Steve Jobs introduces the iPod. (Reuters)On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs convened a group of tech reporters and Apple fans at the company's Cupertino headquarters to announce a new product: the iPod. It was a launch that would lead the company, six years later, to drop the "Computer" from "Apple Computer." It was a launch that would change "the destiny of Apple." It was a launch that would, as one slightly melodramatic analyst puts it, "reshape society completely."
But on October 23, 2001, if you didn't happen to be Steve Jobs, you might not have seen the iPod's society-reshaping potential. You might have seen the iPod, instead, for the other thing it was: just another MP3 player. On the day of its release—when the iPod was simply a consumer electronics product in search of its consumers—reactions to it were decidedly ... mixed. ("Apple's iPod spurs mixed reactions," reads a CNET summary of the launch.) The iPod, after all, wasn't the first portable jukebox. Its software and FireWire ports made it available, in its first iteration, only to Macintosh users. (At the time, only about 7 million people owned iPod-compatible Macs.) The iPod, from that perspective, was a small step forward, not a leap. And, at $399, it was an expensive little step.
"I question the company's ability to sell into a tight consumer market right now at the iPod's current price," one analyst put it. "It's a nice feature for Macintosh users,'' another noted. ''But to the rest of the Windows world, it doesn't make any difference.'' Plus: "Clearly Apple is following Sony's lead by integrating consumer electronics devices into its marketing strategy, but Apple lacks the richness of Sony's product offering." As David Pogue summed it up: "'Breakthrough digital device' might be pushing it."
Apple fans were similarly unimpressed. According to a MacRumors discussion of the iPod as it was being announced:
Great just what the world needs, another freaking MP3 player. Go Steve! Where's the Newton?!
And:
Sounds very revolutionary to me.
hey - heres an idea Apple - rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive and crap server line up? or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm?
And:
I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!
And:
$400 for an Mp3 Player!
I'd call it the Cube 2.0 as it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time...and it's not really functional.
Uuhh Steve, can I have a PDA now?
Of course, not everyone was unconvinced. As one MacRumors poster put it:
Come on everyone, y'all are saying it sucks before you have even held it in your hand. I mean 5GB in a little tiny thing like that, it's amazing. I don't see anyone else making something like that. Do you?
Another person who saw the potential of Apple's portable computer? Bill Gates. At a dinner shortly after the iPod's launch, the journalist Steven Levy handed Microsoft's then-CEO one of the new Apple devices. Gates studied the machine, played with it, scrolled its wheel, pushed its buttons. His conclusion? "It looks like a great product." Via @pourmecoffee
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Scientists Finally Understand Why We Need Sleep, And It’s Because Of Our Dirty Minds
No, not the board game, that's a different thing entirely.
Humans need sleep; everybody knows that without it, we get cranky, a bit loopy, and then we die. Unfortunately, science has been a little iffy about it; though we understood the negative effects associated with lack of sleep, no one really knew why those things happened. Now, we’re finally getting some insight into what sleep does for our bodies.
For the first time ever, scientists at the University of Rochester have found one of the reasonsour brain needs sleep to survive. Turns out, when we sleep, our brain takes that time to clean out the build-up of brain junk we accumulate during our waking hours. Sleep is pretty much necessary for our body’s mental street-cleaners to come out and do their work.
When cells do their daily cell-type work, they produce waste product. The rest of the body has this waste cleared out by the lymphatic system, but the brain is disconnected from that, so it needs another way to wipe out the waste. The brain has it’s own garbage men, carried on the waves of cerebrospinal fluid, who surf the leftovers straight down to your liver for elimination. As it turns out, the brain’s garbage men move twice as fast when you’re sleeping, because your neurons shrink by half, making the fluid channels wider.
“This study shows that the brain has different functional states when asleep and when awake,”said U of R researcher Maiken Nedergaard. “In fact, the restorative nature of sleep appears to be the result of the active clearance of the by-products of neural activity that accumulate during wakefulness.”
So get lots of rest, or else your brain’s spinal-fluid surfing street cleaners can’t get their gig done right.
We're not sure how to break this to you. So we'll just say it: People in China go to Ikeajust to hang out. And sleep on the beds.
When dealing with the most extreme and bizarre practices of foreign cultures, it's often best not to judge. Grotesquely stretching women's necks with a series of metal rings? Outsiders wouldn't understand. Setting old people adrift on ice floes to die? It's just their way. Chinese people using the Beijing Ikea like it's some theme park, spending hours and hours there hanging out like common homeless people, but ostensibly for pleasure? It's not something we could or would desire to understand, no. Nevertheless, the LAT reports:
"It's the only big store in Beijing where a security guard doesn't stop you fromtaking a picture," said Jing Bo, 30, who was looking for promising backdrops for a photograph of his girlfriend.
SEXPAND
Sure, it's tempting to believe that our friends in the Far East have already fast-forwarded directly into our dystopian nightmare future in which soulless big box stores are offered to a zombie-like populace like a fast food menu to replace any dangerous, free-thinking "culture." But who are we to judge?
Imagining the possibilities here is one of the reasons Bai Yalin drove an hour and a half from her apartment to spend a day at the store with her 7-year-old son and two teenage nieces. There are few other indoor spaces, she said, where she can entertain the children free on an oppressive summer afternoon.
Bai mapped out a five-hour outing. First, they had hot dogs and soft ice cream cones at noon. Then they enjoyed a long rest lounging on the beds. Bai kicked off her sandals and sprawled out on a Tromso bunk bed. The 36-year-old homemaker made herself comfortable and even answered passing shoppers' questions about the quality of the mattress.
Friday, October 18, 2013
Study: Almost Half of Public School Students Are Now Low-Income
A new study reminds us that poverty is the giant backpack dragging down American students.
In America, what you earn depends largely on your success in school. Unfortunately, your success in school depends largely on what your parents earn. It's an intergenerational Catch 22 that's at the heart of modern poverty.
Keep that in mind while looking at the monstrously depressing map up above, which comes courtesy of a new report by the Southern Education Foundation. In 2011, there were 17 states where at least half of all public school students came from low-income families, up from just four in 2000. Across the whole country, 48 percent of kids qualified as low income, up from 38 percent a decade earlier.
To be crystal clear, the researchers were not analyzing poverty rates per se. Rather, they tracked at the percentage of children in each state who received free or reduced school lunches, which are only available to students whose families earn below 185 percent of the poverty line. For a family of four, that amounted to about $41,000 in 2011—a figure that might feel dire in New York City, but less so in New Mexico. In the end, we are talking about families poor enough to get for some amount of federal food help.
More troubling than the strict number of low-income students, however, was the long-term trend. As I noted up above, the number of states handing out cheap and free meals to more than half their students quadrupled in ten years, a point that this Washington Post illustration hammers home vividly. American public school students are becoming poorer.
The reasons why are both complicated and familiar. In an interview with the Post, one of the study's authors pointed to the "2008 recession, immigration and a high birthrate among low-income families," as factors. The changes were happening before the economy collapsed, but the bust exacerbated them.
I think there are a few quick points to take away from these numbers.
First, whenever you hear about "America's failing school," remember these maps. Poverty—or in many cases, near poverty—is the 50 pound backpack dragging down U.S. students.
Second, policy makers and pundits often get worked up about our mediocre performances on international standardized tests. But the reality is that there are vast variations between our students, who are divided by geography and socio-economic class in ways quite unlike children in countries such as Japan or Finland. If schools are still, in a sense, factories, then Massachusetts districts get much better raw material to work with than Texas districts. Suburbs get a leg up on cities. And their results often reflect it. Trying to capture our vast range of educational outcomes in a single ranking misses those nuances.
And finally, the worst thing about these numbers may be that they're a glimpse of the future. Like I said up above, students from low-income families tend to end up parents of low-income families. And on it goes.
Monday, October 14, 2013
How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America
The 14th Amendment, when combined with the War on Crime, has paradoxically disenfranchised vast swaths of the population and given the rural, white areas surrounding the prisons unforeseen political power.
Lucy Nicholson/ReutersWhat has it really cost the United States to build the world’s most massive prison system?
To answer this question, some point to the nearly two million people who are now locked up in an American prison—overwhelmingly this nation’s poorest, most mentally ill, and least-educated citizens—and ponder the moral costs.Others have pointed to the enormous expense of having more than seven million Americans under some form of correctional supervision and argued that the system is not economically sustainable. Still others highlight the high price that our nation’s already most-fragile communities, in particular, have paid for the rise of such an enormous carceral state. A few have also asked Americans to consider what it means for the future of our society that our system of punishment is so deeply racialized.
With so many powerful arguments being made against our current criminal justice system, why then does it persist? Why haven’t the American people, particularly those who are most negatively affected by this most unsettling and unsavory state of affairs, undone the policies that have led us here? The answer, in part, stems from the fact that locking up unprecedented numbers of citizens over the last forty years has itself made the prison system highly resistant to reform through the democratic process. To an extent that few Americans have yet appreciated, record rates of incarceration have, in fact, undermined our American democracy, both by impacting who gets to vote and how votes are counted.
The unsettling story of how this came to be actually begins in 1865, when the abolition of slavery led to bitter constitutional battles over who would and would not be included in our polity. To fully understand it, though, we must look more closely than we yet have at the year 1965, a century later—a moment when, on the one hand, politicians were pressured into opening the franchise by passing the most comprehensive Voting Rights Act to date, but on the other hand, were also beginning a devastatingly ambitious War on Crime.
From Voting Rights to the War on Crime
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the federal government a number of meaningful tools with which it could monitor state elections and make sure that states with a particularly grim history of discriminatory voting practices would make no voting policy without its approval. The act had been intended to combat the intimidation and legal maneuvers—such as passage of poll taxes, literacy requirements, and so-called “Grandfather clauses”— that had left only 5 percent of black Americans, by the 1940s, able to vote, despite passage of the 14th and 15th amendments after the Civil War.
But the very same year that Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he also signed another Act into law: the Law Enforcement Administration Act (LEAA), a piece of legislation that, well before crime rates across America hit record highs, created the bureaucracy and provided the funding that would enable a historically and internationally unparalleled war on crime.
So, at the very same moment that the American Civil Rights Movement had succeeded in newly empowering African Americans in the political sphere by securing passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America’s white politicians decided to begin a massive new war on crime that would eventually undercut myriad gains of the Civil Rights Movement—particularly those promised by the Voting Rights Act itself.
From the War on Crime to Mass Incarceration
Thanks to LEAA and America’s post-1965 commitment to the War on Crime, and more specifically, thanks to the dramatic escalation of policing in cities across the nation as well as the legal changes wrought by an ever-intensifying War on Drugs, between 1970 and 2010 more people ended up in prison in this country than anywhere else in the world. At no other point in this nation’s recorded past had the economic, social, and political institutions of a country become so bound up with the practice of punishment.
By the year 2007, 1 in every 31 U.S. residents lived under some form of correctional supervision. By 2010, more than 7.3 million Americans had become entangled in the criminal justice system and 2 million of them were actually locked up in state and federal prisons. By 2011, 39,709 people in Louisiana alone were living behind bars and 71,579 were either in jail, on probation, or on parole. And this was by no means a “southern” phenomenon. In Pennsylvania, 51,638 people were actually locked behind bars in 2011 and a full 346,268 lived under some form of correctional control by that year.
The nation’s decision to embark on a massive War on Crime in the mid-1960s has had a profound impact on the way that American history evolved over the course of the later 20th and into the 21st centuries. As we now know from countless studies, such staggering rates of incarceration have proven bothsocially devastating and economically destructive for wide swaths of this country—particularly those areas of America inhabited by people of color. This nation’s incarceration rate was hardly color blind. Eventually one in nine young black men were locked up in America and, by 2010, black women and girls too were being locked up at a record rate.
Diluting our Democracy
So how did this overwhelmingly racialized mass incarceration end up mattering to our very democracy? How is it that this act of locking up so many Americans, particularly Americans of color, itself distorted our political process and made it almost impossible for those most affected by mass incarceration to eliminate the policies that have undergirded it at the ballot box? The answer lies back in the 1870s and in a little-known caveat to the 14th Amendment.
Ratifying the 14th Amendment was one of Congress’s first efforts to broaden the franchise after the Civil War. A key worry among northern politicians, however, was that since white southerners could no longer rely on the notorious “three-fifths” rule to pad their own political power, they would now try to inflate their census population for the purposes of representation by counting African Americans as citizens while denying them to access the ballot.
So, to prevent any power grab on the part of ex-Confederates, Congress decided to add so-called Section 2 to the 14th Amendment. Firstly it stipulated that any state that “denied” the vote “to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States” would have its representation downsized in proportion to the number of individuals being disenfranchised. Secondly, Section 2 allowed for the disenfranchisement of otherwise eligible citizens—without affecting representation—if they had participated “in rebellion, or other crime.” The idea here was to keep those who had committed crimes against the Union and those who might still be in rebellion against the Union from wielding political power in the wake of the Civil War.
This latter provision of Section 2, however, proved damaging to black freedom—political and otherwise. Almost overnight, white southerners began policing African Americans with new zeal and charging them with “crimes” that had never before been on the books. Within a decade of the Civil War, thousands of African Americans found themselves leased out and locked up on prison plantations and in penitentiaries.
Southern whites, of course, profited from these new laws politically as well as economically. By making so many blacks into convicts, whites could deny them the right to vote under Section 2 without undermining their state’s census population for the purposes of political representation. And, because of another clause of another Amendment, the 13th, which allowed the continuation of slavery for those who had committed a crime, these same white southerners were able to force thousands of newly imprisoned black southerners to work for free under the convict lease system.
Fast-forward 100 years when, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, another War on Crime began that also, almost overnight, led to the mass imprisonment of this nation’s African American citizens.
In 1974, as the numbers of imprisoned Americans was rising precipitously and when states once again began to disfranchise individuals with criminal convictions, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked in a landmark case, Richardson v. Ramirez, to rule explicitly on the issue of whether it was constitutional under the 14th Amendment to disfranchise those serving, or who have served, time in prison. The court did the same thing that many southern states did after the Civil War—it interpreted Section A of the 14th amendment very, very differently than it was intended to be interpreted. It, too, decided that disenfranchisement would be permitted when a citizen was convicted of any crime, without regard to whether such crimes might be thought of as ideologically analogous to rebellion or were more likely to affect African Americans than others.
Notably, Justice Thurgood Marshall dissented vigorously in this case. The purpose of Section 2, he argued, was clearly to enfranchise, not disenfranchise, former slaves and their descendants. Marshall’s fellow members of the bench, though, felt that their decision would not have any discriminatory effect because the nation already had the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to handle this issue.
And yet, the negative impact of Richardson v. Ramirez on African American voting was vast and immediate. By the year 2000, 1.8 million African Americans had been barred from the polls because so many felon disfranchisement laws had been passed in states across the country after 1974. Not only were their votes not counted in that year’s hotly contested presidential election, but by the next presidential election a full ten states, according to The Sentencing Project, had "African American disenfranchisement rates above 15%," which clearly affected the outcome of that contest as well.
By 2006, 48 out of 50 states had passed disfranchisement laws and, with more than 47 million Americans (1/4 of the adult population) having criminal records by that year, the nation’s political process had been fundamentally altered. By 2011, 23.3% of African Americans in Florida, 18.3% of the black population of Wyoming, and 20.4% of African Americans in Virginia were barred from the ballot.
According to sociologists Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, not only did African Americans pay a high price for the disfranchisement policies that accompanied the nation’s War on Crime, but so did liberal voters in general. According to theirresearch, such policies “affected the outcome of seven U.S. Senate races from 1970 to 1998 . . . [and] in each case the Democratic candidate would have won rather than the Republican victor” and these outcomes likely “prevented Democratic control of the Senate from 1986 to 2000” as well.
Distorting our Democracy
Disfranchising thousands of voters is only part of the story of how mass incarceration has distorted American democracy. Today, just as it did more than a hundred years earlier, the way the Census calculates resident population also plays a subtle but significant role. As ex-Confederates knew well, prisoners would be counted as residents of a given county, even if they could not themselves vote: High numbers of prisoners could easily translate to greater political power for those who put them behind bars.
With the advent of mass incarceration, and as the number of people imprisoned not only rose dramatically, but also began moving urbanites of color into overwhelmingly white rural counties that housed prisons, the political process was again distorted. In short, thanks to this process that we now call “prison- gerrymandering,” overwhelmingly white and Republican areas of the United States that built prisons as the War on Crime escalated got more political power, whereas areas of country where policing was particularly concentrated and aggressive, areas in which levels of incarceration were, as a result, staggering, lost political power.
Consider research by the Prison Policy Initiative showing how voters across the country gain political power from housing a penal facility. In Powhatan County,Virginia 41% of the 5th Board of Supervisors District that was drawn after the 2000 Census were actually people in prison and in both the First and Third Supervisory Districts of Nottoway County, approximately ¼ of their population comes from large prisons within the county. In the case of Southampton County, such prison-based gerrymandering means that votes of those citizens who live there are worth almost more than twice as much as votes cast in other districts that have the required number of actual residents.
In Michigan as well, mass incarceration has meant distorted democracy. A full four state senate districts drawn after the 2000 Census (17, 19, 33 and 37), and a full five house districts (65, 70, 92, 107 and 110) meet federal minimum population requirements only because they claim prisoners as constituents. Similarly in Pennsylvania, no fewer than eight state legislative districts would comply with the federal "one person, one vote" civil rights standard if non-voting state and federal prisoners in those districts were not counted as district residents.
Why We Should Care
As Americans go to the polls this November to vote on criminal justice issues that directly affect our lives—ranging from proposals to decriminalize marijuana, to roll back three strikes laws, to fund more prison construction—the massive carceral state that we are trying to shape at the ballot box has already distorted our democracy. Americans’ power to even rethink, let alone undo, the policies and practices that have led to mass incarceration via the franchise has been severely compromised—in no small part due to the fact that the parties that benefitted the most from the rise of this enormous carceral state are now empowered, seemingly in perpetuity, by its sheer size and scope.
There are, of course, other ways to dismantle the carceral state. Indeed, history shows us that we ended the brutal convict leasing system of the Post-Civil War era not by going to the polls but by grassroots and legal activism. Nevertheless, we should all be concerned about the ways mass incarceration has eroded our democracy. Even if we don’t care about the record rate of imprisonment in this country—despite its myriad ugly consequences, its unsustainable cost, and its particularly devastating fallout on communities of color—when the principle of “one person, one vote” no longer has real meaning in a society, and when political power is no longer attained via its people but rather through a manipulation of their laws, we must all question the future of our nation
Monday, October 7, 2013
What the U.S. Government Has to Do With Your Popcorn Shrimp
The shutdown again offers a window into the workings of dry government agencies: 90 percent of America's seafood imports are now going uninspected.
Flickr/jeffreywIt’s day four of the US government shutdown and imported food Americans are eating is passing through with little of the inspection it’s normally given.
Thanks to the shutdown, food safety inspectors at the US Food and Drug Administration, which monitors 80% of the US’s food supply, are on furlough until the budget gets passed, as Food Safety News reports.
That means the FDA isn’t carrying out some of its most critical responsibilities. First is the FDA’s oversight of food imports. The furlough means more than 90% of the foreign seafood Americans eat is coming through unchecked, as well as half the fruit and one-fifth of the vegetables.
One of the big ways the FDA protects consumers is by blocking shipments from companies with a history of tainted foods, monitoring them through what it calls ”red alerts.” These include categories like filthiness (meaning excrement),fruits covered in pesticides, drug-doped seafood, dairy products with melamine, dietary supplements that might have mad cow disease, e. coli-containing seafood and candy laced with lead.
The FDA blocks shipments from tens of thousands such violators. Now, however, there’s no one to stop those foods from finding their way onto American plates.
Take shrimp for example. Americans now eat 4.2 pounds (1.9 kg) a year, way more than any other type of seafood. Some 90% of that is imported, much of it from Thailand, Indonesia, India and Bangladesh:
"Exploitative Labor Practices in the Global Shrimp Industry," Accenture
So consistently has shrimp imported from those four countries arrived alreadydecomposed, covered in filth or teeming with salmonella, that FDA flags all shipments as “red alerts” (companies are exempted only after demonstrating health standard compliance).
That means Americans might unknowingly be chowing down on red-alert shrimp. If that were to cause a nationwide outbreak of, say, salmonella, the FDA would normally step in to prevent people from eating more.
Not now. Though the FDA says it will continue to act on “high-risk recalls” (pdf), Caroline Smith DeWaal, the food safety director of a non-profit group called the Center for Science in the Public Interest, doubts that’s sufficient.
“I don’t have confidence that they have the capacity to recognize an emergency and respond to it,” DeWaal told the Christian Science Monitor.
Note that county health authorities are still managing local problems, such as thesalmonella outbreak that’s killed one person in Kentucky so far.
But county officials can’t do much when the outbreak comes from shipped food, as opposed to shoddy hygiene. The food-related outbreaks cross borders too, such as the outbreak of a rare strain of Hepatitis A that sickened 162 people in 10 states across the US throughout the summer. The FDA traced the strain to a Townsend Farms Organic Antioxidant Blend sold at Costco, prompting a recall. After the FDA isolated the culprit, berries imported from Turkey, it placed the responsible company on red alert .
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