The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Opinion Pages| Op-Ed Columnist
Cry for Me, Argentina
FEB. 27, 2014
Roger Cohen
USHUAIA, Argentina — A bon mot doing the rounds in post-commodities-boom South America is that Brazil is in the process of becoming Argentina, and Argentina is in the process of becoming Venezuela, and Venezuela is in the process of becoming Zimbabwe. That is a little harsh on Brazil and Venezuela.
Argentina, however, is a perverse case of its own. It is a nation still drugged by that quixotic political concoction called Peronism; engaged in all-out war on reliable economic data; tinkering with its multilevel exchange rate; shut out from global capital markets; trampling on property rights when it wishes; obsessed with a lost little war in the Falklands (Malvinas) more than three decades ago; and persuaded that the cause of all this failure lies with speculative powers seeking to force a proud nation — in the words of its leader — “to eat soup again, but this time with a fork.”
A century ago, Argentina was richer than Sweden, France, Austria and Italy. It was far richer than Japan. It held poor Brazil in contempt. Vast and empty, with the world’s richest top soil in the Pampas, it seemed to the European immigrants who flooded here to have all the potential of the United States (per capita income is now a third or less of the United States level). They did not know that a colonel called Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva (“Evita”) would shape an ethos of singular delusional power.
“Argentina is a unique case of a country that has completed the transition to underdevelopment,” said Javier Corrales, a political scientist at Amherst College.
In psychological terms — and Buenos Aires is packed with folks on couches pouring out their anguish to psychotherapists — Argentina is the child among nations that never grew up. Responsibility was not its thing. Why should it be? There was so much to be plundered, such riches in grain and livestock, that solid institutions and the rule of law — let alone a functioning tax system — seemed a waste of time.
Immigrants camped here with foreign passports rather than go through the nation-forming absorption that characterize Brazil or the United States. Argentina was far away at the bottom of the world, a beckoning fertile land mass distant enough from power centers to live its own peripheral fantasies or drown its sorrow in what is probably the world’s saddest (and most haunting) dance. Then, to give expression to its uniqueness, Argentina invented its own political philosophy: a strange mishmash of nationalism, romanticism, fascism, socialism, backwardness, progressiveness, militarism, eroticism, fantasy, musical, mournfulness, irresponsibility and repression. The name it gave all this was Peronism. It has proved impossible to shake.
Perón, who discovered the political uplift a military officer could derive from forging links with the have-nots of Latin America and distributing cash (a lesson absorbed by Hugo Chávez), was deposed in the first of four postwar coups. The Argentina I covered in the 1980s was just emerging from the trauma of military rule. If I have a single emblematic image of the continent then it is of the uncontrollable sobbing of Argentine women clutching the photographs of beloved children who had been taken from them for “brief questioning” only to vanish. The region’s military juntas turned “disappear” into a transitive verb. It is what they did to deemed enemies — 30,000 of them in Argentina.
Since 1983, Argentina has ceased its military-civilian whiplash, tried some of the perpetrators of human rights crimes and been governed democratically. But for most of that time it has been run by Peronists, most recently Néstor Kirchner and his widow, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (shades of Perón’s widow Isabel), who have rediscovered redistribution after a Peronist flurry in the 1990s with neoliberalism. Economic whiplash is alive and well. So are reckless spending in good times and lawless measures in bad. So, too, are mawkish evocations of Perón and Evita and Isabel: On earth as it is in the heavens.
Cry for me, my name is Argentina and I am too rich for my own good.
Twenty-five years ago I left a country of hyperinflation (5,000 percent in 1989), capital flight, currency instability, heavy-handed state interventionism, dwindling reserves, uncompetitive industry, heavy reliance on commodity exports, reawakening Peronist fantasies and bottom-of-the-world complexes. Today inflation is high rather than hyper. Otherwise, not a whole lot has changed.
Coming ashore at Ushuaia on Argentina’s southern tip, the first thing I saw was a sign saying that the “Malvinas” islands were under illegal occupation by the United Kingdom since 1833. The second was a signpost saying Ireland was 13,199 kilometers away (no mention of Britain). The third was a packet of cookies “made in Ushuaia, the end of the world.” The fourth was a pocket calculator used by a shopkeeper to figure out dollar-peso rates.
Hope is hard to banish from the human heart, but it has to be said that Argentina does its best to do so.
Source: www.nytimes.com
Durísima nota sobre la Argentina y el peronismo en The New York Times
Titulada "Llora por mí, Argentina", el artículo de opinión repasa cómo nuestro país pasó de ser más próspero que Suecia y Francia, hace un siglo, al contexto de hoy; "Está camino a convertirse en Venezuela"
Una nota de opinión del veterano periodista Roger Cohen publicada hoy en el diario estadounidense The New York Times repasa cómo la Argentina pasó de ser un país más próspero que Suecia y Francia, hace un siglo, al contexto de hoy. El artículo carga contra el peronismo y augura que el país "en proceso de convertirse" en Venezuela.
"Brasil está en proceso de ser la Argentina, la Argentina está en proceso de transformarse en Venezuela y Venezuela, en Zimbawe. Es duro para Brasil y Venezuela, pero la Argentina, en cambio, es un caso perverso en sí mismo", arranca el texto, titulado "Llora por mí, Argentina".
Cohen relata la "guerra sin cuartel" con las estadísticas, el "toqueteo" del tipo de cambio, la nula participación en los mercados de capitales del mundo, la "obsesión" por una "pequeña guerra perdida" en Malvinas hace tres décadas y el convencimiento de que la causa de todos los fracasos es "el poder especulativo".
La nota da cuenta de cómo la Argentina era -hace un siglo- más rica que Suecia, Francia, Austria, Italia, Japón. "Vasta y vacía, con las tierras más fértiles del mundo en la pampa, los inmigrantes europeos creían que el país tenía la potencia de Estados Unidos. (Hoy, el ingreso per capita es un tercio o menos que en Estados Unidos). No sabían que un coronel llamado Juan Domingo Perón y su mujer Eva ("Evita") darían forma a un ethos de poder singular".
Cohen cita a un politólogo del Amhert Collegue, Javier Corrales, quien explica que la Argentina "es un caso único de un país que completó la transición al subsedesarrollo".
El periodista, quien escribió la nota desde Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, plantea que -en términos psicológicos- la Argentina es "el niño entre las naciones que nunca crecieron".
"La responsabilidad no fue lo suyo. ¿Por qué habría de serlo? Había tanto para saquear, tanta riqueza en granos y ganado, que instituciones sólidas y leyes -sin mencionar un sistema de impuestos que funcione- parecían una pérdida de tiempo", escribe.
Cohen repasa también el surgimiento del peronismo, una "filosofía política propia, mezcla extraña de nacionalismo, romanticismo, fascismo, socialismo, pasado, futuro, militarismo, erotismo, fantasía, lloriqueo, irresponsabilidad y represión".
La nota menciona a Perón, los desaparecidos, los 80, el neoliberalismo de los 90. Compara la situación de de 1989 con la situación actual. Menciona la inestabilidad cambiaria, el intervencionismo del Estado, las reservas en picada, la industria no competitiva y la dependencia de las commodities. "La inflación, hoy, es alta pero no hiper. Salvo eso, lo demás prácticamente no ha cambiado", lanza.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
POL/GralInt-Cristina, parecida a Menem, Cavallo y De la Rúa
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Jueves 27 de febrero de 2014
Cristina, parecida a Menem, Cavallo y De la Rúa
Por Luis Majul | LA NACION
Twitter: @majulluis
Digan lo que digan los comunicadores oficiales y paraoficiales, éste no es un gobierno de corte progresista. Es más bien la administración del ajuste . Y de uno de los ajustes más ortodoxos e indisimulables, aunque se lo quiera ocultar con retórica populista. No se trata de una afirmación caprichosa. Está sustentada por cifras irrefutables. La mayoría surge de los análisis del Instituto de Pensamientos y Políticas Públicas (IPyPP), que coordinan el diputado Claudio Lozano y Tomás Raffo, dirigentes a quienes no se les puede endilgar deshonestidad intelectual.
Empecemos por una categoría emblemática: el salario promedio real. En diciembre de 2001, el peor momento de la historia argentina reciente, era de 494 pesos. Para fines de 2013, ascendía a 4304 pesos. Pero si se compara una y otra cifra con el aumento de precios durante el mismo período, se concluye que el salario real aumentó apenas un 19%. Es decir: muy por debajo del crecimiento del PBI, que acumuló un 82,4%. Y esto, sin contar la devaluación de hace semanas, de casi un 20%, ni el hecho de que millones de trabajadores y también de jubilados pagan impuesto a las ganancias, como si fueran millonarios.
Pero sigamos con la pobreza y la indigencia, ya que el oficialismo habla de modelo nacional y popular e inclusivo. Si se toman, por ejemplo, los datos del IPyPP de 2012, se comprobará que la tasa de pobreza llegó entonces al 32,1% y no al 6,5, como venía mintiendo el Indec. Y que la tasa de indigencia, para ese mismo año, ascendía a 11,4% y no a 1,7%, como reivindicaban las estadísticas oficiales. En mayo de 2001, en medio del estallido de la convertibilidad, la pobreza era de casi el 36% y la indigencia de 11%. Es decir: nada demasiado distinto de lo que tenemos ahora mismo. Y estos datos muestran, por supuesto, un nivel de deterioro gravísimo, si se los compara con la tasa de pobreza e indigencia que había entre 1995 y 2000. Los registros de los últimos 5 años del siglo XX dan 26,4% de pobreza y 6,7% de indigencia, respectivamente. Es decir, había menos pobres hace 13 años que en el presente.
Completemos el panorama con otro dato clave: la concentración de la riqueza. En 1997, las 200 empresas que más venden en la Argentina representaban el 31,7% del total de la riqueza. Hacia 2012, trepaban a casi el 52%. Entre las primeras 20 hay por lo menos 5 bancos privados de primera línea. Sobre este dato, ayer, el presidente del Banco Ciudad, Rogelio Frigerio, me dijo: "Esto demuestra que éste no es un modelo productivo sino financiero".
¿Cuándo empezó a cambiar este gobierno su sesgo progresista para terminar instrumentando un brutal ajuste sobre la clase media y la clase media baja? Una fecha a tener en cuenta es noviembre de 2005, los días previos a la renuncia de Roberto Lavagna. Antes de irse, el ex ministro le planteó al entonces presidente Kirchner tres medidas concretas para "garantizar el éxito de la política económica" en el tiempo. Una: el aumento paulatino de tarifas de los servicios públicos. Dos: la creación de un fondo anticíclico para usarlo en épocas de vacas flacas. La tercera fue la que más enojó a Kirchner: Lavagna le planteó que el presupuesto iba a sufrir un serio desequilibrio si seguía distribuyendo la obra pública entre sus empresarios amigos. El día en que Lavagna se fue, Kirchner se lo anticipó en exclusiva a un alto directivo del Grupo Clarín. "Poné un zócalo en TN. Le acabo de aceptar la renuncia al ministro de Economía." El ex presidente parecía radiante y satisfecho: gobernaba sobre una caja de miles de millones de pesos y nada hacía prever que 6 o 7 años después, al compás del péndulo que va del populismo berreta al ajuste, la economía se vendría a pique. El otro momento clave fue la intervención del Indec. Pero la movida definitiva que terminó con la poca racionalidad económica que le quedaba al gobierno de Cristina Fernández fue el desplazamiento de Martín Redrado del Banco Central, en 2010. Después de eso, los "agentes económicos" comprendieron que la Presidenta iba a manotear las reservas de acuerdo a su necesidad electoral. Cuando Redrado se fue, éstas ascendían a 48,116 millones de dólares y el dólar apenas pasaba los 4 pesos. Después ya no hubo manera de detener la irracionalidad económica que incluyó, entre otras cosas, emitir dinero en forma creciente para exacerbar el consumo y dar la falsa idea de que somos un país rico.
¿Puede sorprender, en este contexto, la voltereta en el aire que dio el ministro de Economía, Axel Kicillof, sobre la indemnización a Repsol por haber expropiado YPF? Hagamos un poco de memoria: Kirchner alentó su privatización cuando le convenía. Oscar Parrilli fue el vocero parlamentario que defendió la desnacionalización en 1992. Kirchner capturó entonces cientos de millones de dólares cuyo destino final nunca quedó demasiado claro. Pero diez años después Cristina pegó un volantazo que ahuyentó a inversores de todas partes. La amenaza de Kicillof de iniciar a Repsol un juicio por daño ambiental nunca debió tomarse en serio. Como tampoco nadie debería tomar en serio la idea de que existen fuerzas muy poderosas agazapadas y metiendo presión para echar a la Presidenta. En realidad, Kicillof y el resto del Gobierno no están haciendo nada diferente de lo que intentó Domingo Cavallo durante el gobierno de Carlos Menem y, luego, con Fernando de la Rúa. La convertibilidad, en el fondo, también fue populismo de Estado, aunque con una retórica de derecha. Y después, el propio ex superministro tuvo que hacer lo que están haciendo ahora: ajustar salarios por debajo de la inflación, golpear la puerta del Fondo Monetario para conseguir préstamos internacionales a tasas razonables y detener la fuga de dólares, subir las tasas de interés aunque la decisión provoque una notable caída de la actividad, y rezar para que la tensión social no termine en una crisis como la de 2001.
Los chicos de La Cámpora pueden verse a sí mismos como "pibes para la liberación". Unidos y Organizados puede acusar de golpistas a los dueños de los hipermercados. Pueden llamar destituyente a Hugo Moyano, porque alienta paritarias con aumentos de más de 30%. Pero la verdad es que, excepto el núcleo duro de seguidores y de dirigentes que buscan conservar su empleo, ya casi nadie cree que éste sea un gobierno progre ni que aliente el Estado de bienestar.
Las encuestas no mienten. Dos de las medidoras más serias calculan la expectativa de inflación, para este año, entre un 40 y un 50%. Y la imagen negativa de la jefa de Estado está llegando al pico más alto desde que asumió por primera vez, en diciembre de 2007. La construcción del relato se derrumba, debajo del enorme peso de la realidad.
© LA NACION.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Jueves 27 de febrero de 2014
Cristina, parecida a Menem, Cavallo y De la Rúa
Por Luis Majul | LA NACION
Twitter: @majulluis
Digan lo que digan los comunicadores oficiales y paraoficiales, éste no es un gobierno de corte progresista. Es más bien la administración del ajuste . Y de uno de los ajustes más ortodoxos e indisimulables, aunque se lo quiera ocultar con retórica populista. No se trata de una afirmación caprichosa. Está sustentada por cifras irrefutables. La mayoría surge de los análisis del Instituto de Pensamientos y Políticas Públicas (IPyPP), que coordinan el diputado Claudio Lozano y Tomás Raffo, dirigentes a quienes no se les puede endilgar deshonestidad intelectual.
Empecemos por una categoría emblemática: el salario promedio real. En diciembre de 2001, el peor momento de la historia argentina reciente, era de 494 pesos. Para fines de 2013, ascendía a 4304 pesos. Pero si se compara una y otra cifra con el aumento de precios durante el mismo período, se concluye que el salario real aumentó apenas un 19%. Es decir: muy por debajo del crecimiento del PBI, que acumuló un 82,4%. Y esto, sin contar la devaluación de hace semanas, de casi un 20%, ni el hecho de que millones de trabajadores y también de jubilados pagan impuesto a las ganancias, como si fueran millonarios.
Pero sigamos con la pobreza y la indigencia, ya que el oficialismo habla de modelo nacional y popular e inclusivo. Si se toman, por ejemplo, los datos del IPyPP de 2012, se comprobará que la tasa de pobreza llegó entonces al 32,1% y no al 6,5, como venía mintiendo el Indec. Y que la tasa de indigencia, para ese mismo año, ascendía a 11,4% y no a 1,7%, como reivindicaban las estadísticas oficiales. En mayo de 2001, en medio del estallido de la convertibilidad, la pobreza era de casi el 36% y la indigencia de 11%. Es decir: nada demasiado distinto de lo que tenemos ahora mismo. Y estos datos muestran, por supuesto, un nivel de deterioro gravísimo, si se los compara con la tasa de pobreza e indigencia que había entre 1995 y 2000. Los registros de los últimos 5 años del siglo XX dan 26,4% de pobreza y 6,7% de indigencia, respectivamente. Es decir, había menos pobres hace 13 años que en el presente.
Completemos el panorama con otro dato clave: la concentración de la riqueza. En 1997, las 200 empresas que más venden en la Argentina representaban el 31,7% del total de la riqueza. Hacia 2012, trepaban a casi el 52%. Entre las primeras 20 hay por lo menos 5 bancos privados de primera línea. Sobre este dato, ayer, el presidente del Banco Ciudad, Rogelio Frigerio, me dijo: "Esto demuestra que éste no es un modelo productivo sino financiero".
¿Cuándo empezó a cambiar este gobierno su sesgo progresista para terminar instrumentando un brutal ajuste sobre la clase media y la clase media baja? Una fecha a tener en cuenta es noviembre de 2005, los días previos a la renuncia de Roberto Lavagna. Antes de irse, el ex ministro le planteó al entonces presidente Kirchner tres medidas concretas para "garantizar el éxito de la política económica" en el tiempo. Una: el aumento paulatino de tarifas de los servicios públicos. Dos: la creación de un fondo anticíclico para usarlo en épocas de vacas flacas. La tercera fue la que más enojó a Kirchner: Lavagna le planteó que el presupuesto iba a sufrir un serio desequilibrio si seguía distribuyendo la obra pública entre sus empresarios amigos. El día en que Lavagna se fue, Kirchner se lo anticipó en exclusiva a un alto directivo del Grupo Clarín. "Poné un zócalo en TN. Le acabo de aceptar la renuncia al ministro de Economía." El ex presidente parecía radiante y satisfecho: gobernaba sobre una caja de miles de millones de pesos y nada hacía prever que 6 o 7 años después, al compás del péndulo que va del populismo berreta al ajuste, la economía se vendría a pique. El otro momento clave fue la intervención del Indec. Pero la movida definitiva que terminó con la poca racionalidad económica que le quedaba al gobierno de Cristina Fernández fue el desplazamiento de Martín Redrado del Banco Central, en 2010. Después de eso, los "agentes económicos" comprendieron que la Presidenta iba a manotear las reservas de acuerdo a su necesidad electoral. Cuando Redrado se fue, éstas ascendían a 48,116 millones de dólares y el dólar apenas pasaba los 4 pesos. Después ya no hubo manera de detener la irracionalidad económica que incluyó, entre otras cosas, emitir dinero en forma creciente para exacerbar el consumo y dar la falsa idea de que somos un país rico.
¿Puede sorprender, en este contexto, la voltereta en el aire que dio el ministro de Economía, Axel Kicillof, sobre la indemnización a Repsol por haber expropiado YPF? Hagamos un poco de memoria: Kirchner alentó su privatización cuando le convenía. Oscar Parrilli fue el vocero parlamentario que defendió la desnacionalización en 1992. Kirchner capturó entonces cientos de millones de dólares cuyo destino final nunca quedó demasiado claro. Pero diez años después Cristina pegó un volantazo que ahuyentó a inversores de todas partes. La amenaza de Kicillof de iniciar a Repsol un juicio por daño ambiental nunca debió tomarse en serio. Como tampoco nadie debería tomar en serio la idea de que existen fuerzas muy poderosas agazapadas y metiendo presión para echar a la Presidenta. En realidad, Kicillof y el resto del Gobierno no están haciendo nada diferente de lo que intentó Domingo Cavallo durante el gobierno de Carlos Menem y, luego, con Fernando de la Rúa. La convertibilidad, en el fondo, también fue populismo de Estado, aunque con una retórica de derecha. Y después, el propio ex superministro tuvo que hacer lo que están haciendo ahora: ajustar salarios por debajo de la inflación, golpear la puerta del Fondo Monetario para conseguir préstamos internacionales a tasas razonables y detener la fuga de dólares, subir las tasas de interés aunque la decisión provoque una notable caída de la actividad, y rezar para que la tensión social no termine en una crisis como la de 2001.
Los chicos de La Cámpora pueden verse a sí mismos como "pibes para la liberación". Unidos y Organizados puede acusar de golpistas a los dueños de los hipermercados. Pueden llamar destituyente a Hugo Moyano, porque alienta paritarias con aumentos de más de 30%. Pero la verdad es que, excepto el núcleo duro de seguidores y de dirigentes que buscan conservar su empleo, ya casi nadie cree que éste sea un gobierno progre ni que aliente el Estado de bienestar.
Las encuestas no mienten. Dos de las medidoras más serias calculan la expectativa de inflación, para este año, entre un 40 y un 50%. Y la imagen negativa de la jefa de Estado está llegando al pico más alto desde que asumió por primera vez, en diciembre de 2007. La construcción del relato se derrumba, debajo del enorme peso de la realidad.
© LA NACION.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
FUN/GralInt-Lip Sync Battle with Paul Rudd-Video
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Lip Sync Battle with Paul Rudd
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
Fuente/Source: www.youtube.com
Lip Sync Battle with Paul Rudd
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
Fuente/Source: www.youtube.com
Thursday, February 20, 2014
POL/GralInt-La mentira tiene patas cortas y consecuencias graves
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
La mentira tiene patas cortas y consecuencias graves
Por Luis Majul | LA NACION
Twitter: @majulluis |
Ver perfil:Luis Majul es periodista y escritor. Autor de Los dueños de la Argentina I y II; Por qué cayó Alfonsín; El Dueño, la historia secreta de Néstor Kirchner; y Él y Ella, entre otros. Conduce La Cornisa por radio La Red AM 910; Cuatro Sillas, por Canal (á); y La Cornisa, por América TV.
Este gobierno engaña , se autoengaña y las consecuencias de la mentira y la negación las pagamos todos los argentinos a un precio exorbitante que muchas veces se cobra en vidas humanas. La última gran muestra de hipocresía o doble discurso sucedió hace dos días, cuando el secretario de Seguridad, Sergio Berni, cruzó al ministro de Defensa, Agustín Rossi, para aclarar que la Argentina no puede ser considerada un país productor de cocaína.
Pero la costumbre de mentir, de ocultar o falsear información no empezó la semana pasada, sino en 2006, cuando se empezaron a manipular las estadísticas oficiales. Esa mentira es la madre de todos los engaños. Y no sólo es injustificable. También explica el aislamiento internacional y la falta de créditos que necesita el país. Fueron tantos años y tan burdo el ardid, que la semana pasada, cuando se dio a conocer el nuevo índice, más cercano a la realidad, presentado por dos de los autores intelectuales de los crímenes, algunos distraídos lo recibieron casi como si se tratara de la milagrosa conversión de un asesino o un violador. Y lo peor es que no fue una mentira inconsciente, sino un falseamiento a sabiendas. Hace tiempo discutí el asunto con uno de los economistas del Grupo Fénix que defendía el modelo. Él, sin negar la maniobra, la justificó así: "Es un acto patriótico de [Guillermo] Moreno. Los índices del Indec nos permiten ahorrar miles de dólares que les tendríamos que pagar a los tenedores de bonos de la deuda". Otro ex conspicuo miembro del equipo económico que ahora es legislador, a quien me encontré por la calle de casualidad, ensayó la misma excusa que luego presentaría Cristina Fernández en su recordada visita a la Universidad de Harvard. Me explicó que todos los países del mundo manipulan o falsean un poco las estadísticas. Incluso los Estados Unidos. Y que si fuera cierto el cálculo de las consultoras o el índice del Congreso, la Argentina ya estaría "volando por los aires". La discusión sucedió antes de las elecciones de octubre que la Presidenta ganó con el 54% de los votos. Le pregunté si el volar por los aires no sería sólo una cuestión de tiempo. Me sugirió que no me preocupara. Que antes de pagar las consecuencias, el Gobierno iba a encontrar la fórmula para corregir las mediciones sin dañar "el modelo nacional y popular de matriz diversificada con inclusión social" y la mar en coche. Como se sabe, ahora todos estamos rezando para que la Argentina no vuele por los aires, entre los vaivenes del precio del dólar, la recesión con altísima inflación, las paritarias y la amenaza de empezar a perder puestos de trabajo.
Lo mismo pasó con el ahora crónico problema de la inseguridad, que le pegó en la cara y en el cuerpo a Néstor Kirchner después del brutal asesinato de Axel Blumberg, en abril de 2004. La inseguridad no fue reconocida ni mencionada como problema central sino hasta diciembre de 2010, cuando los sucesos del Indoamericano hicieron que Cristina designara a Nilda Garré en el Ministerio de Seguridad, mientras les echaba la culpa de los muertos a Mauricio Macri y a la Santísima Trinidad, pero nunca a la subestimación o el ninguneo del flagelo. También en esto mintieron a sabiendas, motivados por el cálculo político. Es que Kirchner y la Presidenta siempre pensaron que, si conseguían trasladar la responsabilidad de la inseguridad a los gobernadores, su imagen pública no se deterioraría y podrían gobernar la Argentina sucediéndose de manera alternativa. Lo que pasó con el levantamiento de la policía de Córdoba en diciembre pasado nos ilustra sobre las consecuencias de semejante especulación. Cualquiera diría que sucedió hace un siglo. No pasaron ni siquiera dos meses. Y no estaría de más recordar sus consecuencias. Más de una docena de muertos. Policías que abandonaron sus puestos de trabajo y se transformaron en saqueadores. Aumentos salariales de más del 30% obtenidos "a punta de pistola". Gendarmes que evitaron una verdadera masacre en Tucumán cuando se interpusieron entre los policías y los vecinos, quienes les echaban en la cara su repentina metamorfosis, de huelguistas a represores de la gente.
Aquellas escenas también pueden servir para dimensionar los estragos que está produciendo el narcotráfico en la Argentina. Las más altas autoridades de la policía de Córdoba, pero también la cúpula de la de Santa Fe y algunas divisiones de la bonaerense han sido penetradas y contaminadas por los barones del narcotráfico que ahora operan en el país. Por otra parte, Berni no miente (del todo). Aquí no se cultiva ni cocaína ni marihuana, porque no existen condiciones geográficas ni climáticas para hacerlo. Pero Rossi es más certero cuando admite que la Argentina debe dejar de ser caracterizado sólo como un país de tránsito porque aquí sí, ahora mismo, se elabora, se procesa y se consume cocaína y marihuana a niveles extraordinarios, si se los compara con los datos de una década atrás. Soldado de la causa K, incondicional de la Presidenta, Berni jamás repetirá lo que piensa y lo que sabe de verdad. Él piensa que la Sedronar nunca sirvió para nada, porque ni combatió en la práctica al narcotráfico ni fue eficiente en la implementación de políticas de contención de adictos. Cree que, en efecto, la Argentina es un paraíso irresistible para los narcos colombianos, porque pueden lavar dinero de la droga, instalarse sin ser detectados, residir en las lujosas mansiones de los barrios cerrados de la zona norte del Gran Buenos Aires y mandar a sus hijos a los colegios más caros, mientras compran y venden empresas y propiedades por debajo del radar de la Unidad de Información Financiera de José Sbattella y también de la AFIP de Ricardo Echegaray. Berni cita al ex jefe del cartel de Medellín, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, para sostener que la policía nunca podrá combatir el narcotráfico.
¿Cómo entran los narcos con tanta facilidad a la Argentina? Berni intuye que el gobierno colombiano los quiere lejos de su país y que entonces les limpia los antecedentes para que se vayan. Berni sabe que Cristina Fernández se lo reclamó, de manera extraoficial, a su par de Colombia, pero que no tuvo respuesta positiva. Berni jamás colocará, de manera oficial, a la Argentina en la categoría que la puso Rossi, con la intención de perjudicar a su adversario político, el gobierno socialista de Santa Fe. Y no lo hará porque, si lo hace, el país será incluido por los Estados Unidos, entre las naciones que habrá que monitorear y castigar si no colabora en las políticas antidroga.
Cualquier parecido con la excusa para manipular el índice de inflación o con los argumentos para negar la catástrofe de la inseguridad no es pura coincidencia. Es la prueba de que este gobierno siempre encuentra un argumento para manipular o interpretar los hechos como más le conviene. Aunque en esta mentira nos entierre a todos.
© LA NACION.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
La mentira tiene patas cortas y consecuencias graves
Por Luis Majul | LA NACION
Twitter: @majulluis |
Ver perfil:Luis Majul es periodista y escritor. Autor de Los dueños de la Argentina I y II; Por qué cayó Alfonsín; El Dueño, la historia secreta de Néstor Kirchner; y Él y Ella, entre otros. Conduce La Cornisa por radio La Red AM 910; Cuatro Sillas, por Canal (á); y La Cornisa, por América TV.
Este gobierno engaña , se autoengaña y las consecuencias de la mentira y la negación las pagamos todos los argentinos a un precio exorbitante que muchas veces se cobra en vidas humanas. La última gran muestra de hipocresía o doble discurso sucedió hace dos días, cuando el secretario de Seguridad, Sergio Berni, cruzó al ministro de Defensa, Agustín Rossi, para aclarar que la Argentina no puede ser considerada un país productor de cocaína.
Pero la costumbre de mentir, de ocultar o falsear información no empezó la semana pasada, sino en 2006, cuando se empezaron a manipular las estadísticas oficiales. Esa mentira es la madre de todos los engaños. Y no sólo es injustificable. También explica el aislamiento internacional y la falta de créditos que necesita el país. Fueron tantos años y tan burdo el ardid, que la semana pasada, cuando se dio a conocer el nuevo índice, más cercano a la realidad, presentado por dos de los autores intelectuales de los crímenes, algunos distraídos lo recibieron casi como si se tratara de la milagrosa conversión de un asesino o un violador. Y lo peor es que no fue una mentira inconsciente, sino un falseamiento a sabiendas. Hace tiempo discutí el asunto con uno de los economistas del Grupo Fénix que defendía el modelo. Él, sin negar la maniobra, la justificó así: "Es un acto patriótico de [Guillermo] Moreno. Los índices del Indec nos permiten ahorrar miles de dólares que les tendríamos que pagar a los tenedores de bonos de la deuda". Otro ex conspicuo miembro del equipo económico que ahora es legislador, a quien me encontré por la calle de casualidad, ensayó la misma excusa que luego presentaría Cristina Fernández en su recordada visita a la Universidad de Harvard. Me explicó que todos los países del mundo manipulan o falsean un poco las estadísticas. Incluso los Estados Unidos. Y que si fuera cierto el cálculo de las consultoras o el índice del Congreso, la Argentina ya estaría "volando por los aires". La discusión sucedió antes de las elecciones de octubre que la Presidenta ganó con el 54% de los votos. Le pregunté si el volar por los aires no sería sólo una cuestión de tiempo. Me sugirió que no me preocupara. Que antes de pagar las consecuencias, el Gobierno iba a encontrar la fórmula para corregir las mediciones sin dañar "el modelo nacional y popular de matriz diversificada con inclusión social" y la mar en coche. Como se sabe, ahora todos estamos rezando para que la Argentina no vuele por los aires, entre los vaivenes del precio del dólar, la recesión con altísima inflación, las paritarias y la amenaza de empezar a perder puestos de trabajo.
Lo mismo pasó con el ahora crónico problema de la inseguridad, que le pegó en la cara y en el cuerpo a Néstor Kirchner después del brutal asesinato de Axel Blumberg, en abril de 2004. La inseguridad no fue reconocida ni mencionada como problema central sino hasta diciembre de 2010, cuando los sucesos del Indoamericano hicieron que Cristina designara a Nilda Garré en el Ministerio de Seguridad, mientras les echaba la culpa de los muertos a Mauricio Macri y a la Santísima Trinidad, pero nunca a la subestimación o el ninguneo del flagelo. También en esto mintieron a sabiendas, motivados por el cálculo político. Es que Kirchner y la Presidenta siempre pensaron que, si conseguían trasladar la responsabilidad de la inseguridad a los gobernadores, su imagen pública no se deterioraría y podrían gobernar la Argentina sucediéndose de manera alternativa. Lo que pasó con el levantamiento de la policía de Córdoba en diciembre pasado nos ilustra sobre las consecuencias de semejante especulación. Cualquiera diría que sucedió hace un siglo. No pasaron ni siquiera dos meses. Y no estaría de más recordar sus consecuencias. Más de una docena de muertos. Policías que abandonaron sus puestos de trabajo y se transformaron en saqueadores. Aumentos salariales de más del 30% obtenidos "a punta de pistola". Gendarmes que evitaron una verdadera masacre en Tucumán cuando se interpusieron entre los policías y los vecinos, quienes les echaban en la cara su repentina metamorfosis, de huelguistas a represores de la gente.
Aquellas escenas también pueden servir para dimensionar los estragos que está produciendo el narcotráfico en la Argentina. Las más altas autoridades de la policía de Córdoba, pero también la cúpula de la de Santa Fe y algunas divisiones de la bonaerense han sido penetradas y contaminadas por los barones del narcotráfico que ahora operan en el país. Por otra parte, Berni no miente (del todo). Aquí no se cultiva ni cocaína ni marihuana, porque no existen condiciones geográficas ni climáticas para hacerlo. Pero Rossi es más certero cuando admite que la Argentina debe dejar de ser caracterizado sólo como un país de tránsito porque aquí sí, ahora mismo, se elabora, se procesa y se consume cocaína y marihuana a niveles extraordinarios, si se los compara con los datos de una década atrás. Soldado de la causa K, incondicional de la Presidenta, Berni jamás repetirá lo que piensa y lo que sabe de verdad. Él piensa que la Sedronar nunca sirvió para nada, porque ni combatió en la práctica al narcotráfico ni fue eficiente en la implementación de políticas de contención de adictos. Cree que, en efecto, la Argentina es un paraíso irresistible para los narcos colombianos, porque pueden lavar dinero de la droga, instalarse sin ser detectados, residir en las lujosas mansiones de los barrios cerrados de la zona norte del Gran Buenos Aires y mandar a sus hijos a los colegios más caros, mientras compran y venden empresas y propiedades por debajo del radar de la Unidad de Información Financiera de José Sbattella y también de la AFIP de Ricardo Echegaray. Berni cita al ex jefe del cartel de Medellín, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, para sostener que la policía nunca podrá combatir el narcotráfico.
¿Cómo entran los narcos con tanta facilidad a la Argentina? Berni intuye que el gobierno colombiano los quiere lejos de su país y que entonces les limpia los antecedentes para que se vayan. Berni sabe que Cristina Fernández se lo reclamó, de manera extraoficial, a su par de Colombia, pero que no tuvo respuesta positiva. Berni jamás colocará, de manera oficial, a la Argentina en la categoría que la puso Rossi, con la intención de perjudicar a su adversario político, el gobierno socialista de Santa Fe. Y no lo hará porque, si lo hace, el país será incluido por los Estados Unidos, entre las naciones que habrá que monitorear y castigar si no colabora en las políticas antidroga.
Cualquier parecido con la excusa para manipular el índice de inflación o con los argumentos para negar la catástrofe de la inseguridad no es pura coincidencia. Es la prueba de que este gobierno siempre encuentra un argumento para manipular o interpretar los hechos como más le conviene. Aunque en esta mentira nos entierre a todos.
© LA NACION.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
BUS/GralInt-What exactly is an entrepreneur?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Business and management
Our Schumpeter columnist
What exactly is an entrepreneur?
Feb 16th 2014, by A.W.
Entrepreneurs are everybody’s favourite heroes. Politicians want to clone them. Popular television programmes such as “The Apprentice” and “Dragons’ Den” lionise them. School textbooks praise them. When the author of this blog was at Oxford “entrepreneur” was a dirty word. Today the Entrepreneur’s Society is one of the university’s most popular social clubs.
But what exactly is an entrepreneur? Here the warm glow of enthusiasm dissolves into intellectual confusion. There are two distinctive views. The first is the popular view: that entrepreneurs are people who run their own companies, the self-employed or small-business people. The second is Joseph Schumpeter’s view that entrepreneurs are innovators: people who come up with ideas and embody those ideas in high-growth companies.
Schumpeterians distinguish between “replicative” entrepreneurs (who set up small businesses much like other small businesses) and “innovative” entrepreneurs (who upset and disorganise the existing way of doing things). They also distinguish between “small businesses” and “high-growth businesses” (most small businesses stay small). Both sorts have an important role in a successful economy. But they are nevertheless very different sorts of organisations.
Most people who try to measure how entrepreneurial a society is try to measure the first type of entrepreneurship. They measure the number of small businesses or the number of people who are self-employed or the number of startups. But this produces perverse results. Egypt regularly comes out as more “entrepreneurial” than the United States. It also produces a highly distorted picture of entrepreneurial activity within advanced economies.
In America most self-employed people do grunt-work in highly conservative industries: construction, landscaping, car-repair, restaurant and truck driving for men and cooking, cleaning and beauty salons for women. Most small companies are Mom-and-Pop stores that will always stay in the family. Three-quarters of people who start companies say that they want to keep their companies small enough to manage themselves.
In a new paper (http://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp959.pdf) Magnus Henrekson and Tino Sanandaji argue that the number of self-made billionaires a country produces provides a much better measure of its entrepreneurial vigour than the number of small businesses. The authors studied Forbes’s annual list of billionaires over the past 20 years and produced a list of 996 self-made billionaires (ie, people who had made their own money by founding innovative companies as opposed to people who inherited money or who had extracted it from the state). They demonstrated that “entrepreneur density” correlates with many things that we intuitively associate with economic dynamism, such as the number of patents per head or the flow of venture capital.
They also demonstrated it correlating negatively with rates of small-business owners, self-employment and startups—in other words that many traditional measures are about as misleading as you can get.
Countries with a lot of small companies are often stagnant. People start their own businesses because there are no other opportunities. Those businesses stay small because they are doing exactly what other small businesses do. The same is true of industries. In America industries that produce more entrepreneur billionaires tend to have a lower share of employees working in firms with less than 20 employees.
This makes sense: successful entrepreneurs inevitably destroy their smaller rivals as they take their companies to scale. Walmart became the world’s largest retailer by replacing thousands of Mom-and-Pop shops. Amazon became a bookselling giant by driving thousands of booksellers out of business. By sponsoring new ways of doing things entrepreneurs create new organisations that employ thousands of people including people who might otherwise have been self-employed. In other words, they simultaneously boost the economy’s overall productivity and reduce its level of self-employment.
Who are the Schumpeterian entrepreneurs who dominate the modern economy? And how do you create more of them? Messrs Henrekson and Sanandaji argue that the majority of the world’s wealthy entrepreneurs acquired their riches by starting a business: 65% in America, 42% in Europe and 52% overall. The list of entrepreneurial hot spots contains a cross-section of countries (see chart), some in the West such as America (ranked at number 3) and Switzerland (4) but also some Asian dragons such as Hong Kong (number one by some way), Singapore (5) and Taiwan (8). Israel (2) is the only country from the Middle East.
Entrepreneurs tend to be highly educated: 45% of American self-made entrepreneurs have advanced degrees, a sharp contrast with the early 20th century, when men like Henry Ford dropped out of school to become tinkerers. They also tend to focus on high-tech and finance. The bulk of American entrepreneurs come from just three clusters: Boston, New York and Silicon Valley. The millionaires may live next door to the average American, as a bestselling book once argued (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door) , but billionaires live in their own little enclaves.
The authors are less informative about the second question. They warn that high taxes can encourage replicative entrepreneurship rather than innovative entrepreneurship. The self-employed face lower tax rates than the employed (and can evade taxes more easily). They also face a lower chance of being audited. This encourages companies to stay small and encourages workers to sell their labour to small companies rather than big companies. The same is also true of heavy regulation. They warn that conceptual confusion over the nature of entrepreneurship can also create policy confusion: attempts to boost the number of small businesses can reduce the likelihood that one of those small businesses will outcompete all the others.
Schumpeterian entrepreneurship is all about innovation and ambition to turn small businesses into big ones. Small business entrepreneurship is all about flexible employment and poor opportunities. But the authors have little to say about how to create the network of institutions that they think helps to create entrepreneurship: high-powered universities and dense clusters of activity of the sort that flourish in Boston and Silicon Valley.
Still, if Henrekson and Sanandaji do not provide us with the key to the secret kingdom, they at least make sure that we are trying to get through the right door.
Source:www.economist.com
Business and management
Our Schumpeter columnist
What exactly is an entrepreneur?
Feb 16th 2014, by A.W.
Entrepreneurs are everybody’s favourite heroes. Politicians want to clone them. Popular television programmes such as “The Apprentice” and “Dragons’ Den” lionise them. School textbooks praise them. When the author of this blog was at Oxford “entrepreneur” was a dirty word. Today the Entrepreneur’s Society is one of the university’s most popular social clubs.
But what exactly is an entrepreneur? Here the warm glow of enthusiasm dissolves into intellectual confusion. There are two distinctive views. The first is the popular view: that entrepreneurs are people who run their own companies, the self-employed or small-business people. The second is Joseph Schumpeter’s view that entrepreneurs are innovators: people who come up with ideas and embody those ideas in high-growth companies.
Schumpeterians distinguish between “replicative” entrepreneurs (who set up small businesses much like other small businesses) and “innovative” entrepreneurs (who upset and disorganise the existing way of doing things). They also distinguish between “small businesses” and “high-growth businesses” (most small businesses stay small). Both sorts have an important role in a successful economy. But they are nevertheless very different sorts of organisations.
Most people who try to measure how entrepreneurial a society is try to measure the first type of entrepreneurship. They measure the number of small businesses or the number of people who are self-employed or the number of startups. But this produces perverse results. Egypt regularly comes out as more “entrepreneurial” than the United States. It also produces a highly distorted picture of entrepreneurial activity within advanced economies.
In America most self-employed people do grunt-work in highly conservative industries: construction, landscaping, car-repair, restaurant and truck driving for men and cooking, cleaning and beauty salons for women. Most small companies are Mom-and-Pop stores that will always stay in the family. Three-quarters of people who start companies say that they want to keep their companies small enough to manage themselves.
In a new paper (http://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp959.pdf) Magnus Henrekson and Tino Sanandaji argue that the number of self-made billionaires a country produces provides a much better measure of its entrepreneurial vigour than the number of small businesses. The authors studied Forbes’s annual list of billionaires over the past 20 years and produced a list of 996 self-made billionaires (ie, people who had made their own money by founding innovative companies as opposed to people who inherited money or who had extracted it from the state). They demonstrated that “entrepreneur density” correlates with many things that we intuitively associate with economic dynamism, such as the number of patents per head or the flow of venture capital.
They also demonstrated it correlating negatively with rates of small-business owners, self-employment and startups—in other words that many traditional measures are about as misleading as you can get.
Countries with a lot of small companies are often stagnant. People start their own businesses because there are no other opportunities. Those businesses stay small because they are doing exactly what other small businesses do. The same is true of industries. In America industries that produce more entrepreneur billionaires tend to have a lower share of employees working in firms with less than 20 employees.
This makes sense: successful entrepreneurs inevitably destroy their smaller rivals as they take their companies to scale. Walmart became the world’s largest retailer by replacing thousands of Mom-and-Pop shops. Amazon became a bookselling giant by driving thousands of booksellers out of business. By sponsoring new ways of doing things entrepreneurs create new organisations that employ thousands of people including people who might otherwise have been self-employed. In other words, they simultaneously boost the economy’s overall productivity and reduce its level of self-employment.
Who are the Schumpeterian entrepreneurs who dominate the modern economy? And how do you create more of them? Messrs Henrekson and Sanandaji argue that the majority of the world’s wealthy entrepreneurs acquired their riches by starting a business: 65% in America, 42% in Europe and 52% overall. The list of entrepreneurial hot spots contains a cross-section of countries (see chart), some in the West such as America (ranked at number 3) and Switzerland (4) but also some Asian dragons such as Hong Kong (number one by some way), Singapore (5) and Taiwan (8). Israel (2) is the only country from the Middle East.
Entrepreneurs tend to be highly educated: 45% of American self-made entrepreneurs have advanced degrees, a sharp contrast with the early 20th century, when men like Henry Ford dropped out of school to become tinkerers. They also tend to focus on high-tech and finance. The bulk of American entrepreneurs come from just three clusters: Boston, New York and Silicon Valley. The millionaires may live next door to the average American, as a bestselling book once argued (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door) , but billionaires live in their own little enclaves.
The authors are less informative about the second question. They warn that high taxes can encourage replicative entrepreneurship rather than innovative entrepreneurship. The self-employed face lower tax rates than the employed (and can evade taxes more easily). They also face a lower chance of being audited. This encourages companies to stay small and encourages workers to sell their labour to small companies rather than big companies. The same is also true of heavy regulation. They warn that conceptual confusion over the nature of entrepreneurship can also create policy confusion: attempts to boost the number of small businesses can reduce the likelihood that one of those small businesses will outcompete all the others.
Schumpeterian entrepreneurship is all about innovation and ambition to turn small businesses into big ones. Small business entrepreneurship is all about flexible employment and poor opportunities. But the authors have little to say about how to create the network of institutions that they think helps to create entrepreneurship: high-powered universities and dense clusters of activity of the sort that flourish in Boston and Silicon Valley.
Still, if Henrekson and Sanandaji do not provide us with the key to the secret kingdom, they at least make sure that we are trying to get through the right door.
Source:www.economist.com
LANG/GralInt-How a dialect differs from a language
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Economist explains
How a dialect differs from a language
Feb 16th 2014, by R.L.G. | BERLIN
HONG KONG'S education department caused a furore last month by briefly posting on its website the claim that Cantonese was “not an official language” of Hong Kong. After an outcry, officials removed the text. But was the claim correct? The law says that “Chinese and English” are Hong Kong’s official languages. Whereas some people say that Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese, others insist that it is a language in its own right. Who is right—and how do dialects differ from languages in general?
Two kinds of criteria distinguish languages from dialects. The first are social and political: in this view, “languages” are typically prestigious, official and written, whereas “dialects” are mostly spoken, unofficial and looked down upon. In a famous formulation of this view, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. Speakers of mere “dialects” often refer to their speech as “slang”, “patois” or the like. (The Mandarin Chinese term for Cantonese, Shanghaiese and others is fangyan, or “place-speech”.) Linguists have a different criterion: if two related kinds of speech are so close that speakers can have a conversation and understand each other, they are dialects of a single language. If comprehension is difficult to impossible, they are distinct languages. Of course, comprehensibility is not either-or, but a continuum—and it may even be asymmetrical. Nonetheless, mutual comprehensibility is the most objective basis for saying whether two kinds of speech are languages or dialects.
By the comprehensibility criterion, Cantonese is not a dialect of Chinese. Rather it is a language, as are Shanghaiese, Mandarin and other kinds of Chinese. Although the languages are obviously related, a Mandarin-speaker cannot understand Cantonese or Shanghaiese without having learned it as a foreign language (and vice-versa, though most Chinese do learn Mandarin today). Most Western lingists classify them as “Sinitic languages”, not “dialects of Chinese”. (Some languages in China, like Uighur, are not Sinitic at all.) Objective though it may be, this criterion can annoy nationalists—and not just in China. Danes and Norwegians can converse, making some linguists classify the two as dialects of a single language, though few Danes or Norwegians think of it this way.
In China the picture is further confused by the fact that one written form unifies Chinese-language speakers (though mainland Chinese write with a simplified version of the characters used in Hong Kong and Taiwan). But this written form is not a universal “Chinese”: it is based on Mandarin. The confusion arises because many people consider written language to be the “real” language, and speech its poor cousin. The same reasoning can be used to classify Arabic as a single language, though a Moroccan and a Syrian, say, cannot easily understand each other. Ethnologue, a reference guide to the world's languages, calls Chinese and Arabic "macrolanguages", noting both their shared literature and the mutual (spoken) unintelligibility of many local varieties, which it calls languages. For the most part, linguists consider spoken language primary: speech is universal, whereas only a fraction of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages are written. This is behind the linguist’s common-sense definition: two people share a language if they can have a conversation without too much trouble.
Source:www.economist.com
The Economist explains
How a dialect differs from a language
Feb 16th 2014, by R.L.G. | BERLIN
HONG KONG'S education department caused a furore last month by briefly posting on its website the claim that Cantonese was “not an official language” of Hong Kong. After an outcry, officials removed the text. But was the claim correct? The law says that “Chinese and English” are Hong Kong’s official languages. Whereas some people say that Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese, others insist that it is a language in its own right. Who is right—and how do dialects differ from languages in general?
Two kinds of criteria distinguish languages from dialects. The first are social and political: in this view, “languages” are typically prestigious, official and written, whereas “dialects” are mostly spoken, unofficial and looked down upon. In a famous formulation of this view, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. Speakers of mere “dialects” often refer to their speech as “slang”, “patois” or the like. (The Mandarin Chinese term for Cantonese, Shanghaiese and others is fangyan, or “place-speech”.) Linguists have a different criterion: if two related kinds of speech are so close that speakers can have a conversation and understand each other, they are dialects of a single language. If comprehension is difficult to impossible, they are distinct languages. Of course, comprehensibility is not either-or, but a continuum—and it may even be asymmetrical. Nonetheless, mutual comprehensibility is the most objective basis for saying whether two kinds of speech are languages or dialects.
By the comprehensibility criterion, Cantonese is not a dialect of Chinese. Rather it is a language, as are Shanghaiese, Mandarin and other kinds of Chinese. Although the languages are obviously related, a Mandarin-speaker cannot understand Cantonese or Shanghaiese without having learned it as a foreign language (and vice-versa, though most Chinese do learn Mandarin today). Most Western lingists classify them as “Sinitic languages”, not “dialects of Chinese”. (Some languages in China, like Uighur, are not Sinitic at all.) Objective though it may be, this criterion can annoy nationalists—and not just in China. Danes and Norwegians can converse, making some linguists classify the two as dialects of a single language, though few Danes or Norwegians think of it this way.
In China the picture is further confused by the fact that one written form unifies Chinese-language speakers (though mainland Chinese write with a simplified version of the characters used in Hong Kong and Taiwan). But this written form is not a universal “Chinese”: it is based on Mandarin. The confusion arises because many people consider written language to be the “real” language, and speech its poor cousin. The same reasoning can be used to classify Arabic as a single language, though a Moroccan and a Syrian, say, cannot easily understand each other. Ethnologue, a reference guide to the world's languages, calls Chinese and Arabic "macrolanguages", noting both their shared literature and the mutual (spoken) unintelligibility of many local varieties, which it calls languages. For the most part, linguists consider spoken language primary: speech is universal, whereas only a fraction of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages are written. This is behind the linguist’s common-sense definition: two people share a language if they can have a conversation without too much trouble.
Source:www.economist.com
Monday, February 17, 2014
LANG/GralInt-15 Annoying Grammatical Mistakes That People Always Make
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
15 Annoying Grammatical Mistakes That People Always Make
Christina Sterbenz, Business Insider
We've already written about the most common grammatical mistakes, but to find out what word-related wrongdoing really irks people, we turned to the Internet.
Quora and Reddit users started two similar threads about the English errors they find most "annoying." We listed the worst of the worst.
1. Using "it's" instead of "its"
"I see it so much that I now expect to see it. I will be reading an article, distracted by the dreadful anticipation of knowing it's coming. Then wham, I read a sentence like, "[T]he fire department said that it's equipment is outdated," and I will be brought to a rage," Michael Wolfe wrote as Quora's top comment.
Use "it's" as a contraction to replace "it is." Use "its" as a possessive pronoun to show ownership.
Example 1: It's raining.
Example 2: The dog wanted its bone.
Note: The top comment on Reddit actually corrected the original question, which asked about "grammar errors." "Grammatical errors," in reality, is proper, as user A40 wrote.
2. Using "I" and "me" in the wrong spots
"I" will always be the subject of a sentence or clause, whereas "me" will be the object. "Me" should follow any preposition (of, in, on, etc.) and function as both the indirect and direct object in a sentence.
3. "I guess using an apostrophe for plural's," Reddit user wekiva joked.
Only possessive words (and contractions) require apostrophes.
Quora user Bruce Feldman discovered an entire website dedicated to photographic evidence of this terrible phenomenon.
4. Improper ellipses
Surprisingly, this appeared high on both sites' threads.
"Ellipsis. Ellipses are three dots. Three. Not two, not four. Three," Tzuwei Chen wrote on Quora. There should also be a space on either side.
And using four dots — a period follow by an ellipses — is actually correct at the end of a sentence, as Reddit user wethrgirl noted.
5. Using "than" instead of "then"
"Then" conveys time, while "than" is used for comparison.
Example 1: We left the party and then went home.
Example 2: We would rather go home than stay at the party.
6. Confusing homophones
Homophones — words that sound the same but have different meanings — weren't explicitly mentioned in either site's list, but we wanted to categorize these complaints.
The homophones include:
They're, their, there
You're, your
could have, could of; should have, should of; would have, would of
affect, effect
For the first, "they're" is a contraction of "they are." "Their" is a possessive pronoun. And finally, "there" is a location.
Similarly, "you're" is the contraction of "you are," while "your" is a possessive pronoun.
You should eliminate "could of," "should of," and "would of" from your vocabulary entirely.
The last, using affect or effect, deserves its own section.
7. Using "affect" instead of "effect"
Use the acronym AVENUE to determine when to use the different forms. "Affect is a verb and effect is a noun, unless it's one of the rare exceptions."
These exceptions are: when someone "effects change" and "affect" as a psychological symptom.
8. Using "less" instead of "fewer"
"If you can count it, it's 'fewer,' if you can't count it, you use 'less,' Reddit user bigbangtheory_ wrote.
"It's fewer marbles and less jam. One counts marbles but not jam," Quora user Roderick Chow wrote.
9. Using "over" instead of "more than"
"Over is a spacial comparison. 'The bird flies over the house.' More than is appropriate for volume comparisons. 'She makes more than he does per hour,'" Reddit user geaster wrote.
10. "Alot"
A lot is two words — no exceptions. You wouldn't write "alittle," so why write "alot?"
"Every time I see 'a lot' written as 'alot' I experience a fleeting, but very real homicidal urge," Quora user Emma-Francis Rutherford admitted.
11. Using adjectives instead of adverbs
"Let's walk quiet." "I'll do it careful" "Make sure to stir it gentle." I grit my teeth every time I hear it," Quora user Jim Seidman wrote.
Some people praise these "flat adverbs" though.
Traditionally though, if you're describing how you do something (a verb), you need an adverb, which will likely end in "-ly."
Example: Let's walk quietly.
12. Improper comma use
"Far too many people seem to think that punctuation use is a personal choice as opposed to a part of grammar. Were I not opposed to murder, I would hunt down Cormac McCarthy and kill him," Quora user Ara Ogle said.
Check out BI's complete guide to using commas without looking like an idiot. Our style guide dictates we use the Oxford comma (the last comma in a series), but some of our reporters vehemently disagree.
13. Irregardless
This isn't an accepted word. Never use it.
14. Using "to" instead of "too"
"To" is either the start of an infinitive or a preposition. "Too" is an adverb to express excess.
15. Confusing "loose" and "lose"
"Loose" is an adjective that means "not tight." When you "lose" something, however, it's no longer in your possession.
Source: https://trove.com/me/content/dg4rN?chid=77542&_p=trending&utm_source=wp&utm_medium=Widgets&utm_campaign=wpsrTrendingExternal-1-opt
(From the Business Insider)
15 Annoying Grammatical Mistakes That People Always Make
Christina Sterbenz, Business Insider
We've already written about the most common grammatical mistakes, but to find out what word-related wrongdoing really irks people, we turned to the Internet.
Quora and Reddit users started two similar threads about the English errors they find most "annoying." We listed the worst of the worst.
1. Using "it's" instead of "its"
"I see it so much that I now expect to see it. I will be reading an article, distracted by the dreadful anticipation of knowing it's coming. Then wham, I read a sentence like, "[T]he fire department said that it's equipment is outdated," and I will be brought to a rage," Michael Wolfe wrote as Quora's top comment.
Use "it's" as a contraction to replace "it is." Use "its" as a possessive pronoun to show ownership.
Example 1: It's raining.
Example 2: The dog wanted its bone.
Note: The top comment on Reddit actually corrected the original question, which asked about "grammar errors." "Grammatical errors," in reality, is proper, as user A40 wrote.
2. Using "I" and "me" in the wrong spots
"I" will always be the subject of a sentence or clause, whereas "me" will be the object. "Me" should follow any preposition (of, in, on, etc.) and function as both the indirect and direct object in a sentence.
3. "I guess using an apostrophe for plural's," Reddit user wekiva joked.
Only possessive words (and contractions) require apostrophes.
Quora user Bruce Feldman discovered an entire website dedicated to photographic evidence of this terrible phenomenon.
4. Improper ellipses
Surprisingly, this appeared high on both sites' threads.
"Ellipsis. Ellipses are three dots. Three. Not two, not four. Three," Tzuwei Chen wrote on Quora. There should also be a space on either side.
And using four dots — a period follow by an ellipses — is actually correct at the end of a sentence, as Reddit user wethrgirl noted.
5. Using "than" instead of "then"
"Then" conveys time, while "than" is used for comparison.
Example 1: We left the party and then went home.
Example 2: We would rather go home than stay at the party.
6. Confusing homophones
Homophones — words that sound the same but have different meanings — weren't explicitly mentioned in either site's list, but we wanted to categorize these complaints.
The homophones include:
They're, their, there
You're, your
could have, could of; should have, should of; would have, would of
affect, effect
For the first, "they're" is a contraction of "they are." "Their" is a possessive pronoun. And finally, "there" is a location.
Similarly, "you're" is the contraction of "you are," while "your" is a possessive pronoun.
You should eliminate "could of," "should of," and "would of" from your vocabulary entirely.
The last, using affect or effect, deserves its own section.
7. Using "affect" instead of "effect"
Use the acronym AVENUE to determine when to use the different forms. "Affect is a verb and effect is a noun, unless it's one of the rare exceptions."
These exceptions are: when someone "effects change" and "affect" as a psychological symptom.
8. Using "less" instead of "fewer"
"If you can count it, it's 'fewer,' if you can't count it, you use 'less,' Reddit user bigbangtheory_ wrote.
"It's fewer marbles and less jam. One counts marbles but not jam," Quora user Roderick Chow wrote.
9. Using "over" instead of "more than"
"Over is a spacial comparison. 'The bird flies over the house.' More than is appropriate for volume comparisons. 'She makes more than he does per hour,'" Reddit user geaster wrote.
10. "Alot"
A lot is two words — no exceptions. You wouldn't write "alittle," so why write "alot?"
"Every time I see 'a lot' written as 'alot' I experience a fleeting, but very real homicidal urge," Quora user Emma-Francis Rutherford admitted.
11. Using adjectives instead of adverbs
"Let's walk quiet." "I'll do it careful" "Make sure to stir it gentle." I grit my teeth every time I hear it," Quora user Jim Seidman wrote.
Some people praise these "flat adverbs" though.
Traditionally though, if you're describing how you do something (a verb), you need an adverb, which will likely end in "-ly."
Example: Let's walk quietly.
12. Improper comma use
"Far too many people seem to think that punctuation use is a personal choice as opposed to a part of grammar. Were I not opposed to murder, I would hunt down Cormac McCarthy and kill him," Quora user Ara Ogle said.
Check out BI's complete guide to using commas without looking like an idiot. Our style guide dictates we use the Oxford comma (the last comma in a series), but some of our reporters vehemently disagree.
13. Irregardless
This isn't an accepted word. Never use it.
14. Using "to" instead of "too"
"To" is either the start of an infinitive or a preposition. "Too" is an adverb to express excess.
15. Confusing "loose" and "lose"
"Loose" is an adjective that means "not tight." When you "lose" something, however, it's no longer in your possession.
Source: https://trove.com/me/content/dg4rN?chid=77542&_p=trending&utm_source=wp&utm_medium=Widgets&utm_campaign=wpsrTrendingExternal-1-opt
(From the Business Insider)
GralInt-Cellphones, social media are new tools in teen dating abuse
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Cellphones, social media are new tools in teen dating abuse
By Lauren McEwen,
February 14
Jokes (and gripes) about teens using social media and cellphones nonstop are aplenty, but some parents might not be aware that these technologies are also being used as tools in dating abuse.
Katie Ray-Jones, president of the National Domestic Violence Hotline has heard stories from teens who have had dating partners use text messaging, social media and cellphone calls to intimidate and control them. February is Teen Dating Violence Month, and Ray-Jones is trying to spread the word about Love is Respect, a service the Hotline launched in 2011 in conjunction with Break the Cycle.
In a 2011 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey, 9.4 percent of high school students reported experiencing some form of physical violence by the person they were dating in the 12 months before the survey.
Because many people are starting to date in middle school, Ray-Jones says high school may be too late to start talking about abusive relationships.
“We want to be able to get that healthy relationship education out early enough so that people understand what their expectations should be, so that we’re not trying to correct behavior at that point,” she says.
A section of the Love is Respect Web site spells out the basics of dating and healthy relationships to help young people searching for information figure out if their feelings of unease about their relationship are a sign of something more serious.
“I think, as a field, we’ve gained traction in educating young people around physical abuse and verbal abuse, but how that translates over a digital platform is not something that young people have necessarily made the link to,” she said.
It is a form of dating abuse Ray-Jones feels her field is just beginning to understand, but they are “trying to be proactive with that messaging to help young people understand the risks and benefits of the digital medium.”
In a 2007 Technology & Teen Dating Abuse Survey by Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU), teens reported that digital dating abuse “is a serious problem,” in which abusers try to control their partners with tactics like constant text messaging and cellphone calls, usually unbeknownst to their parents.
That was seven years ago, before Twitter exploded and before the launch of Instagram, Snapchat and Vine.
Ray-Jones recalls one very extreme case of digital abuse from a teen girl who contacted Love is Respect. Her boyfriend would enlist his friends to text her while he was sleeping to make sure she was always available. She wasn’t able to sleep because, if one of the texts went unanswered, there would be repercussions.
“From an advocacy standpoint, we’re still on the end where we have to inquire about it. It doesn’t necessarily come up freely in conversation because teens and young adults don’t recognize it as a strategy for dating abuse – to exert power and control,” says Ray-Jones.
Ray-Jones has also heard about boyfriends creating fake Facebook accounts in order to see if their girlfriends would cheat or carry on an inappropriate conversation with someone, or threatening to expose pictures or messages on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Digital abuse is not a problem that is unique to teenagers. It’s the very premise of revenge porn sites. Stalkers have also used online sex ads as a tool for abuse, posing as their victims and posting fake ads inviting strangers to their homes and workplaces for sex.
Ray-Jones says there is a lot of crossover between what they hear from adults and teens when it comes to sexting and having pictures used inappropriately, but the challenge they face with teens is “that feeling of invincibility and ‘It’s not going to happen to me.’”
Some parents have difficulty believing their children are experiencing anything more than puppy love, which makes it hard to imagine verbal, physical and emotional abuse being a factor in their dating relationships.
Ray-Jones urges parents who are seeing any sign of dating abuse in their children’s relationships to call Love is Respect for information, but that education doesn’t have to be limited to adults. Many teens will open up to their friends long before they seek help from a parent or teacher. One of the goals of Love is Respect is to teach teens what to do if they notice abuse in their friends’ relationships.
“You have that information so that you can take action if you need to, or you can talk to a friend. We know bystanders play such an important role in ending dating abuse. We want young people to have that information and to know how to have that conversation so that they can help their friends, in addition to teachers and parents,” said Ray-Jones.
© The Washington Post Company
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
Cellphones, social media are new tools in teen dating abuse
By Lauren McEwen,
February 14
Jokes (and gripes) about teens using social media and cellphones nonstop are aplenty, but some parents might not be aware that these technologies are also being used as tools in dating abuse.
Katie Ray-Jones, president of the National Domestic Violence Hotline has heard stories from teens who have had dating partners use text messaging, social media and cellphone calls to intimidate and control them. February is Teen Dating Violence Month, and Ray-Jones is trying to spread the word about Love is Respect, a service the Hotline launched in 2011 in conjunction with Break the Cycle.
In a 2011 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey, 9.4 percent of high school students reported experiencing some form of physical violence by the person they were dating in the 12 months before the survey.
Because many people are starting to date in middle school, Ray-Jones says high school may be too late to start talking about abusive relationships.
“We want to be able to get that healthy relationship education out early enough so that people understand what their expectations should be, so that we’re not trying to correct behavior at that point,” she says.
A section of the Love is Respect Web site spells out the basics of dating and healthy relationships to help young people searching for information figure out if their feelings of unease about their relationship are a sign of something more serious.
“I think, as a field, we’ve gained traction in educating young people around physical abuse and verbal abuse, but how that translates over a digital platform is not something that young people have necessarily made the link to,” she said.
It is a form of dating abuse Ray-Jones feels her field is just beginning to understand, but they are “trying to be proactive with that messaging to help young people understand the risks and benefits of the digital medium.”
In a 2007 Technology & Teen Dating Abuse Survey by Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU), teens reported that digital dating abuse “is a serious problem,” in which abusers try to control their partners with tactics like constant text messaging and cellphone calls, usually unbeknownst to their parents.
That was seven years ago, before Twitter exploded and before the launch of Instagram, Snapchat and Vine.
Ray-Jones recalls one very extreme case of digital abuse from a teen girl who contacted Love is Respect. Her boyfriend would enlist his friends to text her while he was sleeping to make sure she was always available. She wasn’t able to sleep because, if one of the texts went unanswered, there would be repercussions.
“From an advocacy standpoint, we’re still on the end where we have to inquire about it. It doesn’t necessarily come up freely in conversation because teens and young adults don’t recognize it as a strategy for dating abuse – to exert power and control,” says Ray-Jones.
Ray-Jones has also heard about boyfriends creating fake Facebook accounts in order to see if their girlfriends would cheat or carry on an inappropriate conversation with someone, or threatening to expose pictures or messages on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Digital abuse is not a problem that is unique to teenagers. It’s the very premise of revenge porn sites. Stalkers have also used online sex ads as a tool for abuse, posing as their victims and posting fake ads inviting strangers to their homes and workplaces for sex.
Ray-Jones says there is a lot of crossover between what they hear from adults and teens when it comes to sexting and having pictures used inappropriately, but the challenge they face with teens is “that feeling of invincibility and ‘It’s not going to happen to me.’”
Some parents have difficulty believing their children are experiencing anything more than puppy love, which makes it hard to imagine verbal, physical and emotional abuse being a factor in their dating relationships.
Ray-Jones urges parents who are seeing any sign of dating abuse in their children’s relationships to call Love is Respect for information, but that education doesn’t have to be limited to adults. Many teens will open up to their friends long before they seek help from a parent or teacher. One of the goals of Love is Respect is to teach teens what to do if they notice abuse in their friends’ relationships.
“You have that information so that you can take action if you need to, or you can talk to a friend. We know bystanders play such an important role in ending dating abuse. We want young people to have that information and to know how to have that conversation so that they can help their friends, in addition to teachers and parents,” said Ray-Jones.
© The Washington Post Company
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
GralInt-Seeking privacy, teens turn to anonymous-messaging apps
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Seeking privacy, teens turn to anonymous-messaging apps
By Cecilia Kang,
February 16
When the message appeared on Ryan Dominick’s smartphone, the 14-year-old paused to muster some courage. In it was a link sent by an unknown user that could contain anything from a flirtatious come-on to an embarassing put-down.
It turned out to be a picture of Ryan photoshopped to make him look overweight, complete with multiple chins and engorged cheeks. Luckily, the athletic and confident freshman found the picture hilarious.
“LOL,” he responded to the anonymous sender while literally laughing out loud and showing the picture to friends.
The picture was typical of the pranks exchanged among Ryan’s Los Angeles classmates on the anonymous-messaging app Backchat, one of a fast-expanding breed of social-media apps that mask users’ identities and can create messages that self-destruct. Anonymous and ephemeral, apps such as Whisper, Secret, Ask.fm and Snapchat fill a growing demand among teens for more fun, less accountability and more privacy online.
But the boom is opening secret new corners of the Internet at a time when educators and law enforcement officials are worried about the safety of youth online. As teens look increasingly for alternatives to the social giants Facebook and Twitter, the anonymous apps create the opportunity for bullying and cruelty in a forum where they cannot be tracked.
Educators, parents and law enforcement officials complain that it’s hard enough to keep up with activity on public forums such as Facebook. Accounts on the anonymous sites are even harder to monitor, they say, noting that the popular anonymous question-and-answer forum Ask.fm has become a magnet for cyberbullying.
The apps fill a critical need, however, among teens, the majority of whom have their own smartphones and manage their social lives on multiple online networks. Many have been thoroughly lectured about the dangers of sharing too much on traditional sites: They know that future employers and college recruiters are likely to sift carefully through their Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Besides, when parents, grandparents and Little League coaches became core users of Facebook, kids naturally gravitated to new places where they could socialize away from the watchful eye of adults, experts say.
“Youth need a way to share material in a more natural way, like a voice conversation, and that they don’t have to worry about lingering around and being part of what’s now become curated life online,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Experts estimate that dozens of anonymous and so-called “ephemeral” apps such as Snapchat have sprung up, attracting millions of teenage users. Most are relatively simple, capable only of sending photos and texts, and there are no fussy profiles or privacy settings.
Take Backchat: The app was created by Ryan’s 14-year-old classmate Daniel Singer and attracted 125,000 members in its first few months. He launched it with support from his father and $200,000 in seed investments.
“There’s suspense in not knowing who is sending you messages, and it’s actually kind of fun, knowing someone spent the time to make the photo,” said Ryan, who has been on a hunt this week to find the mystery sender of the picture. “It adds spice, more than on Facebook, where everything is permanent and out there.”
Some apps are backed by the biggest Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Whisper, whose users post pictures and comments anonymously, received $21 million from Sequoia Capital last fall. Secret was created by former employees of Google and Foursquare, to take advantage of a backlash to the scripted feel of Facebook.
“What we found was people on social networks were trying to put forth their best image of their great dinners, amazing beach vacations. But life isn’t always like that,” said Chrys Bader, a co-founder of Secret.
The Secret app combs through users’ contact lists to find other members of the anonymous network. A user never knows which of his or her friends might be a Secret user, too.
Many of the Secret posts are corny jokes, but some target individuals. One recent post invited condemnation of a girl who was identified by name: “Raise your hand if any of you have ever felt personally victimized by” the girl, it said.
Among the comments, came this reply: “Push her in front of a bus.”
Bader said the site allows users to flag abusive comments and that harmful posts will be taken down. He said the majority of messages are not harmful, but he declined to say how many people use Secret and whether they are mainly teens.
According to a 2011 Pew Internet and American Life study, nearly nine of 10 teen users said they have witnessed “mean or cruel”actions aimed at peers online. Still, many experts say serious online cruelty is rare and that the risks of cyberbullying have been overblown because of a few high-profile teen suicides.
But they also wonder if the recent proliferation of anonymous apps could change that.
This month, Olivia Birdsong, a 13-year-old Memphis resident, saw classmates trash a girl as a “slut” on the question-and-answer board Ask.fm. The high school freshman said a few people stood up for the girl, but many piled on with criticism.
“The worst stuff happens on the anonymous sites because people are either too scared to say something to someone’s face or they want to present someone with public humiliation,” Olivia said.
Numerous psychological studies show conflict is often resolved when people talk face-to-face. When people can see signs of sadness or other emotions, they tend to back down. Facebook said the majority of users who are flagged for abusive or bullying conduct never do it again. On the anonymous sites, there are no such brakes on negative behavior.
Ask.fm, which is based in the tiny Baltic nation of Latvia, has emerged as a particularly vicious online playground, where hateful comments circulate quickly, with no monitoring and little accountability. Florida resident Rebecca Sedwick, 12, jumped to her death last September after cyberbullying by former middle-school classmates on Ask.fm and other social networks. “you seriously deserve to die,” read one message directed to Rebecca on the site.
To protect against cyberbullying, some of the new apps don’t allow minors. Whisper, for example, requires users to be 17 or older. But no one polices the requirement. Meanwhile, it takes just one tap on a pop-up notice to verify age and get online.
Arielle Ampeh, a junior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, said she resisted using social networks until last year. At first, she said she just joined Facebook, mainly to keep up with class assignments posted by teachers and to look at her lacrosse team’s page.
“I didn’t even want to join at first. I didn’t see the draw. And I saw people post dumb things, like with vulgar language that they may regret saying later,” she said.
But in the past year, Arielle has graduated to Snapchat, where she likes to post silly pictures of dogs and look at photos from friends. She also follows popular posts on Tumblr such as Humans of New York.
Arielle said she remains a cautious user who mostly browses friends’ posts and rarely contributes anything of her own.
Still, she said, “it’s hard not to be on social networks.”
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
Seeking privacy, teens turn to anonymous-messaging apps
By Cecilia Kang,
February 16
When the message appeared on Ryan Dominick’s smartphone, the 14-year-old paused to muster some courage. In it was a link sent by an unknown user that could contain anything from a flirtatious come-on to an embarassing put-down.
It turned out to be a picture of Ryan photoshopped to make him look overweight, complete with multiple chins and engorged cheeks. Luckily, the athletic and confident freshman found the picture hilarious.
“LOL,” he responded to the anonymous sender while literally laughing out loud and showing the picture to friends.
The picture was typical of the pranks exchanged among Ryan’s Los Angeles classmates on the anonymous-messaging app Backchat, one of a fast-expanding breed of social-media apps that mask users’ identities and can create messages that self-destruct. Anonymous and ephemeral, apps such as Whisper, Secret, Ask.fm and Snapchat fill a growing demand among teens for more fun, less accountability and more privacy online.
But the boom is opening secret new corners of the Internet at a time when educators and law enforcement officials are worried about the safety of youth online. As teens look increasingly for alternatives to the social giants Facebook and Twitter, the anonymous apps create the opportunity for bullying and cruelty in a forum where they cannot be tracked.
Educators, parents and law enforcement officials complain that it’s hard enough to keep up with activity on public forums such as Facebook. Accounts on the anonymous sites are even harder to monitor, they say, noting that the popular anonymous question-and-answer forum Ask.fm has become a magnet for cyberbullying.
The apps fill a critical need, however, among teens, the majority of whom have their own smartphones and manage their social lives on multiple online networks. Many have been thoroughly lectured about the dangers of sharing too much on traditional sites: They know that future employers and college recruiters are likely to sift carefully through their Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Besides, when parents, grandparents and Little League coaches became core users of Facebook, kids naturally gravitated to new places where they could socialize away from the watchful eye of adults, experts say.
“Youth need a way to share material in a more natural way, like a voice conversation, and that they don’t have to worry about lingering around and being part of what’s now become curated life online,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Experts estimate that dozens of anonymous and so-called “ephemeral” apps such as Snapchat have sprung up, attracting millions of teenage users. Most are relatively simple, capable only of sending photos and texts, and there are no fussy profiles or privacy settings.
Take Backchat: The app was created by Ryan’s 14-year-old classmate Daniel Singer and attracted 125,000 members in its first few months. He launched it with support from his father and $200,000 in seed investments.
“There’s suspense in not knowing who is sending you messages, and it’s actually kind of fun, knowing someone spent the time to make the photo,” said Ryan, who has been on a hunt this week to find the mystery sender of the picture. “It adds spice, more than on Facebook, where everything is permanent and out there.”
Some apps are backed by the biggest Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Whisper, whose users post pictures and comments anonymously, received $21 million from Sequoia Capital last fall. Secret was created by former employees of Google and Foursquare, to take advantage of a backlash to the scripted feel of Facebook.
“What we found was people on social networks were trying to put forth their best image of their great dinners, amazing beach vacations. But life isn’t always like that,” said Chrys Bader, a co-founder of Secret.
The Secret app combs through users’ contact lists to find other members of the anonymous network. A user never knows which of his or her friends might be a Secret user, too.
Many of the Secret posts are corny jokes, but some target individuals. One recent post invited condemnation of a girl who was identified by name: “Raise your hand if any of you have ever felt personally victimized by” the girl, it said.
Among the comments, came this reply: “Push her in front of a bus.”
Bader said the site allows users to flag abusive comments and that harmful posts will be taken down. He said the majority of messages are not harmful, but he declined to say how many people use Secret and whether they are mainly teens.
According to a 2011 Pew Internet and American Life study, nearly nine of 10 teen users said they have witnessed “mean or cruel”actions aimed at peers online. Still, many experts say serious online cruelty is rare and that the risks of cyberbullying have been overblown because of a few high-profile teen suicides.
But they also wonder if the recent proliferation of anonymous apps could change that.
This month, Olivia Birdsong, a 13-year-old Memphis resident, saw classmates trash a girl as a “slut” on the question-and-answer board Ask.fm. The high school freshman said a few people stood up for the girl, but many piled on with criticism.
“The worst stuff happens on the anonymous sites because people are either too scared to say something to someone’s face or they want to present someone with public humiliation,” Olivia said.
Numerous psychological studies show conflict is often resolved when people talk face-to-face. When people can see signs of sadness or other emotions, they tend to back down. Facebook said the majority of users who are flagged for abusive or bullying conduct never do it again. On the anonymous sites, there are no such brakes on negative behavior.
Ask.fm, which is based in the tiny Baltic nation of Latvia, has emerged as a particularly vicious online playground, where hateful comments circulate quickly, with no monitoring and little accountability. Florida resident Rebecca Sedwick, 12, jumped to her death last September after cyberbullying by former middle-school classmates on Ask.fm and other social networks. “you seriously deserve to die,” read one message directed to Rebecca on the site.
To protect against cyberbullying, some of the new apps don’t allow minors. Whisper, for example, requires users to be 17 or older. But no one polices the requirement. Meanwhile, it takes just one tap on a pop-up notice to verify age and get online.
Arielle Ampeh, a junior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, said she resisted using social networks until last year. At first, she said she just joined Facebook, mainly to keep up with class assignments posted by teachers and to look at her lacrosse team’s page.
“I didn’t even want to join at first. I didn’t see the draw. And I saw people post dumb things, like with vulgar language that they may regret saying later,” she said.
But in the past year, Arielle has graduated to Snapchat, where she likes to post silly pictures of dogs and look at photos from friends. She also follows popular posts on Tumblr such as Humans of New York.
Arielle said she remains a cautious user who mostly browses friends’ posts and rarely contributes anything of her own.
Still, she said, “it’s hard not to be on social networks.”
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
Sunday, February 16, 2014
BUS/GralInt-The Hidden Power of Socail Media:The strength of ‘weak signals’
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The strength of ‘weak signals’
Snippets of information, often hidden in social-media streams, offer companies a valuable new tool for staying ahead.
February 2014 | byMartin Harrysson, Estelle Métayer, and Hugo Sarrazin
As information thunders through the digital economy, it’s easy to miss valuable “weak signals” often hidden amid the noise. Arising primarily from social media, they represent snippets—not streams—of information and can help companies to figure out what customers want and to spot looming industry and market disruptions before competitors do. Sometimes, companies notice them during data-analytics number-crunching exercises. Or employees who apply methods more akin to art than to science might spot them and then do some further number crunching to test anomalies they’re seeing or hypotheses the signals suggest. In any case, companies are just beginning to recognize and capture their value. Here are a few principles that companies can follow to grasp and harness the power of weak signals.
Engaging at the top
For starters, given the fluid nature of the insights that surface, it’s often useful to get senior leaders actively involved with the social-media sources that give rise to weak signals. Executives who are curious and attuned to the themes emerging from social media are more likely to spot such insights.1
For example, a global manufacturer whose high quality and low prices were the topic of one customer’s recent social-media post almost certainly would not have examined it but for a senior executive who was a sensitive social “listener” and found its implications intriguing. Did the company have an opportunity, the executive wondered, to increase prices or perhaps to seek market share more aggressively at the current prices?
To find out, the executive commissioned research to quantify what had started out as a qualitative hunch. Ultimately, the low-price perception turned out to be an anomaly, but the outsize perception of the product’s quality was widely held. In response, the company has started funneling marketing resources to the product in hopes of building its market share by capitalizing on its quality and differentiating it further from the offerings of competitors.
Listening and mapping
As the manufacturer’s example implies, spotting weak signals is more likely when companies can marshal dispersed networks of people who have a deep understanding of the business and act as listening posts. One global beverage company is considering including social-media awareness in its hiring criteria for some managers, to build its network and free its management team from “well-rehearsed habits.”
Weak signals are everywhere, of course, so deciding when and where to keep the antennae out is critical. One such situation involves a product, market, or service that doesn’t yet exist—but could. Consider the case of a global advertising company that was investigating (for one of its clients) a US growth opportunity related to child care. Because no one was offering the proposed service, keyword searches on social media (and on the web more broadly) wouldn’t work. Instead, the company looked to social-media platforms where it might find weak signals—finally discovering an online content service that allows users to create and share individualized newspapers.
In the child-care arena, digital-content channels are often curated by mothers and fathers, who invite conversations about their experiences and concerns, as well as assemble relevant articles by experts or government sources. Analysts used semantic clues to follow hundreds of fine-grained conversations on these sites. The exercise produced a wealth of relevant information about the types of services available in individual markets, the specific levels of service that parents sought, the prices they were willing to pay, the child-care options companies already sponsored, the strength of local providers (potential competitors), and the people in various communities who might become ambassadors for a new service. This wasn’t a number-crunching exercise; instead, it took an anthropological view of local child care—a mosaic formed from shards of information found only on social media. In the end, the weak signals helped the company to define the parameters of a not-yet-existing service.
Spotting visual clues
It’s also useful to search for weak signals when customers start engaging with products or services in new, tech-enabled ways, often simply by sharing perceptions about a company’s offerings and how they are using them. This can be hard for companies to relate to at first, as it’s quite removed from the usual practice of finding data patterns, clustering, and eliminating statistical noise. Spotting weak signals in such circumstances requires managers and employees to have the time and space to surf blogs or seek inspiration through services such as Tumblr or Instagram.
As intangible as these techniques may sound, they can deliver tangible results. US retailer Nordstrom, for example, took an early interest in the possibilities of Pinterest, the digital-scrapbooking site where users “pin” images they like on virtual boards and share them with a larger community. Displayed on Pinterest, the retailer’s products generate significant interest: the company currently has more than four million followers on the site.
Spotting an opportunity to share this online engagement with in-store shoppers, the company recently started displaying popular Pinterest items in two of its Seattle-area stores. When early results were encouraging, Nordstrom began rolling out the test more broadly to capitalize on the site’s appeal to customers as the “world’s largest ‘wish list,’” in the words of one executive.2
The retailer continues to look for more ways to match other customer interactions on Pinterest with its products. Local salespeople already use an in-store app to match items popular on Pinterest with items in the retailer’s inventory. As the “spotting” ability of companies in other industries matures, we expect visual tools such as Pinterest to be increasingly useful in detecting and capitalizing on weak signals.
Crossing functions
As the Nordstrom example demonstrates, listening for weak signals isn’t enough—companies must channel what’s been learned to the appropriate part of the organization so the findings can influence product development and other operational activities. Interestingly, TomTom, a company that offers products and services for navigation and traffic, found that the mechanism for spotting weak signals proved useful in enhancing its product-development process.
As part of normal operations, TomTom monitored social media closely, mining conversations to feed into performance metrics for marketing and customer-service executives. The normal process changed after an attentive company analyst noted that users posting on a UK forum were focused on connectivity problems. Rather than let the tenuous comments get lost in the company’s performance statistics, he channeled them to product-development teams. To resolve the issue, the teams worked directly—and in real time—with customers. That helped short-circuit an otherwise costly process, which would have required drivers using TomTom’s offerings to check out connectivity issues in a number of locales. The broader payoff came in the form of new R&D and product-development processes: TomTom now taps directly into its driving community for ideas on design and product features, as well as to troubleshoot new offerings quickly.
At most companies, weak signals will be unfamiliar territory for senior management, so an up-front investment in leadership time will be needed to clarify the strategic, organizational, and resource implications of new initiatives. The new roles will require people who are comfortable navigating diverse, less corporate sources of information.
Regardless of where companies observe weak signals, the authority to act on them should reside as close to the front lines as possible. Weak signals are strategic enough to demand top-management attention. They are sufficiently important to the day-to-day work of customer-service, technical-development, and marketing teams to make anything other than deep organizational engagement unwise.
About the authors
Martin Harrysson is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office, where Hugo Sarrazin is a director; Estelle Métayer, an alumnus of the Montréal office, is an adjunct professor at McGill University, in Montréal.
Source: www.mckinsey.com
The strength of ‘weak signals’
Snippets of information, often hidden in social-media streams, offer companies a valuable new tool for staying ahead.
February 2014 | byMartin Harrysson, Estelle Métayer, and Hugo Sarrazin
As information thunders through the digital economy, it’s easy to miss valuable “weak signals” often hidden amid the noise. Arising primarily from social media, they represent snippets—not streams—of information and can help companies to figure out what customers want and to spot looming industry and market disruptions before competitors do. Sometimes, companies notice them during data-analytics number-crunching exercises. Or employees who apply methods more akin to art than to science might spot them and then do some further number crunching to test anomalies they’re seeing or hypotheses the signals suggest. In any case, companies are just beginning to recognize and capture their value. Here are a few principles that companies can follow to grasp and harness the power of weak signals.
Engaging at the top
For starters, given the fluid nature of the insights that surface, it’s often useful to get senior leaders actively involved with the social-media sources that give rise to weak signals. Executives who are curious and attuned to the themes emerging from social media are more likely to spot such insights.1
For example, a global manufacturer whose high quality and low prices were the topic of one customer’s recent social-media post almost certainly would not have examined it but for a senior executive who was a sensitive social “listener” and found its implications intriguing. Did the company have an opportunity, the executive wondered, to increase prices or perhaps to seek market share more aggressively at the current prices?
To find out, the executive commissioned research to quantify what had started out as a qualitative hunch. Ultimately, the low-price perception turned out to be an anomaly, but the outsize perception of the product’s quality was widely held. In response, the company has started funneling marketing resources to the product in hopes of building its market share by capitalizing on its quality and differentiating it further from the offerings of competitors.
Listening and mapping
As the manufacturer’s example implies, spotting weak signals is more likely when companies can marshal dispersed networks of people who have a deep understanding of the business and act as listening posts. One global beverage company is considering including social-media awareness in its hiring criteria for some managers, to build its network and free its management team from “well-rehearsed habits.”
Weak signals are everywhere, of course, so deciding when and where to keep the antennae out is critical. One such situation involves a product, market, or service that doesn’t yet exist—but could. Consider the case of a global advertising company that was investigating (for one of its clients) a US growth opportunity related to child care. Because no one was offering the proposed service, keyword searches on social media (and on the web more broadly) wouldn’t work. Instead, the company looked to social-media platforms where it might find weak signals—finally discovering an online content service that allows users to create and share individualized newspapers.
In the child-care arena, digital-content channels are often curated by mothers and fathers, who invite conversations about their experiences and concerns, as well as assemble relevant articles by experts or government sources. Analysts used semantic clues to follow hundreds of fine-grained conversations on these sites. The exercise produced a wealth of relevant information about the types of services available in individual markets, the specific levels of service that parents sought, the prices they were willing to pay, the child-care options companies already sponsored, the strength of local providers (potential competitors), and the people in various communities who might become ambassadors for a new service. This wasn’t a number-crunching exercise; instead, it took an anthropological view of local child care—a mosaic formed from shards of information found only on social media. In the end, the weak signals helped the company to define the parameters of a not-yet-existing service.
Spotting visual clues
It’s also useful to search for weak signals when customers start engaging with products or services in new, tech-enabled ways, often simply by sharing perceptions about a company’s offerings and how they are using them. This can be hard for companies to relate to at first, as it’s quite removed from the usual practice of finding data patterns, clustering, and eliminating statistical noise. Spotting weak signals in such circumstances requires managers and employees to have the time and space to surf blogs or seek inspiration through services such as Tumblr or Instagram.
As intangible as these techniques may sound, they can deliver tangible results. US retailer Nordstrom, for example, took an early interest in the possibilities of Pinterest, the digital-scrapbooking site where users “pin” images they like on virtual boards and share them with a larger community. Displayed on Pinterest, the retailer’s products generate significant interest: the company currently has more than four million followers on the site.
Spotting an opportunity to share this online engagement with in-store shoppers, the company recently started displaying popular Pinterest items in two of its Seattle-area stores. When early results were encouraging, Nordstrom began rolling out the test more broadly to capitalize on the site’s appeal to customers as the “world’s largest ‘wish list,’” in the words of one executive.2
The retailer continues to look for more ways to match other customer interactions on Pinterest with its products. Local salespeople already use an in-store app to match items popular on Pinterest with items in the retailer’s inventory. As the “spotting” ability of companies in other industries matures, we expect visual tools such as Pinterest to be increasingly useful in detecting and capitalizing on weak signals.
Crossing functions
As the Nordstrom example demonstrates, listening for weak signals isn’t enough—companies must channel what’s been learned to the appropriate part of the organization so the findings can influence product development and other operational activities. Interestingly, TomTom, a company that offers products and services for navigation and traffic, found that the mechanism for spotting weak signals proved useful in enhancing its product-development process.
As part of normal operations, TomTom monitored social media closely, mining conversations to feed into performance metrics for marketing and customer-service executives. The normal process changed after an attentive company analyst noted that users posting on a UK forum were focused on connectivity problems. Rather than let the tenuous comments get lost in the company’s performance statistics, he channeled them to product-development teams. To resolve the issue, the teams worked directly—and in real time—with customers. That helped short-circuit an otherwise costly process, which would have required drivers using TomTom’s offerings to check out connectivity issues in a number of locales. The broader payoff came in the form of new R&D and product-development processes: TomTom now taps directly into its driving community for ideas on design and product features, as well as to troubleshoot new offerings quickly.
At most companies, weak signals will be unfamiliar territory for senior management, so an up-front investment in leadership time will be needed to clarify the strategic, organizational, and resource implications of new initiatives. The new roles will require people who are comfortable navigating diverse, less corporate sources of information.
Regardless of where companies observe weak signals, the authority to act on them should reside as close to the front lines as possible. Weak signals are strategic enough to demand top-management attention. They are sufficiently important to the day-to-day work of customer-service, technical-development, and marketing teams to make anything other than deep organizational engagement unwise.
About the authors
Martin Harrysson is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office, where Hugo Sarrazin is a director; Estelle Métayer, an alumnus of the Montréal office, is an adjunct professor at McGill University, in Montréal.
Source: www.mckinsey.com
GralInt-TED Talks-Alex Wissner-Gross: A new equation for intelligence
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Alex Wissner-Gross: A new equation for intelligence
Filmed Nov 2013 • Posted Feb 2014 • TEDxBeaconStreet 2013
Is there an equation for intelligence? Yes. It’s F = T ∇ Sτ. In a fascinating and informative talk, physicist and computer scientist Alex Wissner-Gross explains what in the world that means. Alex Wissner-Gross applies science and engineering principles to big (and diverse) questions, like: "What is the equation for intelligence?" and "What's the best way to raise awareness about climate change?"
Transcript:
Intelligence -- what is it? If we take a look back at the history of how intelligence has been viewed, one seminal example has been Edsger Dijkstra's famous quote that "the question of whether a machine can think is about as interesting as the question of whether a submarine can swim." Now, Edsger Dijkstra, when he wrote this, intended it as a criticism of the early pioneers of computer science, like Alan Turing. However, if you take a look back and think about what have been the most empowering innovations that enabled us to build artificial machines that swim and artificial machines that [fly], you find that it was only through understanding the underlying physical mechanisms of swimming and flight that we were able to build these machines. And so, several years ago, I undertook a program to try to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence.
Let's take a step back. Let's first begin with a thought experiment. Pretend that you're an alien race that doesn't know anything about Earth biology or Earth neuroscience or Earth intelligence, but you have amazing telescopes and you're able to watch the Earth, and you have amazingly long lives, so you're able to watch the Earth over millions, even billions of years. And you observe a really strange effect. You observe that, over the course of the millennia, Earth is continually bombarded with asteroids up until a point, and that at some point, corresponding roughly to our year, 2000 AD, asteroids that are on a collision course with the Earth that otherwise would have collided mysteriously get deflected or they detonate before they can hit the Earth. Now of course, as earthlings, we know the reason would be that we're trying to save ourselves. We're trying to prevent an impact. But if you're an alien race who doesn't know any of this, doesn't have any concept of Earth intelligence, you'd be forced to put together a physical theory that explains how, up until a certain point in time, asteroids that would demolish the surface of a planet mysteriously stop doing that. And so I claim that this is the same question as understanding the physical nature of intelligence.
So in this program that I undertook several years ago, I looked at a variety of different threads across science, across a variety of disciplines, that were pointing, I think, towards a single, underlying mechanism for intelligence. In cosmology, for example, there have been a variety of different threads of evidence that our universe appears to be finely tuned for the development of intelligence, and, in particular, for the development of universal states that maximize the diversity of possible futures. In game play, for example, in Go -- everyone remembers in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess -- fewer people are aware that in the past 10 years or so, the game of Go, arguably a much more challenging game because it has a much higher branching factor, has also started to succumb to computer game players for the same reason: the best techniques right now for computers playing Go are techniques that try to maximize future options during game play. Finally, in robotic motion planning, there have been a variety of recent techniques that have tried to take advantage of abilities of robots to maximize future freedom of action in order to accomplish complex tasks. And so, taking all of these different threads and putting them together, I asked, starting several years ago, is there an underlying mechanism for intelligence that we can factor out of all of these different threads? Is there a single equation for intelligence?
And the answer, I believe, is yes. ["F = T ∇ Sτ"] What you're seeing is probably the closest equivalent to an E = mc² for intelligence that I've seen. So what you're seeing here is a statement of correspondence that intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, tau. In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped. Intelligence tries to maximize future freedom of action and keep options open. And so, given this one equation, it's natural to ask, so what can you do with this? How predictive is it? Does it predict human-level intelligence? Does it predict artificial intelligence? So I'm going to show you now a video that will, I think, demonstrate some of the amazing applications of just this single equation.
(Video) Narrator: Recent research in cosmology has suggested that universes that produce more disorder, or "entropy," over their lifetimes should tend to have more favorable conditions for the existence of intelligent beings such as ourselves. But what if that tentative cosmological connection between entropy and intelligence hints at a deeper relationship? What if intelligent behavior doesn't just correlate with the production of long-term entropy, but actually emerges directly from it? To find out, we developed a software engine called Entropica, designed to maximize the production of long-term entropy of any system that it finds itself in. Amazingly, Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests, play human games, and even earn money trading stocks, all without being instructed to do so. Here are some examples of Entropica in action.
Just like a human standing upright without falling over, here we see Entropica automatically balancing a pole using a cart. This behavior is remarkable in part because we never gave Entropica a goal. It simply decided on its own to balance the pole. This balancing ability will have appliactions for humanoid robotics and human assistive technologies. Just as some animals can use objects in their environments as tools to reach into narrow spaces, here we see that Entropica, again on its own initiative, was able to move a large disk representing an animal around so as to cause a small disk, representing a tool, to reach into a confined space holding a third disk and release the third disk from its initially fixed position. This tool use ability will have applications for smart manufacturing and agriculture. In addition, just as some other animals are able to cooperate by pulling opposite ends of a rope at the same time to release food, here we see that Entropica is able to accomplish a model version of that task. This cooperative ability has interesting implications for economic planning and a variety of other fields.
Entropica is broadly applicable to a variety of domains. For example, here we see it successfully playing a game of pong against itself, illustrating its potential for gaming. Here we see Entropica orchestrating new connections on a social network where friends are constantly falling out of touch and successfully keeping the network well connected. This same network orchestration ability also has applications in health care, energy, and intelligence. Here we see Entropica directing the paths of a fleet of ships, successfully discovering and utilizing the Panama Canal to globally extend its reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific. By the same token, Entropica is broadly applicable to problems in autonomous defense, logistics and transportation.
Finally, here we see Entropica spontaneously discovering and executing a buy-low, sell-high strategy on a simulated range traded stock, successfully growing assets under management exponentially. This risk management ability will have broad applications in finance and insurance.
Alex Wissner-Gross: So what you've just seen is that a variety of signature human intelligent cognitive behaviors such as tool use and walking upright and social cooperation all follow from a single equation, which drives a system to maximize its future freedom of action.
Now, there's a profound irony here. Going back to the beginning of the usage of the term robot, the play "RUR," there was always a concept that if we developed machine intelligence, there would be a cybernetic revolt. The machines would rise up against us. One major consequence of this work is that maybe all of these decades, we've had the whole concept of cybernetic revolt in reverse. It's not that machines first become intelligent and then megalomaniacal and try to take over the world. It's quite the opposite, that the urge to take control of all possible futures is a more fundamental principle than that of intelligence, that general intelligence may in fact emerge directly from this sort of control-grabbing, rather than vice versa.
Another important consequence is goal seeking. I'm often asked, how does the ability to seek goals follow from this sort of framework? And the answer is, the ability to seek goals will follow directly from this in the following sense: just like you would travel through a tunnel, a bottleneck in your future path space, in order to achieve many other diverse objectives later on, or just like you would invest in a financial security, reducing your short-term liquidity in order to increase your wealth over the long term, goal seeking emerges directly from a long-term drive to increase future freedom of action.
Finally, Richard Feynman, famous physicist, once wrote that if human civilization were destroyed and you could pass only a single concept on to our descendants to help them rebuild civilization, that concept should be that all matter around us is made out of tiny elements that attract each other when they're far apart but repel each other when they're close together. My equivalent of that statement to pass on to descendants to help them build artificial intelligences or to help them understand human intelligence, is the following: Intelligence should be viewed as a physical process that tries to maximize future freedom of action and avoid constraints in its own future.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Alex Wissner-Gross: A new equation for intelligence
Filmed Nov 2013 • Posted Feb 2014 • TEDxBeaconStreet 2013
Is there an equation for intelligence? Yes. It’s F = T ∇ Sτ. In a fascinating and informative talk, physicist and computer scientist Alex Wissner-Gross explains what in the world that means. Alex Wissner-Gross applies science and engineering principles to big (and diverse) questions, like: "What is the equation for intelligence?" and "What's the best way to raise awareness about climate change?"
Transcript:
Intelligence -- what is it? If we take a look back at the history of how intelligence has been viewed, one seminal example has been Edsger Dijkstra's famous quote that "the question of whether a machine can think is about as interesting as the question of whether a submarine can swim." Now, Edsger Dijkstra, when he wrote this, intended it as a criticism of the early pioneers of computer science, like Alan Turing. However, if you take a look back and think about what have been the most empowering innovations that enabled us to build artificial machines that swim and artificial machines that [fly], you find that it was only through understanding the underlying physical mechanisms of swimming and flight that we were able to build these machines. And so, several years ago, I undertook a program to try to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence.
Let's take a step back. Let's first begin with a thought experiment. Pretend that you're an alien race that doesn't know anything about Earth biology or Earth neuroscience or Earth intelligence, but you have amazing telescopes and you're able to watch the Earth, and you have amazingly long lives, so you're able to watch the Earth over millions, even billions of years. And you observe a really strange effect. You observe that, over the course of the millennia, Earth is continually bombarded with asteroids up until a point, and that at some point, corresponding roughly to our year, 2000 AD, asteroids that are on a collision course with the Earth that otherwise would have collided mysteriously get deflected or they detonate before they can hit the Earth. Now of course, as earthlings, we know the reason would be that we're trying to save ourselves. We're trying to prevent an impact. But if you're an alien race who doesn't know any of this, doesn't have any concept of Earth intelligence, you'd be forced to put together a physical theory that explains how, up until a certain point in time, asteroids that would demolish the surface of a planet mysteriously stop doing that. And so I claim that this is the same question as understanding the physical nature of intelligence.
So in this program that I undertook several years ago, I looked at a variety of different threads across science, across a variety of disciplines, that were pointing, I think, towards a single, underlying mechanism for intelligence. In cosmology, for example, there have been a variety of different threads of evidence that our universe appears to be finely tuned for the development of intelligence, and, in particular, for the development of universal states that maximize the diversity of possible futures. In game play, for example, in Go -- everyone remembers in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess -- fewer people are aware that in the past 10 years or so, the game of Go, arguably a much more challenging game because it has a much higher branching factor, has also started to succumb to computer game players for the same reason: the best techniques right now for computers playing Go are techniques that try to maximize future options during game play. Finally, in robotic motion planning, there have been a variety of recent techniques that have tried to take advantage of abilities of robots to maximize future freedom of action in order to accomplish complex tasks. And so, taking all of these different threads and putting them together, I asked, starting several years ago, is there an underlying mechanism for intelligence that we can factor out of all of these different threads? Is there a single equation for intelligence?
And the answer, I believe, is yes. ["F = T ∇ Sτ"] What you're seeing is probably the closest equivalent to an E = mc² for intelligence that I've seen. So what you're seeing here is a statement of correspondence that intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, tau. In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped. Intelligence tries to maximize future freedom of action and keep options open. And so, given this one equation, it's natural to ask, so what can you do with this? How predictive is it? Does it predict human-level intelligence? Does it predict artificial intelligence? So I'm going to show you now a video that will, I think, demonstrate some of the amazing applications of just this single equation.
(Video) Narrator: Recent research in cosmology has suggested that universes that produce more disorder, or "entropy," over their lifetimes should tend to have more favorable conditions for the existence of intelligent beings such as ourselves. But what if that tentative cosmological connection between entropy and intelligence hints at a deeper relationship? What if intelligent behavior doesn't just correlate with the production of long-term entropy, but actually emerges directly from it? To find out, we developed a software engine called Entropica, designed to maximize the production of long-term entropy of any system that it finds itself in. Amazingly, Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests, play human games, and even earn money trading stocks, all without being instructed to do so. Here are some examples of Entropica in action.
Just like a human standing upright without falling over, here we see Entropica automatically balancing a pole using a cart. This behavior is remarkable in part because we never gave Entropica a goal. It simply decided on its own to balance the pole. This balancing ability will have appliactions for humanoid robotics and human assistive technologies. Just as some animals can use objects in their environments as tools to reach into narrow spaces, here we see that Entropica, again on its own initiative, was able to move a large disk representing an animal around so as to cause a small disk, representing a tool, to reach into a confined space holding a third disk and release the third disk from its initially fixed position. This tool use ability will have applications for smart manufacturing and agriculture. In addition, just as some other animals are able to cooperate by pulling opposite ends of a rope at the same time to release food, here we see that Entropica is able to accomplish a model version of that task. This cooperative ability has interesting implications for economic planning and a variety of other fields.
Entropica is broadly applicable to a variety of domains. For example, here we see it successfully playing a game of pong against itself, illustrating its potential for gaming. Here we see Entropica orchestrating new connections on a social network where friends are constantly falling out of touch and successfully keeping the network well connected. This same network orchestration ability also has applications in health care, energy, and intelligence. Here we see Entropica directing the paths of a fleet of ships, successfully discovering and utilizing the Panama Canal to globally extend its reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific. By the same token, Entropica is broadly applicable to problems in autonomous defense, logistics and transportation.
Finally, here we see Entropica spontaneously discovering and executing a buy-low, sell-high strategy on a simulated range traded stock, successfully growing assets under management exponentially. This risk management ability will have broad applications in finance and insurance.
Alex Wissner-Gross: So what you've just seen is that a variety of signature human intelligent cognitive behaviors such as tool use and walking upright and social cooperation all follow from a single equation, which drives a system to maximize its future freedom of action.
Now, there's a profound irony here. Going back to the beginning of the usage of the term robot, the play "RUR," there was always a concept that if we developed machine intelligence, there would be a cybernetic revolt. The machines would rise up against us. One major consequence of this work is that maybe all of these decades, we've had the whole concept of cybernetic revolt in reverse. It's not that machines first become intelligent and then megalomaniacal and try to take over the world. It's quite the opposite, that the urge to take control of all possible futures is a more fundamental principle than that of intelligence, that general intelligence may in fact emerge directly from this sort of control-grabbing, rather than vice versa.
Another important consequence is goal seeking. I'm often asked, how does the ability to seek goals follow from this sort of framework? And the answer is, the ability to seek goals will follow directly from this in the following sense: just like you would travel through a tunnel, a bottleneck in your future path space, in order to achieve many other diverse objectives later on, or just like you would invest in a financial security, reducing your short-term liquidity in order to increase your wealth over the long term, goal seeking emerges directly from a long-term drive to increase future freedom of action.
Finally, Richard Feynman, famous physicist, once wrote that if human civilization were destroyed and you could pass only a single concept on to our descendants to help them rebuild civilization, that concept should be that all matter around us is made out of tiny elements that attract each other when they're far apart but repel each other when they're close together. My equivalent of that statement to pass on to descendants to help them build artificial intelligences or to help them understand human intelligence, is the following: Intelligence should be viewed as a physical process that tries to maximize future freedom of action and avoid constraints in its own future.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
URBDEV/SOC/GralInt-TED Talks-Teddy Cruz: How architectural innovations migrate across borders
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Teddy Cruz: How architectural innovations migrate across borders
Filmed Jun 2013 • Posted Feb 2014 • TEDGlobal 2013
As the world's cities undergo explosive growth, inequality is intensifying. Wealthy neighborhoods and impoverished slums grow side by side, the gap between them widening. In this eye-opening talk, architect Teddy Cruz asks us to rethink urban development from the bottom up. Sharing lessons from the slums of Tijuana, Cruz explores the creative intelligence of the city's residents and offers a fresh perspective on what we can learn from places of scarcity.
Teddy Cruz looks for clues to the "city of the future" in the emerging urban areas of today.
Transcript:
The urban explosion of the last years of economic boom also produced dramatic marginalization, resulting in the explosion of slums in many parts of the world. This polarization of enclaves of mega-wealth surrounded by sectors of poverty and the socioeconomic inequalities they have engendered is really at the center of today's urban crisis. But I want to begin tonight by suggesting that this urban crisis is not only economic or environmental. It's particularly a cultural crisis, a crisis of the institutions unable to reimagine the stupid ways which we have been growing, unable to challenge the oil-hungry, selfish urbanization that have perpetuated cities based on consumption, from southern California to New York to Dubai. So I just really want to share with you a reflection that the future of cities today depends less on buildings and, in fact, depends more on the fundamental reorganization of socioeconomic relations, that the best ideas in the shaping of the city in the future will not come from enclaves of economic power and abundance, but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity from which an urgent imagination can really inspire us to rethink urban growth today.
And let me illustrate what I mean by understanding or engaging sites of conflict as harboring creativity, as I briefly introduce you to the Tijuana-San Diego border region, which has been the laboratory to rethink my practice as an architect.
This is the wall, the border wall, that separates San Diego and Tijuana, Latin America and the United States, a physical emblem of exclusionary planning policies that have perpetuated the division of communities, jurisdictions and resources across the world. In this border region, we find some of the wealthiest real estate, as I once found in the edges of San Diego, barely 20 minutes away from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America. And while these two cities have the same population, San Diego has grown six times larger than Tijuana in the last decades, immediately thrusting us to confront the tensions and conflicts between sprawl and density, which are at the center of today's discussion about environmental sustainability. So I've been arguing in the last years that, in fact, the slums of Tijuana can teach a lot to the sprawls of San Diego when it comes to socioeconomic sustainability, that we should pay attention and learn from the many migrant communities on both sides of this border wall so that we can translate their informal processes of urbanization.
What do I mean by the informal in this case? I'm really just talking about the compendium of social practices of adaptation that enable many of these migrant communities to transgress imposed political and economic recipes of urbanization. I'm talking simply about the creative intelligence of the bottom-up, whether manifested in the slums of Tijuana that build themselves, in fact, with the waste of San Diego, or the many migrant neighborhoods in Southern California that have begun to be retrofitted with difference in the last decades.
So I've been interested as an artist in the measuring, the observation, of many of the trans-border informal flows across this border: in one direction, from south to north, the flow of immigrants into the United States, and from north to south the flow of waste from southern California into Tijuana. I'm referring to the recycling of these old post-war bungalows that Mexican contractors bring to the border as American developers are disposing of them in the process of building a more inflated version of suburbia in the last decades. So these are houses waiting to cross the border. Not only people cross the border here, but entire chunks of one city move to the next, and when these houses are placed on top of these steel frames, they leave the first floor to become the second to be in-filled with more house, with a small business. This layering of spaces and economies is very interesting to notice. But not only houses, also small debris from one city, from San Diego, to Tijuana. Probably a lot of you have seen the rubber tires that are used in the slums to build retaining walls. But look at what people have done here in conditions of socioeconomic emergency. They have figured out how to peel off the tire, how to thread it and interlock it to construct a more efficient retaining wall. Or the garage doors that are brought from San Diego in trucks to become the new skin of emergency housing in many of these slums surrounding the edges of Tijuana.
So while, as an architect, this is a very compelling thing to witness, this creative intelligence, I also want to keep myself in check. I don't want to romanticize poverty. I just want to suggest that this informal urbanization is not just the image of precariousness, that informality here, the informal, is really a set of socioeconomic and political procedures that we could translate as artists, that this is about a bottom-up urbanization that performs. See here, buildings are not important just for their looks, but, in fact, they are important for what they can do. They truly perform as they transform through time and as communities negotiate the spaces and boundaries and resources.
So while waste flows southbound, people go north in search of dollars, and most of my research has had to do with the impact of immigration in the alteration of the homogeneity of many neighborhoods in the United States, particularly in San Diego. And I'm talking about how this begins to suggest that the future of Southern California depends on the retrofitting of the large urbanization -- I mean, on steroids -- with the small programs, social and economic. I'm referring to how immigrants, when they come to these neighborhoods, they begin to alter the one-dimensionality of parcels and properties into more socially and economically complex systems, as they begin to plug an informal economy into a garage, or as they build an illegal granny flat to support an extended family. This socioeconomic entrepreneurship on the ground within these neighborhoods really begins to suggest ways of translating that into new, inclusive and more equitable land use policies. So many stories emerge from these dynamics of alteration of space, such as "the informal Buddha," which tells the story of a small house that saved itself, it did not travel to Mexico, but it was retrofitted in the end into a Buddhist temple, and in so doing, this small house transforms or mutates from a singular dwelling into a small, or a micro, socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure inside a neighborhood.
So these action neighborhoods, as I call them, really become the inspiration to imagine other interpretations of citizenship that have less to do, in fact, with belonging to the nation-state, and more with upholding the notion of citizenship as a creative act that reorganizes institutional protocols in the spaces of the city.
As an artist, I've been interested, in fact, in the visualization of citizenship, the gathering of many anecdotes, urban stories, in order to narrativize the relationship between social processes and spaces. This is a story of a group of teenagers that one night, a few months ago, decided to invade this space under the freeway to begin constructing their own skateboard park. With shovels in hand, they started to dig. Two weeks later, the police stopped them. They barricaded the place, and the teenagers were evicted, and the teenagers decided to fight back, not with bank cards or slogans but with constructing a critical process. The first thing they did was to recognize the specificity of political jurisdiction inscribed in that empty space. They found out that they had been lucky because they had not begun to dig under Caltrans territoy. Caltrans is a state agency that governs the freeway, so it would have been very difficult to negotiate with them. They were lucky, they said, because they began to dig under an arm of the freeway that belongs to the local municipality. They were also lucky, they said, because they began to dig in a sort of Bermuda Triangle of jurisdiction, between port authority, airport authority, two city districts, and a review board. All these red lines are the invisible political institutions that were inscribed in that leftover empty space. With this knowledge, these teenagers as skaters confronted the city. They came to the city attorney's office. The city attorney told them that in order to continue the negotiation they had to become an NGO, and of course they didn't know what an NGO was. They had to talk to their friends in Seattle who had gone through the same experience. And they began to realize the necessity to organize themselves even deeper and began to fundraise, to organize budgets, to really be aware of all the knowledge embedded in the urban code in San Diego so that they could begin to redefine the very meaning of public space in the city, expanding it to other categories. At the end, the teenagers won the case with that evidence, and they were able to construct their skateboard park under that freeway.
Now for many of you, this story might seem trivial or naive. For me as an architect, it has become a fundamental narrative, because it begins to teach me that this micro-community not only designed another category of public space but they also designed the socioeconomic protocols that were necessary to be inscribed in that space for its long-term sustainability. They also taught me that similar to the migrant communities on both sides of the border, they engaged conflict itself as a creative tool, because they had to produce a process that enabled them to reorganize resources and the politics of the city. In that act, that informal, bottom-up act of transgression, really began to trickle up to transform top-down policy.
Now this journey from the bottom-up to the transformation of the top-down is where I find hope today. And I'm thinking of how these modest alterations with space and with policy in many cities in the world, in primarily the urgency of a collective imagination as these communities reimagine their own forms of governance, social organization, and infrastructure, really is at the center of the new formation of democratic politics of the urban. It is, in fact, this that could become the framework for producing new social and economic justice in the city. I want to say this and emphasize it, because this is the only way I see that can enable us to move from urbanizations of consumption to neighborhoods of production today.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Teddy Cruz: How architectural innovations migrate across borders
Filmed Jun 2013 • Posted Feb 2014 • TEDGlobal 2013
As the world's cities undergo explosive growth, inequality is intensifying. Wealthy neighborhoods and impoverished slums grow side by side, the gap between them widening. In this eye-opening talk, architect Teddy Cruz asks us to rethink urban development from the bottom up. Sharing lessons from the slums of Tijuana, Cruz explores the creative intelligence of the city's residents and offers a fresh perspective on what we can learn from places of scarcity.
Teddy Cruz looks for clues to the "city of the future" in the emerging urban areas of today.
Transcript:
The urban explosion of the last years of economic boom also produced dramatic marginalization, resulting in the explosion of slums in many parts of the world. This polarization of enclaves of mega-wealth surrounded by sectors of poverty and the socioeconomic inequalities they have engendered is really at the center of today's urban crisis. But I want to begin tonight by suggesting that this urban crisis is not only economic or environmental. It's particularly a cultural crisis, a crisis of the institutions unable to reimagine the stupid ways which we have been growing, unable to challenge the oil-hungry, selfish urbanization that have perpetuated cities based on consumption, from southern California to New York to Dubai. So I just really want to share with you a reflection that the future of cities today depends less on buildings and, in fact, depends more on the fundamental reorganization of socioeconomic relations, that the best ideas in the shaping of the city in the future will not come from enclaves of economic power and abundance, but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity from which an urgent imagination can really inspire us to rethink urban growth today.
And let me illustrate what I mean by understanding or engaging sites of conflict as harboring creativity, as I briefly introduce you to the Tijuana-San Diego border region, which has been the laboratory to rethink my practice as an architect.
This is the wall, the border wall, that separates San Diego and Tijuana, Latin America and the United States, a physical emblem of exclusionary planning policies that have perpetuated the division of communities, jurisdictions and resources across the world. In this border region, we find some of the wealthiest real estate, as I once found in the edges of San Diego, barely 20 minutes away from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America. And while these two cities have the same population, San Diego has grown six times larger than Tijuana in the last decades, immediately thrusting us to confront the tensions and conflicts between sprawl and density, which are at the center of today's discussion about environmental sustainability. So I've been arguing in the last years that, in fact, the slums of Tijuana can teach a lot to the sprawls of San Diego when it comes to socioeconomic sustainability, that we should pay attention and learn from the many migrant communities on both sides of this border wall so that we can translate their informal processes of urbanization.
What do I mean by the informal in this case? I'm really just talking about the compendium of social practices of adaptation that enable many of these migrant communities to transgress imposed political and economic recipes of urbanization. I'm talking simply about the creative intelligence of the bottom-up, whether manifested in the slums of Tijuana that build themselves, in fact, with the waste of San Diego, or the many migrant neighborhoods in Southern California that have begun to be retrofitted with difference in the last decades.
So I've been interested as an artist in the measuring, the observation, of many of the trans-border informal flows across this border: in one direction, from south to north, the flow of immigrants into the United States, and from north to south the flow of waste from southern California into Tijuana. I'm referring to the recycling of these old post-war bungalows that Mexican contractors bring to the border as American developers are disposing of them in the process of building a more inflated version of suburbia in the last decades. So these are houses waiting to cross the border. Not only people cross the border here, but entire chunks of one city move to the next, and when these houses are placed on top of these steel frames, they leave the first floor to become the second to be in-filled with more house, with a small business. This layering of spaces and economies is very interesting to notice. But not only houses, also small debris from one city, from San Diego, to Tijuana. Probably a lot of you have seen the rubber tires that are used in the slums to build retaining walls. But look at what people have done here in conditions of socioeconomic emergency. They have figured out how to peel off the tire, how to thread it and interlock it to construct a more efficient retaining wall. Or the garage doors that are brought from San Diego in trucks to become the new skin of emergency housing in many of these slums surrounding the edges of Tijuana.
So while, as an architect, this is a very compelling thing to witness, this creative intelligence, I also want to keep myself in check. I don't want to romanticize poverty. I just want to suggest that this informal urbanization is not just the image of precariousness, that informality here, the informal, is really a set of socioeconomic and political procedures that we could translate as artists, that this is about a bottom-up urbanization that performs. See here, buildings are not important just for their looks, but, in fact, they are important for what they can do. They truly perform as they transform through time and as communities negotiate the spaces and boundaries and resources.
So while waste flows southbound, people go north in search of dollars, and most of my research has had to do with the impact of immigration in the alteration of the homogeneity of many neighborhoods in the United States, particularly in San Diego. And I'm talking about how this begins to suggest that the future of Southern California depends on the retrofitting of the large urbanization -- I mean, on steroids -- with the small programs, social and economic. I'm referring to how immigrants, when they come to these neighborhoods, they begin to alter the one-dimensionality of parcels and properties into more socially and economically complex systems, as they begin to plug an informal economy into a garage, or as they build an illegal granny flat to support an extended family. This socioeconomic entrepreneurship on the ground within these neighborhoods really begins to suggest ways of translating that into new, inclusive and more equitable land use policies. So many stories emerge from these dynamics of alteration of space, such as "the informal Buddha," which tells the story of a small house that saved itself, it did not travel to Mexico, but it was retrofitted in the end into a Buddhist temple, and in so doing, this small house transforms or mutates from a singular dwelling into a small, or a micro, socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure inside a neighborhood.
So these action neighborhoods, as I call them, really become the inspiration to imagine other interpretations of citizenship that have less to do, in fact, with belonging to the nation-state, and more with upholding the notion of citizenship as a creative act that reorganizes institutional protocols in the spaces of the city.
As an artist, I've been interested, in fact, in the visualization of citizenship, the gathering of many anecdotes, urban stories, in order to narrativize the relationship between social processes and spaces. This is a story of a group of teenagers that one night, a few months ago, decided to invade this space under the freeway to begin constructing their own skateboard park. With shovels in hand, they started to dig. Two weeks later, the police stopped them. They barricaded the place, and the teenagers were evicted, and the teenagers decided to fight back, not with bank cards or slogans but with constructing a critical process. The first thing they did was to recognize the specificity of political jurisdiction inscribed in that empty space. They found out that they had been lucky because they had not begun to dig under Caltrans territoy. Caltrans is a state agency that governs the freeway, so it would have been very difficult to negotiate with them. They were lucky, they said, because they began to dig under an arm of the freeway that belongs to the local municipality. They were also lucky, they said, because they began to dig in a sort of Bermuda Triangle of jurisdiction, between port authority, airport authority, two city districts, and a review board. All these red lines are the invisible political institutions that were inscribed in that leftover empty space. With this knowledge, these teenagers as skaters confronted the city. They came to the city attorney's office. The city attorney told them that in order to continue the negotiation they had to become an NGO, and of course they didn't know what an NGO was. They had to talk to their friends in Seattle who had gone through the same experience. And they began to realize the necessity to organize themselves even deeper and began to fundraise, to organize budgets, to really be aware of all the knowledge embedded in the urban code in San Diego so that they could begin to redefine the very meaning of public space in the city, expanding it to other categories. At the end, the teenagers won the case with that evidence, and they were able to construct their skateboard park under that freeway.
Now for many of you, this story might seem trivial or naive. For me as an architect, it has become a fundamental narrative, because it begins to teach me that this micro-community not only designed another category of public space but they also designed the socioeconomic protocols that were necessary to be inscribed in that space for its long-term sustainability. They also taught me that similar to the migrant communities on both sides of the border, they engaged conflict itself as a creative tool, because they had to produce a process that enabled them to reorganize resources and the politics of the city. In that act, that informal, bottom-up act of transgression, really began to trickle up to transform top-down policy.
Now this journey from the bottom-up to the transformation of the top-down is where I find hope today. And I'm thinking of how these modest alterations with space and with policy in many cities in the world, in primarily the urgency of a collective imagination as these communities reimagine their own forms of governance, social organization, and infrastructure, really is at the center of the new formation of democratic politics of the urban. It is, in fact, this that could become the framework for producing new social and economic justice in the city. I want to say this and emphasize it, because this is the only way I see that can enable us to move from urbanizations of consumption to neighborhoods of production today.
Thank you.
(Applause)
DOMVIOL/GralInt-TED Talks-Esta Soler: How we turned the tide on domestic violence (Hint: the Polaroid helped)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Esta Soler: How we turned the tide on domestic violence (Hint: the Polaroid helped)
Filmed Dec 2013 • Posted Feb 2014 • TEDWomen 2013
When Esta Soler lobbied for a bill outlawing domestic violence in 1984, one politician called it the "Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act." "If only I had Twitter then," she mused. This sweeping, optimistic talk charts 30 years of tactics and technologies -- from the Polaroid camera to social media -- that led to a 64% drop in domestic violence in the U.S.
In 1994, Esta Soler convinced Congress to pass a law to combat the devastating effects of violence against women. Today, her mission is global.
Transcript:
I want you to imagine what a breakthrough this was for women who were victims of violence in the 1980s. They would come into the emergency room with what the police would call "a lovers' quarrel," and I would see a woman who was beaten, I would see a broken nose and a fractured wrist and swollen eyes. And as activists, we would take our Polaroid camera, we would take her picture, we would wait 90 seconds, and we would give her the photograph. And she would then have the evidence she needed to go to court. We were making what was invisible visible.
I've been doing this for 30 years. I've been part of a social movement that has been working on ending violence against women and children. And for all those years, I've had an absolutely passionate and sometimes not popular belief that this violence is not inevitable, that it is learned, and if it's learned, it can be un-learned, and it can be prevented. (Applause)
Why do I believe this? Because it's true. It is absolutely true. Between 1993 and 2010, domestic violence among adult women in the United States has gone down by 64 percent, and that is great news. (Applause)
Sixty-four percent. Now, how did we get there? Our eyes were wide open. Thirty years ago, women were beaten, they were stalked, they were raped, and no one talked about it. There was no justice. And as an activist, that was not good enough. And so step one on this journey is we organized, and we created this extraordinary underground network of amazing women who opened shelters, and if they didn't open a shelter, they opened their home so that women and children could be safe. And you know what else we did? We had bake sales, we had car washes, and we did everything we could do to fundraise, and then at one point we said, you know, it's time that we went to the federal government and asked them to pay for these extraordinary services that are saving people's lives. Right? (Applause)
And so, step number two, we knew we needed to change the laws. And so we went to Washington, and we lobbied for the first piece of legislation. And I remember walking through the halls of the U.S. Capitol, and I was in my 30s, and my life had purpose, and I couldn't imagine that anybody would ever challenge this important piece of legislation. I was probably 30 and naive. But I heard about a congressman who had a very, very different point of view. Do you know what he called this important piece of legislation? He called it the Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act. The Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act. Ladies and gentlemen, that was in 1984 in the United States, and I wish I had Twitter. (Laughter)
Ten years later, after lots of hard work, we finally passed the Violence Against Women Act, which is a life-changing act that has saved so many lives. (Applause) Thank you. I was proud to be part of that work, and it changed the laws and it put millions of dollars into local communities.
And you know what else it did? It collected data. And I have to tell you, I'm passionate about data. In fact, I am a data nerd. I'm sure there are a lot of data nerds here. I am a data nerd, and the reason for that is I want to make sure that if we spend a dollar, that the program works, and if it doesn't work, we should change the plan.
And I also want to say one other thing: We are not going to solve this problem by building more jails or by even building more shelters. It is about economic empowerment for women, it is about healing kids who are hurt, and it is about prevention with a capital P.
And so, step number three on this journey: We know, if we're going to keep making this progress, we're going to have to turn up the volume, we're going to have to increase the visibility, and we're going to have to engage the public. And so knowing that, we went to the Advertising Council, and we asked them to help us build a public education campaign. And we looked around the world to Canada and Australia and Brazil and parts of Africa, and we took this knowledge and we built the first national public education campaign called There's No Excuse for Domestic Violence. Take a look at one of our spots.
(Video) Man: Where's dinner?
Woman: Well, I thought you'd be home a couple hours ago, and I put everything away, so—
Man: What is this? Pizza. Woman: If you had just called me, I would have known—
Man: Dinner? Dinner ready is a pizza? Woman: Honey, please don't be so loud. Please don't—Let go of me!
Man: Get in the kitchen! Woman: No! Help!
Man: You want to see what hurts? (Slaps woman)
That's what hurts! That's what hurts! (Breaking glass)
Woman: Help me!
["Children have to sit by and watch. What's your excuse?"]
Esta Soler: As we were in the process of releasing this campaign, O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his wife and her friend. We learned that he had a long history of domestic violence. The media became fixated. The story of domestic violence went from the back page, but actually from the no-page, to the front page. Our ads blanketed the airwaves, and women, for the first time, started to tell their stories. Movements are about moments, and we seized this moment. And let me just put this in context. Before 1980, do you have any idea how many articles were in The New York Times on domestic violence? I'll tell you: 158. And in the 2000s, over 7,000. We were obviously making a difference.
But we were still missing a critical element. So, step four: We needed to engage men. We couldn't solve this problem with 50 percent of the population on the sidelines. And I already told you I'm a data nerd. National polling told us that men felt indicted and not invited into this conversation. So we wondered, how can we include men? How can we get men to talk about violence against women and girls? And a male friend of mine pulled me aside and he said, "You want men to talk about violence against women and girls. Men don't talk." (Laughter) I apologize to the men in the audience. I know you do. But he said, "Do you know what they do do? They do talk to their kids. They talk to their kids as parents, as coaches." And that's what we did. We met men where they were at and we built a program. And then we had this one event that stays in my heart forever where a basketball coach was talking to a room filled with male athletes and men from all walks of life. And he was talking about the importance of coaching boys into men and changing the culture of the locker room and giving men the tools to have healthy relationships. And all of a sudden, he looked at the back of the room, and he saw his daughter, and he called out his daughter's name, Michaela, and he said, "Michaela, come up here." And she's nine years old, and she was kind of shy, and she got up there, and he said, "Sit down next to me." She sat right down next to him. He gave her this big hug, and he said, "People ask me why I do this work. I do this work because I'm her dad, and I don't want anyone ever to hurt her." And as a parent, I get it. I get it, knowing that there are so many sexual assaults on college campuses that are so widespread and so under-reported. We've done a lot for adult women. We've got to do a better job for our kids. We just do. We have to. (Applause)
We've come a long way since the days of the Polaroid. Technology has been our friend. The mobile phone is a global game changer for the empowerment of women, and Facebook and Twitter and Google and YouTube and all the social media helps us organize and tell our story in a powerful way. And so those of you in this audience who have helped build those applications and those platforms, as an organizer, I say, thank you very much. Really. I clap for you. (Applause)
I'm the daughter of a man who joined one club in his life, the Optimist Club. You can't make that one up. And it is his spirit and his optimism that is in my DNA. I have been doing this work for over 30 years, and I am convinced, now more than ever, in the capacity of human beings to change. I believe we can bend the arc of human history toward compassion and equality, and I also fundamentally believe and passionately believe that this violence does not have to be part of the human condition. And I ask you, stand with us as we create futures without violence for women and girls and men and boys everywhere.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Esta Soler: How we turned the tide on domestic violence (Hint: the Polaroid helped)
Filmed Dec 2013 • Posted Feb 2014 • TEDWomen 2013
When Esta Soler lobbied for a bill outlawing domestic violence in 1984, one politician called it the "Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act." "If only I had Twitter then," she mused. This sweeping, optimistic talk charts 30 years of tactics and technologies -- from the Polaroid camera to social media -- that led to a 64% drop in domestic violence in the U.S.
In 1994, Esta Soler convinced Congress to pass a law to combat the devastating effects of violence against women. Today, her mission is global.
Transcript:
I want you to imagine what a breakthrough this was for women who were victims of violence in the 1980s. They would come into the emergency room with what the police would call "a lovers' quarrel," and I would see a woman who was beaten, I would see a broken nose and a fractured wrist and swollen eyes. And as activists, we would take our Polaroid camera, we would take her picture, we would wait 90 seconds, and we would give her the photograph. And she would then have the evidence she needed to go to court. We were making what was invisible visible.
I've been doing this for 30 years. I've been part of a social movement that has been working on ending violence against women and children. And for all those years, I've had an absolutely passionate and sometimes not popular belief that this violence is not inevitable, that it is learned, and if it's learned, it can be un-learned, and it can be prevented. (Applause)
Why do I believe this? Because it's true. It is absolutely true. Between 1993 and 2010, domestic violence among adult women in the United States has gone down by 64 percent, and that is great news. (Applause)
Sixty-four percent. Now, how did we get there? Our eyes were wide open. Thirty years ago, women were beaten, they were stalked, they were raped, and no one talked about it. There was no justice. And as an activist, that was not good enough. And so step one on this journey is we organized, and we created this extraordinary underground network of amazing women who opened shelters, and if they didn't open a shelter, they opened their home so that women and children could be safe. And you know what else we did? We had bake sales, we had car washes, and we did everything we could do to fundraise, and then at one point we said, you know, it's time that we went to the federal government and asked them to pay for these extraordinary services that are saving people's lives. Right? (Applause)
And so, step number two, we knew we needed to change the laws. And so we went to Washington, and we lobbied for the first piece of legislation. And I remember walking through the halls of the U.S. Capitol, and I was in my 30s, and my life had purpose, and I couldn't imagine that anybody would ever challenge this important piece of legislation. I was probably 30 and naive. But I heard about a congressman who had a very, very different point of view. Do you know what he called this important piece of legislation? He called it the Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act. The Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act. Ladies and gentlemen, that was in 1984 in the United States, and I wish I had Twitter. (Laughter)
Ten years later, after lots of hard work, we finally passed the Violence Against Women Act, which is a life-changing act that has saved so many lives. (Applause) Thank you. I was proud to be part of that work, and it changed the laws and it put millions of dollars into local communities.
And you know what else it did? It collected data. And I have to tell you, I'm passionate about data. In fact, I am a data nerd. I'm sure there are a lot of data nerds here. I am a data nerd, and the reason for that is I want to make sure that if we spend a dollar, that the program works, and if it doesn't work, we should change the plan.
And I also want to say one other thing: We are not going to solve this problem by building more jails or by even building more shelters. It is about economic empowerment for women, it is about healing kids who are hurt, and it is about prevention with a capital P.
And so, step number three on this journey: We know, if we're going to keep making this progress, we're going to have to turn up the volume, we're going to have to increase the visibility, and we're going to have to engage the public. And so knowing that, we went to the Advertising Council, and we asked them to help us build a public education campaign. And we looked around the world to Canada and Australia and Brazil and parts of Africa, and we took this knowledge and we built the first national public education campaign called There's No Excuse for Domestic Violence. Take a look at one of our spots.
(Video) Man: Where's dinner?
Woman: Well, I thought you'd be home a couple hours ago, and I put everything away, so—
Man: What is this? Pizza. Woman: If you had just called me, I would have known—
Man: Dinner? Dinner ready is a pizza? Woman: Honey, please don't be so loud. Please don't—Let go of me!
Man: Get in the kitchen! Woman: No! Help!
Man: You want to see what hurts? (Slaps woman)
That's what hurts! That's what hurts! (Breaking glass)
Woman: Help me!
["Children have to sit by and watch. What's your excuse?"]
Esta Soler: As we were in the process of releasing this campaign, O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his wife and her friend. We learned that he had a long history of domestic violence. The media became fixated. The story of domestic violence went from the back page, but actually from the no-page, to the front page. Our ads blanketed the airwaves, and women, for the first time, started to tell their stories. Movements are about moments, and we seized this moment. And let me just put this in context. Before 1980, do you have any idea how many articles were in The New York Times on domestic violence? I'll tell you: 158. And in the 2000s, over 7,000. We were obviously making a difference.
But we were still missing a critical element. So, step four: We needed to engage men. We couldn't solve this problem with 50 percent of the population on the sidelines. And I already told you I'm a data nerd. National polling told us that men felt indicted and not invited into this conversation. So we wondered, how can we include men? How can we get men to talk about violence against women and girls? And a male friend of mine pulled me aside and he said, "You want men to talk about violence against women and girls. Men don't talk." (Laughter) I apologize to the men in the audience. I know you do. But he said, "Do you know what they do do? They do talk to their kids. They talk to their kids as parents, as coaches." And that's what we did. We met men where they were at and we built a program. And then we had this one event that stays in my heart forever where a basketball coach was talking to a room filled with male athletes and men from all walks of life. And he was talking about the importance of coaching boys into men and changing the culture of the locker room and giving men the tools to have healthy relationships. And all of a sudden, he looked at the back of the room, and he saw his daughter, and he called out his daughter's name, Michaela, and he said, "Michaela, come up here." And she's nine years old, and she was kind of shy, and she got up there, and he said, "Sit down next to me." She sat right down next to him. He gave her this big hug, and he said, "People ask me why I do this work. I do this work because I'm her dad, and I don't want anyone ever to hurt her." And as a parent, I get it. I get it, knowing that there are so many sexual assaults on college campuses that are so widespread and so under-reported. We've done a lot for adult women. We've got to do a better job for our kids. We just do. We have to. (Applause)
We've come a long way since the days of the Polaroid. Technology has been our friend. The mobile phone is a global game changer for the empowerment of women, and Facebook and Twitter and Google and YouTube and all the social media helps us organize and tell our story in a powerful way. And so those of you in this audience who have helped build those applications and those platforms, as an organizer, I say, thank you very much. Really. I clap for you. (Applause)
I'm the daughter of a man who joined one club in his life, the Optimist Club. You can't make that one up. And it is his spirit and his optimism that is in my DNA. I have been doing this work for over 30 years, and I am convinced, now more than ever, in the capacity of human beings to change. I believe we can bend the arc of human history toward compassion and equality, and I also fundamentally believe and passionately believe that this violence does not have to be part of the human condition. And I ask you, stand with us as we create futures without violence for women and girls and men and boys everywhere.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
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