Month: November 2012

The Post-Sandy Manhattan Cover Photo in New York Magazine

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The new cover photo from New York Magazine is absolutely spectacular, showing the division of power-less and aglow Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy:

Manhattan, half dark.

The photograph was captured by Iwan Baan. The editors at the NY Magazine explain how the photo came out to be:

An improvised newsroom was soon up and running, with 32 editors, photo editors, designers, and production specialists squeezed around a conference-room table, down the length of which snaked a tangle of power strips, extension cords, and chargers resembling similar arrays sprouting across the city. At this point, proofs were due to go to press in 72 hours. Staffers spent them scrambling to secure writers and photographers as well as exchanging personal e-mail addresses to make it possible to transfer files (our servers were still down), arranging car pools, finding rooms at three different hotels for colleagues from darkened neighborhoods, and draining our hosts of coffee and soda. The easiest part of a harried three days came Friday around noon, when we met to settle on the cover. A photograph taken by Iwan Baan on Wednesday night, showing the Island of Manhattan, half aglow and half in dark, was the clear choice, for the way it fit with the bigger story we have tried to tell here about a powerful city rendered powerless. We crammed back into the conference room, raced to finish our pages, and hoped, like other New Yorkers, that everyone would find the lights on when they got home.

What a story.

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Update (11/4/12): According to Poynter, Baan created the photograph with the Canon 1-D X with the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L lens on full open aperture (f/2.8). The camera was set at 25,000 ISO and Baan used 1/40th second shutter speed. Baan mentions that this photograph would have been impossible to photograph without the ability to boost to such a high ISO, but I disagree. He could have underexposed the image significantly and brought out the shadows in post-processing. How much leverage he has in editing photos, however, I do not know.

 

Touch: The Future of Computing

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Jeff Atwood got his hands on the newly released tablet Microsoft Surface RT. He reviews his experience with the device in his provocatively titled post “Do You Wana Touch” But it is his take on the future of computing which I thought was worth highlighting here:

I love computers, always have, always will. My strategy with new computing devices is simple: I buy ’em all, then try living with them.The devices that fall away from me over time – the ones that gather dust, or that I forget about – are the ones I eventually get rid of. So long, Kindle Fire! I knew that the Nexus 7 was really working for me when I gave mine to my father as a spontaneous gift while he was visiting, then missed it sorely when waiting for the replacement to arrive.

As I use these devices, I’ve grown more and more sold on the idea that touch is going to dominate the next era of computing. This reductionism is inevitable and part of the natural evolution of computers. Remove the mouse. Remove the keyboard. Remove the monitor. Reducing a computer to its absolute minumum leads us inexorably, inevitably to the tablet (or, if a bit smaller, the phone). All you’re left with is a flat, featureless slate that invites you to touch it. Welcome to the future, here’s your … rectangle.

He rationalizes:

I’ve stopped thinking of touch as some exotic, add-in technology contained in specialized devices. I belatedly realized that I love to touch computers. And why not? We constantly point and gesture at everything in our lives, including our screens. It’s completely natural to want to interact with computers by touching them. That’s why the more unfortunate among us have displays covered in filthy fingerprints.

I don’t disagree. I love my iPhone and iPad. But I also love my MacBook Air, on which I am composing this post. Will we see a touch MacBook Air (with an uncompromised keyboard) from Apple in a few years? After reading Jeff’s post, I want to say yes.

A Life Less Posted

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A nice bit of nostalgia to days without Facebook and Instagram from Rian van der Merwe, in his post “A Life Less Posted”:

We checked our email maybe once in every city — if we could find an Internet cafe. For the most part we were on our own. Just one couple amongst a sea of tourists. There was nothing different about the bottle of wine we had in that one Italian restaurant. Except that it was our bottle of wine, and we shared it just with each other. Not with anyone else. It was a whole month of secret moments in public, and we were just… there. We didn’t check in on Foursquare, we didn’t talk about it on Facebook, we didn’t post any photos anywhere. I now look back and appreciate the incredible freedom we had to live before we all got online and got this idea that the value of a moment is directly proportional to the number of likes it receives.

…

Guilt, anger, envy… Those are the emotions that fuel all social networks, but perhaps Facebook more than the others. They’re the emotions that make us share/like/comment on things. And then I thought about our Europe trip, and how much I long for that time before we became obligated to carry the burden of the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of every single person we’re connected to online. It’s what Frank Chimero once called “huffing the exhaust of other people’s digital lives.”

I’ve been reading more and more of posts aching in a similar fashion. Ted Nyman’s piece on packaged lives, for instance, was excellent.

Small Things Lead to Big Things

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Great post from Joel Gascoigne on how great things develop from small things:

What I’m starting to notice more and more, is that great things almost always start small. Most of us know that Branson started the Virgin brand with a student magazine, but Virgin is just one of many examples which shows that the reality is counterintuitive: actually, the best things we know and love started as tiny things.

I’ve found that if I look into my own life, I find similarly that some of the most important achievements I’ve made started as little projects. My startup Buffer itself is a great example: it started as a two page website and in addition the short blog post describing this process has now turned into a talk I’ve given more than 30 times.

I’ve read Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, but didn’t remember the anecdote Joel mentioned at the beginning of his post. Great reminder.

On Nate Silver and Predicting Elections: Betting is a Tax on Bullshit

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Yesterday, The New York Times math/election guru Nate Silver offered, via Twitter, to make a $1,000 election bet with MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on who would win the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election.  Silver’s overlords at the New York Times were not pleased. From their Public Editor Journal:

Whatever the motivation behind it, the wager offer is a bad idea – giving ammunition to the critics who want to paint Mr. Silver as a partisan who is trying to sway the outcome. It’s also inappropriate for a Times journalist, which is how Mr. Silver is seen by the public even though he’s not a regular staff member. “I wouldn’t want to see it become newsroom practice,” said the associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett. He described Mr. Silver’s status as a blogger — something like a columnist — as a mitigating factor. Granted, Mr. Silver isn’t covering the presidential race as a political reporter would. But he is closely associated with The Times and its journalism – in fact, he’s probably (and please know that I use the p-word loosely) its most high-profile writer at this particular moment. When he came to work at The Times, Mr. Silver gained a lot more visibility and the credibility associated with a prominent institution. But he lost something, too: the right to act like a free agent with responsibilities to nobody’s standards but his own.

Alex Tabarrok counters and thinks that betting is a good idea, a way to put your money where your mouth is:

My best parse of the argument is that by betting Silver has given himself an interest in the election and this hurts his credibility. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.

A properly structured bet is the most credible guarantor of rigorous disinterest. In order to prove his point, Silver is not required to take the Obama side of the bet! At the odds implied by his model (currently between 3 and 4 to 1) Silver should be willing to take either side of a modest bet. Indeed, we could hold a coin toss, heads Silver takes the Obama side, tails he takes Romney.

In fact, the NYTimes should require that Silver, and other pundits, bet their beliefs. Furthermore, to remove any possibility of manipulation, the NYTimes should escrow a portion of Silver’s salary in a blind trust bet. In other words, the NYTimes should bet a portion of Silver’s salary, at the odds implied by Silver’s model, randomly choosing which side of the bet to take, only revealing to Silver the bet and its outcome after the election is over. A blind trust bet creates incentives for Silver to be disinterested in the outcome but very interested in the accuracy of the forecast.

Overall, I am for betting because I am against bullshit. Bullshit is polluting our discourse and drowning the facts. A bet costs the bullshitter more than the non-bullshitter so the willingness to bet signals honest belief. A bet is a tax on bullshit; and it is a just tax, tribute paid by the bullshitters to those with genuine knowledge.

Fantastic.

As of this writing, Joe Scarborough has not agreed to the bet. But he should.

Seth Godin: Get Over Yourself

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In the wake of Sandy’s devastation, Seth Godin offers:

In the face of billions of dollars of destruction, of the loss of life, of families disrupted, it’s easy to wonder what we were so hung up on just a few days ago. Many just went face to face with an epic natural disaster, and millions are still recovering. Writer’s block or a delayed shipment or an unreturned phone call seem sort of trivial now.

We’re good at creating drama, at avoiding emotional labor and most of all, at thinking small. Maybe we don’t need another meeting, a longer coffee break or another hour whittling away at our stuckness.

There’s never been a better opportunity to step up and make an impact, while we’ve got the chance. This generation, this decade, right now, there are more opportunities to connect and do art than ever before. Maybe even today.

It’s pretty easy to decide to roll with the punches, to look at the enormity of natural disaster and choose to hunker down and do less. It’s more important than ever, I think, to persist and make a dent in the universe instead.

We’ve all been offered access to so many tools, so many valuable connections, so many committed people. What an opportunity.

How will you take advantage of this opportunity?

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Here is my review of Seth Godin’s Linchpin, which is perhaps the best book he’s written.

On Twitter, The Expanse and Beauty of #NYTBooks

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The best thing on Twitter today was the sudden proliferation of the #NYTbooks hashtag. I don’t know who started the tag, but I participated in the festivities and loved reading through what others had to share. Here were some of my favorites:

And a couple by yours truly:

Did I mention I love Twitter?

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Update (11/1/12): The #NYTBooks meme began by Mother Jones’s Timothy Murphy, according to Poynter.

When Animals Talk

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Annyong!

An Asian elephant called Koshik has astounded scientists with his Korean language skills. Researchers report that the mammal has learnt to imitate human speech and can say five words in Korean: hello, no, sit down, lie down, and good.

From a press release:

There have been some earlier reports of vocal mimicry in both African and Asian elephants. African elephants have been known to imitate the sound of truck engines, and a male Asian elephant living in a zoo in Kazakhstan was said to produce utterances in both Russian and Kazakh, but that case was never scientifically investigated.

In the case of Koshik, Angela Stoeger, Daniel Mietchen, Tecumseh Fitch, and their colleagues confirmed that Koshik was imitating Korean words in several ways. First, they asked native Korean speakers to write down what they heard when listening to playbacks of the elephant’s sounds.

You can see a brief video here.

Earlier this month, we learned about a beluga whale that can make animal sounds:

Although dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have been trained to match numbers and durations of human vocal bursts [1] and reported to spontaneously match computer-generated whistles [2], spontaneous human voice mimicry has not previously been demonstrated. The first to study white whale (Delphinapterus leucas) sounds in the wild, Schevill and Lawrence [3] wrote that “occasionally the calls would suggest a crowd of children shouting in the distance”. Fish and Mowbary [4] described sound types and reviewed past descriptions of sounds from this vociferous species. At Vancouver Aquarium, Canada, keepers suggested that a white whale about 15 years of age, uttered his name “Lagosi”. Other utterances were not perceptible, being described as “garbled human voice, or Russian, or similar to Chinese” by R.L. Eaton in a self-published account in 1979. However, hitherto no acoustic recordings have shown how such sounds emulate speech and deviate from the usual calls of the species. We report here sound recordings and analysis which demonstrate spontaneous mimicry of the human voice, presumably a result of vocal learning [5], by a white whale.

Which animals will follow suit in this phenomenon?