Tagged: New York Times
The science of ugliness
The blobfish, highlighted in a New York Times slide show on ugly animals, is “practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor.” An accompanying article explores the underpinnings of our aesthetic recoil:
[C]omparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.
Wildlife biologists are far from immune to prejudice against the unbeautiful.
[R]researchers found 1,855 papers about chimpanzees, 1,241 on leopards and 562 about lions — but only 14 for that mammalian equivalent of the blobfish, the African manatee.
“The manatee was the least studied large mammal,” [University of Pretoria researcher Morgan] Trimble said. Speculating on a possible reason for the disparity, she said, “Most scientists are in it for the love of what they do, and a lot of them are interested in big, furry cute things.”
Greenpeace and the IFAW learned how to monetize this prejudice decades ago, via their cash cow, the seal hunt protest.
So, buttons on your britches?
Anand Girisharadas of the New York Times addresses a weighty issue that threatens to become a regular topic on Contrarian: use of conjunction “so” to begin a sentence. He notes a National Public Radio interview in which fully one quarter of the sentences began with “so.”
While Girisharadas dredges up a 14th century poem in which Chaucer begins a sentence with “so,” he cites scholars who trace the recent boom in introductory so’s to Silicon Valley, or perhaps to Microsoft employees.
In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of possible transitions with a catchall. And “so” suggested a kind of thinking that appealed to problem-solving software types: conversation as a logical, unidirectional process — if this, then that.
This logical tinge to “so” has followed it out of software. Compared to “well” and “um,” starting a sentence with “so” uses the whiff of logic to relay authority. Whereas “well” vacillates, “so” declaims.
Girisharadas also cites Galina Bolden, a linguistics scholar who has written a scholarly paper [pdf] on the use of “so.”
[Bolden] believes that “so” is also about the culture of empathy that is gaining steam as the world embraces the increasing complexity of human backgrounds and geographies.
The ascendancy of “so,” Dr. Bolden said, “suggests that we are concerned with displaying interest for others and downplaying our interest in our own affairs.”
To begin a sentence with “oh,” she said in an e-mail message, is to focus on what you have just remembered and your own concerns. To begin with “so,” she said, is to signal that one’s coming words are chosen for their relevance to the listener.
Hat tip: Now the Details via CH
No evidence, but we’ll keep you locked up anyway
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald notes the lead paragraph in a New York Times story Saturday:
WASHINGTON — The 48 Guantánamo Bay detainees whom the Obama administration has decided to keep holding without trial include several for whom there is no evidence of involvement in any specific terrorist plot, according to a report disclosed Friday.
The report itself concludes that “for many detainees at Guantanamo, prosecution is not feasible in either federal court or a military commission.” Greenwald comments:
They can’t even be prosecuted in the due-process-abridging military commissions we invented out of whole cloth for those who can’t be convicted in a real court. In other words: of course we’ll provide a fair tribunal for proving your guilt — as long as we’re certain we can convict you — otherwise, we’ll just imprison you indefinitely without charges. All this even though 72% of Guantanamo detainees have been found to be wrongfully held since the Supreme Court compelled habeas hearings in 2008. And then there are the numerous Yemeni prisoners who have been cleared for release but who will be kept in a cage anyway because we arbitrarily decreed that we’re not going to release even innocent prisoners back to Yemen.
The whole post is worth a read, as Greenwald nearly always is.
Infographics: miles driven by price of gas
Hannah Fairfield of the New York Times plots the number of miles driven by US drivers, both private and commercial, against the retail price of gasoline from 1956 to February, 2010. The horizontal axis represents miles driven, while the vertical axis shows the price per US gallon (3.79 litres) in current US dollars. The drawn path represents the passage of time.
Note that sharp spikes in gas prices coincided with reductions in miles driven in 1973, 1978, and from 2005 to 2010. Click here for a larger image with interesting subgraphs and embedded commentary.
How to apologize – corporate edition
We’ve read a lot lately about the value of swift, full, and forthright apologies when public figures screw up. What about companies that screw up?
Blippy is a website that lets users trade updates about their consumer purchases. Recently, an obscure programming error, compounded by mistakes at Google and one small midwestern bank, allowed Google to index the credit card numbers of four or five Blippy customers, potentially exposing these numbers to people browsing the web. Co-founder & CEO Ashvin Kumar’s apology to users could serve as a model for companies that find themselves in a similar pickle. Moneyquote:
It has been a rocky weekend for Blippy. The weekend began with a front page article in the New York Times announcing our Series A financing. The elation didn’t last long. A few hours later, reports surfaced about the discovery of credit card numbers within Google’s cached search results. Our mood quickly went from elation to disbelief to disappointment. We are very sorry.
However, this is a very serious issue and simply apologizing is not enough. We’ve spent the last 48 hours working around the clock to dissect the issues, reach out to affected users, and put together a plan to ensure this never happens again.
There followed a detailed, plainspoken, 1000-word explanation of exactly what went wrong, and the steps Blippy and Google took to fix the problem. The explanation is admirably devoid of weasel words or any attempt at evading responsibility. It neither grovels nor glosses over. By treating customers with respect, it inspires reciprocal respect for the company at an awkward time.
Customers do not expect perfect products and perfect service. Their loyalty (or hostility) to a brand arises in large measure from the way a company responds to problems that inevitably arise. A willingness to listen to customers, an ethic of candor in dealings with them, and an honest determination to put things right—companies that get those three things right will enjoy excellent customer relations.
War crime – followup
The appalling Wikileaks video showing a US helicopter gunship mowing down a group of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, two children, and a pair of Good Samaritans whose only offense was to come to the aid of a badly injured man, continues to provoke reaction. Reader Cliff White writes:
You can’t help wondering after watching that terrible video if killing has just become a game to those soldiers in the helicopter. It’s both terribly disturbing and dismaying to listen to their casual banter as they go about their “work”. Even when they learn that children have been injured it’s no big deal, it’s someone else’s fault. I’d like to see videos like this publicly displayed every time war fever is on the rise in the country. The reality is that this kind of behaviour is not the exception in war, it is frequently the norm…. Given the situation in Iraq at the time the video was shot was it standard military practice to kill anyone carrying a weapon and anyone else who happen to be in their vicinity?
Two things are important here: While the behavior of the soldiers was shocking, it’s probably not unusual. As Cliff says, when we make the decision to go to war, we need to understand that this is exactly what we are deciding to do. Second, ultimate responsibility for this travesty lies beyond the helicopter, with the generals in the war rooms.
I have been shocked at the breadth of efforts to dismiss the video as somehow not reflecting reality, or evidence that liberals don’t support “our boys.” You expect this from right wing organs like the National Standard, where blogger Bill Roggio posted an error-riddled screed against Wikileaks, later nicely debunked by Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, who has been a one-man truth squad on the story. Among other things, Roggio and the New York Times chided Wikileaks for editing the tape, accusing them of redacting critical context. Wikileaks did edit the tape, but it simultaneously released the 39-minute original, completely unedited.
Greenwald’s coverage pointed me to a blogger called Jotman, who has relentlessly cataloged CNN’s cowardly coverage of the video (here, here, and here.) CNN won’t even show its viewers the most incriminating parts of the video. In a gesture reminiscent of Elvis Presley’s maiden appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, only far more sinister, Blitzer and Co. black out part of the screen when the shooting starts—all out of deference to the families of the victims, of course.
George Packer, a long time apologist for the war, pooh-poohs the video in, of all places, his New Yorker blog. The main thrust is that less worldly wise civilians fail to consider the context, fog of war, recent firefight, violent history of the neighborhood, blah, blah, blah, before condemning the soldiers’ actions. The blog is worth read both as an example of sophistry, and for the acuity of the New Yorker readers’ rebuttals.
The most apt response to this line of rationalization comes in a pair of unnamed readers’ comments to James Fallows’s blog yesterday.
First a question: If these loose rules of engagement were in common use in 2007, how do we explain the behavior of the victims? They were aware of the helicopter. Why didn’t they recognize their danger? [Ie, if it was commonplace for gunships to be shooting people with as little immediate provocation as we see, why did they dare expose themselves?]
Next, an observation: Door gunner-ship is not randomly assigned. It may well be that 99% (or 99.9%) of U.S. troops would not have allowed this tragedy to occur, but that simple fact quite possibly disqualified all those individuals from being in that position. (And I note this as a direct result of my Army tour in Viet Nam.) The same, of course, applies to Granger and gang at Abu Ghraib. It is possible to indict the individuals involved and their commanders and ‘the system’ without involving American troops categorically.
And a conclusion: Until one can say one would apply precisely the same reasoning and the same judgment without knowing the nationality of the miscreants, one flounders.
and:
You might — MIGHT — justify the initial attack on the group on the ground, but the American soldiers were itching to fire on the two men whose only crime was that they were trying to come to the aid of a wounded man. Those men in the van clearly did not have any weapons, and posed no threat to anyone. But the American soldiers were almost pleading with their command to be given permission to kill them. If you are going to excuse this by putting it into “context,” then you can excuse almost any behavior.
War crime – reaction
Some reaction to yesterday’s Wikileak disclosure of horrific footage from an American helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed* civilians, as crewmen gloated over the killings.
I can’t pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again assuming this is what it seems to be, the temptation will be to blame the operations-level people who were, in this case, chuckling as they mowed people down. That’s not where the real responsibility lies.
Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin:
Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van [that arrived on the scene after the initial carnage and tried to rescue an injured man, only to be destroyed by the gunship] was a Good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.
A New York Times dispatch from Mosul, Iraq, reports that the family of 22-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was killed in the incident, burst into tears as they watched the video.
“At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth,” said Noor Eldeen, the father of the photographer… “If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?”
Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald notes that the Pentagon was forced to admit Sunday that its initial whitewash of a similar war crime in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, February 12 was false.
[A]fter surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, [US soldiers] shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager).
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on MSNBC:
In this case, we really have unique material that shows how modern aerial warfare is done… [It] shows the debasement and moral corruption of soldiers as a result of war. It seems like they are playing video games with people’s lives.
Assange and Greenwald joined Iraq expert and surge architect Brett McGurck and Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan show to discuss the incident. I have embedded the conversation below, but the video does not show up on some browsers. You can link to it here.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* Several sources say at least one person in the video appears to have a rifle dangling off his shoulder. I didn’t notice it. However, the people from the passing van who happened on the scene and attempted to remove the man injured in the first assault man were the clearly unarmed.
OK Go
I don’t normally post videos with 6.8 million views, but the Chicago band OK Go’s latest home-made, Rube Goldberg, paint-ball spectacular is irresistible. Plus it comes with a great yarn about the counter-intuitive value of giveaway Internet content, and the pea-sized brains of record company dinosaurs.
Ira Glass, host of the great National Public Radio show This American Life, calls OK Go “living catnip.” They direct their own videos, shoot them on shoe-string budgets, and, in the words of singer Damian Kulash, Jr., “we see them as creative works and not as our record company’s marketing tool.”
In a recent New York Time op-ed piece, Kulash explained how OK Go posted its homemade 2006 video, “Here it goes again,” on YouTube without record company EMI’s knowledge or permission, a technical violation of its recording contract. The video won a Grammy, tens of millions of fans saw it, thousands poured into OK Go’s concerts, and EMI made lots of money.
How did the record company react? By pressuring YouTube to curb the viral spread of its videos. Technically, they did this by blocking embedding. Kulash explains after the jump:
Who still uses a pay phone?
The New York Times checked out a sidewalk booth outside the Fast & Fresh Supermarket Deli & Grocery on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens, NY.
Benjamin Patir called his son because he was lonely and, perhaps more important, because he had a quarter. Robert J. Covelli called his son, too, to find out if, at some point during the more than 24 hours he spent in custody, he had become, for the first time, a grandfather. Frank Federico, fresh from a courthouse jail cell, called his mother, who spared him any lectures and asked him if he needed a ride home.
The three men used the same curbside pay phone on a busy block of Queens Boulevard last week. So did Carlos Luciano, who lent his cellphone to his wife. And Alex Santana, who bought a banana to get change. And Marvin McCain, a subway conductor trying to call in sick, and two men uninterested in giving their names or explaining why, at midnight on a neon-lit stretch of Kew Gardens, Queens, they had to make a call.
Give it away … or make them pay?
O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, decided in 2008 to remove digital rights management — copy prevention software — from its ebooks. The result? In the 18 months since, ebook sales are up 103%.
Long Island’s Newsday, the 11th-largest-circulation newspaper in the US, is one of the first non-business newspapers to put its website behind a pay wall — a step The New York Times and all of Rupert Murdoch’s papers are said to be considering. The result? In three months, Newsday’s $5-a-week website has attracted 35 paying subscribers.
Hat tip: SP.
