Post Civil Rights Reflections

Occasionally I'll meet a person who went to Catholic school or otherwise had strictly religious parents and who now feels permanently harmed by the whole experience. They talk about being fearful of the nuns commands or of attending all manner of religious services and performing associated rituals, giving the impression that they've never been the same. And they now reject the whole experience and call it a scar on their past. A similar set of cultural baggage is associated with Jewish motherhood; certain people (mostly Jewish women) complain of the guilt or other emotional trauma associated with having a Jewish mother.

Copyright: Educational versus Entertainment Content

Since the introduction and widespread use of digital media, many people have come to believe that copyright law needs to be amended. And while it may not be likely to happen, there are some things worth considering if the laws were updated. For example, it might be helpful to distinguish between types of content to balance commercial interest versus the greater good. Balancing the interests of the private sector (businesses) and the public good has after all engaged government since the Progressive Era of the early 20th century.

With regard to copyrighting publications in the academic world, it would help if the law at some point in the past had distinguished between material which is educational and that which is of entertainment value; this might have avoided much of what is called the Open Access (OA) movement. OA has been an effort by the scientific and research community to make as widely available as possible the publications resulting from research conducted at universities, laboratories and other not-for-profit facilities and which has very little commercial appeal outside of the university libraries which purchase it.

If the law had treated educational content more fairly it would allow for wider distribution and copying due to the general belief that education is a public good whether it takes place in a school or formal institution or on one's own. If material that is designed to inform rather than entertain was easily available and reusable, separate from (for example) feature films or popular music, we wouldn't have what Jim Neal of Columbia University called civil disobedience in copyright violations that take place today at universities among faculty and graduate students.

It is not helpful to subject use of an article on the evolution of reptile locomotion to the same restrictions as the use of a popular music release or a feature length Hollywood production.

This is one fairly easy call that copyright law amendment could address: is the work primarily educational or research in nature or is it purely entertainment. Undoubtedly there would be some debate over certain creative works, but recognizing the distinction would be a good framework for debate. Disputes could perhaps begin with the establishment of whether the work is mostly factual or mostly artistic. Again, a Beatles single is a creative, artistic work while an article detailing the morphology of bone marrow cancer cells is almost entirely factual.

[see my earlier post on other alternatives to rights in the entertainment realm]

The Alvin Award

After Larry Bird retired from basketball in 1992, I loudly declared to anyone who would listen, "The NBA will never name another white man its Most Valuable Player."

And boy was I wrong.

Chowder Head

I was in the staff cafeteria the other day and being that it was Friday, the soup was clam chowder. I normally don't like the soup there but I look forward to Fridays and clam chowder.

It reminded me of an incident when I was a young boy. It's really just a snippet of a memory but worth repeating for posterity.

A kid in our neighborhood--a bit older than me--used the term, "chowder head' to insult another kid. I suppose he was just repeating something he heard on a cartoon or some other television content. I don't remember much else except that at the time I thought it was the funniest thing I'd heard. You know how kids are: we get to giggling over something and just can't stop. I remember myself being doubled over in laughter for a long time

I repeated the phrase over and over and called as many people chowder head as I could get away with over the next day or two. Probably made an ass of myself but as I recall it sure was fun.

Consumer Behavior and Psychology

I heard a segment on the news this morning which talked about (among other things) why and when humans give charitably. It is worth noting that we tend to tip better when the waiter gives us a piece of candy along with our bill in a restaurant. Also mentioned were the rates of charitable giving when we receive unsolicited gifts such as return address labels with our name and address printed on them, or a small gift from Hare-Krishna members in the airport.

It reminds me of things I've heard and read about certain marketing practices designed to get a person to spend more, for example product display tricks such as putting the same product in two or three different size containers and pricing them in such a way as to influence which size we purchase.

I would like to believe that this inside information and the details of marketing ploys would one day have  some monetary value to me but that's not necessarily true. Despite knowing how retailers and other corporations try to change my purchasing behavior:

• It is unlikely that I will take this information and profit from it by purchasing more wisely
• Knowing the tricks of marketing or philanthropic organizations does not necessarily mean that I will anticipate and counter these devices
• Nor do I harbor any idea that if I did outwit them, that I will get rich because of it

And most importantly, it goes without saying that even if I did save money--even a lot of it--this way, I wouldn't necessarily be any happier than I am right now.

Adjustable Taxes on Investment Income and Sales

When we in the democratic capitalist countries want to encourage or discourage certain behaviors we use either taxes or subsidies to influence peoples' choices. Smoking is one example, another is borrowing money to purchase a home. The former is discouraged by being taxed, the latter is encouraged by means of a tax break or subsidy.

But we Americans are going to have to revise our tax code if we intend to stave off fiscal insolvency in the near future. Below is an idea that may take some revision but seems like it would be a step in the right direction.

Self Driving Cars

Whether called "driverless cars" or "robo-cars" the, "auto" mobiles are coming. And although like all new technologies they will bring with them a new set of yet unknown problems, they are being developed  to solve an existing set of problems most of us would like to eliminate.

There has been a lot written about robotic cars and the reader can spend an afternoon reading about the success of, for example the Google car.

While a completely machine-driven vehicle is not on the market today, there are several developments in recent years where sensors and microprocessors already adjust the operation of a vehicle without the driver knowing about it. Anti-lock brakes is one example, as is the parking-assist feature that uses a rear-bumper sensor and other automation technologies.

Many say that once the market is saturated with autonomous vehicles, there will be a reduction in personal ownership of cars in favor of hiring them on demand. After all, a fleet of robot vehicles could easily contain the technology to drive themselves to a person's home when he calls for one via computer. After taking the passenger to the directed location, the vehicle would leave the scene and park itself (perhaps with other idle vehicles) so as to take up as little surface street/lot area as possible.

The system of robots for hire would have a number of ramifications, many of which no doubt I have not thought of yet. But one of them would be to ultimately reduce the competitive nature of car ownership that seems to have dominated the auto culture since the 1950s.

The commodification of cars as suggested by automated cars-for-hire has implications for the physical care and condition that private ownership has in the past addressed. For example, what happens when a renter of these auto-mobiles on demand uses one and leaves trash strewn about the interior or otherwise stains and leaves the interior dirty? The anonymity of the usage of this kind of automobile means that people might be more likely to leave their empties or not clean up after themselves like they would in a public place such as a  bus or subway car staffed by the mass transit operator.

For this reason it may be that driverless cars that we don't own but rather hire on demand will have to look a lot different from the comfortable compartments we know today. For example, they will likely  not have cloth seats but rather hard plastic seats and floors in much the same way that many subway and bus systems.

Like the technological change to sports officiating (see other post) the new driverless cars are certainly feasible within a short time but the test will be whether the public and government (law enforcement, etc.) will accept them. I'm afraid that a lot of people are emotionally attached to owning their own car, one with comfortable cloth seats and carpets and that are bigger, faster and shinier than their neighbors'. This may be the primary obstacle to adoption.

The Boundary Between Man and Machine

Noted futurist, Ray Kurzweil has said that human immortality is probably less than 20 years away. Actually, I didn't hear him say this or even read his exact words. But I read the newspaper headline and that's more than most people do.

I strongly suspect that Kurzweil is predicting the marriage of biomedicine and computer technology so that it will be possible to revive failed anatomical systems (e.g. respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive) and/or replace human organs beyond those that are currently possible (e.g. heart, kidney, lungs). And that therefore it is possible to keep an individual alive indefinitely. Or at least this is what immortality will look like in the beginning.

Some might argue that (if my assumptions are correct) replacing so many parts means that the resulting individual can hardly be considered the same person. I suppose the argument might be made that if I have a 40 year old car and over its life I have replaced the engine, front and rear axles, suspension, interior and enough other components that it really is a misnomer to say I have the same car today that I had all these years.

But no matter, I think that we humans will one day soon have components implanted in our bodies that are intelligent and that are custom designed to respond to circumstances enough so that instead of wearing out over the years, they improve with time. We already have artificial joints and organs so this is not that far off. The big difference is that we will now move into supplementing or replacing our thinking and memory functions in addition to our motor skills, circulation or respiration.This may one day make humans and machines virtually indistinguishable. Or at least humans and synthetic organisms and/or biological parts.

Furthermore on boundary blurring . . .

It seems that boundaries are disappearing everywhere. There is a border between the U.S. and Canada, but aside from a different form of currency, you wouldn't know you're in another country were you to walk across it. I would say the same thing about the boundary between Texas and Mexico; there is very little noticeable difference on either side.

In media, the boundary between the program and the advertisement has been eroding for years. Product placement has been growing in Hollywood film and television programming so that it is not clearly defined which part of the broadcast is paid for by the sponsor and which is part of the creative work.

The Effectiveness of Deficit or Stimulus Spending

Conventional wisdom holds that an industrialized nation facing an economic slide should spend government funds to get money into the hands of those who can spend it on goods and services. This in turn puts other workers back on the payroll and creates a virtuous cycle. This idea is attributed to John Maynard Keynes, although it was undoubtedly bandied about by earlier theorists (just as the idea of evolutionary biology was considered by scientists earlier than Charles Darwin).

Deficit spending worked well in the 1930s but it was actually wartime production (financed by deficit) that ended the Great Depression more than domestic works projects. But if the economic stimulus helped during that period, unfortunately the effectiveness of this kind of measure has been diluted in subsequent recessions. It was used in the early 1980s, the early 1990s and the early 2000s with dubious success. The United States pulled out of each of those recessions but the degree to which we can attribute the recovery to deficit spending is questionable. 

However having said that, I must admit that it is one of very few tools available to government to get us out of the current predicament. The others are so ludicrous that I mention them only to demonstrated the inevitability of the Keynesian approach: printing money and soaking the rich.

The former would only exchange one problem for another. The second is also a non-starter since the rich run our country. I should point out that president Obama advocates increasing taxes on the wealthy and although I agree with his position, the increased income for the Treasury wouldn’t come close to solving our fiscal deficit.

New Business Model

Much of my professional life over the past 5 years has been in studying the changes to the way that scholarly publishers do business and collect revenue. I don't have time to go into detail now, but will only say that it is inevitable that the service which academic journals provide will soon be paid for by a different group than has done so in the past. We call it a "new business model," and it basically means that author-scientists benefit more from these journals than reader-scientists and that therefore the costs will shift from library subscribers to manuscript submission or publication fees.

I can't help but think about a new business model that the American political establishment chooses to ignore. It goes like this: every American president, member of Congress and most other elected officials see one of their primary duties as the creation of jobs or at least of economic conditions that favor increased production and growth which would favor a greater number of employment opportunities. But what this ignores is that increased economic production and growth necessarily means greater consumption but nobody will say this out loud.

The reason is that consumption, although used as an economic term, has negative connotations. Consumerism is bad, we've learned in the past few decades both because it generally means an increase in consumption of natural resources or in a psycho-social degradation of the society we became so proud of in the mid-20th century. Producing more goods and services means that more of the earth will be plowed, mined, resurfaced or paved and that more automobiles, airplanes and ships will burn more fossil fuels and deposit more residue in our air and oceans ultimately affecting the ability of our earth to sustain us 7 billion.

But nobody wants to say that.

The old business model has our elected officials falling all over themselves to get a certain industry or corporation to move operations to the home jurisdiction. Some years ago the state of Maryland extended all sorts of perks and incentives to  the Marriott Corporation to convince them to keep their headquarters in Montgomery County rather than moving across the Potomac river to Fairfax, Virginia.

This kind of thing happens everywhere and although most of us citizens generally object to the notion of giving tax breaks or building roads and infrastructure purely for these mammoth corporations, we as workers generally like it when it happens specifically to us. We rail against corrupt politicians who will only vote on a sensible piece of legislation if it contains a provision for some government spending or economic development in his or her legislative district. But if we happen to live in that district--and we need a job--we tend to soften our opposition.

In order to reverse the degradation of our natural resources, we have not to prohibit certain consumer behaviors or undertake a concerted and long-term campaign of public service announcements trying to change behavior. Rather we need to price a livable earth with all its components (clean air and water or undisturbed forests, for example) so that any economic products that detract from those components have to bear the cost. Therefore the price of most everything would go up and we would consume less. Our earth would be more livable, but our personal "standards of living" (as defined narrowly in popular culture) would decline.

Such a new business model is inevitable if we want to avoid a biological catastrophe.

But nobody wants to say that.

Except maybe Al Gore.