Futurist from 1901 Describes the World of 2001: Opera by Telephone, Free College & Pneumatic Tubes Aplenty

in History, Magazines, Technology | November 12th, 2020

Just shy of 120 years ago, “the wis­est and most care­ful men in our great­est insti­tu­tions of sci­ence and learn­ing” told Amer­i­ca what would change by the far-flung dawn of 2001. C, X and Q gone from the alpha­bet; “Air-Ships” in the skies, strict­ly for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es (pas­sen­ger traf­fic being han­dled by “fast elec­tric ships”); straw­ber­ries as large as apples; uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion “free to every man and woman”: these are just a few of the details of life in the com­ing 21st cen­tu­ry. We for whom the year 2001 is now firm­ly in the past will get a laugh out of all this. But as with any set of pre­dic­tions, amid the miss­es come par­tial hits. We don’t get our “hot and cold air from spig­ots,” but we do get it from air-con­di­tion­ing and heat­ing sys­tems. We don’t send pho­tographs across the world by tele­graph, but the device we all keep in our pock­ets does the job well enough.

Writ­ten by a civ­il engi­neer named John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. (pre­sum­ably the son of Smith­son­ian Cura­tor of Mechan­i­cal Tech­nol­o­gy John Elfreth Watkins, Sr.), “What May Hap­pen in the Next Hun­dred Years” ran in the Decem­ber 1900 issue of that renowned futur­o­log­i­cal organ Ladies’ Home Jour­nal. You can hear it read aloud, and see it accom­pa­nied by his­tor­i­cal film clips, in the Voic­es of the Past video above.

A few years ago the piece came back into cir­cu­la­tion on the inter­net (which goes unmen­tioned by its experts, more con­cerned as they were with pro­lif­er­a­tion of tele­phone lines and pneu­mat­ic tubes) and its pre­dic­tions were put to the test. At the Sat­ur­day Evening Post, Jeff Nils­son gives Watkins (once a Post con­trib­u­tor him­self) points for less out­landish prophe­cies, such as a rise in human­i­ty’s life expectan­cy and aver­age height.

Watkins describes his sources as “the most learned and con­ser­v­a­tive minds in Amer­i­ca.” In some areas they were too con­ser­v­a­tive: they fore­see “Trains One Hun­dred and Fifty Miles an Hour,” but as Nils­son notes, today’s “high-speed trains are trav­el­ing over 300 mph. Just not in the Unit­ed States.” Amer­i­cans did lose their street­cars as pre­dict­ed, but not due to their replace­ment by sub­ways and mov­ing side­walks — and what would these experts make of the street­car’s 21st-cen­tu­ry renais­sance? When Watkins writes that “grand opera will be tele­phoned to pri­vate homes,” we may think of the Met’s cur­rent COVID-prompt­ed stream­ing, a sce­nario that would have occurred to few in a world yet to expe­ri­ence even the Span­ish flu pan­dem­ic of 1918. But then, the future’s defin­ing qual­i­ty has always been its very unknowa­bil­i­ty: con­sid­er how much has come to pass since we last post­ed about these pre­dic­tions here on Open Cul­ture — not least the end of Ladies Home Jour­nal itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

1902 French Trad­ing Cards Imag­ine “Women of the Future”

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee, The Rule of Eugen­ics (1926/35)

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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When Billy Idol Went Cyberpunk: See His Tribute to Neuromancer, His Recording Session with Timothy Leary, and His Limited-Edition Floppy Disk (1993)

in History, Music, Technology | October 27th, 2020

Bil­ly Idol has long evad­ed straight­for­ward musi­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion, being a full-on star but one ful­ly belong­ing to nei­ther rock nor pop. He may have come up in the 1970s as the front­man of Gen­er­a­tion X, the first punk band to play Top of the Pops, but the hits he went on to make as an MTV-opti­mized solo artist in the 80s and 90s — “Eyes With­out a Face,” “Cra­dle of Love” — sit less than eas­i­ly with those ori­gins. But as the end of the mil­len­ni­um approached and the zeit­geist grew increas­ing­ly high-tech­no­log­i­cal, it seems to have occurred to the for­mer William Michael Albert Broad that, if he could­n’t be a punk, he could per­haps be a cyber-punk instead.

As bad luck would have it, the bio­me­chan­i­cal had already intrud­ed onto Idol­’s life in the form of a steel rod implant­ed in his leg after a motor­cy­cle acci­dent. This lost him the role of T‑1000, the killer cyborg in Ter­mi­na­tor 2, but it inspired him in part to record the ambi­tious con­cept album Cyber­punk in 1993. Like Pete Town­shend’s Psy­choderelict or Don­ald Fagen’s Kamakiri­ad from that same year (or David Bowie’s Out­side from 1995), Cyber­punk is built on a dystopi­an nar­ra­tive in which “the future has implod­ed into the present” and “mega-cor­po­ra­tions are the new gov­ern­ments. Com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed info-domains are the new fron­tiers.” Thus speaks Idol in the album’s open­ing man­i­festo.

“Though there is bet­ter liv­ing through sci­ence and chem­istry, we’re all becom­ing cyborgs. The com­put­er is the new cool tool. Though we say all infor­ma­tion should be free, it is not. Infor­ma­tion is pow­er and cur­ren­cy of the vir­tu­al world we inhab­it.” Here, “cyber­punks are the true rebels.” This would have sound­ed famil­iar to read­ers of William Gib­son, whose Neu­ro­mancer pop­u­lar­ized the aes­thet­ic and ethos of “high tech meets low life” — and shares a title with one of Cyber­punk’s songs. In fact, as Gib­son lat­er recalled, Idol “made it a con­di­tion of get­ting an inter­view with him, that every jour­nal­ist had to have read Neu­ro­mancer.” They did, “but when they met with Bil­ly, the first thing that became real­ly appar­ent was that Bil­ly had­n’t read it.”

What­ev­er his intel­lec­tu­al invest­ment in cyber­punk, Idol threw him­self into what he saw as the cul­ture sur­round­ing it. This effort involved fre­quent­ing Usenet’s alt.cyberpunk news­group; read­ing Mon­do 2000; and con­nect­ing with fig­ures like Gareth Bran­wyn, author of cyber­punk man­i­festos, and Mark Frauen­felder, co-founder of Boing Boing. “We are merg­ing with machines to become smarter, faster, and more pow­er­ful,” writes Frauen­felder in an essay includ­ed among the “mul­ti­me­dia” con­tents of the 3.5″ flop­py disk orig­i­nal­ly bun­dled with Cyber­punk. “Are you going to ignore tech­nol­o­gy, turn your back on it, and let author­i­ty enslave you with it, or are you going to learn every­thing you can about sur­viv­ing in the dig­i­tal age?”

Cyber­punk con­sti­tutes Idol­’s affir­ma­tive answer to that ques­tion. Much of his excite­ment about per­son­al tech­nol­o­gy sure­ly owes to the lib­er­at­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties of the pro­fes­sion­al-grade home record­ing stu­dio. “I’d always real­ly sort of worked through a team of a pro­duc­er and an engi­neer,” he said in one inter­view, “and in the end I think real­ly you felt like you weren’t get­ting as close to your ideas as you could be.” From his own home stu­dio he wit­nessed the 1992 Los Ange­les riots, which prompt­ed him then and there to rewrite the song “Shock to the Sys­tem” to reflect the tur­moil roil­ing out­side his door. (Film­mak­er Kathryn Bigelow would explore at greater length that explo­sion of urban dis­con­tent’s inter­sec­tion with cyber­punk cul­ture in 1995’s Strange Days.)

See­ing cyber­punk as the lat­est man­i­fes­ta­tion of a broad­er coun­ter­cul­ture, Idol cast a wide net for col­lab­o­ra­tors and inspi­ra­tions. He invit­ed Tim­o­thy Leary, the “cyberdel­ic” cul­tur­al icon who dreamed of mak­ing a Neu­ro­mancer com­put­er game, not just to inter­view him about the project but par­tic­i­pate in its record­ing. The album’s cen­ter­piece is a cov­er of the Vel­vet Under­ground’s “Hero­in,” and a dance cov­er at that. Though remem­bered as nei­ther an artis­tic nor a com­mer­cial suc­cess (the rea­sons for which Youtube music crit­ic Todd in the Shad­ows exam­ines in the video at the top of the post), Cyber­punk set some­thing of a prece­dent for main­stream musi­cians keen to use cut­ting-edge record­ing and pro­duc­tion tech­nol­o­gy to go ful­ly D.I.Y. — to go, as it were, cyber-punk.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cyber­punk: 1990 Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing William Gib­son & Tim­o­thy Leary Intro­duces the Cyber­punk Cul­ture

Tim­o­thy Leary Plans a Neu­ro­mancer Video Game, with Art by Kei­th Har­ing, Music by Devo & Cameos by David Byrne

William Gibson’s Sem­i­nal Cyber­punk Nov­el, Neu­ro­mancer, Dra­ma­tized for Radio (2002)

Dis­cov­er Rare 1980s CDs by Lou Reed, Devo & Talk­ing Heads That Com­bined Music with Com­put­er Graph­ics

When David Bowie Launched His Own Inter­net Ser­vice Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Phone Relief: The Ultimate Hands-Free Headset (1993)

in Random, Technology | October 20th, 2020

We have fea­tured some great acts of imag­i­na­tion when it comes to tele­phone technology–from the worlds’ first mobile phone shown in this 1922 British Pathé news­reel, to when Fritz Lang “invent­ed” the video phone in Metrop­o­lis in 1927. “Phone Relief,” the ulti­mate hands-free head­set mar­ket­ed in 1993, will nev­er qual­i­fy as a great act of imag­i­na­tion. But it does make for a great kitschy ad.

via @moodvintage

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vin­tage Film

When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones (1923)

How to Use the Rotary Dial Phone: A Primer from 1927

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The Great Illustration That Accompanied Eddie Van Halen’s Application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (1987)

in Music, Technology | October 12th, 2020

Through­out the past week, we’ve read many trib­utes to Eddie Van Halen and his end­less capac­i­ty for inno­va­tion. Styl­is­ti­cal­ly, EVH changed the sound of rock with tap­ping, a tech­nique that let him play rapid arpeg­gios with two hands on the gui­tar’s fret­board. (Exhib­it A is here.) Tech­ni­cal­ly, he cre­at­ed a unique sound by fash­ion­ing his own gui­tar, the Franken­strat, which meld­ed the sounds of Gib­son and Fend­er gui­tars. And what’s more, he patent­ed three inven­tions, one of which came with the daz­zling illus­tra­tion above. Edward L. Van Halen’s 1987 patent for a “musi­cal instru­ment sup­port” was described as fol­lows:

A sup­port­ing device for stringed musi­cal instru­ments, for exam­ple, gui­tars, ban­jos, man­dolins and the like… The sup­port­ing device is con­struct­ed and arranged for sup­port­ing the musi­cal instru­ment on the play­er to per­mit total free­dom of the play­er’s hands to play the instru­ment in a com­plete­ly new way, thus allow­ing the play­er to cre­ate new tech­niques and sounds pre­vi­ous­ly unknown to any play­er. The device, when in its oper­a­tional posi­tion, has a plate which rests upon the play­er’s leg leav­ing both hands free to explore the musi­cal instru­ment as nev­er before. Because the musi­cal instru­ment is arranged per­pen­dic­u­lar to the play­er’s body, the play­er has max­i­mum vis­i­bil­i­ty of the instru­men­t’s entire play­ing sur­face.

What would this device look like? The graph­ic above visu­al­izes it all. Find the illus­tra­tion in the patent appli­ca­tion here.

Back in 2015, Van Halen wrote a piece in Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics dis­cussing his patents and oth­er tech­ni­cal work on gui­tars and amps. For those who want to delve deep­er into his tin­ker­ing, read the arti­cle here.

via Brad­ford Peter­son & Boing Boing

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Some of Eddie Van Halen’s (RIP) Great­est Per­for­mances: “Shred­ding Was Eddie’s Very Essence”

15-Year-Old French Gui­tar Prodi­gy Flaw­less­ly Rips Through Solos by Eddie Van Halen, David Gilmour, Yng­wie Malm­steen & Steve Vai

Musi­cal Come­di­an Reg­gie Watts Rein­vents Van Halen’s Clas­sic, “Pana­ma”

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The Story of the SynthAxe, the Astonishing 1980s Guitar Synthesizer: Only 100 Were Ever Made

in History, Music, Technology | October 9th, 2020

What is the musi­cal instru­ment most thor­ough­ly of the 1980s? Many would say the “key­tar,” a class of syn­the­siz­er key­boards shaped and worn like a gui­tar. Their rel­a­tive­ly light weights and afford­able prices, even when first brought to mar­ket, put key­tars with­in the reach of musi­cians who want­ed to pos­sess both the wide son­ic palette of dig­i­tal syn­the­sis and the inher­ent cool of the gui­tarist. This arrange­ment was­n’t with­out its com­pro­mis­es: few key­tar play­ers enjoyed the full range of that son­ic palette, to say noth­ing of that cool. But in 1985, a new hope appeared for the syn­the­siz­er-envy­ing gui­tarist and gui­tar-envy­ing syn­the­sist alike: the Syn­thAxe.

Cre­at­ed by Eng­lish inven­tors Bill Aitken, Mike Dixon, and Tony Sedi­vy (and fund­ed in part by Richard Bran­son’s Vir­gin Group), the Syn­thAxe made a quan­tum leap in the devel­op­ment of syn­the­siz­er-gui­tars, or gui­tar-syn­the­siz­ers. Unlike a key­tar, it used actu­al strings — not just one but two inde­pen­dent sets of them — that when played could con­trol any syn­the­siz­er com­pat­i­ble with the recent­ly intro­duced Musi­cal Instru­ment Dig­i­tal Inter­face (MIDI) stan­dard.

As Gui­tarist mag­a­zine edi­tor Neville Marten demon­strates in the con­tem­po­rary pro­mo­tion­al video at the top of the post, this grant­ed any­one who could play the gui­tar com­mand of all the sounds cut­ting-edge syn­the­siz­ers could make.

Not that mas­tery of the gui­tar trans­lat­ed imme­di­ate­ly into mas­tery of the Syn­thAxe: even the most pro­fi­cient gui­tarist had to get used to the unusu­al­ly sharp angle of its neck, its even­ly spaced frets, and the set of keys embed­ded in its body. (“That is the point, it’s not a gui­tar,” as Aitken took pains to explain.) You can see Lee Rite­nour make use of both the Syn­thAx­e’s strings and keys in the 1985 con­cert clip above. Nick­named “Cap­tain Fin­gers” due to his sheer dex­ter­i­ty, Rite­nour had been in search of ways to expand his sound, exper­i­ment­ing with gui­tar-syn­the­siz­er hybrid sys­tems even in the 70s. When the Syn­thAxe came along, not only did he record a whole album with it, that album’s cov­er is a paint­ing of him with the strik­ing new instru­ment in hand.

So is the cov­er of Atavachron, the first album Allan Holdsworth record­ed after meet­ing the Syn­thAx­e’s cre­ators at a trade show. No gui­tarist would take up the Syn­thAxe with the same fer­vor: Holdsworth, seen play­ing it with a breath con­troller (!) in the clip above, would con­tin­ue to use it on his record­ings up until his death in 2017. “Peo­ple used to write notes on my amp, ask­ing me to stop play­ing the Syn­thAxe and play the gui­tar instead,” he told Gui­tar World in his final inter­view that year. “But now peo­ple often ask me, ‘We’d love to hear you play the Syn­thAxe — did you bring it?’ I rarely play it onstage any­more because it’s too cost­ly to take on the road and it requires a lot of equip­ment.”

The amount of asso­ci­at­ed gear no doubt put many an aspir­ing syn­the­siz­er-gui­tarist off the Syn­thAxe. (“It’s about as portable as a drum kit isn’t,” writes ear­ly adopter John Hol­lis.) So must the price tag, a cool £10,000 back in 1985. This did­n’t put off gui­tarist Alec Stans­field, whose enthu­si­asm for the Syn­thAxe as was such that he joined the com­pa­ny, hav­ing “knocked long and hard on their door until they gave me a job as a pro­duc­tion engi­neer.” Alas, he writes, “the instru­ment was nev­er a com­mer­cial suc­cess and even­tu­al­ly the com­pa­ny ceased trad­ing. Few­er than 100 instru­ments had been pro­duced in total. In the final months I was paid with a Syn­thAxe sys­tem since cash was tight” — a sys­tem he shows off in the video above. 

Stans­field sold off his Syn­thAxe in 2013, but what has become of the oth­ers? One of Rite­nour’s Syn­thAx­es even­tu­al­ly found its way into the pos­ses­sion of Roy Wil­fred Wooten, bet­ter known as Future Man of Béla Fleck and the Fleck­tones. “Over a peri­od of time, he began mod­i­fy­ing it into an almost entire­ly new instru­ment: the Syn­thAxe Dru­mi­tar,” writes Com­put­er His­to­ry Muse­um cura­tor Chris Gar­cia. “This sys­tem, which replaced the strings as the pri­ma­ry trig­ger­ing mech­a­nism, allowed Wooten to play the ‘drums’ using the gui­tar-like device.” In the con­cert clip just above, you can behold Future Man play­ing and explain­ing this “Syn­thAxe­Dru­mi­tar,” sounds like a drum kit but looks like a gui­tar — though rather vague­ly, at this point. Call it Syn­thAxe-meets-Mad Max.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the First Elec­tric Gui­tar: The 1931 “Fry­ing Pan”

Bri­an May’s Home­made Gui­tar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motor­cy­cle Parts & More

Hear Musi­cians Play the Only Playable Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World: The “Sabionari”

The Nano Gui­tar: Dis­cov­er the World’s Small­est, Playable Micro­scop­ic Gui­tar

How the Yama­ha DX7 Dig­i­tal Syn­the­siz­er Defined the Sound of 1980s Music

Every­thing Thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Syn­the­siz­er: A Vin­tage Three-Hour Crash Course

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Dear Facebook, This is How You’re Breaking Democracy: A Former Facebook Insider Explains How the Platform’s Algorithms Polarize Our Society

in Current Affairs, Life, Technology, TED Talks | October 5th, 2020

Is this what we want? A post-truth world where tox­i­c­i­ty and trib­al­ism trump bridge build­ing and con­sen­sus seek­ing? —Yaël Eisen­stat

It’s an increas­ing­ly famil­iar occur­rence.

A friend you’ve enjoyed recon­nect­ing with in the dig­i­tal realm makes a dra­mat­ic announce­ment on their social media page. They’re delet­ing their Face­book account with­in the next 24 hours, so shoot them a PM with your email if you’d like to stay in touch.

Such deci­sions used to be spurred by the desire to get more done or return to neglect­ed pas­times such as read­ing, paint­ing, and going for long uncon­nect­ed nature walks.

These announce­ments could induce equal parts guilt and anx­i­ety in those of us who depend on social media to get the word out about our low-bud­get cre­ative projects, though being prone to Inter­net addic­tion, we were near­ly as like­ly to be the one mak­ing the announce­ment.

For many, the break was tem­po­rary. More of a social media fast, a chance to reeval­u­ate, rest, recharge, and ulti­mate­ly return.

Legit­i­mate con­cerns were also raised with regard to pri­va­cy. Who’s on the receiv­ing end of all the sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion we’re offer­ing up? What are they doing with it? Is some­one lis­ten­ing in?

But in this elec­tion year, the deci­sion to quit Face­book is apt to be dri­ven by the very real fear that democ­ra­cy as we know it is at stake.

For­mer CIA ana­lyst, for­eign ser­vice offi­cer, and—for six months—Facebook’s Glob­al Head of Elec­tions Integri­ty Ops for polit­i­cal adver­tis­ing, Yaël Eisen­stat, address­es these pre­oc­cu­pa­tions in her TED Talk, “Dear Face­book, This is How You’re Break­ing Democ­ra­cy,” above.

Eisen­stat con­trasts the civil­i­ty of her past face-to-face ”hearts and minds”-based engage­ments with sus­pect­ed ter­ror­ists and anti-West­ern cler­ics to the polar­iza­tion and cul­ture of hatred that Facebook’s algo­rithms foment.

As many users have come to sus­pect, Face­book rewards inflam­ma­to­ry con­tent with ampli­fi­ca­tion. Truth does not fac­tor into the equa­tion, nor does sin­cer­i­ty of mes­sage or mes­sen­ger.

Lies are more engag­ing online than truth. As long as [social media] algo­rithms’ goals are to keep us engaged, they will feed us the poi­son that plays to our worst instincts and human weak­ness­es.

Eisen­stat, who has val­ued the ease with which Face­book allows her to main­tain rela­tion­ships with far-flung friends, found her­self effec­tive­ly demot­ed on her sec­ond day at the social media giant, her title revised, and her access to high lev­el meet­ings revoked. Her hir­ing appears to have been pure­ly orna­men­tal, a pal­lia­tive ruse in response to mount­ing pub­lic con­cern.

As she remarked in an inter­view with The Guardian’s Ian Tuck­er ear­li­er this sum­mer:

They are mak­ing all sorts of reac­tive changes around the mar­gins of the issues, [to sug­gest] that they are tak­ing things seri­ous­ly – such as build­ing an ad library or ver­i­fy­ing that polit­i­cal adver­tis­ers reside in the coun­try in which they adver­tis­ing – things they should have been doing already. But they were nev­er going to make the fun­da­men­tal changes that address the key sys­temic issues that make Face­book ripe for manip­u­la­tion, viral mis­in­for­ma­tion and oth­er ways that the plat­form can be used to affect democ­ra­cy.

In the same inter­view she assert­ed that Facebook’s recent­ly imple­ment­ed over­sight board is lit­tle more than an inter­est­ing the­o­ry that will nev­er result in the total over­haul of its busi­ness mod­el:

First of all, it’s anoth­er exam­ple of Face­book putting respon­si­bil­i­ty on some­one else. The over­sight board does not have any author­i­ty to actu­al­ly address any of the poli­cies that Face­book writes and enforces, or the under­ly­ing sys­temic issues that make the plat­form absolute­ly rife for dis­in­for­ma­tion and all sorts of bad behav­iour and manip­u­la­tion.

The sec­ond issue is: it’s basi­cal­ly an appeal process for con­tent that was already tak­en down. The big­ger ques­tion is the con­tent that remains up. Third, they are not even going to be oper­a­tional until late fall and, for a com­pa­ny that claims to move fast and break things, that’s absurd.

Nine min­utes into her TED Talk, she offers con­crete sug­ges­tions for things the Face­book brass could do if it was tru­ly seri­ous about imple­ment­ing reform:

  • Stop ampli­fy­ing and rec­om­mend­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion and bias-based hatred, no mat­ter who is behind it—from con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists to our cur­rent pres­i­dent.
  • Dis­con­tin­ue per­son­al­iza­tion tech­niques that don’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between tar­get­ed polit­i­cal con­tent and tar­get­ed ads for ath­let­ic footwear.
  • Retrain algo­rithms to focus on a met­rics beyond what users click or linger on.
  • Imple­ment safe­ty fea­tures that would ensure that sen­si­tive con­tent is reviewed before it is allowed to go viral.

Hope­ful­ly view­ers are not feel­ing maxed out on con­tact­ing their rep­re­sen­ta­tives, as gov­ern­ment enforce­ment is Eisenstat’s only pre­scrip­tion for get­ting Face­book to alter its prod­uct and prof­it mod­el. And that will require sus­tained civic engage­ment.

She sup­ple­ments her TED Talk with rec­om­men­da­tions for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence engi­neer Guil­laume Chaslot’s insid­er per­spec­tive op-ed “The Tox­ic Poten­tial of YouTube’s Feed­back Loop” and The Fil­ter Bub­ble: How the New Per­son­al­ized Web Is Chang­ing What We Read and How We Think by MoveOn.org’s for­mer Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Eli Paris­er.

Your clued-in Face­book friends have no doubt already point­ed you to the doc­u­men­tary The Social Dilem­ma, which is now avail­able on Net­flix. Or per­haps to Jaron Lanier’s Ten Argu­ments for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Read the tran­script of Yaël Eisenstat’s TED Talk here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Prob­lem with Face­book: “It’s Keep­ing Things From You”

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Cal New­port

This Is Your Kids’ Brains on Inter­net Algo­rithms: A Chill­ing Case Study Shows What’s Wrong with the Inter­net Today

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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GPS Tracking Reveals the Secret Lives of Outdoor Cats

in Data, K-12, Maps, Nature, Science, Technology | October 2nd, 2020

We track sharks, rhi­no, and bears, so why not Boo Boo Kit­ty, Peanut, and Pump­kin?

The Long Island feline res­i­dents volunteered—or more accu­rate­ly, were volunteered—by their human com­pan­ions to par­tic­i­pate in a domes­tic cat move­ment study as part of the inter­na­tion­al Cat Track­er project.

Each beast was out­fit­ted with a GPS track­er-enhanced har­ness, which they wore for a week.

(Many cat own­ers will find that alone some­thing of an achieve­ment.)

In total, almost a thou­sand house­holds in four coun­tries took part—the Unit­ed States, New Zealand, Aus­tralia, and the UK.

Sci­en­tists were par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed to learn the degree of may­hem these cher­ished pets were vis­it­ing on sur­round­ing wildlife in their off hours.

Any­one who’s been left a present of a fresh­ly mur­dered baby bun­ny, mole, or wing­less bat can prob­a­bly guess.

It’s a con­sid­er­able amount, though by and large the domes­ti­cat­ed par­tic­i­pants stuck close to home, rarely trav­el­ing more than two foot­ball fields away from the com­forts of their own yards. The impulse to keep the food bowl with­in easy range con­fines their hunt­ing activ­i­ties to a fair­ly tight area. Woe to the field mice who set up shop there.

Their move­ments also revealed the per­il they put them­selves in, cross­ing high­ways, roads, and park­ing lots. Researcher Hei­dy Kikil­lus, who tracked cats in New Zealand, report­ed that a num­ber of her group’s sub­jects wound up in a fatal encounter with a vehi­cle.

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, gen­der, age, and geog­ra­phy play a part in how far a cat roams, with males, younger ani­mals, and coun­try dwellers cov­er­ing more ground. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, those who have not been neutered or spayed tend to have a freer range too.

“With­out the moti­va­tions of food and sex, most cats seem con­tent to be home­bod­ies,” zool­o­gist Roland Kays, one of the US Project lead­ers, not­ed.

Amer­i­can cit­i­zen sci­en­tists who’d like to enroll their cat can find infor­ma­tion and the nec­es­sary forms on the Cat Track­er web­site.

The cat-less and those with indoor cats can enjoy pho­tos of select par­tic­i­pants and explore their tracks here.

And what bet­ter fall craft than a DIY cat track­ing GPS har­ness?

via Nation­al Geo­graph­ic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

In 1183, a Chi­nese Poet Describes Being Domes­ti­cat­ed by His Own Cats

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

How Humans Domes­ti­cat­ed Cats (Twice)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Google Introduces 6‑Month Career Certificates, Threatening to Disrupt Higher Education with “the Equivalent of a Four-Year Degree”

in Education, Technology | September 5th, 2020

Update: You can find the first of the Google Career Cer­tifi­cates here. They’re also added to our col­lec­tion 200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies. 

I used to make a point of ask­ing every col­lege-apply­ing teenag­er I encoun­tered why they want­ed to go to col­lege in the first place. Few had a ready answer; most, after a deer-in-the-head­lights moment, said they want­ed to be able to get a job — and in a tone imply­ing it was too obvi­ous to require artic­u­la­tion. But if one’s goal is sim­ply employ­ment, does­n’t it seem a bit exces­sive to move across the state, coun­try, or world, spend four years tak­ing tests and writ­ing papers on a grab-bag of sub­jects, and spend (or bor­row) a large and ever-inflat­ing amount of mon­ey to do so? This, in any case, is one idea behind Google’s Career Cer­tifi­cates, all of which can be com­plet­ed from home in about six months. Find the first ones here.

Any such remote edu­ca­tion­al process looks more viable than ever at the moment due to the ongo­ing coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, a con­di­tion that also has today’s col­lege-apply­ing teenagers won­der­ing whether they’ll ever see a cam­pus at all. Nor is the broad­er eco­nom­ic harm lost on Google, whose Senior Vice Pres­i­dent for Glob­al Affairs Kent Walk­er frames their Career Cer­tifi­cates as part of a “dig­i­tal jobs pro­gram to help Amer­i­ca’s eco­nom­ic recov­ery.” He writes that “peo­ple need good jobs, and the broad­er econ­o­my needs their ener­gy and skills to sup­port our future growth.” At the same time, “col­lege degrees are out of reach for many Amer­i­cans, and you shouldn’t need a col­lege diplo­ma to have eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty.”

Hence Google’s new Career Cer­tifi­cates in “the high-pay­ing, high-growth career fields of Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment, and User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design,” which join their exist­ing IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion in Python Cer­tifi­cates.

Host­ed on the online edu­ca­tion plat­form Cours­era, these pro­grams (which run about $300-$400) are devel­oped in-house and taught by Google employ­ees and require no pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence. To help cov­er their cost Google will also fund 100,000 “need-based schol­ar­ships” and offer stu­dents “hun­dreds of appren­tice­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties” at the com­pa­ny “to pro­vide real on-the-job train­ing.” None of this guar­an­tees any giv­en stu­dent a job at Google, of course, but as Walk­er empha­sizes, “we will con­sid­er our new career cer­tifi­cates as the equiv­a­lent of a four-year degree.”

Tech­nol­o­gy-and-edu­ca­tion pun­dit Scott Gal­loway calls that bach­e­lor’s-degree equiv­a­lence the biggest sto­ry in his field of recent weeks. It’s per­haps the begin­ning of a trend where tech com­pa­nies dis­rupt high­er edu­ca­tion, cre­at­ing afford­able and scal­able edu­ca­tion­al pro­grams that will train the work­force for 21st cen­tu­ry jobs. This could con­ceiv­ably mean that uni­ver­si­ties lose their monop­oly on the train­ing and vet­ting of stu­dents, or at least find that they’ll increas­ing­ly share that respon­si­bil­i­ty with big tech.

This past spring Gal­loway gave an inter­view to New York mag­a­zine pre­dict­ing that “ulti­mate­ly, uni­ver­si­ties are going to part­ner with com­pa­nies to help them expand.” He adds: “I think that part­ner­ship will look some­thing like MIT and Google part­ner­ing. Microsoft and Berke­ley. Big-tech com­pa­nies are about to enter edu­ca­tion and health care in a big way, not because they want to but because they have to.” Whether such uni­ver­si­ty part­ner­ships will emerge as falling enroll­ments put the strain on cer­tain seg­ments of the uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem remains to be seen, but so far Google seems con­fi­dent about going it alone. And where Google goes, as we’ve all seen before, oth­er insti­tu­tions often fol­low.

Note: You can lis­ten to Gal­loway elab­o­rate on how Google may lead to the unbundling of high­er ed here. Lis­ten to the episode “State of Play: The Shar­ing Econ­o­my” from his Prof G pod­cast:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies.

Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Google Launch­es a Free Course on Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learn­ing Crash Course”

Google Launch­es Free Course on Deep Learn­ing: The Sci­ence of Teach­ing Com­put­ers How to Teach Them­selves

Mal­colm Glad­well Asks Hard Ques­tions about Mon­ey & Mer­i­toc­ra­cy in Amer­i­can High­er Edu­ca­tion: Stream 3 Episodes of His New Pod­cast

Niet­zsche Lays Out His Phi­los­o­phy of Edu­ca­tion and a Still-Time­ly Cri­tique of the Mod­ern Uni­ver­si­ty (1872)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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