Mouse embryo made without father
This research is going to be absolutely politically problematic. I love it. (The hypothesis that i’ve heard wrt to human research is that it’s probably possible to create embryos with two mothers.) Note how often the researchers try to talk about all of the reasons why people shouldn’t be worried about human research in this vain. This only further convinces me that there are political problems because people can’t handle this possibility.
Apparently, the SUV contacted my insurance. As we had left it, i was going to contact theirs to file a complaint, if i wanted to. Exhausted and not wanting to deal, i had decided not to. Well, they contacted my insurance for me. This meant that i had to talk to State Farm all day to clear up what had happened, repeat my story like 15 times, etc. Of course, such conversations always make me flustered, frustrated and utterly upset.
I had to deal with State Farm once before. My car was nearly totalled after getting crushed between an SUV and a cab due to an out of control SUV in the rain only 10 days after getting new insurance. State Farm consisted of angels, angels and more angels. This time, it was less clear as to whose fault it was. But once again, the nice people at State Farm came to my rescue being beyond helpful and clearing up my confusion and calming my frustration. The nice agent even told me not to worry about it – go to Europe, enjoy it, forget about the car and deal when i get back. “Europe is more important than your car.” If i wasn’t on the phone with the guy, i would’ve hugged him. He was so reassuring, so calming, so helpful.
Of course, i was thinking about it… an insurance agent should be a good therapist. They should want to keep you calm, relaxed, unanxious. I’m a better driver when i’m not a ball of nerves. This is probably a good approach for them. State Farm should teach this to Blue Cross. I swear my medical insurance gives me additional ulcers and anxiety-related disorders every time i have to deal with them. This can’t be good business for them. They don’t want me to be ill; that costs them money. But they do a damn good job of creating stress-related disorders in me a few times a year.
Example: today i got a bill from August 2003 from a doctor telling me that my insurance decided not to recoup all of the money (apparently, that’s been in battle for the last n months). Of course, not only is this super annoying on my insurance’s part, but it’s after i filed taxes where i list how much i pay each year in medical. ::shaking head:: Sometimes, i think that they do this just to break me down. I mean, i’d rather pay the extra money then deal with my insurance company because i do believe that there’s a decrease in health whenever i have to deal with them. Insurance is simple… they screw up and they charge you either in time or money – you choose.
This is why i love State Farm. I pay them once a year; they take care of me and they give me free calming words whenever i call.
Ever since i came back from Japan, the first question out of everyone’s mouth is: “Is it like Lost in Translation!?!?” I always respond “Well….”
It’s hard to parse what i’m being asked. Perhaps i’m being asked if i was just as lost and overwhelmed in Tokyo as Murray and Johansson are. Or perhaps i’m being asked if the caricatures of the Japanese are true. I tend to assume the former, but perhaps that’s hopeful…
Japan was a totally overwhelming experience for me. Not only was it (New York + London)^2 in terms of intensity, but the subtle differences were so fascinating that i spent my entire trip watching for details. Even in my own glazed-over viewpoint, there is no doubt that the Japanese characters in the film were caricatures.
It’s important to remember how caricatures operate. Ever watch a caricature artist? What they do is take the features that appear fundamentally different to their perceived norm and magnify them. Each caricature artist magnifies different features dependent on their own perspective (although, if you have a large nose, you’re going to have a tremendous nose in the eyes of every caricature artist).
Try as i might to see Tokyo on Tokyo’s level, i was brutally aware of my own caricaturization of the city. Fashion played a prominent role in my own processing. My memory has somehow secured the rush of men in business suits in Shibuya and the absurd commonality of 1980s retro fashion. I know that this doesn’t fit everyone, but it stood out because it was so different from what i normally see. My mind was holding on to magnificent differences only.
The problem with creating caricatures is that it’s only funny when you’ve chosen to expose yourself to that processing, when you want to see what stands out from another’s perspective. We choose to subject ourselves to the caricature artist. It’s not nearly as humorous when it is subjected on us. This is where i recognize the problem with Coppola’s movie. I suspect that she meant well… she wanted to portray a sappy set of characters in what she perceived as the American caricaturization of Tokyo. That said, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this doesn’t read well in Japan. It’s far more insulting because the joke is not shared.
This goes to the root of humor. When humor operates by making fun of a population, it is only funny to that population if they were the joke tellers. For example, when my ex-girlfriend used to roll her eyes and call something gay, it was funny; when a stranger does the same, it’s homophobic. Context. Audience. Speaker. One of the key problems with LiT is that it is a caricaturization by gaijin.
[Thoughts stemming from the CSM article (thanks Joi) and Mimi’s old post]
[For more on humor, read Jokes and Their Relation to the Unsconscious. References on caricature can be found in “The City and the Body” from Judith Donath’s “Inhabiting the virtual city.”]
Update:
I had a great talk with Joi about differentiating portrayals situated in hatred and those situated in stereotypes. The latter are not nearly as visible and can hurt just as much. This is a really good point and i conflated the two in this entry. Humor based on stereotypes doesn’t feel as problematic because the intention is not based on hate. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt.
I also realized that a really good way to consider LiT is to juxtaposition it alongside Kill Bill. Kill Bill (both parts of the full movie) is not nearly as problematic because it is caricaturing every action genre out there, from Chinese martial arts to Japanese sword fighting to Westerns to stupid Americans and their guns. When you laugh, the laughter is only partially at the characters; it is predominantly at Tarantino for incorporating yet-another genre in an off-the-wall way. Additionally, in the Japanese section of Kill Bill, Tarantino goes out of his way to caricature Japanese sword-fighting while simultaneously empowering female fighters to be the most prestigeous. Certainly, everyone in that film dies except two and all of the wrongful deaths are righted, but it’s important to remember that everyone proves their worth in fighting except the stupid dumbfuck American hick with his gun.
Update:
United Airlines is showing Lost in Translation for the month of May on two types of flights: to Tokyo/Narita, to Hong Kong / China / Korea. This gives me the distinct impression that people are linking the movie to certain cultures, not simply to the state of being lost in another country. Other movies during the month of May had no clear linkage between location and direction. LiT is not being shown to/from Europe, unlike almost every other movie.
From Caterina:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Just as we are afraid of ghosts and of the God of the panopticon insofar as they are imaginary non-entities – that is, because they do not exist – so, according to lacan, we love God precisely because he does not exist.
I had to fudge it. The first two books i picked up didn’t have 5 sentences on page 23. Leave it to Derrida and JL Austin to have rather long sentences that fill the page. Thus, i went with Bentham’s “The Panopticon Writings” (which were out due to a recent debate with my roommate).
Note: catching up on blog reading, but i thought that this exercise was fun!
For one of my classes, we’re discussing online dating. This is particularly timely since i’m about to head off to Vienna to discuss the same topic at CHI. Instead of taking it too seriously, i’m glad that my class decided to find the humor. So i thought i’d share.
First, tales of horror from the online dating world.
There are also various “how to translate personal ads” going around. Inside is one that i thought was funny.
Update: Jonas has some great data on online dating. (thanks Ado!)
I interviewed a person i know a few days ago about hir blog/journal. S/he talked about writing as a form of cathartic processing. S/he got to write down hir thoughts and share them with hir friends who would know when to comment and when to just let hir process. At one point, s/he looked at me and said: remember when you used to blog for that?
Wow… i really did use to process unfinished thoughts, personal frustrations, frameworks i was trying to construct… all in my various web journals. I didn’t have to defend myself to strangers; my friends were totally constructive in their critiques. I didn’t need to remember to be formal; i was allowed to be half-baked.
Now blogging is this psycho addiction. I’m aware of having an audience of unknowns, but trying to put on blinders just to write. I want the cathartic processing, but i want to share some of my findings/ideas with the world. They don’t both fit into the same forum, even though i try. I write so that i don’t lose track of thoughts. Yet, i am only able to deal with comments and people on occasion. I struggle to find the appropriate voice. Another friend told me that my blog tended to have a lot of content, personalized. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. Then again, i was told that my thesis looked like a stream of consciousness writing. It was.
As i interview people about their regrets, i start to wonder if i’ll have my own. Will i regret blogging? I try not to live in regrets, or rather, i try to forget that which i might regret. Yet, is forgetting possible?
I’d always seen the steam vacs at Safeway. Thus, when we decided to do a massive house cleaning yesterday, i decided to make certain that all of the carpets and rugs got a thorough cleaning. We have a no-shoe policy in our house so i figured it would just help get rid of Marble fur and random dust. I was so not prepared for the color of the water in a matter of moments. The amount of dirt that came out of those rugs was mindblowing. Where on earth did it come from? Is it from before my time? If you think that your house is clean and tidy, go do a steam vac on your rugs. Me oh my.
This evening, my roommate wrote a mock USPS launch announcement to highlight why Gmail might seem foreign to those who view their email as a metaphor for the real thing:
Now the advertisements you receive free each day — courtesy of the trusted USPS — will be automatically selected to match keywords found in your correspondences. And it’s all privacy-friendly!
Newly installed robots will open every letter handled by the USPS, read its contents, reseal the envelope, and send the recipient — free of charge — third-party material describing goods and services directly related to the scanned content of the letter.
…(cont’d)
Many people have heard me tell an anecdote that i learned while living in Holland: At the turn of the century, the Dutch government collected mass amounts of data about its citizens with good intentions. In order to give people proper burials, they included religion. In 1939, the Nazis invaded and captured that data in less than 3 days. A larger percentage of Dutch Jews died than any other Jews because of this system.
Well, i’d been searching for a citation for a while. Tonight, i remembered to ask Google Answers and in less than an hour, had a perfect citation:
The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses. Social Research, Summer, 2001, by William Seltzer, Margo Anderson
The essay is even better than my anecdote and i truly believe that anyone in the business of doing data capture should be required to read this.
why privacy issues matter… to me
Bloody Gmail (and the scarier A9) has me back to thinking about my love/hate relationship with privacy issues and my deep need to unpack the term and insert the issues of vulnerability into the discussion. Privacy is a loaded term. I’ve heard way too many people talk past one another thinking that they’re both talking about privacy issues. It’s a slippery discussion and i leave it to Dourish to fully flesh out why. But i do think that there are important issues that must be teased out in order to have a conversation about privacy, vulnerability or any of our data woes.
Key privacy-related questions
Given XYZ situation, i ask myself two key privacy-related questions:
1) Does XYZ make any person or group of persons feel icky? Who? Why?
2) Are there any rational scenarios of how XZY can be abused by the creators, potential hackers, or ill-advised governments/coups?
[Note: these are my questions for myself and thus i define rational, a notably arbitrary definition that falls under the “i know it when i see it” category. The key anecdote that i keep in my head is that at the turn of the century, Holland (and other countries) collected religion as part of their census data. In 1939, that data was horribly horribly abused. This may not have appeared to be a rational situation in the 1920s, but it is in my scope of the possible now.]
Reasons for the ickiness factor
First, i address the ickiness factor. I immediately disregard any groups that involve the paranoid from my list of ickiness contenders that must be addressed. I do not exclude the marginalized. Often, the ‘why’ answer for this group has to do with heightened walls around what is normative and what is not. Given that i’m politically all-in-favor of challenging normative values, i recognize their plight and pay special attention to it, albeit reflexively so.
Of the groups who fall into the ickiness reaction zone, i’ve identified a few reasons why there’s usually a reaction to XYZ:
Vulnerability embedded in ickiness
This ickiness feeling in relation to ‘privacy’ is what i called vulnerability. Something that XYZ has done has made people feel vulnerable to potentially abusive strangers, cultures and cultural norms, known others, and institutions with power. I am particularly interested in rational constructions of vulnerability, particularly amongst those who have felt the fire. We already live in a culture of fear – i’m not interested in magnifying it.
Outside of those who live in a fear for fear’s sake mentality, there’s a pretty consistent set of patterns regarding vulnerability:
– New situation raises people’s vulnerability concerns; walls go up
– Situation appears to cause no harm; walls start lowering
– Incentives are used to encourage participation; walls lower faster
– Vulnerability comes to forefront with resultant situation; walls spike
Point two is where the concerns slumber and why civil rights activists are essential. People’s innate vulnerability concerns definitely subside over time. Incentives definitely work, particularly when the consequences are not high.
While you may not give any demographic information just because, you will probably give it for the chance of winning a Porsche. For most people, this isn’t an issue of high vulnerability and there are low consequences so they don’t need a strong incentive. Take it to the next level. What will it cost to have a bot track your web surfing? Many people will do it… but the necessary incentive is usually more than dreadful odds at winning a Porsche. Take it to the next level. What will it take for you to be willing to turn your personal web surfing data over to your boss, lover or parents? Surfed any porn lately? The incentive (or, more likely, extreme guilt/requirement) must be high because the consequences of having to face your actions are much higher, particularly if you weren’t prepared to turn over your data to those with power over you. Note that for many people, fear of turning over this information to known undesired audience is far more threatening than having to turn this over to institutions; this is not the case in certain countries where vulnerability to dreadful governments runs much deeper than vulnerability to known individuals. A lot has to do with power and ability to execute enforcement over undesired behavior.
Why we need civil rights activists, legal changes and architects
Let me dig out of this hole and return to the civil rights activists. As people’s concerns lower, they’re willing to tolerate much more invasive access to data because they only see the incentives and they don’t see the consequences. This is rational. We tend to operate on local, not meta levels in everyday life. The role of the civil rights activist is to go meta and deal with first point #2 – can any rational abuse of data be expected? Their role is to look at the larger picture and protect people from engaging in localized decisions that might harm the larger picture.
There are usually two approaches that said activists take:
1) Try to educate the masses.
2) Try to change XYZ from happening through any means possible.
Education is nice and it works locally through social networks, but i genuinely do not believe that privacy education (which usually works by inserting fears) will overcome the incentives. Furthermore, the incentives will be increased and living in a culture of fear sucks; even Americans have started to ignore the bloody terrorist warning color markers. Of course, a moment of super-fear and then its slow decline to disregard always puts people on greater guard than originally. But i wouldn’t want the education camp to educate by creating situations that instigated super-fear. Leave that to governments.
I should clarify… i’m not entirely opposed to education; i just don’t believe that it’s the solution. Let’s keep it in mind as the social norms part of Lessig’s 4 point regulation scheme – valuable as a contributor, but not effective as the sole approach.
Then there’s the systemic changes. Going with Lessig, there are three types of systemic changes that can be made – the market, the law and the architecture. Personally, i think that the market is the reason that things are being moved in this direction and thus, i think that they’re a bit impossible to swing, so i believe that more effective approaches can be made on the law and the architecture side. Architecture is a bit more obvious, except that it is inherently tied into the market (or government). That kinda leaves law. And law continued to become more fubared. One excuse is that it is in bed with the market. Another excuse is that it’s fending off the paranoids.
The reality, i believe, ties into how law negotiates social norms. I wish i remember the details, but i remember learning once that social practices are often enough to affirm laws. In other words, if a law and the social practices are primarily in cahoots, it is unlikely that the law will change. It is only when there are significant differences that change is likely to occur. In other words, if people are tolerant of invasive practices, why regulate against them?
This is where i start to believe in the education branch of the civil rights movement. The key shouldn’t be to make people see the world differently, but stall them enough that they don’t assimilate to problematic breaches of privacy so that laws can be changed. Of course, i don’t know how to do this and thus, i suspect that it will take extreme conditions of masses feeling vulnerable to upset the law structure. (It is for this reason that Europe is much slower about opening up privacy… they remember WWII.)
The opportunity for designers and why i’m involved
Bring this back to me. From my perspective, a lot of the architectural decisions that induce vulnerability emerge from naivety, not poor intention. I genuinely believe that many creators really meant to do the right thing. The problem is that their construction of how to do the right thing is about privacy, not vulnerability. They only imagine how to address the data, not how to address people’s relationship with the data. The approaches are fundamentally about creating control or transparency. I’ve never found anyone who really thought through the implications of having all of the data in the first place. And most designers don’t realize the cultural norms that they insert into a system. Also, control is really really hard when people are trying to manage an external representation of their information. These systems insert new architectures: persistence, searchability, lurkers, etc. Control doesn’t work when people don’t know how to operate the controls. As for transparency, i am horrified by most people’s reading of Brin. Universal transparency will only heighten vulnerability, particularly that on a local level. It is not a solution for most of the situations that i’m concerned with.
So, as i see it, i have two roles as an activist on this issue:
– Educate people to conceptualize vulnerability and go through the exercise of thinking about who a design might affect, how, and why. Encourage them to minimize vulnerability in their design, not simply protect privacy.
– Work directly in domains that are all about vulnerability management and dive deep into the design issues with a conscientious perspective trying to maximize the protections afforded to users.
Dear me that was a rant…