On Aaron Swartz and Martin Luther King, Jr.

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One week after Aaron Swartz’s suicide, there are still many questions. Larry Lessig, ahead of the MLK holiday, reflects in this post titled “A Time for Silence”:

His motive was political — obviously. His harm was exactly none — as JSTOR effectively acknowledged. But he deserved, your “career prosecutors” believed, to be deprived of his rights as a citizen (aka, a “felon,” no longer entitled to the political rights he fought to perfect) because of what he did. 

Yet here’s the thing to remember on MLK weekend (even though my saying this violates a rule I believe in firmly, a kind of inverse to Godwin’s law, because though I believe these two great souls were motivated by exactly the same kind of justice, King’s cause was greater): How many felonies was Martin Luther King, Jr., convicted of? King, whose motives were political too, but who, unlike Aaron, triggered actions which caused real harm. What’s that number? 

Zero. 

And how many was he even charged with in the whole of his career?

Two. Two bogus charges (perjury and tax evasion) from Alabama, which an all-white jury acquitted him of.

This is a measure of who we have become. And we don’t even notice it. We can’t even see the extremism that we have allowed to creep into our law. And we treat as decent a government official who invokes her family while defending behavior which in part at least drove this boy to his death.

I still dream. It is something that Darrell Issa and Zoe Lofgren are thinking along the same lines. On this anniversary of the success of the campaign to stop SOPA — a campaign which Aaron helped architect — maybe I’m right to be hopeful that even this Congress might do something. We’ll see. Maybe they’ll surprise us. Maybe.

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Related: Lessig’s earlier much-circulated post, “Prosecutor as Bully.”

Dissecting Bilbo’s Contract in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit

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James Daily, a lawyer and co-author of The Law and Superheroes, typically focuses his legal critiques on the superhero world at the Law and the Multiverse website he runs with fellow lawyer and co-author Ryan Davidson. And in this piece for Wired, James Daily dissects the lengthy contract between Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

Two clauses describe Bilbo’s primary obligations:

I, the undersigned, [referred to hereinafter as Burglar,] agree to travel to the Lonely Mountain, path to be determined by Thorin Oakenshield, who has a right to alter the course of the journey at his so choosing, without prior notification and/or liability for accident or injury incurred.

The aforementioned journey and subsequent extraction from the Lonely Mountain of any and all goods, valuables and chattels [which activities are described collectively herein as the Adventure] shall proceed in a timely manner and with all due care and consideration as seen fit by said Thorin Oakenshield and companions, numbering thirteen more or less, to wit, the Company.

All contracts require some consideration from all parties to the contract.  Consideration, in the contract sense, means a bargained-for performance or promise. Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 71(1). Basically, this is something of value given or promised as part of the agreement. This can be anything that the parties agree is valuable; the classic example is a single peppercorn.  Whitney v. Stearns, 16 Me. 394, 397 (1839).

Here, Bilbo is promising to go with the Company to the Lonely Mountain and performing various services there, including extracting the treasure, plus a few more services we’ll get to later. In turn, as we shall see, the Company promises to pay Bilbo one fourteenth of the profits, plus a few other obligations. Thus we have “a promise for a promise,” otherwise known as a bilateral contract.

There are some other details to notice in these clauses. One is the use of defined terms (e.g. “referred to hereinafter as Burglar”). The parties to a contract may define terms however they wish, even in ways that contradict the definition used in statutes or regulations.

Continuing:

Next we have a non-disclosure or confidentiality clause:

Confidentiality is of utmost importance and must be strictly maintained at all times.  During the course of his employment with the Company, Burglar will hear, see, learn, apprehend, comprehend, and, in short, gain knowledge of particular facts, ideas, plans, strategies, theories, geography, cartography, iconography, means, tactics and/or policies, whether actual, tangible, conceptual, historical or fanciful.  Burglar undertakes and agrees to maintain this knowledge in utmost secrecy and confidentiality, and to neither divulge nor make known said knowledge by any means, including but not limited to speech, writing, demonstration, re-enactment, mime, or storage and retrieval within means or apparatus currently known or unknown or as yet unthought of.

(It is a plain drafting error to refer to “the course of [the Burglar’s] employment with the company”, since a later clause specifies in no uncertain terms that “Burglar is in all respects an independent contractor, and not an employee … of the Company.”)

This confidentiality agreement is a little overbroad, since by its strict terms it requires Bilbo to keep confident anything he learns on the journey, not just things he learns in confidence.  The fact that information is already publicly known is usually a defense to a breach of confidentiality, since the information wasn’t actually secret.  Overbreadth probably isn’t fatal to the clause, however.

What’s really unusual about this part of the contract is that it doesn’t appear to include a clause acknowledging that monetary damages alone would be inadequate compensation in the event of a breach of confidentiality.  The purpose of such a clause is to make it easier to obtain an injunction ordering the breaching party to stop disclosing the confidential information.  Ordinarily breach of contract results in a payment of monetary damages, and getting an injunction usually requires showing, among other things, that those damages are insufficient to remedy the harm done.

Recommended reading if you’re a fan of the book. I saw the film in late 2012, but must admit that it was too long for my taste. And they’re making The Hobbit a trilogy!?

Zack Arias on Signal, Noise, and Social Media

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Zack Arias, an Atlanta-based photographer, pens a guest post on Scott Kelby’s blog about signal and the noise, social media hiatus, and finding inspiration. It’s worth reading in entirety, but here were my favorite bits:

– Build an inspiration wall :: I had stacks and stacks and stacks of magazines and photography books. I would thumb through them every now and then. Most of the time they just collect dust. I keep them for “inspiration” but they aren’t in front of me all the time. Since opening the lab I have started to rip out all the stuff that inspires me and have started taping this stuff to the walls in my production office and hair and make up room. Everyday I walk in I’m confronted by walls of stuff I find cool. At first I thought I was building a wall of intimidation but I see that it is a wall of inspiration. I see a picture, something about it speaks to me, I rip it out and tape it on the wall. Do this in your garage, basement, garden shed, hallway, somewhere.

Maybe I like the colors. Maybe I like the pose. Maybe I’m responding to the light. Whatever it is I tape it up and recycle bin the rest of the zine or book. It is cutting down on the clutter on my shelves and giving me cool stuff to look at each day. It starts to tell you some things about yourself as well. Currently my inspiration wall is about 90% black and white. Much of it is dramatically lit. There’s a lot of multiple exposures, motion, and projection.  It’s also nice to have it hanging up in a client area (hair and makeup room) because you can easily point things out like styling cues, posing ideas, emotional aspects of what you are wanting to make, etc. Don’t rip stuff out and put it in a binder. Get it on the walls in a place you’ll see it every day.

The nice thing about seeing this stuff everyday is you can begin to build ideas that you’ll start with on your next shoot. Grab one photo that you like for the light. Grab another that has a color palette you respond to. Another shot is a pose that you like. Another one has an idea for a background or location. You then start to build a shot with that light, this pose, that color palette, at this location. Signal. Showing up on a shoot with zero ideas can be a lot of noise.

For a different type of inspiration wall, try this.

On my recent trip to New York City, I took this to heart. I walked around with only the Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon 35mm prime lens:

– One lens. One light. One something :: Simplify your gear. You pick up a camera for the photograph. You pick up a camera for the photograph. It’s the photograph stupid. Not the Nikon. Not the Canon. Not the 8×10. Not the new 24-70 whatever. Not the new Octabank. Limit your gear usage for a week or for a month or for a year. One camera. One lens. One light source. Master it. MASTER it. Know it. Inside and out. Do everything you can with that one camera, one lens, and one light. My thing right now is one background. I shoot on a white background all the time. ALL the time. What else can I do with it? I know, from looking at my inspiration wall, that I can do more with a simple white wall than what I’m doing now.

Using only one set of gear is both constraining and liberating. Constraining because you can’t, for instance, get everything in the frame. But once you get over this barrier, it becomes liberating because you’re forced to think a bit more about getting the shot.

Lastly, something that I’ve only been able to do with limited success but plan on trying harder in 2013:

– Turn off facebook / twitter / flickr for awhile :: Get offline. Say adios to everyone and go make stuff. Work on a personal project. Get all the honey-do stuff off your list. Clean your basement. Organize your crap. Get all that stuff that lingers over your head off your plate. All those loose ends are noise. Social Media, as much as I LOVE it, is filled with noise. Social Media plays an important part in my life. It’s also a time suck. It’s a place where ideas, questions, and thoughts scatter in a million different directions from a million different sources 24 hours a day. Turn it off. Clear your plate. Let your brain quiet down.

Read the entire post here and don’t miss Zack’s video, Signal & Noise:

On Revamping Your Online Dating Profile

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After a string of digital dating disasters, Amy Webb dug into the data, played around with her dating profile on Match.com and OKCupid.com, changed it, and soon went on her “last first date.” It sounds quite easy, but I think it took a lot of work. She provides some tips on revamping your dating profile in this interesting Wall Street Journal piece:

My profile was obviously attracting the wrong kind of man. After one particularly disastrous date—he casually dropped the fact that he was actually married—I decided to change my approach. Drawing on my background in data analysis, I set out to reverse engineer my profile. I outlined 10 male archetypes and created profiles for each of them on JDate. There was JewishDoc1000, the private-practice cardiologist who hated cruise-ship travel, and LawMan2346, an attorney who was very close to his family and a former national debate champion.

And here are Amy’s tips on attracting the right kind of person on your online dating profile:

• Use between three and five photos in your gallery. More photos can do some good, but after five, my analysis suggests, profiles pass a point of diminishing returns.

• Lead with your hobbies and activities, unless they require lots of description or explanation. So you can start with tennis, if that’s your thing, but not aikido—or worse, “I have a black belt in aikido.” (I actually do, and I put it on my profile at one point, which prompted some men to challenge me to a fight on the first date, which was as horrible and awkward as it sounds.)

• It’s really hard to be funny in print—especially if you’re naturally prone to sarcasm. I found that people who thought they were being funny in their profiles weren’t. Instead, they seemed angry or aloof.

Women: Don’t mention work, especially if your job is difficult to explain. You may have the most amazing career on the planet, but it can inadvertently intimidate someone looking at your profile. I realize this sounds horribly regressive, but during my experiment I found that women were attracted to men with high-profile careers, while the majority of men were turned off by powerful women.

• Women with curly hair are at a distinct disadvantage online. I have no idea whether men prefer blondes, but I can say definitively that most men prefer women with healthy, long, straight hair. If you have curls and feel comfortable (and look good) straightening your hair, give that a try.

These tips will appear in Amy Webb’s upcoming book, Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match.

Risk Management at JPMorgan: Relying on Excel Spreadsheets

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I spent some time this morning reading the recently published “JPMorgan Chase & Co. Management Task Force Regarding 2012 CIO Losses,” a 129-page report on how and why the Chief Investment Office (CIO) lost more than $6 billion for the company in 2012. The media has been quick to point the finger at Bruno Iksil, the so-called “London Whale” responsible for executing the trades. As Felix Salmon notes, the executive summary on the first 17 pages of the report is well-written and provides the context behind this trading disaster for JPMorgan.

I went through the other portions of the document and wanted to highlight that the Risk Management, particularly in the CIO, wasn’t up to snuff. First, this was a huge red flag:

The Firm’s Chief Investment Officer did not receive (or ask for) regular reports on the positions in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio or on any other portfolio under her management, andinstead focused on VaR, Stress VaR, and mark-to-market losses. As a result, she does not appear to have had any direct visibility into the trading activity, and thus did not understand in real time
what the traders were doing or how the portfolio was changing. And for his part, given the magnitude of the positions and risks in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio, CIO’s CFO should havetaken steps to ensure that CIO management had reports providing information sufficient to fully understand the trading activity, and that he understood the magnitude of the positions and what
was driving the performance (including profits and losses) of the Synthetic Credit Portfolio.

But the big question: why did it take so long for JP Morgan to discover that these trades were losing money for the company? Turns out, it had to do with rudimentary platforms in place to measure/track risk on a daily basis. Alas, they were relying on Microsoft Excel!

During the review process, additional operational issues became apparent. For example, the model operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another. In addition, many of the tranches were less liquid, and therefore, the same price was given for those tranches on multiple consecutive days, leading the model to convey a lack of volatility. While there was some effort to map less liquid instruments to more liquid ones (i.e., calculate price changes in the less liquid instruments derived from price changes in more liquid ones), this effort was not organized or consistent.

…

In addition to these risk-related controls, the Task Force has also concluded that the Firm and, in particular, the CIO Finance function, failed to ensure that the CIO VCG (Valuation Control Group) price-testing procedures – an important financial control – were operating effectively. As a result, in the first quarter of 2012, the CIO VCG price-testing procedures suffered from a number of operational deficiencies. For example, CIO VCG did not have documentation of price-testing thresholds. In addition, the price-testing process relied on the use of spreadsheets that were not vetted by CIO VCG (or Finance) management, and required time-consuming manual inputs to entries and formulas, which increased the potential for errors.

Yikes!

If you’re into risk management at all (like I am), the entire report is worth perusing.

Aaron Swartz on Staying Curious

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Ronaldo Lemos interviewed Aaron Swartz in 2009. Here is what the late Aaron Swartz had to say about curiosity:

Q: You did a lot of important things at a very young age, could you describe a few of them? And how do you see and would explain that? Talent, inspiration, curiosity, hard work? Is there something that you would think that other kids who would like to follow your steps should know?

A: When I was a kid, I thought a lot about what made me different from the other kids. I don’t think I was smarter than them and I certainly wasn’t more talented. And I definitely can’t claim I was a harder worker — I’ve never worked particularly hard, I’ve always just tried doing things I find fun. Instead, what I concluded was that I was more curious — but not because I had been born that way. If you watch little kids, they are intensely curious, always exploring and trying to figure out how things work. The problem is that school drives all that curiosity out. Instead of letting you explore things for yourself, it tells you that you have to read these particular books and answer these particular questions. And if you try to do something else instead, you’ll get in trouble. Very few people’s curiosity can survive that. But, due to some accident, mine did. I kept being curious and just followed my curiosity. First I got interested in computers, which led me to get interested in the Internet, which led me to get interested in building online news sites, which led me to get interested in standards (like RSS), which led me to get interested in copyright reform (since Creative Commons wanted to use similar standards). And on and on. Curiosity builds on itself — each new thing you learn about has all sorts of different parts and connections, which you then want to learn more about. Pretty soon you’re interested in more and more and more, until almost everything seems interesting. And when that’s the case, learning becomes really easy — you want to learn about almost everything, since it all seems really interesting. I’m convinced that the people we call smart are just people who somehow got a head start on this process. I fell like the only thing I’ve really done is followed my curiosity wherever it led, even if that meant crazy things like leaving school or not taking a “real” job. 

Amen to this. Stay curious, friends.

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(hat tip: Dave Winer)

North Dakota: Kuwait on the Prairie

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Do you see that patch of light in North Dakota?

Do you see that patch of light in North Dakota?

Robert Krulwich wonders: what’s up with all that light seen in North Dakota in a recent nighttime image of the United States? Turns out there is no big city there. That light pollution is coming from nighttime evidence of an oil boom created by fracking. Those lights are rigs, hundreds of them, lit at night, or fiery flares of natural gas. One hundred oil companies are set up in this region known as the Bakken formation.

This oil rush is so sudden, so enormous, North Dakota now has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. More than 41,000 workers got jobs there between 2008 and 2012. Only seven years ago, the U.S. was importing 60 percent of its oil. Now imports are down to 42 percent. The Bakken fields are helping to improve energy security.

See the post for more images and great videos.

On Bargain Homes in Detroit

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“You can’t go to California and get a pair of shoes for what you can get a house in Detroit.”

That’s a quote from this Bloomberg story on the distressed housing market in Detroit, and how some people are scooping up foreclosed homes by the dozens. According to the story, one man bought 290 Detroit properties for $189,600, which is less expensive than a single-family home in many U.S. Metropolitan areas.

A bit more from the story:

More than 6,500 Wayne County parcels were auctioned in 2011 and another 20,000 are expected for sale this year, said David Szymanski, the county’s chief deputy treasurer.

 

Roughly one-quarter of Detroit’s housing units are vacant, according to Detroit Future City, a 50-year blueprint for the city’s recovery. Mallach worked on the plan initiated by Mayor Dave Bing to redesign Detroit’s 139 square miles, larger than San Francisco, Boston and Manhattancombined for a shrinking population. It envisions such strategies as turning sparsely populated swaths into green space and farms.

 

About 150,000 of Detroit’s 385,390 lots are vacant or have unused buildings, Mallach said. About 66,000 parcels are publicly owned, and that number grows as unsold homes from tax auctions revert to the city or state.

 

Detroit Future City assumes the population will bottom out at about 615,000. It fell by 25 percent since 2000 to 713,000 in the 2010 U.S. Census.

More here.

Obituary for Leon Leyson, Youngest Survivor on Schindler’s List

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Schindler’s List is one of my all-time favourite films. It is worth rewatching after I read an obituary of Leon Leyson, the youngest survivor on Oskar Schindler’s list, in this Los Angeles Times piece.

Leyson, a longtime resident of Fullerton, died Saturday in Whittier after a four-year battle with lymphoma, his daughter Stacy Wilfong said. He was 83.

She said her father was reluctant to talk about the war years because he “didn’t think anybody was interested. He didn’t have public speaking experience. He didn’t think he was going to be any good.”

His reticence may also have been due to his attitude that, having been given a second chance at life, he just wanted to get on with it.

“The truth is, I did not live my life in the shadow of the Holocaust,” he told the Portland Oregonian in 1997. “I did not give my children a legacy of fear. I gave them a legacy of freedom.”

The youngest of five children of a glass factory worker and his wife, Leyson was born Sept. 15, 1929, in Narewka, Poland, a village near the Russian border. He later moved to Krakow with his family.

He was a few weeks shy of his 10th birthday in 1939 when German forces invaded Poland and life as he had known it began to crumble.

Six months after the invasion, Poland’s Jews were ordered into a section of Krakow enclosed by a fence, the tops of which, Leyson often recalled, resembled grave markers. “I don’t think that was an accident,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. His parents loaded their belongings onto a wagon and were crammed into one bedroom of an apartment in the Jewish ghetto with only a sheet separating them from another family.

Leyson didn’t discount his luck in survival:

“I can recount dozens of times where if I had stepped … to my left I would have been gone, or if I happened to step to my right,” Leyson told The Times. “It wasn’t anything like being smart or clever or anything like that.”

Worth reading the article for the last line alone. So touching.

On Effective Opening Sentences

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What’s the best way to begin a blog post or an essay? Perhaps not with a question mark.

This great post summarizes useful techniques for a strong opening sentence: 

You can start with a blanket statement. Chapter Nine of Sol Stein’s excellent How to Grow a Novel begins with: “A writer cannot write what he does not read with pleasure.” Chapter Fourteen begins with: “All fiction writers are emigrants from nonfiction.”

Sometimes you can just be stark-blunt about what you intend to do. Chapter Eight of Stein’s book, on “Getting Intimate with the Reader,” starts out: “This is a chapter about opportunities.”

If you’re writing a blog post about unequal pay of women and men, you can start with: “This post is about unfairness.” Just tell the reader what the subject is.

If you’re writing about a difficult subject (for example, rape), you can begin: “Rape is not easy to write about.”

Make an exaggerated statement, then tone it down. “In Prohibition days, alcohol could be purchased illegally on every street corner. Actually, that’s an exaggeration, but in fact it’s true that . . .”

Involve the reader in a bit of conjecture. “Suppose you were faced with the choice of living with cancer every day, or obtaining treatment that may or may not work, at the cost of becoming bankrupt and homeless.”

Sometimes you can start with a statistic. “This year, over two hundred thousand Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer.”

Summarize the current state of affairs, then tell how it’s changed recently. “Until recently, new MBA graduates could count on getting a job straight out of school. That’s no longer the case.” 

Put up a straw man and knock it down. “The conventional view of [XYZ] is [ABC].” (That’s the straw man.) “But it turns out the conventional view is wrong.” (That’s knocking it down.) Naomi Klein often uses this technique.

Read the entire post here.