term scientific program that is obtaining biological and ecosystem information required for proper management.”
(There is no ban or limit on such harvests, even though most of the meat is sold commercially in Japan.)
The Japan Whaling Association, a private group representing the whaling operations, has described complaints as cultural imperialism on its Web site, whaling.jp:
“Asking Japan to abandon this part of its culture,” the association says, “would compare to Australians being asked to stop eating meat pies, Americans being asked to stop eating hamburgers and the English being asked to go without fish and chips.”
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Rethinking What Caused the Last Mass Extinction: By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
FREEHOLD, N.J. — Splashing through a shallow creek in suburban New Jersey, the paleontologists stepped back 65 million years to the time of the last mass extinction, the one notable for the demise of the dinosaurs.
The stream flows over sediment laid down toward the end of geology’s Cretaceous period. The clay at water level holds meaningful traces of iridium, the element more common in asteroids and other extraterrestrial objects than in the earth. No one could resist sticking a finger to the clay, treating it as a touchstone of their time travel.
Scientists associate the iridium anomaly with the asteroid impact or impacts thought to have set off the extinctions. The thin layer, which has been detected worldwide, is also considered the marker for the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of the Tertiary period, known as the K-T boundary.
At the time, sea levels were higher and New Jersey was warmer. The proto-Atlantic waters reached the center of the current boundaries of New Jersey, standing more than 60 feet deep here, where on a recent day the paleontologists were up to their ankles in a creek. They had their eyes on the sediments in the bank just above the iridium clay. They call this the Pinna layer.
On previous visits, they had found in the Pinna rock and soil a surprising number of marine fossils, including small clams, crabs and sea urchins. There was an abundance of ammonites, considered index organisms of the uppermost Cretaceous environment. Somehow, here at least, life appeared to have not only persisted but also flourished for tens, perhaps hundreds, of years after the putative asteroid impact.
“This is really putting New Jersey on the map of the K-T boundary,” said Neil H. Landman, an invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History who is directing the new research in the Manasquan River basin.
The discovery of thriving communities of survivors at the end of the Cretaceous is giving some scientists second thoughts about the extinction’s causes and effects. Some question the conventional explanation of a single large impact that enveloped Earth in a cloud of dust and almost instantaneously brought on a deadly global winter. They contend that this may be an oversimplification, and that the real story behind the dinosaur-ending disaster is more complicated and as yet unclear.
“It is undeniable that the iridium spike at the base of the Pinna layer was produced by the impact,” Dr. Landman said. “That’s amazing and makes it hard to explain the ammonite abundances we find above the iridium anomaly.”
Gerta Keller, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at Princeton University, said the research by Dr. Landman’s group “shows the complexity of this extinction event and the difficulty explaining it by the currently popular impact theory.”
Dr. Keller, who had no part in the New Jersey discovery, has investigated the K-T boundary in Brazil, Mexico and Texas, finding evidence that she says indicates multiple asteroid impacts occurring at the end of the Cretaceous. She reported that the one that gouged out the Chicxulub crater at the tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which had been the prime suspect in the extinction, struck at least 300,000 years before the dinosaurs died out.
At a meeting of the Geological Society of America last week, Dr. Keller reported marine fossil evidence that she said linked the mass extinction to widespread volcanic eruptions that swept India at the end of the Cretaceous.
In other words, the world’s ecosystem was under widespread stress for an extended time. The extinctions might have had multiple causes, not the single asteroid impact and almost instant death as hypothesized in 1980 after the detection of the global iridium layer.
At first, the paleontologists treated the fossil discoveries in New Jersey with caution. Geologists who analyzed 37 samples of sediment from three sites at the creek and elsewhere in the basin concluded that they contained a telling concentration of iridium at the Pinna base. Still, Dr. Landman thought it possible that the iridium had shifted over time, confusing the chronology.
Dr. Landman said he had since become increasingly confident that the iridium layer at the creek remained where it was deposited. It is presumably a true marker of an asteroid impact with global repercussions, and this further complicates understanding of the mass extinction. Why is there no evidence at the creek for the almost immediate post-impact destruction, as assumed by the standard theory?
A construction project led scientists to the discovery. Excavations for a new bridge three years ago exposed a section of rock spanning the K-T boundary. In a report this year, Dr. Landman’s group wrote that the section contained “the most abundant and diverse invertebrate assemblage ever discovered from this interval in New Jersey.”
The first investigations, beginning with Ralph O. Johnson, a mostly self-educated but expert paleontologist who lives in West Long Branch, uncovered traces of the fossil-rich stratum reaching to the undisturbed outcrops along this creek. The stream has no name on maps, but the scientists, thinking of the prickling briars and entangling wild grape vines, call it Agony Creek.
“You don’t have to go to Mongolia to discover important fossils,” Mr. Johnson said. “These outcrops sit in the middle of the suburbs, two and a half miles from my home. How could they have been missed until now?”
Wading downstream, Dr. Landman, Mr. Johnson and Matthew P. Garb, a doctoral student in geology at Brooklyn College, came to a place that looked good for prospecting. Wet and dirty, they got to work — grown men squatting at the edge of a creek, making mud pies, or so it appeared.
In fact, they were cutting out wedges of the Pinna layer and, wielding picks, knives and brushes, were extracting and examining the remains of presumed survivors in the aftermath of the K-T mass extinction.
At least 110 species of near-shore marine organisms have been identified in the Pinna layer, Dr. Landman explained. This was a robust community that lived over a geologically short period of time, perhaps several tens of years. But the Pinna is truncated at the top, which the scientists said implied a still longer duration amounting to hundreds of years.
Later, back at his museum laboratory in Manhattan, Dr. Landman pulled out trays of ammonites, his scientific specialty. These organisms first appeared in the Devonian period, about 410 million years ago; there were 30 known species at the end of the Cretaceous, and after the extinctions, there were none. Their near-relative the nautilus survives, perhaps because it is a scavenger that will eat just about anything.
The trays held a collection of the creek specimens. Ten ammonite species were recovered from the presumably post-impact Pinna layer. One of them, Discoscaphites jerseyensis, is unique to New Jersey.
After the event producing the iridium residue, and the occurrence of any accompanying disasters, Dr. Landman said, the extinctions were not immediate everywhere, certainly not among marine organisms off New Jersey.
“This is what I imagine happening,” he said. “Storms of biblical proportions and a heavy discharge of river floods might have buried sediments rapidly. These marine communities may have flourished immediately afterward as a result of a lot of organic material, such as plankton, dying and settling to the depths for their consumption.”
A few other paleontologists have also cast doubt on the timing and single-impact suddenness of the mass extinction. The idea of a killer impact that became the standard theory was proposed in 1980 on the basis of iridium traces; it gained wide acceptance after the discovery in 1991 of the impact crater in Mexico. But in some places, the fossil record for dinosaurs seems to disappear a little before the iridium is deposited. Geologists have found several other crater remnants that could have been gouged out by asteroids and also the suspect volcanoes of India.
Dr. Landman said he was not sure how long the ammonites in New Jersey lived above the iridium marker, but they “could not possibly have survived 300,000 years,” as Dr. Heller of Princeton argues.
At the creek site, above the fossils of the Pinna layer, the Hornerstown Formation preserves a record of impoverished life, beginning a few hundred years after the extinction event or events. There were tiny oyster shells from a single species, and little else.
The stream flows over sediment laid down toward the end of geology’s Cretaceous period. The clay at water level holds meaningful traces of iridium, the element more common in asteroids and other extraterrestrial objects than in the earth. No one could resist sticking a finger to the clay, treating it as a touchstone of their time travel.
Scientists associate the iridium anomaly with the asteroid impact or impacts thought to have set off the extinctions. The thin layer, which has been detected worldwide, is also considered the marker for the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of the Tertiary period, known as the K-T boundary.
At the time, sea levels were higher and New Jersey was warmer. The proto-Atlantic waters reached the center of the current boundaries of New Jersey, standing more than 60 feet deep here, where on a recent day the paleontologists were up to their ankles in a creek. They had their eyes on the sediments in the bank just above the iridium clay. They call this the Pinna layer.
On previous visits, they had found in the Pinna rock and soil a surprising number of marine fossils, including small clams, crabs and sea urchins. There was an abundance of ammonites, considered index organisms of the uppermost Cretaceous environment. Somehow, here at least, life appeared to have not only persisted but also flourished for tens, perhaps hundreds, of years after the putative asteroid impact.
“This is really putting New Jersey on the map of the K-T boundary,” said Neil H. Landman, an invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History who is directing the new research in the Manasquan River basin.
The discovery of thriving communities of survivors at the end of the Cretaceous is giving some scientists second thoughts about the extinction’s causes and effects. Some question the conventional explanation of a single large impact that enveloped Earth in a cloud of dust and almost instantaneously brought on a deadly global winter. They contend that this may be an oversimplification, and that the real story behind the dinosaur-ending disaster is more complicated and as yet unclear.
“It is undeniable that the iridium spike at the base of the Pinna layer was produced by the impact,” Dr. Landman said. “That’s amazing and makes it hard to explain the ammonite abundances we find above the iridium anomaly.”
Gerta Keller, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at Princeton University, said the research by Dr. Landman’s group “shows the complexity of this extinction event and the difficulty explaining it by the currently popular impact theory.”
Dr. Keller, who had no part in the New Jersey discovery, has investigated the K-T boundary in Brazil, Mexico and Texas, finding evidence that she says indicates multiple asteroid impacts occurring at the end of the Cretaceous. She reported that the one that gouged out the Chicxulub crater at the tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which had been the prime suspect in the extinction, struck at least 300,000 years before the dinosaurs died out.
At a meeting of the Geological Society of America last week, Dr. Keller reported marine fossil evidence that she said linked the mass extinction to widespread volcanic eruptions that swept India at the end of the Cretaceous.
In other words, the world’s ecosystem was under widespread stress for an extended time. The extinctions might have had multiple causes, not the single asteroid impact and almost instant death as hypothesized in 1980 after the detection of the global iridium layer.
At first, the paleontologists treated the fossil discoveries in New Jersey with caution. Geologists who analyzed 37 samples of sediment from three sites at the creek and elsewhere in the basin concluded that they contained a telling concentration of iridium at the Pinna base. Still, Dr. Landman thought it possible that the iridium had shifted over time, confusing the chronology.
Dr. Landman said he had since become increasingly confident that the iridium layer at the creek remained where it was deposited. It is presumably a true marker of an asteroid impact with global repercussions, and this further complicates understanding of the mass extinction. Why is there no evidence at the creek for the almost immediate post-impact destruction, as assumed by the standard theory?
A construction project led scientists to the discovery. Excavations for a new bridge three years ago exposed a section of rock spanning the K-T boundary. In a report this year, Dr. Landman’s group wrote that the section contained “the most abundant and diverse invertebrate assemblage ever discovered from this interval in New Jersey.”
The first investigations, beginning with Ralph O. Johnson, a mostly self-educated but expert paleontologist who lives in West Long Branch, uncovered traces of the fossil-rich stratum reaching to the undisturbed outcrops along this creek. The stream has no name on maps, but the scientists, thinking of the prickling briars and entangling wild grape vines, call it Agony Creek.
“You don’t have to go to Mongolia to discover important fossils,” Mr. Johnson said. “These outcrops sit in the middle of the suburbs, two and a half miles from my home. How could they have been missed until now?”
Wading downstream, Dr. Landman, Mr. Johnson and Matthew P. Garb, a doctoral student in geology at Brooklyn College, came to a place that looked good for prospecting. Wet and dirty, they got to work — grown men squatting at the edge of a creek, making mud pies, or so it appeared.
In fact, they were cutting out wedges of the Pinna layer and, wielding picks, knives and brushes, were extracting and examining the remains of presumed survivors in the aftermath of the K-T mass extinction.
At least 110 species of near-shore marine organisms have been identified in the Pinna layer, Dr. Landman explained. This was a robust community that lived over a geologically short period of time, perhaps several tens of years. But the Pinna is truncated at the top, which the scientists said implied a still longer duration amounting to hundreds of years.
Later, back at his museum laboratory in Manhattan, Dr. Landman pulled out trays of ammonites, his scientific specialty. These organisms first appeared in the Devonian period, about 410 million years ago; there were 30 known species at the end of the Cretaceous, and after the extinctions, there were none. Their near-relative the nautilus survives, perhaps because it is a scavenger that will eat just about anything.
The trays held a collection of the creek specimens. Ten ammonite species were recovered from the presumably post-impact Pinna layer. One of them, Discoscaphites jerseyensis, is unique to New Jersey.
After the event producing the iridium residue, and the occurrence of any accompanying disasters, Dr. Landman said, the extinctions were not immediate everywhere, certainly not among marine organisms off New Jersey.
“This is what I imagine happening,” he said. “Storms of biblical proportions and a heavy discharge of river floods might have buried sediments rapidly. These marine communities may have flourished immediately afterward as a result of a lot of organic material, such as plankton, dying and settling to the depths for their consumption.”
A few other paleontologists have also cast doubt on the timing and single-impact suddenness of the mass extinction. The idea of a killer impact that became the standard theory was proposed in 1980 on the basis of iridium traces; it gained wide acceptance after the discovery in 1991 of the impact crater in Mexico. But in some places, the fossil record for dinosaurs seems to disappear a little before the iridium is deposited. Geologists have found several other crater remnants that could have been gouged out by asteroids and also the suspect volcanoes of India.
Dr. Landman said he was not sure how long the ammonites in New Jersey lived above the iridium marker, but they “could not possibly have survived 300,000 years,” as Dr. Heller of Princeton argues.
At the creek site, above the fossils of the Pinna layer, the Hornerstown Formation preserves a record of impoverished life, beginning a few hundred years after the extinction event or events. There were tiny oyster shells from a single species, and little else.
You Are What Your Name Says You Are: By ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
IN France, a person’s name can signify as little as a measure of what’s big on TV at any given time, or as much as an entire country’s nature.
The recent publication there of two annual guides charting the popularity of first names could only prompt more soul-searching in a nation already painfully struggling with how to define its character. The issue appears so urgent that President Nicolas Sarkozy felt the need to create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, and the government has passed a law authorizing DNA testing to establish family links among would-be immigrants.
The discussion of names is much lighter in tone. It turns out that names featuring “a” are hot for girls (Clara, Sarah, Léa), as are “o” ones for boys (Mathéo, Enzo, Hugo). Scratch a bit deeper, and race and class quickly rear their heads. After all, names can provide an immediate indication of someone’s background in a country that does not include ethnicity in its national statistics, and where salaries are rarely discussed in public.
In a recent article pegged to the publication of one of the guides, Joséphine Besnard’s “Index of First Names in 2008,” the newspaper Libération asked 15 people to talk about their own names, prompting a lively debate on its Web site. A few readers commented on some French assumptions. “What of the new first names — Binta, Jamila, Lin, Ahmed, etc. — of an increasing number of French people?” wrote one commentator at the Web site. “It would have been interesting to look into that issue and how society perceives people with those names, people who may be born here but whose parents almost certainly weren’t.”
But Guy Desplanques, a demographer, pointed out in 2002 that names like Ahmed and Jamila actually were on the wane, and that second-generation French men and women work toward integration by coming up with variations like Yanis or Rayan; the latter has become popular in some banlieues, evoking both the Maghreb and the relatively widespread Ryan.
Ms. Besnard’s father was the sociologist Philippe Besnard, who did extensive work on first names, establishing that until the 1970s the popularity of names trickled down from the upper classes. For instance, “Gilles” peaked in France’s high-society registry in 1942 and in the general population in 1960. That all changed in the 1980s, when the less wealthy and less educated turned into first-name innovators (perhaps caught up in fads spread by popular music and TV) while the rich rediscovered more traditional French-sounding names.
Sociologists like Mr. Besnard observed that first names were often quick markers of social and educational status. As another Libération reader, an elementary school teacher, pointed out: “I can often guess the ‘profile’ of a child thanks to the first name. A ‘Maxime,’ a ‘Louise,’ a ‘Kevin,’ a ‘Lolita.’ It’s sad, but that’s how it often works.” That is, Maxime and Louise probably have wealthy parents, while Kevin and Lolita are more likely to have a working- or lower-middle-class background.
Indeed, bourgeois French parents are unlikely to give their children “Anglo-Saxon” names; Jennifer was the most popular name for girls from 1984 to 1986, but it’s a safe bet few Jennifers came from well-educated families. (The craze is commonly explained by the success of the TV series “Hart to Hart” in France at that time — Jennifer Hart was one of the title characters — while “Beverly Hills, 90210,” featuring a popular character named Dylan McKay, is sometimes blamed for the explosion of Dylans a few years later.)
This quick profiling can hamper those looking for a job: Several studies have shown that all things being equal, applicants with “foreign”-sounding names are less likely to be hired. But that’s only one more hurdle to the work force’s integration: It is not rare in France to encounter job postings that request candidates to reveal their marital status and age, and to attach a photo to their résumés.
The recent publication there of two annual guides charting the popularity of first names could only prompt more soul-searching in a nation already painfully struggling with how to define its character. The issue appears so urgent that President Nicolas Sarkozy felt the need to create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, and the government has passed a law authorizing DNA testing to establish family links among would-be immigrants.
The discussion of names is much lighter in tone. It turns out that names featuring “a” are hot for girls (Clara, Sarah, Léa), as are “o” ones for boys (Mathéo, Enzo, Hugo). Scratch a bit deeper, and race and class quickly rear their heads. After all, names can provide an immediate indication of someone’s background in a country that does not include ethnicity in its national statistics, and where salaries are rarely discussed in public.
In a recent article pegged to the publication of one of the guides, Joséphine Besnard’s “Index of First Names in 2008,” the newspaper Libération asked 15 people to talk about their own names, prompting a lively debate on its Web site. A few readers commented on some French assumptions. “What of the new first names — Binta, Jamila, Lin, Ahmed, etc. — of an increasing number of French people?” wrote one commentator at the Web site. “It would have been interesting to look into that issue and how society perceives people with those names, people who may be born here but whose parents almost certainly weren’t.”
But Guy Desplanques, a demographer, pointed out in 2002 that names like Ahmed and Jamila actually were on the wane, and that second-generation French men and women work toward integration by coming up with variations like Yanis or Rayan; the latter has become popular in some banlieues, evoking both the Maghreb and the relatively widespread Ryan.
Ms. Besnard’s father was the sociologist Philippe Besnard, who did extensive work on first names, establishing that until the 1970s the popularity of names trickled down from the upper classes. For instance, “Gilles” peaked in France’s high-society registry in 1942 and in the general population in 1960. That all changed in the 1980s, when the less wealthy and less educated turned into first-name innovators (perhaps caught up in fads spread by popular music and TV) while the rich rediscovered more traditional French-sounding names.
Sociologists like Mr. Besnard observed that first names were often quick markers of social and educational status. As another Libération reader, an elementary school teacher, pointed out: “I can often guess the ‘profile’ of a child thanks to the first name. A ‘Maxime,’ a ‘Louise,’ a ‘Kevin,’ a ‘Lolita.’ It’s sad, but that’s how it often works.” That is, Maxime and Louise probably have wealthy parents, while Kevin and Lolita are more likely to have a working- or lower-middle-class background.
Indeed, bourgeois French parents are unlikely to give their children “Anglo-Saxon” names; Jennifer was the most popular name for girls from 1984 to 1986, but it’s a safe bet few Jennifers came from well-educated families. (The craze is commonly explained by the success of the TV series “Hart to Hart” in France at that time — Jennifer Hart was one of the title characters — while “Beverly Hills, 90210,” featuring a popular character named Dylan McKay, is sometimes blamed for the explosion of Dylans a few years later.)
This quick profiling can hamper those looking for a job: Several studies have shown that all things being equal, applicants with “foreign”-sounding names are less likely to be hired. But that’s only one more hurdle to the work force’s integration: It is not rare in France to encounter job postings that request candidates to reveal their marital status and age, and to attach a photo to their résumés.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Karma Power:What Makes a Monk Mad By SETH MYDANS
BANGKOK
AS they marched through the streets of Myanmar’s cities last week leading the biggest antigovernment protests in two decades, some barefoot monks held their begging bowls before them. But instead of asking for their daily donations of food, they held the bowls upside down, the black lacquer surfaces reflecting the light.
It was a shocking image in the devoutly Buddhist nation. The monks were refusing to receive alms from the military rulers and their families — effectively excommunicating them from the religion that is at the core of Burmese culture.
That gesture is a key to understanding the power of the rebellion that shook Myanmar last week.
The country — the former Burma — has roughly as many monks as soldiers. The military rules by force, but the monks retain ultimate moral authority. The lowliest soldier depends on them for spiritual approval, and even the highest generals have felt a need to honor the clerical establishment. They claim to rule in its name.
Begging is a ritual that expresses a profound bond between the ordinary Buddhist and the monk. “The people are feeding the monks and the monks are helping the people make merit,” said Josef Silverstein, an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University. “When you refuse to accept, you have broken the bond that has tied them for centuries together.”
Instead, the monks drew on a different and more fundamental bond with Myanmar’s population, leading huge demonstrations after the government tried to repress protests that began a month ago over a rise in fuel prices.
By last week, the country’s two largest and most established institutions were confronting each other, the monkhood and the military, both about 400,000 strong, both made up of young men, mostly from the poorer classes, who could well be brothers. Rejected by both its spiritual and popular bases, the junta that has ruled for 19 years had little to fall back on but force.
It unleashed its troops to shoot, beat, arrest and humiliate the men in brick-red robes, definitively alienating itself from the clergy whose support gives it legitimacy. Soldiers surrounded monasteries, preventing monks from leading further demonstrations — or from making their morning rounds to collect the alms that feed them.
In Myanmar and other Buddhist nations, many join the monkhood as a lifelong vocation, but many other young men become monks for shorter periods, ranging from a few months to a few years. These young monks remain closer to the lives and concerns of the people whose alms they receive.
Burmese monks have taken part in protests in the past, against British colonial rule and against a half-century of rule by military dictatorship. The most notable recent occasion was in 1990.
Their militant resistance to the British produced the most prominent political martyr of Burmese Buddhism, U Wisara, who died in prison in 1929 after a 166-day hunger strike.
His statue stands near the tall, golden Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s holiest shrine, which was a rallying point for the recent demonstrations and the scene of the first violence against the monks last week.
That attack came as a shock to people who said the military would not turn violently against the monks, and it had the predictable effect of arousing the fury of a devout population.
But monks have not always been in the political front lines. It was students, for example, who led the mass demonstrations of 1988 that brought the current junta to power in a military massacre.
The monks’ power comes instead from their role in bestowing legitimacy on the rulers.
“Legitimacy in Burma is not about regime performance, it’s not about human rights like the West,” said Ingrid Jordt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and an expert on Burmese Buddhism. “It is something that comes from the potency and karma bestowed by the monks. That’s why the sangha is so important to the government,” she said, referring to the Buddhist hierarchy and the spiritual status that its monks can convey. “They are actually the source of power.”
The junta has gone to great lengths to identify itself with Buddhism. Like their predecessors through the centuries, the generals have been busy building temples, supporting monasteries and carrying out religiously symbolic acts. In 1999, they regilded the spire of the Shwedagon Pagoda, which now glitters with 53 tons of gold and 4,341 diamonds on the crowning orb.
The gilding of the spire was a high-risk ploy for an unpopular regime, an act permitted only to kings and legitimate rulers. When the two-ton, seven-tier finial was added and the spire was complete, the nation held its breath, waiting for the earth to send a signal of disapproval through lightning or thunder or floods, Ms. Jordt said. But nature remained indifferent.
“Aung pyi!” the generals shouted. “We won!”
But their grip on power has never been secure. They have ruled through a security service that keeps order through intimidation. They have arrested thousands of political prisoners and have held the pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years.
In that context, the huge street demonstrations were an act of courage and catharsis.
They started tentatively on Aug. 19 after a fuel price increase raised the costs of transportation and basic goods. Veterans of the student demonstrations of 1988 staged small protests, but most were quickly arrested or driven into hiding. The unrest was fading when security officers beat monks and fired shots into the air during a confrontation in the city of Pakokku on Sept. 5.
That became a spark that grew into a broad-based challenge to the government, culminating last week in the breach between those who hold moral authority and those who have the guns.
“This was not an accidental uprising,” said Zin Linn, a former editor and political prisoner who is now information minister for the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, an exile opposition group based in Washington. The transition in leadership in the protests — from militant former students to activist monks — was well planned, he said, through secret meetings among young men sharing similar grievances and aspirations for their country. For the most part, it was not the elders who backed the protests. Over the years, the junta has worked to co-opt the Buddhist hierarchy, placing chosen men in key positions just as they have done in every other institution, angering and alienating the younger monks.
After the military clampdown on the monasteries last week, the streets of Yangon were mostly empty of monks. But their gesture of rejection of the junta, and the junta’s violent response, had changed the dynamics of Burmese society in ways that had only begun to play out.
The junta’s action “shows how desperate they are,” Ms. Jordt said. “It shows that they are willing to do anything at this point in terms of violence. Once you’ve thrown your lot in against the monks, I think it will be impossible for the regime to go back to normal daily legitimacy.”
AS they marched through the streets of Myanmar’s cities last week leading the biggest antigovernment protests in two decades, some barefoot monks held their begging bowls before them. But instead of asking for their daily donations of food, they held the bowls upside down, the black lacquer surfaces reflecting the light.
It was a shocking image in the devoutly Buddhist nation. The monks were refusing to receive alms from the military rulers and their families — effectively excommunicating them from the religion that is at the core of Burmese culture.
That gesture is a key to understanding the power of the rebellion that shook Myanmar last week.
The country — the former Burma — has roughly as many monks as soldiers. The military rules by force, but the monks retain ultimate moral authority. The lowliest soldier depends on them for spiritual approval, and even the highest generals have felt a need to honor the clerical establishment. They claim to rule in its name.
Begging is a ritual that expresses a profound bond between the ordinary Buddhist and the monk. “The people are feeding the monks and the monks are helping the people make merit,” said Josef Silverstein, an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University. “When you refuse to accept, you have broken the bond that has tied them for centuries together.”
Instead, the monks drew on a different and more fundamental bond with Myanmar’s population, leading huge demonstrations after the government tried to repress protests that began a month ago over a rise in fuel prices.
By last week, the country’s two largest and most established institutions were confronting each other, the monkhood and the military, both about 400,000 strong, both made up of young men, mostly from the poorer classes, who could well be brothers. Rejected by both its spiritual and popular bases, the junta that has ruled for 19 years had little to fall back on but force.
It unleashed its troops to shoot, beat, arrest and humiliate the men in brick-red robes, definitively alienating itself from the clergy whose support gives it legitimacy. Soldiers surrounded monasteries, preventing monks from leading further demonstrations — or from making their morning rounds to collect the alms that feed them.
In Myanmar and other Buddhist nations, many join the monkhood as a lifelong vocation, but many other young men become monks for shorter periods, ranging from a few months to a few years. These young monks remain closer to the lives and concerns of the people whose alms they receive.
Burmese monks have taken part in protests in the past, against British colonial rule and against a half-century of rule by military dictatorship. The most notable recent occasion was in 1990.
Their militant resistance to the British produced the most prominent political martyr of Burmese Buddhism, U Wisara, who died in prison in 1929 after a 166-day hunger strike.
His statue stands near the tall, golden Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s holiest shrine, which was a rallying point for the recent demonstrations and the scene of the first violence against the monks last week.
That attack came as a shock to people who said the military would not turn violently against the monks, and it had the predictable effect of arousing the fury of a devout population.
But monks have not always been in the political front lines. It was students, for example, who led the mass demonstrations of 1988 that brought the current junta to power in a military massacre.
The monks’ power comes instead from their role in bestowing legitimacy on the rulers.
“Legitimacy in Burma is not about regime performance, it’s not about human rights like the West,” said Ingrid Jordt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and an expert on Burmese Buddhism. “It is something that comes from the potency and karma bestowed by the monks. That’s why the sangha is so important to the government,” she said, referring to the Buddhist hierarchy and the spiritual status that its monks can convey. “They are actually the source of power.”
The junta has gone to great lengths to identify itself with Buddhism. Like their predecessors through the centuries, the generals have been busy building temples, supporting monasteries and carrying out religiously symbolic acts. In 1999, they regilded the spire of the Shwedagon Pagoda, which now glitters with 53 tons of gold and 4,341 diamonds on the crowning orb.
The gilding of the spire was a high-risk ploy for an unpopular regime, an act permitted only to kings and legitimate rulers. When the two-ton, seven-tier finial was added and the spire was complete, the nation held its breath, waiting for the earth to send a signal of disapproval through lightning or thunder or floods, Ms. Jordt said. But nature remained indifferent.
“Aung pyi!” the generals shouted. “We won!”
But their grip on power has never been secure. They have ruled through a security service that keeps order through intimidation. They have arrested thousands of political prisoners and have held the pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years.
In that context, the huge street demonstrations were an act of courage and catharsis.
They started tentatively on Aug. 19 after a fuel price increase raised the costs of transportation and basic goods. Veterans of the student demonstrations of 1988 staged small protests, but most were quickly arrested or driven into hiding. The unrest was fading when security officers beat monks and fired shots into the air during a confrontation in the city of Pakokku on Sept. 5.
That became a spark that grew into a broad-based challenge to the government, culminating last week in the breach between those who hold moral authority and those who have the guns.
“This was not an accidental uprising,” said Zin Linn, a former editor and political prisoner who is now information minister for the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, an exile opposition group based in Washington. The transition in leadership in the protests — from militant former students to activist monks — was well planned, he said, through secret meetings among young men sharing similar grievances and aspirations for their country. For the most part, it was not the elders who backed the protests. Over the years, the junta has worked to co-opt the Buddhist hierarchy, placing chosen men in key positions just as they have done in every other institution, angering and alienating the younger monks.
After the military clampdown on the monasteries last week, the streets of Yangon were mostly empty of monks. But their gesture of rejection of the junta, and the junta’s violent response, had changed the dynamics of Burmese society in ways that had only begun to play out.
The junta’s action “shows how desperate they are,” Ms. Jordt said. “It shows that they are willing to do anything at this point in terms of violence. Once you’ve thrown your lot in against the monks, I think it will be impossible for the regime to go back to normal daily legitimacy.”
Monday, September 24, 2007
King Algorithm:An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine By GEORGE JOHNSON September 23, 2007
IN the 12th century A.D., when the Arabic treatise “On the Hindu Art of Reckoning” was translated into Latin, the modern decimal system was bestowed on the Western world — an advance that can best be appreciated by trying to do long division with Roman numerals. The name of the author, the Baghdad scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, was Latinized as Algoritmi, which mutated somehow into algorismus and, in English, algorithm — meaning nothing more than a recipe for solving problems step by step.
It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence. Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate. You can’t visit Amazon.com without being confronted with a list of books and other products that the Great Algoritmi recommends.
Its intuitions, of course, are just calculations — given enough time they could be carried out with stones. But when so much data is processed so rapidly, the effect is oracular and almost opaque. Even with a peek at the cybernetic trade secrets, you probably couldn’t unwind the computations. As you sit with your eHarmony spouse watching the movies Netflix prescribes, you might as well be an avatar in Second Life. You have been absorbed into the operating system.
Last week, when executives at MySpace told of new algorithms that will mine the information on users’ personal pages and summon targeted ads, the news hardly caused a stir. The idea of automating what used to be called judgment has gone from radical to commonplace.
What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms — those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language — have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net.
Go to Google Image Labeler (images.google.com/imagelabeler) and you are randomly matched with another bored Web surfer — in Korea, maybe, or Omaha — who has agreed to play a game. Google shows you both a series of pictures peeled from the Web — the sun setting over the ocean or a comet streaking through space — and you earn points by typing as many descriptive words as you can. The results are stored and analyzed, and through this human-machine symbiosis, Google’s image-searching algorithms are incrementally refined.
The project is still experimental. But the concept is not so different from what happens routinely during a Google search. The network of computers answering your query pays attention to which results you choose to read. You’re gathering data from the network while the network is gathering data about you. The result is a statistical accretion of what people — those beings who clack away at the keys — are looking for, a rough sense of what their language means.
In the 1950s William Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, anticipated something like this merger when he wrote about intelligence amplification — human thinking leveraged by machines. But it is both kinds of intelligence, biological and electronic, that are being amplified. Unlike the grinning cyborgs envisioned by science fiction, the splicing is not between hardware and wetware but between software running on two different platforms.
Several years ago, SETI@home became a vehicle for computer owners to donate their spare processing cycles for the intense number-crunching needed to sift radio-telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life. Now a site run by Amazon.com, the Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com), asks you to lend your brain. Named for an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that turned out to have a human hidden inside, the Mechanical Turk offers volunteers a chance to search for the missing aviator Steve Fossett by examining satellite photos. Or you can earn a few pennies at a time by performing other chores that flummox computers: categorizing Web sites (“sexually explicit, “arts and entertainment,” “automotive”), identifying objects in video frames, summarizing or paraphrasing snippets of text, transcribing audio recordings — specialties at which neural algorithms excel.
(Not all of these Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, as Amazon calls them, involve serving as a chip in some entrepreneur’s machine. Hoping to draw more traffic to their sites, bloggers are using the Mechanical Turk to solicit comments for their online postings. In some cases you get precisely 2 cents for your opinion.)
In his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing foresaw a day when it would be hard to tell the difference between the responses of a computer and a human being. What he may not have envisioned is how thoroughly the boundary would blur.
How do you categorize Wikipedia, a constantly buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts? Submit an article or change one and a swarm of warm- and sometimes hot-blooded proofreading routines go to work making corrections and corrections to the corrections.
Or maybe the mercurial encyclopedia is more like an organism with an immune system of human leukocytes guarding its integrity. (Biology too is algorithmic, beginning with the genetic code.) When the objectivity of Wikipedia was threatened by tweaking from special interests — a kind of autoimmune disease — another level of protection evolved: a Web site called WikiScanner that reports the Internet address of the offender. Someone at PepsiCo, for example, removed references about the health effects of its flagship soft drink. With enough computing power the monitoring could be semiautomated — scanning the database constantly and flagging suspicious edits for humans to inspect.
No one but a utopian would have predicted how readily people will work for free. We’re cheaper than hardware — a good thing considering how hard we are to duplicate.
It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence. Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate. You can’t visit Amazon.com without being confronted with a list of books and other products that the Great Algoritmi recommends.
Its intuitions, of course, are just calculations — given enough time they could be carried out with stones. But when so much data is processed so rapidly, the effect is oracular and almost opaque. Even with a peek at the cybernetic trade secrets, you probably couldn’t unwind the computations. As you sit with your eHarmony spouse watching the movies Netflix prescribes, you might as well be an avatar in Second Life. You have been absorbed into the operating system.
Last week, when executives at MySpace told of new algorithms that will mine the information on users’ personal pages and summon targeted ads, the news hardly caused a stir. The idea of automating what used to be called judgment has gone from radical to commonplace.
What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms — those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language — have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net.
Go to Google Image Labeler (images.google.com/imagelabeler) and you are randomly matched with another bored Web surfer — in Korea, maybe, or Omaha — who has agreed to play a game. Google shows you both a series of pictures peeled from the Web — the sun setting over the ocean or a comet streaking through space — and you earn points by typing as many descriptive words as you can. The results are stored and analyzed, and through this human-machine symbiosis, Google’s image-searching algorithms are incrementally refined.
The project is still experimental. But the concept is not so different from what happens routinely during a Google search. The network of computers answering your query pays attention to which results you choose to read. You’re gathering data from the network while the network is gathering data about you. The result is a statistical accretion of what people — those beings who clack away at the keys — are looking for, a rough sense of what their language means.
In the 1950s William Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, anticipated something like this merger when he wrote about intelligence amplification — human thinking leveraged by machines. But it is both kinds of intelligence, biological and electronic, that are being amplified. Unlike the grinning cyborgs envisioned by science fiction, the splicing is not between hardware and wetware but between software running on two different platforms.
Several years ago, SETI@home became a vehicle for computer owners to donate their spare processing cycles for the intense number-crunching needed to sift radio-telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life. Now a site run by Amazon.com, the Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com), asks you to lend your brain. Named for an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that turned out to have a human hidden inside, the Mechanical Turk offers volunteers a chance to search for the missing aviator Steve Fossett by examining satellite photos. Or you can earn a few pennies at a time by performing other chores that flummox computers: categorizing Web sites (“sexually explicit, “arts and entertainment,” “automotive”), identifying objects in video frames, summarizing or paraphrasing snippets of text, transcribing audio recordings — specialties at which neural algorithms excel.
(Not all of these Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, as Amazon calls them, involve serving as a chip in some entrepreneur’s machine. Hoping to draw more traffic to their sites, bloggers are using the Mechanical Turk to solicit comments for their online postings. In some cases you get precisely 2 cents for your opinion.)
In his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing foresaw a day when it would be hard to tell the difference between the responses of a computer and a human being. What he may not have envisioned is how thoroughly the boundary would blur.
How do you categorize Wikipedia, a constantly buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts? Submit an article or change one and a swarm of warm- and sometimes hot-blooded proofreading routines go to work making corrections and corrections to the corrections.
Or maybe the mercurial encyclopedia is more like an organism with an immune system of human leukocytes guarding its integrity. (Biology too is algorithmic, beginning with the genetic code.) When the objectivity of Wikipedia was threatened by tweaking from special interests — a kind of autoimmune disease — another level of protection evolved: a Web site called WikiScanner that reports the Internet address of the offender. Someone at PepsiCo, for example, removed references about the health effects of its flagship soft drink. With enough computing power the monitoring could be semiautomated — scanning the database constantly and flagging suspicious edits for humans to inspect.
No one but a utopian would have predicted how readily people will work for free. We’re cheaper than hardware — a good thing considering how hard we are to duplicate.
Monday, September 17, 2007
When the Limits Push Back by WILLIAM YARDLEY
William Yardley explores the lives of various risk-takers and what makes them tick. C. Robert Cloninger, a professor of psychiatry and genetics at Washington University in St. Louis, states that "the need for heroic transformation is very deep in the human psyche." People take risks to make this transformation, when according to Cloninger "really the lesson that is needed is self-acceptance."
In this article Yardley uses the example of Timothy Treadwell, "Grizzly Man", who lived with grizzly bears in Alaska for many summers. Trying to find this "self-acceptance" Treadwell was killed and eaten by a bear in 2003.
This is an interesting article. It really makes you think about whats going on inside some people's head and where the line can be drawn between risk-taker and lunatic.
In this article Yardley uses the example of Timothy Treadwell, "Grizzly Man", who lived with grizzly bears in Alaska for many summers. Trying to find this "self-acceptance" Treadwell was killed and eaten by a bear in 2003.
This is an interesting article. It really makes you think about whats going on inside some people's head and where the line can be drawn between risk-taker and lunatic.
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