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Feb. 3rd, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 5

Feb-03-2012 | Comments (1)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: All the followups have to do with extremes. We start with an In Focus photo spread on this week’s “Tough Guy” competition, another extreme sport many readers will not feel the need to partake of. But all readers partake in the debate on Foxconn, maker of the computers on which you read this. We link to a fine debate on Reddit: the excerpted quote is the top comment and makes a strong argument for Foxconn as a positive role in China. Many respondents don’t agree…. Continuing with our Apocalypse Soon investigation. we link to the recently web-restored Apocamon a comic adaptation of the Book of Revelations as performed by Pokemon. And following last week’s brain feature, we look at the ethics of upsizing your intelligence.

* Tough Guy 2012 In Focus – The Atlantic

Billed as “the toughest race in the world,” the Tough Guy 2012 competition took place yesterday in Perton, England. Every year, thousands of men and women tackle the course, which is described on the Tough Guy website as eight country miles filled with freezing mud and “barbed wire, cuts, scrapes, burns, dehydration, hypothermia, acrophobia, claustrophobia, electric shocks, sprains, twists, joint dislocation and broken bones.” Gathered here are some images of the fun had by the tough competitors in this year’s event.

* Foxconn And Workers Rights Reddit comment

“In a poor country like ours, the alternative to low-paid jobs isn’t well-paid ones, it’s no jobs at all.”-Jesús Heroles, Fmr. Mexican Ambassador to the US

I’m not going to lie, Foxconn doesn’t sound like a terribly fun place to work. That being said, it’s crucial to note that Foxconn employees are not slaves. Every employee is there of their own accord and is perfectly free to leave whenever they want (in fact, Foxconn has a 30-40% turnover rate). That’s critically important to realise. It’s important because the fact that someone would choose to work at Foxconn means that it’s better than any other option they have. Remember that for the vast majority of Foxconn workers, the alternative is farming rice in a country where there’s 1 tractor for every 200 farmers. It should be axiomatic that if a person is offered a choice, they will take the option that improves their life. Unless you’re of the opinion that all people to the East of the Himalayas are stricken with some kind of mass delusion, the fact that people are wilfully choosing to work at Foxconn should be indisputable evidence that Foxconn is having a positive effect on their lives.

* Apocamon: The Final Judgement (NSFW) Written by St. John the Divine, Illustrated by Patrick Farley

Warning: Some people will find this offensive and rude; others will find it very funny. Caveat lector.

* The Ethics Of Brain Boosting Oxford University

Recent research in Oxford and elsewhere has shown that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and maths abilities, memory, problem solving, attention, even movement.

Critically, this is not just helping to restore function in those with impaired abilities. TDCS can be used to enhance healthy people’s mental capacities. Indeed, most of the research so far has been carried out in healthy adults.

TDCS uses electrodes placed on the outside of the head to pass tiny currents across regions of the brain for 20 minutes or so. The currents of 1–2 mA make it easier for neurons in these brain regions to fire. It is thought that this enhances the making and strengthening of connections involved in learning and memory. The technique is painless, all indications at the moment are that it is safe, and the effects can last over the long term.

5. Apple, Foxconn, and Economics

Jan-27-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: As Apple set all-time records for profit this week, we learned that in the last quarter year Apple made more iphones made than humans made babies. The process of making them appears to be a lot less fun, however. The lead This American Life is their most downloaded podcast, and has been linked to all over the net in the past month. It’s about how Foxconn, the Chinese company, makes iStuff, and about the lives of the people who work there. Brilliantly presented (Mike Daisey does stand-up) and memorable. The Times has a follow up article, and we offer Apple’s reaction. Worth noting is that while this focuses on Apple, most other computers (Sony, HP, Dell, Samsung, etc…) are made in the same factory under the same conditions. If you need a piece for your next ideas discussion group, this might be a good one to consider.

* Mr. Daisey And The Apple Factory This American Life (60 minute audio)

Mike Daisey was a self-described “worshipper in the cult of Mac.” Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.

* Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class New York Times

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

* Apple ‘Attacking Problems’ At Its Factories In China Telegraph

In an email allegedly sent to Apple’s 60,000 or so employees, Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive said that Apple “cares about every worker in its supply chain”. The letter appears to be in response to a series of articles in the New York Times cataloguing the company’s problems in China and divisions within Apple about how to handle the issues.

Mr Cook’s letter, which was reproduced on the website 9to5mac.com, promised that Apple would “continue to dig deeper” into problems in China and that it would “undoubtedly find more issues”. “What will not do, and never have done, is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain,” he added. “Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are,” he said.

7. The Past, Present, and Future of Books

Apr-23-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s-Eye: Can you identify the opening first lines of 20 famous books from the past? Can you beat your editor’s score of 14/20? ☺ In the future we will read ebooks on a Kindle, or an iPad, or in paperback, or not at all. The New Yorker tells us where it’s all going. And in the present two heavyweight authors land counterpunches: JK Rowling to those who want to cut social assistance (There she goes again, promoting the gay socialist wizarding agenda!) and Margaret Atwood responding to those who think she should decline her 450k prize “from” an Israeli University. Comments, anyone?

* First Lines Quiz The Guardian

* The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books The New Yorker

For the time being, Apple’s entrance into the book market has given publishers a reprieve. A close associate of Bezos said, “Amazon was thinking of direct publishing—until the Apple thing happened. For now, it was enough of a threat that Amazon was forced to negotiate with publishers.”

Most publishers mistrust Amazon and think it is unnecessarily secretive. It won’t tell them details about customer habits, or the number of Kindles sold, or what it costs to make a Kindle. It won’t even disclose the percentage of revenues its book sales represent, saying only that “media”—movies, music, and books—accounted for fifty-two per cent of sales in 2009.

Publishers say that the negotiations with Apple were less contentious. There were arguments over the price of e-books, with publishers wanting the top price set at seventeen dollars and Apple insisting on fifteen. “Once Apple had determined that they were going to accept the agency model,” a publisher said, “they were very tough: Take it or leave it.” But the Apple people “had a much more agreeable feel than Amazon did. They said they would share some consumer data about buying e-books. We have no such data from Amazon.”

* Rowling on UK election

“The 2010 election campaign, more than any other, has underscored the continuing gulf between Tory values and my own. It is not only that the renewed marginalisation of the single, the divorced and the widowed brings back very bad memories. … I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. …I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. “

* Atwood on the Dan David Prize

“Since I accepted the Dan David Prize and it has been announced, I have received several letters from different groups asking me to reverse my acceptance and boycott this event…. PEN International, an organization of which I am a Vice President, is in favour of continuing dialogue that crosses borders of all kinds. www.internationalpen.org.uk “International PEN, the world’s oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. International PEN was founded in 1921 to dispel national, ethnic, and racial hatreds and to promote understanding among all countries.” (See U.S. PEN’s recent New York Tariq Ramadan Cooper Union event, for which they were attacked by extremists from all sides.) Moderates who want to promote dialogue always get hammered twice as much, as they get stones thrown at them from several directions at once.”

6. Education versus Creativity

Apr-16-2010 | Comments (2)

Bird’s-Eye: John Brunner said he left school because it was interfering with his education. A fascinating study from new (to us) blog Frontal Cortex shows how (most) teachers don’t like creative students, Henry Giroux (wiki bio) looks at how teachers are being forced to stop teaching creativity, and a wonderful Steve Jobs commencement address from Stanford looks (among other things) at the benefits of dropping out.

* Classroom Creativity The Frontal Cortex

Eric Barker recently referred me to this interesting study, which looked at how elementary school teachers perceived creativity in their students. While the teachers said they wanted creative kids in their classroom, they actually didn’t. In fact, when they were asked to rate their students on a variety of personality measures – the list included everything from “individualistic” to “risk-seeking” to “accepting of authority” – the traits mostly closely aligned with creative thinking were also closely associated with their “least favorite” students. As the researchers note, “Judgments for the favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity; judgments for the least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity.”

* In Defense of Public School Teachers in a Time of Crisis Henry Giroux (Thanks, Amy!)

Since the 1980s, teachers have been under an unprecedented attack by those forces that view schools less as a public good than as a private right. Seldom accorded the status of intellectuals that they deserved, they remain the most important component in the learning process for students, while serving as a moral compass to gauge how seriously a society invests in its youth and in the future. Yet, teachers are being deskilled, unceremoniously removed from the process of school governance, largely reduced to technicians or subordinated to the authority of security guards. Underlying these transformations are a number of forces eager to privatize schools, substitute vocational training for education and reduce teaching and learning to reductive modes of testing and evaluation.

* Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks — including death itself — at the university’s 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005

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5. Apple, Foxconn, and Economics

6. Education versus Creativity

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