For A Moment, He Started to Look Like A Real Man

"Pinocchio wants to be a real person, and on Thursday night he’s going to attempt to make the transformation on national television."

(Charles Blow in New York Times, August 30, 2012) 

Mitt Romney has a statuesque build topped off with a permanently perfect quiff hairdo, and he speaks fairly well. But human? 

There were moments when you thought a tear would come, but here he showed that he was neither an actor nor an ordinary man, but a steely business executive. The only time he showed what could have been taken for human emotions was when he told his story of Bain Capital, and had it not been for his growing nose, we might have believed that he was a real person after all.

In the age of artificial everything, artificial man is claiming his right to rule.

Thats a fact, an artificial fact.

The Orwellian Republican Convention

The Republican convention in Tampa 2012 could very well be a lost chapter in George Orwell's "1984". Slavery is freedom, war is peace and the truth is nowhere to be seen. It's bizarre, it's sickening and it is very dangerous to the world. A Romney-Ryan victory will drive the American economy over the cliff straight into a depression, which the clueless duo will respond to by launching new wars abroad and repression at home. It's easy to laugh at the Republican team, but it's no laughing matter. Remember George W. Bush, which people wrote off as a lightweight doofus. We know how that worked out.

Hope feels like a very far away place.
The forces of darkness are encircling the forces of humanity.

No, Mr. Friedman, Average is Not Over

Thomas Friedman has written two columns on the theme "Average is over." He wrote in his first article back in January that:

"In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over." (Average Is Over)

As an example of the kind of competition American workers have to deal with, he enthusiastically relate technological advances and alternative markets where global producers can get much more for much less:

“Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ”

If only American workers were as dedicated and desperate as those mostly young Chinese workers in their dorms. The answer to this challenge is of course education, which is the subject Friedman tackles in part two. He has been talking to Andreas Schleicher whose team at the OECD coordinates the international PISA test.

The results are dire, while the parents obviously think they live in Lake Wobegon:

"The U.S. does not stand out. It’s just average, but many parents are sure their kid is above average."

The solution that Friedman falls for is of course more technology. He quotes Schleicher:

“Imagine, in a few years, you could sign onto a Web site and see this is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world,” says Schleicher. “And then you take this information to your local superintendent and ask: ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?’ ” (Average Is Over, Part II)

But is this really the solution? Is it even the path towards one?

I'm not saying that America's educational system is in a good shape. Not at all, but I question the fundamental reasoning behind Freidman's techno-optimism. And I doubt very much that the socially, ethnically complex and diverse American nation could replicate the schools in Finland and Shanghai even if the parents could compare fMRI scans between school districts across the world.

Education is not an olympic sport where all that counts is a gold medal, or maybe a silver or a bronze. The big question is why we can't find a way to share the amazing wealth we have created. If we could address that question, there would be much less need to fight for a seat at the table.

Average is not over. It just needs to be better.

A Brave New World, "1984", The Minority Report... Get Ready For the Age of Big Data

Big Data is the big buzz, and the opportunities are endless.... but do we know what we are getting into? Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and co-author of the book Infinite Reality, wrote a fascinating and scary piece for Slate - Your Kinect Is Watching You.

"Just imagine if teachers, based on a small sample of their students’ nonverbal behavior, could instantly detect which students needed extra attention or specialized assignments.....  Other scientists have developed applications for detecting behavior in the home. Jaeyong Sung and his colleagues at Cornell University are looking at whether a Kinect could assist people by recognizing their activities—automatically detecting, for example, if someone is brushing her teeth, cooking, or opening a pill container. The models were highly accurate (84 percent) at categorizing behavior for people who the system had seen previously. But even more impressive was how it categorized new people. If someone new visits your home and walks past the video-game console, it still recognized that person’s behavior 64 percent of the time."
"Also consider a project we worked on at the behest of Kyoto-based factory automation company OMRON. With a single camera, we demonstrated that some workplace mistakes can be detected before they occur simply by examining the workers’ facial movements. Again, while tracking nonverbal behavior may help prevent accidents, it could also clue in employers about personal habits that workers might not want to share."

If that makes you think about where we are heading, go on and read Stephen Shankland's article for CNET News - How Google is becoming an extension of your mind:

"Think of Google diagnosing your daughter's illness early based on where she's been, how alert she is, and her skin's temperature, then driving yourcar to school to bring her home while you're at work. Or Google translating an incomprehensible emergency announcement while you're riding a train in foreign country. Or Google steering your investment portfolio away from a Ponzi scheme.
Google, in essence, becomes a part of you. Imagine Google playing a customized audio commentary based on what you look at while on a tourist trip and then sharing photo highlights with your friends as you go. Or Google taking over your car when it concludes based on your steering response time and blink rate that you're no longer fit to drive. Or your Google glasses automatically beaming audio and video to the police when you say a phrase that indicates you're being mugged."

If you think Google or Facebook is tracking your every move, listen to what these two researchers at the online educational start-up Knewton has to say:

"Mr. Ferreira: Knewton's capturing in the hundreds of thousands of data per user per day. We're capturing what you're getting right, what you're getting wrong, what answers you're falling for if you get something wrong, what concepts are in that answer choice that you're falling for. We're also capturing when you log into the system; how much you do; what tasks you do; what you don't do; what was recommended that you do that you didn't do, and vice versa. Your time on task for every little task, whether it's reading something or doing a practice question or watching something. Your click rate—how fast you're clicking on stuff. You can imagine one student accessing different material. If her click rate increases between math and verbal—maybe she's going through the verbal a little faster—maybe it's a little easier for her." (A Conversation With 2 Developers of Personalized-Learning Software, Chronicle of Higher Education)

Remember John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program? Congress pulled the plug on the project in 2003 after a heated debate where conservative and progressive commentators slammed the Orwellian implications of the gigantic surveillance project. TIA was killed, but parts of the project were picked up by other agencies under the pretext of fighting terrorism. The big difference between this early Big Data project and today's Big Data is that TIA was based on monitoring transactions of unknowing individuals, while today's Big Data is volunteered by the online public everytime you add something to you Facebook timeline or add something to Google+. We sign away our privacy as easily and untroubled as we sign EULA's whenever we install a new program or application.

Where will this lead? Nobody knows. That may be the scariest part!  

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste

In Getting Away with It, Paul Krugman and Robin Wells discuss three books about President Barack Obama, the Democrats, the Republicans and the global economic crisis.

It's not an uplifting story, but it is a necessary one.

"But while the economy now may bear a strong resemblance to that of the 1930s, the political scene does not, because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are what once they were. Coming into the Obama presidency, much of the Democratic Party was close to, one might almost say captured by, the very financial interests that brought on the crisis; and as the Booker and Clinton incidents showed, some of the party still is. Meanwhile, Republicans have become extremists in a way they weren’t three generations ago; contrast the total opposition Obama has faced on economic issues with the fact that most Republicans in Congress voted for, not against, FDR’s crowning achievement, the Social Security Act of 1935.

These changes in America’s political parties explain both why there has been no second New Deal and why the policy response to the prolonged economic slump has been so inadequate."

          ...

"Obama’s innate centrism led him to adopt the preoccupation with the budget deficit of Geithner and Peter Orszag (his head of the Office of Management and Budget and another Rubin protégé) in opposition to vocal protests from both Summers and Romer that now was not the time to worry about deficits. As a result, Obama would never acknowledge that the original stimulus was not big enough, a position that left him boxed in when it became clear—as it already had by summer of 2010, if not earlier—that it had indeed been far too small."

Richard Ford disses James Joyce's Ulysses

The author Richard Ford is interviewed in the New York Times Book Review and gets this question:

"What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?"

His answer begins this way:
"Overrated . . . Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Hands down. A professor’s book. Though I guess if you’re Irish it all makes sense."

I tend to agree.

I am reading - actually listening - to Ulysses in English after having read it in Swedish many years ago, and after having listened to 24 spirited lectures by professor James Heffernan, who recently retired from  of Dartmouth, and I must say that James Joyce's cathedral of words feels essentially empty. He is just showing off words and language, like an acrobat is showing off his marvelous skills. I enjoy listening to it, but then I find myself wondering what I am listening to, and why I am doing it. What is it all about? The Odysseys is at least exciting!

Educational Divide Perpetuates Downward Drift

On this past Wednesday, the New York Times had an interesting story about educational challenges facing cities like Dayton, OH.

Dayton sits on one side of a growing divide among American cities, in which a small number of metro areas vacuum up a large number of college graduates, and the rest struggle to keep those they have.
The winners are metro areas like Raleigh, N.C., San Francisco, and Stamford, Conn., where more than 40 percent of the population has a college degree. Metro areas like Bakersfield, Calif., Lakeland, Fla., and Youngstown, Ohio, where less than a fifth of the population has a college degree, are being left behind. The divide shows signs of widening as college graduates gravitate to places with a lot of other college graduates and the atmosphere that creates.
“This is one of the most important developments in recent economic history of this country,” said Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who recently published a book on the topic, “The New Geography of Jobs.”
(Well-Educated Flock to Some Cities, Leaving Others Behind)

The article made me think of Joel Garreau's book about edge cities and Robert Reich's discussion of the geographic concentration to areas like Princeton, NJ, of what he then called "the symbolic-analysts".

• Joel Garreau: Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (1991)
• Robert Reich: Secession of the Successful (Jan 20, 1991)
• Louis Uchitelle: ECONOMIC VIEW; In This Recovery, a College Education Backfires (Mar 14, 2004)

Alone in our own bubble (Loreen)

Congrats to Loreen to the Eurovision schlager win. She sings and dances well, and she is surely sexier than Russia's dancing babushkas.

But the lyrics?

We are here, we’re all alone in our own Universe,
We are free, where everything’s allowed and love comes first,
Forever and ever together, we sail into infinity,
We’re higher and higher and higher, we’re reaching for divinity.

A close reading would make you think that it is a comment on the current European crisis, but that's not fair. It's all about the title, and "Euphoria" will echo up there in Schlager heaven together with "Waterloo" (1974), "Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley" (1984), "Fångad av en stormvind" (1991), and "Take Me to Your Heaven"(1999).

Ex-Dissients Addresses Chen Guangcheng

Wei Jingsheng: Don’t Believe China’s Promises
Wang Dan: Mr. Chen, Welcome to America

A Chinese professor and friend told me during my first trip to China back in 1985 that China's leaders don't believe in any "higher being," so they have no one to answer to. I'm not religious, and I don't think my friend was either, but I think he was right about the potential of a religious belief to restrain power. It doesn't have to be that way - much evil has been done in the name of one god or another - but it often is. My friend was thinking of Mao Zedong, but his successors were as committed to their cause - economic modernization and national power - as Mao was his revolutionary zeal.

Wei Jingsheng raised the question of political freedom to Deng Xiaoping, and that was enough for him to be locked up for 15 years. China has changed a lot since I met the professor on that rooftop bar in Chengdu (I am not mentioning his name even though he has passed away, since family members can be targeted too), but no fundamental political has happened since then. Wei and was right in 1979, and he is right now.

Nicholas D. Kristof on Chen Guangcheng