FAITH
has taken a huge, absurd “makeover” lately... Fascinating.
According to a recent Pew Research report, the percentage of
Americans who are not affiliated with any religion is on the rise,
including a third of Americans under 30. In recent years—what
actually is the difference between getting high in a rock fest, Super
Bowl, applauding in a political party convention, and attending a
church convergence? Not much. Both rent stadium seating in thousands,
Jumbotrons and smoke machines. Like a Tea Party soiree or Lady Gaga
CD launch, “religious” congregations these days—such as the
faithful in Deep Ellum in Dallas—perk up their church with
come-ons: an art gallery, a yoga studio and a business incubator,
sharing the building with a coffee shop and a performance space. Yes,
that is a Church... BTW, don't forget your credit card.
DENIM
GROOMING. Just for my (and probably your) trivia amusement... I was
just browsing an issue of Men's Health and came across a
fashion/style page titled, “Denim Democracy,” or how to groom in
style on denim ensemble. Okay, here goes: Brunello Cuccinelli tie,
$140; DKNY jeans, $156; G-Star vest, $220; Mark McNairy/New Amsterdam
shoes, $425; Diesel under denim brief, $25; Stetson hat, $110; Will
Leather Goods bag, $275. That is a whopping $1,351 (excluding tax)!
With that money, I can organize 4 or 5 “Bonfires for Peace” free
concert events, 5 hours each event. But I'd love a Stetson hat and
Will Leather bag sometime... I'll wait for them at Goodwill, for
maybe $3 and $7, respectively.
FASCINATING.
An ad on TV offers service to humans how to use their brain
properly... I went online and, I quote: “In addition to arranging
Right Brain Express and Right Brain Aerobics training for your
organization or department, you can also arrange a Right
Brain-storming or Right Brain Sales session to...” etc etc. I
wonder what'd the Neanderthals say. The direct grannies and granpas
of these stone age homeys learned how to control fire 125,000 years
ago without paying some smart brain consultant a pound of dino meat.
Or what would Elle Cyd, the koolcat, say if I offer her a
brain-training service? Probably she'd scowl at me: “Dude, I am not
that dumb! I can roam wherever—yet here I am, not losing my way
home each time. But you, humans, need a Smartphone to remind you you
got a brain. Hello?!?”
ABOUT
a month ago, the Chinese government issued rules requiring Internet
users to provide their real names to service providers, while
assigning Internet companies greater responsibility for deleting
forbidden postings and reporting them to the authorities. We could
easily judge such drastic measure—or outright censorship—as
brought about by the Chinese Communist Party's hyper-sensitivity in
regards anything political or internal. But I am ambivalent about the
issue—in the context of our own internet lives. Free Speech is a
basic human right but rights come with utmost responsibility. The
internet has been used and abused—destructive “jokes” (ie false
news about an individual's death or the Manti Te'o “virtual”
girlfriend sham), outright ridicule of other people's religious
beliefs, distortion of photos for pornographic purposes, vicious
identity thefts etc. Who's going to “police” us? Us.
AS
librarians across the nation struggle with the task of redefining
their roles in a digital age, many public libraries are seeing an
opportunity to fill the void created by the loss of traditional
bookstores. They are increasingly adapting their collections and
services based on the demands of library patrons, whom they now call
customers... Today’s libraries are now showcasing the latest best
sellers, lending Kindles loaded with e-books, and offering
grass-roots technology training centers. “I think public libraries
used to seem intimidating to many people, but today, they are
becoming much more user-friendly, and are no longer these big,
impersonal mausoleums,” said Jeannette Woodward, author of
“Creating the Customer-Driven Library: Building on the Bookstore
Model.” On closer look, however, it's just a matter of time till
e-book companies control libraries. And yes, you hear it right—the
patrons are now called customers.
AS
though outsourcing factory work in China isn't enough, here comes
Russia with more hands to offer America... When China entered WTO in
the 1990s, it ushered the demise of American industrial might and the
disenfranchisement of its once-vaunted workforce. Recently, Russia
was accepted as a WTO member... Hence, the eventuality: General
Motors ramps up production in Russia, a country that is becoming a
bright spot for G.M. and much of the rest of the automotive industry.
Trickle-down oil wealth and the spread of easily accessible auto
financing are lifting sales, which rose by 40 percent in the first
half of this year compared with the same period a year ago.
G.M., Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan and Renault are
all opening new plants, or intend to do so soon.
HOW'D
you feel when, on your first date, just when you're about to nibble
on your strawberry shortcake dessert, she (or he) asks you this
question: “What’s
your credit score?” The credit score, once a little-known metric
derived from a complex formula that incorporates outstanding debt and
payment histories, has become an increasingly important number used
to bestow credit, determine housing etc. It’s so widely used that
it has also become a bigger factor in dating decisions, sometimes
eclipsing more traditional priorities like a good job, shared
interests and physical chemistry. “Credit scores are like the
dating equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease test,” said
Manisha Thakor, the founder and chief executive of MoneyZen Wealth
Management, a financial advisory firm. “It’s a shorthand way to
get a sense of someone’s financial past the same way an S.T.D. test
gives some information about a person’s sexual past.”
IT
is sad, of course—when we see high school seniors opt out of
college and decide to tread the surest path to a job, for the
meantime. Many degree holders are toiling as wait staff or hotel crew
as jobs continue to be shipped abroad—yet many youths become
millionaires as sports stars, recording artists or computer wizards.
For most though, they just have to be practical... Teenagers in a
small oil county of Sidney in Montana are examples. Youths choose the
oil fields over universities, forgoing higher education. It is a
lucrative but risky decision for any 18-year-old to make, one that
could foreclose on his future if the frenzied pace of oil and gas
drilling from here to North Dakota to Texas falters and work dries
up. But with unemployment at more than 12 percent nationwide for
young adults and college tuition soaring, students here said they
were ready to take their chances.
WHAT
is “gamification”? This is a marketing trick that aims to infuse
otherwise mundane activities with the excitement and instant feedback
of video games. Many businesses are using these game strategies to
try to get people hooked on their products and services — and it is
working, thanks to smartphones and the Internet. Buying a cup of
coffee? Foursquare, the social networking app that helped popularize
the gamification idea, gives people virtual badges for checking in at
a local cafe or restaurant. Conserving energy? More than 75 utilities
have begun using a service from a company called Opower that awards
badges to customers when they reduce their energy consumption. You
get the drift, right? Now, keep on playing...
MEDIA
blackout. This happens when news organizations decide to shut up in
the face of certain events. There are many reasons why media may
declare a blackout—most out of caution. In 2008, when David Rohde,
then a reporter for The New York Times, was kidnapped by the Taliban
in Afghanistan, more than 40 major news outlets refrained from
reporting the story for seven months, until he and a local
reporter escaped... There are also many instances when persistent
reporters outsmart actual police investigation, for example. Media is
concerned with info dissemination, police focuses on solving crimes.
Most often than not, these intents collide. But we know for a fact
that that line has narrowed due to a fluid stream of “info” flow
in the internet. Gossip websites such as Gawker can easily post a
video or blog entry and things go haywire... Or a 13-year old nerd
could cook up a photoshopped image and then, voila!
AN
article in Shareable concludes: “... Private banks are finding ways
to swindle the American people.” It is hard to argue him. For one,
collateralized debt obligations and asset-backed securities helped
create the housing bubble. Now, bankers are using interest-rate swap
bonds to obtain greater profits from loans that finance national
infrastructure. In this complex process, when a city needs cash for a
new school or subway line, Wall Street entices it into a “swap
bond” with a promise to pay more (in regular installments) as
interest rates rise, while the city pays a fixed monthly rate. But if
interest rates fall, so do the bank’s payments, leaving the city
scrambling to pay the monthly bills with less cash on hand. Problem
is, virtually all interest rate swaps between local and state
governments and the largest banks have turned into perverse contracts
whereby cities and counties pay millions yearly to the few elite
banks that run the global financial system...
DUE
to many acquired sociocultural sensitivities these days, it seems
easier to assume that differences in job opportunities and racial
trends in academic “success” has also narrowed. Not true,
according to recent studies... New evidences suggest that low-income
Americans have lower chances of upward mobility than counterparts in
Canada and Western Europe. Thirty
years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the
share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor’s
degrees, according to researchers at the University of Michigan. Now
the gap is 45 points. This means, both
groups improved their odds of finishing college—but the affluent
improved much more, widening their sizable lead. It seems a
no-brainer but a lot of factors play around such a trend...
YOU
and me aren't the only ones multitasking—and I am not just talking
about cooking, editing and making family-related phone calls. It most
prevalent in global economy. It’s
called microtasking, and it works by outsourcing small, virtual tasks
to an army of online workers, who then perform them for pennies.
These tasks vary widely in scope and substance, but what links them
all is that they’re essentially too difficult or too dependent on
human analysis for a computer to do, but too simple for skilled
labor. And they’re the bedrock of the internet. Crowdsourced
microtasking—conducted largely via Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk
site—is now a multimillion-dollar industry. And I am not even
talking about why my job as journalist-editor has been microtasked so
widely, universally...
WE
are getting older alive, yes—physically... A sharp decline in
deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and
tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the
past 20 years, according to the department of medical ethics and
health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. The shift reflects
improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food
throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad
public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are
striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from
1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and
years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8. The study, however,
didn't provide data on mental health...
HUNDREDS
of thousands of people across the world have switched on their
computers to find distressing messages alerting them that they no
longer have access to their PCs or any of the files on them. The
messages claim to be from the FBI, some 20 other law enforcement
agencies across the globe or, most recently, Anonymous, a shadowy
group of hackers. The computer users are told that the only way to
get their machines back is to pay a steep fine. And it’s working.
The scheme is making more than $5 million a year, according to
computer security experts who are tracking them. The
scourge dates to 2009 in Eastern Europe. There are now more than 16
gangs of sophisticated criminals extorting millions from victims
across Europe. It's no surprise that it's also widespread in the US.
PEOPLE
of all ages, especially those between 18 and 34, have become so
comfortable with online commerce, instant correspondence, and daily
confession that personal privacy is being redefined and, some argue,
blithely forfeited. “Young people have already embraced the
frenzied commercial environment of the digital marketplace,” says
Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.
So fast. Cell phones track physical movement; computer cookies
transmit buying habits, political affiliations, and sexual
proclivities. And now, because computer users have characteristic
patterns of how they time their keystrokes [and] browse websites,
researchers are learning how to use typeprints, clickprints, and
writeprints, respectively, as digital forms of fingerprints. The
future is scary.
WE
are
a landlocked people, fenced away from our own beautiful shores,
unable to exercise the ancient right to enjoy our precious beaches.
These days, beachfront property owners, wealthy municipalities and
private homeowners’ associations threw up a variety of physical and
legal barriers designed to ensure the exclusivity — and
marketability — of the beach. These measures were not only
antisocial but also environmentally destructive. By increasing the
value of shoreline property and encouraging rampant development, the
trend toward privatizing formerly public space has contributed in no
small measure to the damage storms inflict. Tidal lands that soaked
up floodwaters were drained and developed. Jetties, bulkheads and sea
walls were erected, hastening erosion. And sand dunes — which block
rising waters but also profitable ocean views — were
bulldozed. So what is safer: Let the people freely enjoy the beaches
or let business own them?
IN
the 1970s, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh developed a
software to diagnose complex problems in general internal
medicine—which resulted in a commercial program called Quick
Medical Reference. IBM is now working on Watson for Healthcare
(Watson, the Jeopardy-playing computer). Before that, in 1996--the
Deep Blue chess program trounced Garry Kasparov, the world’s best
player at the time--to claim an unambiguous victory in the computer’s
relentless march into the human domain. What does this portend? Now
it is easier to solve problems with the help of machines that are
made by human minds? Or does it say—since we've already stocked up
data and stuff on these electronic gadgets that humans should think
less this time? So we become the machines...
THIS
year, more than 40 brand-name drugs — valued at $35 billion in
annual sales — lost their patent protection, meaning that generic
companies were permitted to make their own lower-priced versions of
well-known drugs like Plavix, Lexapro and Seroquel — and share in
the profits that had exclusively belonged to the brands. Next year,
the value of drugs scheduled to lose their patents and be sold as
generics is expected to decline by more than half, to about $17
billion, according to an analysis by Crédit Agricole Securities...
Big freakin' deal! During the first nine months of 2012, sales of
generic drugs increased by 19 percent over the same period in 2011,
to $39.1 billion from $32.8 billion, according to Credit Suisse. I'd
like to translate those money to food production, instead.
PRESIDENT
Obama previously said that the 30,000 American troops deployed
to Afghanistan would be home by September, and he made good on
that promise. He also said troop reductions would continue at a
“steady pace” until the remaining 66,000 were out by the end of
2014. A “steady pace” should mean withdrawing all combat forces
on a schedule... However, it was recently reported that military
commanders are pressing to keep most of the remaining troops until
the end of the 2013. The cost of maintaining troops there is on the
upward of $500 billion. The real story: Aside from Afghanistan's
steady supply of natural gas and crude oil, the country has has been
the greatest opium producer in the entire world. Opium can be
manufactured into codeine and morphine, both legal pain-killers,
among other drugs (legal and illegal). There are more than a dozen
giant, mostly American and European, pharmaceutical companies
maintaining base in Afghanistan.
