Month: November 2013

On Playing Video Games in Iraq

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Simon Parkin, writing in The New Yorker, chronicles how video games have become a welcome refuge in the war-torn Iraq. For many kids, it’s a way to spend significant time at home and staying safe in the process:

The rise of video games in Iraq is a relatively recent phenomenon. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, it was difficult to buy them, and only relatively well-off, professional-class families like Mohammed’s could afford to import titles from Europe. Until the advent of disc-based video games in the mid-nineties, it was too difficult to pirate game cartridges. “The industry is still in its infancy in Iraq,” said Omar M. Alanseri, the owner of the Iraqi Games Center, one of only a small number of dedicated video-game retailers in Baghdad, which opened sixteen months ago. “But each year, more people get involved. I’ve seen the audience vastly increase, especially among teen-agers.”

Nevertheless, finding stock for Alanseri’s store shelves can be a challenge. “It’s not easy for me to get new games,” he said. “Mostly we import from online sites like Amazon.” Relatively few video games have been created by Iraqis. “Many games created here are not good enough to be published,” said Abdulla. “There is one title called Labaik Ya Iraq, which means ‘Iraq, We Answer Your Call.’ It is a strategy game, but not as good as, say, Command & Conquer.” Consequently, piracy remains rampant, and many copied games can be purchased for around a dollar.

This is unsurprising:

Some of the most popular video games in Iraq, as in America, are military-themed shooters, in which the player assumes the role of a soldier and blasts through waves of virtual enemies. “Almost all of my friends play video games like World of Tanks [and] Battlefield 3,” said Abdulla. “In fact, we have some of the top-ranked players in the world here.” The interest in military games stems from the local environment as much as, in the case of many players, male vanity. “Growing up, my life was completely military-focused,” Abdulla said. “It is the way we are raised. For example, I was taught how to use an AK-47 when I was in elementary school. Younger players who are not so affected by Saddam’s agendas play other game types more easily than we do, like Minecraft and other non-military games.”

Many of these first-person shooters, often created with input from U.S. military advisers—a handful of Navy SEALs was punished for consulting on the 2012 video game Medal of Honor: Warfighter—are set against the backdrop of fictionalized real-world conflicts, often within Middle Eastern countries. Some have entire sections set within Iraq, like the Battlefield series.

Read the entire piece here.

The Three Week OKCupid Date Across Europe

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Clara Bensen shares the story of how she met a guy on OKCupid and decided to go with him for a three week travel adventure across Europe. The catch? They would wear the same clothing during the entire trip and bring no luggage:

Our no-luggage journey began with the buzzing protest energy of Istanbul and from there it zigzagged wildly across the European continent. There were no plans. With no stuff, moving to the next destination was as simple as getting out of bed and pointing to a dot on the map. We jumped from city to city using almost every mode of transportation on earth: an old train along the Turkish coast, a giant ferry across the Aegean, a cramped bus through the Balkans, a series of hitches through Croatia, a flight to Edinburgh, and a pair of bikes in London. From baristas and dancers to investment bankers and Cambridge professors, we wandered the streets with guides who were as varied as the urban landscapes we were moving through.

Looks like they survived and bonded (though it’s not clear from the story whether Jeff and Clara are still dating):

We ended our journey after eight countries, 3,500 miles and 21 days in the same clothes. Our romantic relationship intact, Jeff and I boarded the Heathrow return flight as closer friends than ever (despite the questionable state of our undergarments). Materially speaking I was as empty-handed as the day we started, but I actually carried a great deal back home across the Atlantic. Traveling with no luggage and no plans was much more than a minimalist lesson in living well with less. It was an intense, in-your-face invitation to the unknown. There’s a truly magnificent side to the unknown, but we aren’t taught how to welcome it, let alone explore the breadth of its possibilities.

Did our luggage-less dance with uncertainty lead to some kind of travel nirvana? Yes and no. We careered through time and space at a fiendish pace and experienced all the blood, sweat and exhaustion that might be expected. At the same time, we were vividly present in the midst of a disorienting cloud of city grids, metro stops and incomprehensible dialects that shape-shifted with every border crossing. We were alive. And every so often the intensity was punctuated with time-crushing moments that were so staggeringly beautiful and strange that even now I’m not sure they occurred at all.

Still. A very cool story.

Pennsylvania Newspaper Apologizes 150 Years After Gettysburg Address

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In what may be longest-coming newspaper retraction in American history, The Patriot News, based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has apologized for lambasting President Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, delivered nearly 150 years ago (as of November 19, 2013):

Seven score and ten years ago, the forefathers of this media institution brought forth to its audience a judgment so flawed, so tainted by hubris, so lacking in the perspective history would bring, that it cannot remain unaddressed in our archives.

We write today in reconsideration of “The Gettysburg Address,” delivered by then-President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the greatest conflict seen on American soil. Our predecessors, perhaps under the influence of partisanship, or of strong drink, as was common in the profession at the time, called President Lincoln’s words “silly remarks,” deserving “a veil of oblivion,” apparently believing it an indifferent and altogether ordinary message, unremarkable in eloquence and uninspiring in its brevity.

In the fullness of time, we have come to a different conclusion. No mere utterance, then or now, could do justice to the soaring heights of language Mr. Lincoln reached that day. By today’s words alone, we cannot exalt, we cannot hallow, we cannot venerate this sacred text, for a grateful nation long ago came to view those words with reverence, without guidance from this chagrined member of the mainstream media.

The world will little note nor long remember our emendation of this institution’s record – but we must do as conscience demands:

In the editorial about President Abraham Lincoln’s speech delivered Nov. 19, 1863, in Gettysburg, the Patriot & Union failed to recognize its momentous importance, timeless eloquence, and lasting significance. The Patriot-News regrets the error. 

That’s awesome.

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(via Time)

IBM’s Watson to Open to Developers

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More than two years after IBM’s Watson dominated at Jeopardy!, the company has some interesting news today: it will make its IBM Watson technology available as a development platform in the cloud, “to enable a worldwide community of software application providers to build a new generation of apps infused with Watson’s cognitive computing intelligence.”

IBM is unveiling its new ecosystem vision with three business partners that have developed early versions of Watson-powered apps, targeted to enter the market in 2014:

Fluid: Fluid, which builds online shopping experiences for retail businesses to drive customer engagement and conversion, is developing the Fluid Expert Personal Shopper(sm) powered by IBM Watson. The app calls upon Watson’s ability to understand the nuances of human language and uncover answers from Big Data. Consumers who use Fluid’s app will interact with rich media and dialogue with Watson, as their newfound “cognitive, expert personal shopper.” The Fluid app incorporates the information users share and questions they ask to help them make smart, satisfying purchases by putting a knowledgeable sales associate in the hands of consumers, on demand.

MD Buyline: This provider of supply chain solutions for hospitals and healthcare systems is developing an app to allow clinical and financial users to make real-time, informed decisions about medical device purchases, to improve quality, value, outcomes and patient satisfaction. Hippocrates powered by IBM Watson will provide users with access to a helpful research assistant that provides fast, evidence based recommendations from a wealth of data, to help ensure medical organizations are making the best decisions for their physicians’ and patients’ needs. 

Welltok: A pioneer in the emerging field of Social Health Management™, Welltok is developing an app that will create Intelligent Health Itineraries™ for consumers. These personalized itineraries, sponsored by health plans, health systems and health retailers, will include tailored activities, relevant content and condition management programs, and will reward users for engaging in healthy behaviors. Consumers who use Welltok’s app — CaféWell Concierge powered by IBM Watson – will participate in conversations about their health with Watson. By leveraging Watson’s ability to learn from every interaction, the app will offer insights tailored to each individual’s health needs.  

I am particularly interested in Welltok. It sounds similar to what FitBit and other consumer wearable devices have been able to accomplish.

The Space Race and The Lebanese Rocket Society

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During the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for supremacy in space. But little known at the time, there was another contestant in the race: the Lebanese Rocket Society, a science club from a university in Beirut and the subject of a recently released film. The BBC investigates in a radio program and this story about Manoug Magnougian and his founding the Lebanese Rocket Society:

Manougian’s passion for space began as a boy in the 1940s growing up in Jericho in the West Bank. Inspired by Jules Verne novels, he would climb the nearby Mount of Temptation and gaze at the night sky. At school he carved rockets onto his desk.

A maths and physics degree from the University of Texas followed, before Manougian returned to Lebanon for a teaching post at Beirut’s small Haigazian College at the age of 25. In an attempt to drum up numbers, in November 1960 he renamed the science club the Haigazian College Rocket Society.

“To my surprise a number of students decided to join,” he says. “I had no finances and there was little support for something like this. But I figured I could dip into my meagre salary and convince my wife that I could buy what I needed for the experiments.”

It was a successful program, albeit “in the slow lane” compared to the U.S.S.R.:

The Cedar IV launched in 1963 was so successful that it was commemorated on a stamp. It reached a height of 90 miles (145 km), putting it close to the altitude of satellites in low-earth orbit.

For those curious, below is the trailer for the film, The Lebanese Rocket Society:

 

 

 

Celebrating Literary Jeopardy!

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I would have loved to participate in Literary Jeopardy!. The New Yorker details how the event unfolded, in advance of the recently published A Reader’s Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year by Tom Nissley:

“Wolf Wolfe Wolff Woolf” was the most popular category, probably because it was so much fun to say: “I’ll take ‘Wolf Wolfe Wolff Woolf’ for four hundred, Tom.” The contestants were formidably well read. Ruth Franklin knew the author of “Never Cry Wolf” (Farley Mowat; May 23rd). Eric Banks named the writer of whom Virginia Woolf said “she stinks like—well, a civet cat that had taken to street walking” (Katherine Mansfield; February 11th). And Lorin Stein improved on the name of Judy Blume’s sixth-grade heroine with “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret Fuller” (March 8th).

The hardest category was “Before & After,” in which an acrostic-style clue offered a mashup that required a two-part answer in which the last word of the first half was the first word of the last half. Got that? Neither did the contestants. “Watergate whistleblowing author of ‘Blind Ambition’ who, in Kerouac’s original ‘On the Road’ scroll, still went by the name of his real-life inspiration, Neal Cassady.” Silence as the contestants chewed it over. It was Roger Craig who finally got it: John Dean Moriarty.

The book has been added to my to-read list!

Heartbreak at the Edge of Mongolia

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Ariel Levy’s piece “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” is agonizing, riveting, and devastating. It’s incredibly well-written and recounts her choosing to travel to Mongolia while pregnant:

People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself. I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself. And I liked the idea of telling my kid, “When you were inside me, we went to see the edge of the earth.” I wasn’t truly scared of anything but the Mongolian winter. The tourist season winds down in October, and by late November, when I got on the plane, the nights drop to twenty degrees below zero. But I was prepared: I’d bought snow pants big enough to fit around my convex gut and long underwear two sizes larger than I usually wear.

To be pregnant is to be in some kind of discomfort pretty much all the time. For the first few months, it was like waking up with a bad hangover every single morning but never getting to drink—I was nauseated but hungry, afflicted with a perpetual headache, and really qualified only to watch television and moan. That passed, but a week before I left for Mongolia I started feeling an ache in my abdomen that was new. “Round-ligament pain” is what I heard from everyone I knew who’d been pregnant, and what I read on every prenatal Web site: the uterus expanding to accommodate the baby, as he finally grew big enough to make me look actually pregnant, instead of just chunky. That thought comforted me on the fourteen-hour flight to Beijing, while I shifted endlessly, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt my round ligaments.

No spoilers here. Just read the whole thing.

A Modest Proposal in Switzerland: Breathe, and Get Paid

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One of the wealthiest countries in the world, Switzerland, is considering a proposal that will entitle every single citizen of the country a guaranteed monthly income on which to live (“payment for being alive”):

The proposal is, in part, the brainchild of a German-born artist named Enno Schmidt, a leader in the basic-income movement. He knows it sounds a bit crazy. He thought the same when someone first described the policy to him, too. “I tell people not to think about it for others, but think about it for themselves,” Schmidt told me. “What would you do if you had that income? What if you were taking care of a child or an elderly person?” Schmidt said that the basic income would provide some dignity and security to the poor, especially Europe’s underemployed and unemployed. It would also, he said, help unleash creativity and entrepreneurialism: Switzerland’s workers would feel empowered to work the way they wanted to, rather than the way they had to just to get by. He even went so far as to compare it to a civil rights movement, like women’s suffrage or ending slavery. 

The reporter for The New York Times, Annie Lowrey, is bullish on this idea working in the United States:

If our economy is no longer able to improve the lives of the working poor and low-income families, why not tweak our policies to do what we’re already doing, but better — more harmoniously? It’s hardly uplifting news, but minimum incomes just might be stimmig for the United States too. 

What do you think?

Spend Money on TWTR or Spend Time on Twitter

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I was really excited about the IPO of Twitter today. This is one company/service that I have used consistently over the last 5+ years, and I expect to continue using it for the foreseeable future. Which is why I really like Felix Salmon’s advice on how you can invest in Twitter without spending the cash:

So how is the individual investor supposed to navigate these treacherous waters? It’s actually incredibly easy. And it works like this. Twitter’s profits, if and when they ever appear, are going to be some fraction of its revenues. Its revenues, in turn, are going to be some fraction of the value it provides to its users. I have personally already extracted many thousands of dollars in value out of Twitter, over the past five years, and it hasn’t cost me a penny. On an ROI basis, I’m doing unbelievably well — and my returns are only going to keep on growing into the future.

Here’s my advice, then: take the amount of money you were thinking of investing in Twitter, and divide it by the rate at which you value your own time. So, if you were going to invest $5,000 and you value your time at $50 per hour, then you’d end up with a figure of 100 hours. Then, instead of spending the $5,000 on Twitter stock, spend 100 hours on Twitter: the cost is the same. The value you get from being on Twitter — from interacting with people you admire, from learning new things, from being able to express yourself so easily and concisely — will be much greater than the value you’d ever get from buying $5,000 of Twitter stock. And you’ll still have $5,000 left over to do whatever you want with, whether it’s putting it into some other investment or spending it on something awesome — a holiday, perhaps, or a gift to a friend, or even some fine wine.

I estimate my time is worth $100/hour and I wanted to invest $1,000 into Twitter. So that’s 10 hours I will be spending on Twitter in the next few weeks.

(As an aside: my limit buy order at $30/share didn’t go through this morning as TWTR opened at an astronomical $45.10/share).

On the Metadata of a Tweet

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On the day of the Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) IPO, Paul Ford has a great piece about the metadata that is associated with every single tweet. There are 31 publicly documented data fields (number of favorites, number of retweets, and many more you probably weren’t familiar with):

This is the sort of combinatorial work that defines the modern Web: There’s so much data that there’s a very good chance that you will be the first of all humankind to find something interesting or unexpected. Whether you find something valuable is another question. But it’s surprisingly easy to become an expert in a very tiny niche as a developer—to become a world-leading expert in Android video or a specialist in Twitter geography—and charge accordingly for your services.

For all the possibilities of APIs, there are also limits. Another tweet field, “withheld_copyright,” if set to “true,” lets you know that a tweet is in trouble—that its content has raised flags and hackles over copyright. The text of the tweet, in that case, may be suppressed. The “withheld_in_countries” field can provide a list of the nations in which the tweet is banned. Another field has a telling name: “possibly_sensitive.” It’s set to either true or false. The field indicates whether a tweet links to potentially offensive things such as “nudity, violence, or medical procedures.” (If ever you wanted a snapshot of our world’s anxieties in three terms, there you have it.) As a user you can check a box on your profile so that the media you link to is automatically flagged this way. If you don’t, you risk having your pictures of your medical procedure marked as objectionable by an offended reader and thus put “in review,” the Twitter version of limbo.

A field like this indicates the inherent difficulty of managing an enormous platform like Twitter. The only way the company survives is if it can safely ignore most of what’s said on Twitter. If it had to use employees to monitor tweets, it wouldn’t last a day. But in order to attract as many users as possible, it must find ways to avoid horrifying them.

There’s a great deal of hedging in both the words “possibly” and “sensitive.” The end result is that Twitter is putting the moral burden on the user. One person’s art is another person’s smut, and Twitter is not going to decide which is which—nor is it going to force you to look at the stuff. This position is both somewhat noble for its acceptance of the range of human expression and also highly expedient, putting the responsibility back on the user: We told you the picture was “possibly sensitive,” so why did you look at it?

Much of the rest of the metadata contained in a tweet is familiar: The number of times people have starred, or “fav’d,” a tweet, the number of times it’s been retweeted. The value for “user” contains a whole huge bundle of stuff—the user’s name, a link to an avatar image, the user’s number of followers, the number of people the user follows, and whether the user is “verified” and deserves one of those blue checkmarks. It’s a pretty full portrait of an individual, given that this portrait is attached to every tweet.

From a single tweet and with no other information, you can extract a sense of social influence—how big a voice an individual has, the number of people they reach, the number of people who engaged with this particular tweet. Tweets themselves are just regular text (although text on a computer is anything but regular; there are dozens of abstractions that make it possible for an “a” to appear on a screen—but it’s safe to gloss over that). Here it is, 140 characters, a plain little beastie. You might be fooled into thinking there’s hardly anything there.

Read the rest here.