kateoplis:
“Still, there’s a reason for optimism about America’s workforce, and a good lesson to be learned from Apple’s surge. What really makes the iPhone work isn’t the hardware. Sure, the glass—designed by Corning in upstate New York and manufactured in China—is beautiful. But the transformative part of the phone is the software. The code behind the touch-screen was written here; the iOS operating system was written here; most of the apps that we use are written here. Thousands of companies, in fact, have been started here to write apps for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Software remains a great American expertise, and it’s only becoming more important as processors shrink into ever more powerful forms. As Marc Andreessen argued in the Wall Street Journal this summer, “software is eating the world.” Computer code is transforming industry after industry, and writing code is something that Americans are very good at. It’s also something that requires creativity, which isn’t fostered in giant factories with guards guiding people through crowded doorways and a central kitchen that roasts three tons of pork and thirteen tons of rice a day.
So perhaps there’s a different insight from Apple for Obama. Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum.
That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here. And it would certainly help develop “an economy that’s built to last.”
— Nicholas Thompson
Yes.
newyorker:
The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm
Photograph by Steve Liss.
This is important. Remember this every time someone carelessly talks about the “land of the free.” We need to deserve to call ourselves that. Right now, we do not.
latimes:
The American Cinematheque has a Studio Ghibli retrospective starting Thursday at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica.
Photo: “My Neighbor Totoro.” Credit: Studio Ghibli
Let’s do one of these in San Diego.
In theory, you can use crowdsourcing to get the metadata, but so far I’ve not had a lot of luck persuading thousands of people to spend their time doing that kind of work.
Unfortunately financial calculators show with the current inflation figures and interest rates, savings of $100 per month in a child’s 529 plan utilizing an age-based strategy from birth to college-age may not amass enough even to pay for the first year’s expenses.
If you know how to use Excel on top of having all of the above cited analytical abilities that could come from an education in Philosophy, there is nothing that you cannot accomplish.
Apply for the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies →
usagov:
From the Library of Congress:
The Alan Lomax Fellows Program, established for a period of five years, supports scholarly research that contributes significantly to a greater understanding of the work of Lomax and the cultural traditions he documented over the course of a vigorous and highly productive seventy-year career. It provides an opportunity, for a period of up to 8 months, for concentrated use of materials from the Lomax Collection and other collections of the Library of Congress, through full-time residency at the Library. The program supports research projects in the disciplines of anthropology, ethnomusicology, ethnography, ethno-history, dance, folklore and folklife, history, literature, linguistics, and movement analysis, with particular emphasis on the traditional music, dance, and narrative of the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the Caribbean, as well as methodologies for their documentation and analysis. We encourage interdisciplinary projects that combine disciplines in novel and productive ways.
Applications are due on February 28. Learn more about the fellowship and how to apply.
Someone from the Internet should do this. Someone must be doing dissertations on Soulja Boy et al right now, right?
The Atlantic: The Zynga Abyss →
dbreunig:
90wpm:
The Atlantic published an excerpt from my essay for Distance today. It’s a little over 1500 words, and covers some of the main points in the essay.
It also includes a fantastic photoshopped stock photo of a lab rat playing FarmVille in a Skinner box.
Here’s a small snip:
In the 1890s, while studying natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, a Russian mathematician named Ivan Pavlov was analyzing dogs’ saliva output over time. Pavlov noticed that dogs tended to salivate more before eating and that merely the sight of a white lab coat would induce salivation — even if no food was on the way. So he tried ringing a bell before presenting them with food, and found that over time, the dogs would salivate even if a bell was rung with no food presented. Pavlov’s research defined classical conditioning, in which a primary reinforcer (one which naturally elicits a response, e.g. food or pain) is associated with a conditioned or secondary reinforcer, such as the lab coat or bell.
Forty years later, Burrhus Frederic Skinner built upon Pavlov’s observations as a young psychologist in graduate school. He constructed a soundproof, lightproof chamber that housed a small animal; a lever was placed within the animal’s reach, which triggered a primary reinforcer. Called the Skinner box, the device opened up many possibilities for experimentation, leading to breakthroughs in later research: from the relative addictiveness of cocaine in isolation versus in a larger community, to the question of whether rats have empathy.
I’m really, really excited about the impending release after Feb. 17, especially given the awesome essays that Vitorio Miliano and Jon Whipple are working on alongside me.
Anyone curious about social game design, behavioral psychology, or even just why FarmVille is so damn addictive should take a look at the full excerpt.
Really inspiring work.
I hope the buzz of ‘gamification’ wears off and we return to saying ‘Skinnerian’. It’s so much less rosy that way.
This abyss (dopamine mine?) is well charted by slot machine manufacturers who have found what lies at the bottom: “customer extinction.” As explained in this lecture by Natasha Schull, “the stated goal of [slot machines] is “customer extinction” - the moment at which the customer is out of money:”
Sounds like a cool scene.
