Saturday, June 19, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Obama, the Thin-Skinned President
[Chief political aide David] Axelrod also warned that Obama's confessions of youthful drug use, described in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, would be used against him. "This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience," he wrote. "It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don't know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don't relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched," he said of Obama's 2004 U.S. Senate opponent.
Sen. Roberts is being too generous. Obama is among the most thin-skinned presidents we have had, and we see evidence of it in every possible venue imaginable, from one-on-one interviews to press conferences, from extemporaneous remarks to set speeches.Let's face it: this has been the toughest year and a half since any year and a half since the 1930s.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Thursday, May 06, 2010
2010 Cervelo RS
| Fork | 3T Funda PRO |
| Headset | FSA Orbit IS |
| Seatpost | FSA Carbon Pro CSI |
| Shift/Brake Levers | Shimano Ultegra 6700 |
| Front Derailleur | Shimano Ultegra 6700 |
| Rear Derailleur | Shimano Ultegra 6700 |
| Cassette | Shimano Ultegra 6700 (11-28) |
| Chain | Shimano Ultegra 6700 |
| Brake Calipers | Shimano Ultegra 6700 |
| Crankset | Shimano Ultegra 6700 (50/34) |
| Bottom Bracket | Shimano Ultegra 6700 |
| Stem | 3T ARX PRO |
| Handlebars | 3T Ergonova OE |
| Saddle | fi'zi:k Aliante Carbon K:ium Twin Flex |
| Wheels | Mavic Ksyrium SL |
| Tires | Continental Grand Prix 4000S |
| Color Pedals | silver/black SPD SL -6700 |
Review
- cyclingweeking magazine - Roger Hammond's RS
- Bicycling Buyer’s Guide
- Bicycling Award “Best Plush Bike” for Cervélo RS
- Cycling Weekly UK gives the RS a first impression of 10 out of 10!
- Endurance magazine proclaims the RS “the bike that makes sense” for a lot of people
- RS wins top spot in the Buyer’s Guide gallery of Bicycling, the world’s largest bike mag
- Cycling Weekly UK reviews the Cervélo RS
- RoadBikeReview.com
- Competitive Cyclist
- BikeReviews.com
- TestRider.com
Saturday, May 01, 2010
So Cruel: U2's tour to send Angels on a 14-game trip in June
And there's at least one place where his mysterious ways are very effective: The Major League Baseball season.
When U2 comes to town this summer, the Los Angeles Angels, Oakland Athletics and Toronto Blue Jays will have to vacate their home stadium, jump that plane and find somewhere else to ply their trade.
The band's 360º concert tour, which resumes in June and runs through October, hits 10 major-league cities and includes three big-league ballparks: Angel Stadium, the Oakland Coliseum and Rogers Centre.
Anyone who has ever been to a U2 show can tell you it's not like they set up folding chairs in a middle school gymnasium and start playing. The Pop Martians perform on elaborate monstrosities that take days to assemble and break down. Yes, days.
Just ask Katy Feeney, a longtime MLB executive who handles the league's scheduling issues. Trying to throw your arms around the world calendar seems to be difficult enough work, the kind that only gets more complex when accounting for a variable like Bono.
Via Scott Miller's blog at CBS Sports:
"They've become my least-favorite band — which has nothing to do with their songs, talent or anything else," Feeney joked.
Because of the magnitude of the tour and sheer size of the stage, Feeney says, "they require 10 days to set up the concert and then break it down. That's an unusually long period of time [compared to other concerts]."
This is why the Angels will be forced to embark on a 14-game road trip in June.
Fourteen games? Oh, you've done it now, Paul David Hewson!
This is approximately what Angel Stadium will look like June 6-7 when U2's 360º tour drops from space into Orange County. (The original photo of the "Big A" is from a 1978 Rolling Stones concert with U2's modern stage superimposed.)
It's not just that the rock concert takes up space in Anaheim. Not having the Angels able to play at home for ten days or two weeks affects other team's road trips.
The whole league feels it a little.
"Unfortunately, everything has a ripple effect," Feeney says. "And the
number of actual teams hosting the concert, other than those 10 days,
may not feel as many consequences as some other clubs."
Forcing the Rally Monkey from his home for two weeks?
Probably not the legacy Bono is shooting for.
The Data-Driven Life
The Data-Driven Life
By GARY WOLF
Published: April 26, 2010
Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can’t even answer the simplest questions. Where was I last week at this time? How long have I had this pain in my knee? How much money do I typically spend in a day? These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut.
That is, some of us do. Others use data. A timer running on Robin Barooah’s computer tells him that he has been living in the United States for 8 years, 2 months and 10 days. At various times in his life, Barooah — a 38-year-old self-employed software designer from England who now lives in Oakland, Calif. — has also made careful records of his work, his sleep and his diet.
A few months ago, Barooah began to wean himself from coffee. His method was precise. He made a large cup of coffee and removed 20 milliliters weekly. This went on for more than four months, until barely a sip remained in the cup. He drank it and called himself cured. Unlike his previous attempts to quit, this time there were no headaches, no extreme cravings. Still, he was tempted, and on Oct. 12 last year, while distracted at his desk, he told himself that he could probably concentrate better if he had a cup. Coffee may have been bad for his health, he thought, but perhaps it was good for his concentration.
Barooah wasn’t about to try to answer a question like this with guesswork. He had a good data set that showed how many minutes he spent each day in focused work. With this, he could do an objective analysis. Barooah made a chart with dates on the bottom and his work time along the side. Running down the middle was a big black line labeled “Stopped drinking coffee.” On the left side of the line, low spikes and narrow columns. On the right side, high spikes and thick columns. The data had delivered their verdict, and coffee lost.
He was sad but also thrilled. Instead of a stimulating cup of coffee, he got a bracing dose of truth. “People have such very poor sense of time,” Barooah says, and without good time calibration, it is much harder to see the consequences of your actions. If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them.
Five years ago, Ben Lipkowitz, who is now 28, was living with some friends in Bloomington, Ind., and he found himself wondering how much time he spent doing one of his roommates’ dishes. Lipkowitz had a handheld electronic datebook that he purchased on a trip to Tokyo, and on May 11, 2005, at 2:20 p.m., he started using it to keep a record of his actions. Instead of entering his future appointments, he entered his past activities, creating a remarkably complete account of his life. In one sense this was just a normal personal journal, albeit in a digital format and unusually detailed. But the format and detail made all the difference. Lipkowitz eventually transferred the data to his computer, and now, using a few keyboard commands, he can call up his history. He knows how much he has eaten and how much he has spent. He knows what books he has read and what objects he has purchased. And of course, he knows the answer to his original question. “I was thinking I was spending an hour a day cleaning up after this person,” Lipkowitz says. He shrugs. “It turned out it was more like 20 minutes.”
Another person I’m friendly with, Mark Carranza — he also makes his living with computers — has been keeping a detailed, searchable archive of all the ideas he has had since he was 21. That was in 1984. I realize that this seems impossible. But I have seen his archive, with its million plus entries, and observed him using it. He navigates smoothly between an interaction with somebody in the present moment and his digital record, bringing in associations to conversations that took place years earlier. Most thoughts are tagged with date, time and location. What for other people is an inchoate flow of mental life is broken up into elements and cross-referenced.
These men all know that their behavior is abnormal. They are outliers. Geeks. But why does what they are doing seem so strange? In other contexts, it is normal to seek data. A fetish for numbers is the defining trait of the modern manager. Corporate executives facing down hostile shareholders load their pockets full of numbers. So do politicians on the hustings, doctors counseling patients and fans abusing their local sports franchise on talk radio. Charles Dickens was already making fun of this obsession in 1854, with his sketch of the fact-mad schoolmaster Gradgrind, who blasted his students with memorized trivia. But Dickens’s great caricature only proved the durability of the type. For another century and a half, it got worse.
Or, by another standard, you could say it got better. We tolerate the pathologies of quantification — a dry, abstract, mechanical type of knowledge — because the results are so powerful. Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually. In science, in business and in the more reasonable sectors of government, numbers have won fair and square.
For a long time, only one area of human activity appeared to be immune. In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy.
And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed. On MedHelp, one of the largest Internet forums for health information, more than 30,000 new personal tracking projects are started by users every month. Foursquare, a geo-tracking application with about one million users, keeps a running tally of how many times players “check in” at every locale, automatically building a detailed diary of movements and habits; many users publish these data widely. Nintendo’s Wii Fit, a device that allows players to stand on a platform, play physical games, measure their body weight and compare their stats, has sold more than 28 million units.
Two years ago, as I noticed that the daily habits of millions of people were starting to edge uncannily close to the experiments of the most extreme experimenters, I started a Web site called the Quantified Self with my colleague Kevin Kelly. We began holding regular meetings for people running interesting personal data projects. I had recently written a long article about a trend among Silicon Valley types who time their days in increments as small as two minutes, and I suspected that the self-tracking explosion was simply the logical outcome of this obsession with efficiency. We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?
But I soon realized that an emphasis on efficiency missed something important. Efficiency implies rapid progress toward a known goal. For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.
Ubiquitous self-tracking is a dream of engineers. For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. A hundred years ago, a bold researcher fascinated by the riddle of human personality might have grabbed onto new psychoanalytic concepts like repression and the unconscious. These ideas were invented by people who loved language. Even as therapeutic concepts of the self spread widely in simplified, easily accessible form, they retained something of the prolix, literary humanism of their inventors. From the languor of the analyst’s couch to the chatty inquisitiveness of a self-help questionnaire, the dominant forms of self-exploration assume that the road to knowledge lies through words. Trackers are exploring an alternate route. Instead of interrogating their inner worlds through talking and writing, they are using numbers. They are constructing a quantified self.
UNTIL A FEW YEARS ago it would have been pointless to seek self-knowledge through numbers. Although sociologists could survey us in aggregate, and laboratory psychologists could do clever experiments with volunteer subjects, the real way we ate, played, talked and loved left only the faintest measurable trace. Our only method of tracking ourselves was to notice what we were doing and write it down. But even this written record couldn’t be analyzed objectively without laborious processing and analysis.
Then four things changed. First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.
Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But when the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Automated sensors do more than give us facts; they also remind us that our ordinary behavior contains obscure quantitative signals that can be used to inform our behavior, once we learn to read them.
“When you have small, distributed battery-powered sensors, you want to collect all biometric data,” says Ken Fyfe, one of the pioneers of wearable tracking devices. In the mid-’90s, Fyfe was teaching engineering at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where his specialty was acoustics and vibration. He was also a runner, in a family of runners. His sons were national competitors at 400 and 800 meters. At the time, runners who wanted to know more about the mechanics of their performance — their stride, their cadence, the way their motion changed as they grew tired — had to go into a lab and be filmed. “You would run in a room on a treadmill with reflective stickers on your hips, knees, ankles and feet,” Fyfe recalls.
Taking video of people in motion, and then analyzing the video, seemed like a roundabout way to get data. Why not use an accelerometer, which can directly measure changes in speed and direction? Accelerometers had long been used in industry and cost several hundred dollars each. Then accelerometers were developed to trigger the air bags in cars. Massive purchases in the automotive industry drove the cost down. The size and power demands shrank, too. Suddenly, it seemed less crazy to put an accelerometer on your body.
Fyfe guessed that there would be plenty of interest in something like a personal speedometer, a wearable instrument that displayed how far you’d gone and your average speed. So he tried to invent one. “I worked on it every weekend for three years,” Fyfe says. He put accelerometers into a molded plastic insert. The insert fit into a shoe, and data were transmitted wirelessly to a sports watch. But there was a problem. The numbers produced by a motion sensor don’t necessarily say anything about a runner’s pace and distance. They give you the acceleration of a runner’s foot — that’s all. Some method — a formula or algorithm — is needed to translate the data into the information you want, and the method must work for almost everybody under a wide range of conditions: stopping and starting, jumping over a curb, limping because of an injury. Developing these algorithms took up most of Fyfe’s time during the years he perfected his system.
Thanks to faster computers and clever mathematical techniques, Fyfe and other inventors are turning messy data from cheap sensors into meaningful information. “The real expertise you need is signal processing and statistical analysis,” says James Park, the chief executive and co-founder of Fitbit, a company that makes a tracker released late last year. The Fitbit tracker is two inches long, half an inch wide and shaped like a thick paperclip. It tracks movement, and if you wear it in a little elastic wristband at night, it can also track your hours of sleep. (You are not completely still when sleeping. Your pattern of movement, however, can be correlated with sleeping and waking, just as the acceleration of a runner’s foot reveals speed.) Park and his partner, Eric Friedman, first showed their prototype at a San Francisco business conference in the summer of 2008. Five weeks later, Park and Friedman, who are both 33, had $2 million in venture capital, and they were flying back and forth to Singapore to arrange production. Last winter they shipped their first devices.
At nearly the same time, Philips, the consumer electronics company, began selling its own tiny accelerometer-based self-tracker, called DirectLife, which, like the Fitbit, is meant to be carried on the body at all times. Zeo, a company based in Newton, Mass., released a tracker contained in a small headband, which picks up electrical signals from the brain, and uses them to compile the kind of detailed record of light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep that, until now, was available only if you spent the night in a sleep-research clinic. Lately I’ve been running into people who say they wear it every night. And Nike recently announced that its Nike+ system, one of the first personal speedometers, has been used by more than 2.5 million runners since its release in 2006.
Ken Fyfe’s accelerometer-based tracking system is used with sports watches by Adidas and Polar. In 2006 he sold his company, Dynastream, for $36 million to Garmin, which makes navigation equipment commonly used in cars and airplanes and which is now branching out into personal tracking. Fyfe’s former company stayed in Alberta, where it continues to sell tracking components. A low-power data-transmission protocol they invented is in new blood-pressure cuffs, glucose monitors, blood-oxygenation sensors, weight scales and sleep monitors, all of which are aimed at the consumer market.
Web entrepreneurs like to talk about democratizing communication. Fyfe’s dream is to democratize objective research on human subjects. “Until we came up with this technology, you couldn’t do this kind of analysis unless you could get into a lab,” he says. “Now you can.”
At the center of this personal laboratory is the mobile phone. During the years that personal-data systems were making their rapid technical progress, many people started entering small reports about their lives into a phone. Sharing became the term for the quick post to a social network: a status update to Facebook, a reading list on Goodreads, a location on Dopplr, Web tags to Delicious, songs to Last.fm, your breakfast menu on Twitter. “People got used to sharing,” says David Lammers-Meis, who leads the design work on the fitness-tracking products at Garmin. “The more they want to share, the more they want to have something to share.” Personal data are ideally suited to a social life of sharing. You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report.
This is how the odd habits of the ultrageek who tracks everything have come to seem almost normal. An elaborate setup is no longer necessary, because the phone already envelops us in a cloud of computing. This term, “the cloud,” has some specialized meanings among software architects, but fundamentally the cloud is just a poetic label for the global agglomeration of computer resources — the processors, hard drives, fiber-optic cables and so on — that allow us to access our private data from any Internet connection. We entrust all kinds of things to the cloud: our mail and our family photographs; the places we go and the list of people we call on the phone. When Jeff Clavier, the founder of SoftTech VC, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in a small financial company called Mint (now part of Intuit), he was warned that ordinary people were unlikely to trust their bank passwords and credit-card details to the cloud. “About 1.5 million people did it,” Clavier says.
One of the reasons that self-tracking is spreading widely beyond the technical culture that gave birth to it is that we all have at least an inkling of what’s going on out there in the cloud. Our search history, friend networks and status updates allow us to be analyzed by machines in ways we can’t always anticipate or control. It’s natural that we would want to reclaim some of this power: to look outward to the cloud, as well as inward toward the psyche, in our quest to figure ourselves out.
SOPHIE BARBIER, a 47-year-old teacher in Palo Alto, is a cyclist who regularly logs her time, distance and heart rate during a ride. “Training logs have been around forever,” she told me. “But the more variables I added, the more curious I got.” Along with her cycling stats, Barbier began scoring her mood, sleep and ability to focus, as well as her caffeine consumption, and noting the days her menstrual cycle began and ended.
After surgery for a back problem, Barbier had trouble sleeping. On CureTogether, a self-tracking health site, she learned about tryptophan, a common amino acid available as a dietary supplement. She took the tryptophan, and her insomnia went away. Her concentration scores also improved. She stopped taking tryptophan and continued to sleep well, but her ability to concentrate deteriorated. Barbier ran the test again, and again the graph was clear: tryptophan significantly increased her focus. She had started by looking for a cure for insomnia and discovered a way to fine-tune her brain.
It is tempting to dismiss reports of such experiments as trivial anecdotes, or the placebo effect. I took Barbier’s results to a friend of mine, Seth Roberts, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on self-experimentation. “There is a large difference between what Barbier did and the minimal story of somebody who takes a pill looking for a certain effect and then finds it,” he pointed out. “First, she wrote the numbers down, so the results are not subject to memory distortion. Second, she changed the conditions several times. Every switch is a test of her original theory.”
Roberts told me about his own method of measuring mental changes, a quick test he programmed on his computer that involves 32 easy arithmetic problems. The test takes about three minutes, and he has found that it can detect small changes in cognitive performance. He has used his self-tracking system to adjust his diet, learning that three tablespoons daily of flaxseed oil reliably decreases the amount of time it takes him to do math. Consuming a lot of butter also seems to have a good effect.
Self-experiments like Barbier’s and Roberts’s are not clinical trials. The goal isn’t to figure out something about human beings generally but to discover something about yourself. Their validity may be narrow, but it is beautifully relevant. Generally, when we try to change, we simply thrash about: we improvise, guess, forget our results or change the conditions without even noticing the results. Errors are possible in self-tracking and self-experiment, of course. It is easy to mistake a transient effect for a permanent one, or miss some hidden factor that is influencing your data and confounding your conclusions. But once you start gathering data, recording the dates, toggling the conditions back and forth while keeping careful records of the outcome, you gain a tremendous advantage over the normal human practice of making no valid effort whatsoever.
I recently received an e-mail message from a 26-year-old filmmaker named Toli Galanis, who keeps track of about 50 different streams of personal data, including activities, health, films watched and books read, the friends he talks with and the topics they discuss. While Galanis acknowledged that he gets pleasure from gathering data and organizing it intelligently, it was a different aspect of his report that caught my attention. “I know that immediately after watching a bad movie I am more apt to be negative about my career prospects as a filmmaker,” he wrote, explaining that tracking has made him better able to detect the influence of seemingly trivial circumstances on his mood and decisions.
The idea that our mental life is affected by hidden causes is a mainstay of psychology. Facility in managing the flow of thought and emotion is a sign of happiness and good adjustment. But how is it done? Nearly every therapeutic prescription involves an invitation to notice, to pay attention. Once we have a notion in our sights, we can attack it with an arsenal of tools: cognitive, psychoanalytic, even spiritual. But none of these will tell us if we’ve missed something. You may simply have failed to notice a debilitating habit, a negative correlation, a bad influence.
Galanis’s realization that bad movies subject him to professional discouragement is the type of insight that will seem accessible to anybody blessed with a modest amount of self-awareness; finding it is no more difficult than catching sight of a dollar in the street and picking it up. But for every one you grab, how many do you overlook?
It’s not only the context of our thoughts that escapes us. Our actions do, too. Since 2004, Terry Paul, an educational entrepreneur and philanthropist, has been working on a digital device that tucks into specially designed toddlers’ clothing and can be used to predict language development through tracking the number of conversational exchanges a child has with adults. It cost Paul $32 million to perfect the system that takes the noisy sounds of a baby’s environment and translates it into reliable data. As a commercial enterprise, it was unsuccessful. His device, called the LENA monitor, is used for academic research but never took off as a consumer product. When I tell parents about it, most of them are horrified. They imagine a nightmare of surveillance and an inducement to neurotic competition: who wants a digital recorder that grades you on how you talk to your kid?
Were we to submit to such a test, however, many of us would fare poorly. Parents, in fact, overestimate how much they talk to their preverbal children. Users of the LENA monitor can be awkwardly surprised. A mother I spoke with recently began monitoring after her daughter was prescribed a seizure medication that was associated with language delays. “It became very clear to us that my husband’s words were less than mine,” she said. He needed to try to talk to his daughter more. Until he saw the data, he had no idea that his attention was wandering.
Of course, sometimes we fail to notice what we do because we are motivated not to notice it. We are ashamed of ourselves, so we lie to ourselves. Shaun Rance started tracking his drinking two years ago, after his father was given a diagnosis of end-stage liver disease. He didn’t pledge to stop drinking; he didn’t do a searching moral inventory; he just started counting, using the anonymous Web site drinkingdiary.com. He found that his externalized memory was very powerful. Having a record of every drink he took sharpened his awareness and increased his feeling of self-mastery — and reduced his drinking. Because his tally is held by a machine, he doesn’t feel any of the social shame that might make him, consciously or not, underestimate his drinking. “I don’t lie to the diary,” he says. After all, it is silly to posture in front of a machine. The tracking system is an extension of a basic faculty of Rance’s consciousness, there to remind him where he stands, and it does its work without emotion. As far as he’s concerned, that’s a virtue.
There may be new domains of our biology that we can incorporate into our sense of self. “We know about asleep, awake, hungry, depressed, cold, drowsy, nauseous,” says Dave Marvit, a vice-president at Fujitsu Laboratories of America, where he is leading a research project on self-tracking. “But what about hypoxic, anemic, hyperglycemic?” If we had a gentle signal about how much sugar was in our blood, would we change how we ate? Would it change how we feel?
Drinking. Talking. Being discouraged by a movie. Giving a moment’s attention to a feeling of anger or elation, a small surge of energy or a metabolic dip. These are the materials of daily life. They barely stand out against the background of what we take for granted, and yet picking up these weak signals gives us leverage. Margaret Morris, a clinical psychologist and a researcher at Intel, recently ran a series of field trials using a mobile phone for tracking emotion. At random times, the phone rang and quizzed its owner about his or her mood. A man in one of Morris’s studies reviewed the trends in his data and noticed that his foul mood began at the same time every day. He had a rushed transition from work to home. While unfinished tasks were still on his mind, new demands crowded in. The stress followed him for the rest of the evening. The data showed him where the problem was. With help, he learned to take a short mental break right there. He was much relieved.
The contrast to the traditional therapeutic notion of personal development is striking. When we quantify ourselves, there isn’t the imperative to see through our daily existence into a truth buried at a deeper level. Instead, the self of our most trivial thoughts and actions, the self that, without technical help, we might barely notice or recall, is understood as the self we ought to get to know. Behind the allure of the quantified self is a guess that many of our problems come from simply lacking the instruments to understand who we are. Our memories are poor; we are subject to a range of biases; we can focus our attention on only one or two things at a time. We don’t have a pedometer in our feet, or a breathalyzer in our lungs, or a glucose monitor installed into our veins. We lack both the physical and the mental apparatus to take stock of ourselves. We need help from machines.
Watch out for those machines, though. Humans know a special trick of self-observation: when to avert our gaze. Machines don’t understand the value of forgiving a lapse, or of treating an unpleasant detail with tactful silence. A graph or a spreadsheet talks only in numbers, but there is a policeman inside all of our heads who is well equipped with punishing words. “Each day my self-worth was tied to the data,” Alexandra Carmichael, one of the founders of the self-tracking site CureTogether, wrote in a heartfelt blog post about why she recently stopped tracking. “One pound heavier this morning? You’re fat. Skipped a day of running? You’re lazy. It felt like being back in school. Less than 100 percent on an exam? You’re dumb.” Carmichael had been tracking 40 different things about herself. The data she was seeing every day didn’t respect her wishes or her self-esteem. It was awful, and she had to stop.
Electronic trackers have no feelings. They are emotionally neutral, but this very fact makes them powerful mirrors of our own values and judgments. The objectivity of a machine can seem generous or merciless, tolerant or cruel. Designers of tracking systems are trying to finesse this ambivalence. A smoking-cessation program invented by Pal Kraft, a Norwegian researcher at the University of Oslo, automatically calls people who are trying to quit, asking them every day whether they’ve smoked in the last 24 hours. When the answer is yes, a recorded voice delivers an encouraging message: All is well, take it easy, try again. This mechanical empathy, barely more human than a recorded voice on the customer-service line, can hardly be expected to fool anybody. But a long line of research in human-computer interaction demonstrates that when machines are given humanlike characteristics and offer emotional reassurance, we actually do feel reassured. This is humbling. Do we really feel better when a computer pats us on the back? Yes, we do.
Jon Cousins is a 54-year-old software entrepreneur and former advertising executive who was given a diagnosis in 2007 of bipolar affective disorder. Cousins built a self-tracking system to help manage his feelings, which he called Moodscope; now used by about 1,000 others, Moodscope automatically sends e-mail with mood-tracking scores to a few select friends. “My life was changed radically,” Cousins told me recently in an e-mail message. “If I got the odd dip, my friends wanted to know why.” Sometimes, after he records a low score, a friend might simply e-mail: “?” Cousins replies, and that act alone makes him feel better. Moodscope is a blended system in which measurement is supplemented by human sympathy. Self-tracking can sometimes appear narcissistic, but it also allows people to connect with one another in new ways. We leave traces of ourselves with our numbers, like insects putting down a trail of pheromones, and in times of crisis, these signals can lead us to others who share our concerns and care enough to help.
Often, pioneering trackers struggle with feelings of being both aided and tormented by the very systems they have built. I know what this is like. I used to track my work hours, and it was a miserable process. With my spreadsheet, I inadvertently transformed myself into the mean-spirited, small-minded boss I imagined I was escaping through self-employment. Taking advantage of the explosion of self-tracking services available on the Web, I started analyzing my workday at a finer level. Every time I moved to a new activity — picked up the phone, opened a Web browser, answered e-mail — I made a couple of clicks with my mouse, which recorded the change. After a few weeks I looked at the data and marveled. My day was a patchwork of distraction, interspersed with valuable, but too rare, periods of focus. In total, the amount of uninterrupted close attention I was able to muster in a given workday was less than three hours. After I got over the humiliation, I came to see how valuable this knowledge was. The efficiency lesson was that I could gain significant benefit by extending my day at my desk by only a few minutes, as long as these minutes were well spent. But a greater lesson was that by tracking hours at my desk I was making an unnecessary concession to a worthless stereotype. Does anybody really believe that long hours at a desk are a vocational ideal? I got nothing from my tracking system until I used it as a source of critical perspective, not on my performance but on my assumptions about what was important to track.
People are not assembly lines. We cannot be tuned to a known standard, because a universal standard for human experience does not exist. Bo Adler, a young computer scientist at Fujitsu Laboratories of America, is one of the most committed self-trackers I’ve ever met: during his most active phase he wore a blood-pressure cuff, pulse oximeter and accelerometer all day long, along with a computer on a harness to collect the data. Adler has sleep apnea, and he is trying to figure it out. When he became too self-conscious going to the gym in his gear, he wore a Google T-shirt to throw people off. Maybe he was a freak, but at least people could mistake him for a millionaire freak.
“Here’s what they told me was the normal surgical course of treatment,” Adler explained. “First they were going to cut out my tonsils, and if that didn’t work, they would break my jaw and reset it to reposition my tongue, and finally they would cut out the roof of my mouth. I had one question: What if my case is different? They said, ‘Let’s try the standard course of treatment first, and if that doesn’t work, then we’ll know your case is different.’ ” Adler recognized what this proposal meant: it meant that his doctors had no cure for different. They wanted to see him as a standard case, because they have treatments for the standard cases. Before Adler underwent surgery, he wanted some evidence that he was a standard case. Some of us aren’t standard, after all; perhaps many of us aren’t.
Adler’s idea that we can — and should — defend ourselves against the imposed generalities of official knowledge is typical of pioneering self-trackers, and it shows how closely the dream of a quantified self resembles therapeutic ideas of self-actualization, even as its methods are startlingly different. Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.
“My girlfriend thinks I’m the weird person when I wear all these devices,” Bo Adler says. “She sees me as an oddity, but I say no, soon everybody is going to be doing this, and you won’t even notice.”
Monday, April 26, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Achtung Baby is SPIN's Best Album
SPIN magazine has named Achtung Baby the best/most influential album of the past 25 years -- part of SPIN's celebration of its 25th anniversary. Says the magazine:
"Unlike Radiohead with OK Computer and Kid A, U2 took their post-industrial, trad-rock disillusionment not as a symbol of overall cultural malaise, but as a challenge to buck up and transcend. Their confessions of frailty and blindness amid murky atmospherics (no doubt egged on by coproducer Brian Eno) had an air of cleansing rather than whining. That the album trails off introspectively is brave in its own quiet way."
In order, the rest of SPIN's top five:
2. Sign 'O The Times, Prince
3. The Queen Is Dead, The Smiths
4. Nevermind, Nirvana
5. OK Computer, Radiohead
Only one other U2 album made the list: The Joshua Tree at number 62. U2 also appears in several categories on SPIN's 25th anniversary readers' poll.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Citibank Survey: Small Businesses Not Leveraging Online Tools
Apr 21, 2010 | 12:05 PM
New York, N.Y. " April 21, 2010 " Despite the ubiquitous and relentless buzz around social media, most small businesses today aren't leveraging the basic online tools readily available to them to help grow their businesses, according to the latest small business survey by Citibank.
According to the survey of 552 small business executives across the United States, in the last year 37 percent of small businesses have not used a Web site for marketing or expanding their business and 84 percent have not used ecommerce to sell their products or services. Additionally, 62 percent aren't using basic email for marketing their business. Yet among those businesses that do have a Web site, 74 percent say their site has been effective at generating more business.
"Many small businesses today have yet to really harness the marketing and communication power that online tools can provide them," said Raj Seshadri, the head of Small Business Banking at Citibank. "Our survey reveals a huge opportunity for many businesses to begin using some of the basic online tools, such as email marketing, to drive their sales."
When it comes to more advanced methods of online marketing, and increasing reach and influence, the survey's findings were similar: Sixty-five percent of small businesses are not placing online ads to expand their business and 67 percent have not used search engine optimization.
The survey also uncovered a disconnect regarding the importance placed on word-of-mouth marketing by small businesses. Sixty-three percent of respondents say word-of-mouth marketing is the most effectiveway to market their business and find new customers. Yet this doesn't translate into online behavior, showing that many do not view social media as a word-of-mouth channel; 81 percent say they have not used social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedInor Twitter. Among those not using social media sites, 47 percent don't believe these sites are of value to their business while another 21 percent believe these sites are more for personal than business use; 18 percent say they don't know enough about how to use the sites.
At the same time, many small businesses say they plan more online activity in the next 12 months. Among the findings: 72 percent say they are likely to use a Web site for marketing or expanding their business in the next 12 months - up 14% from those who do today. 24 percent will likely use ecommerce to sell their products or services online over the next 12 months " up 50% from those who do today. 30 percent say they intend to use social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedInor Twitterfor marketing or expanding their business " up 58% from those who do today.
"This survey shows that many small businesses have yet to add new tools to traditional marketing methods that they have found effective in the past," said Seshadri. "This may be because the online world does not fit their business model or other factors such as inexperience with technology or lack of time to effectively enter these marketing channels. It's encouraging, however, to see that many intend to utilize more of these tools in the next 12 months."
Age Makes a Difference
When it comes to leveraging online tools for business growth, small business executives 45-years-old and older are less likely to use online tools than younger small business executives. Twenty-seven percent of small business executives under the age of 45 used social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitterand LinkedInas marketing tools in the last 12 months, while only 16 percent of their peers aged 45 and over used them. In addition, more younger survey respondents say they are likely to use a company Web site for marketing purposes (81 percent versus 69 percent of older respondents) and search engine optimization (52 percent versus 35 percent of older respondents) to market their business in the next year.
This Citibankpoll was conducted via telephone by Abt SRBI during the period March 10 - March 31, 2010 among a national random sample of 552 small businesses, with revenue over $100,000 and no more than 100 employees. The margin of error is approximately +/- 5 percentage points at the 95% confidence interval. Surveys are subject to other error sources as well, including sampling coverage error, recording error, and respondent error.
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Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Can a Rock Band Change the World?
U2’s Bono performs at the Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona, Spain. Manu Fernandez/Associated Press
By Jeff Keuss, SPU Associate Professor of Christian Ministry
When we hear the blending of music that matters and music that moves us, we do more than listen. We ask questions that are at the core of our identity. Rock music is often discounted in theological circles as mere distraction from what we are called to be and do in the name of Christ. Music that does nothing more than make people fantasize about becoming rock stars is a good example. But when we hear music, regardless of genre, that calls out the “Better angels of our nature” and causes us to reflect on our core vocations — as spouses, parents, leaders — then we need to inline our ears and consider what is going on in that music.
Lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, identified U2’s goal in a 1981 interview in Rolling Stone magazine. He said the band sought to move beyond “punk rock” and re-establish rock and roll as a vehicle for people to think about their actions in relation to one another:
“The idea of punk at first was, ‘Look, you’re an individual, express yourself how you want, do what you want to do,’” Bono told the reporter. “Kids were sold the imagery of violence, which turned into the reality of violence, and it’s that negative side that I worry about. … We want our audience to think about their actions and where they are going, to realize the pressures that are on them, but at the same time, not to give up.”
As a band whose career has charted countless No. 1 hits and filled stadiums with fans of all ages for three decades, U2 has certainly earned a place in the history of rock and roll as one of the most successful rock acts ever. But can a rock band, to borrow Seattle Pacific University’s vision statement, move beyond fame to truly “engage the culture and change the world” as Christ would have us do?
Eugene Peterson, Seattle Pacific alumnus of 1954 and author of The Message, thinks so. In a foreword to Get Up Off Your Knees (Cowley Publications, 2003), a collection of sermons inspired by the music of U2, he wrote: “Is U2 a prophetic voice? I rather think so. And many of my friends think so. If they do not explicitly proclaim the Kingdom, they certainly prepare the way for that proclamation in much the same way that John the Baptist prepared the way for the kerygma [preaching] of Jesus.”
While it is true that U2 is a band where three of the four members are self-described Christians, they are not a “Christian rock band” in the sense that we would understand in the States. They prefer to compete in the public marketplace, not preach to the choir. That impulse motivates imaginative and compelling lyrics at the symbolic intersections of faith and apathy, hope and despair, love and betrayal, grace and damnation. And that impulse reminds us that true leaders speak without boundaries.
If U2’s early albums (War, 1983; and The Unforgettable Fire, 1985) were about kerygma — getting the word out — and their later albums (Achtung Baby, 1992; Zooropa, 1993; and Pop, 1997) were about the musical form of that kerygmatic vision — R&B, Euro pop, retro disco, electronica — then their latest CDs have been about putting it all together.
The years after Zooropa and Pop have been enlivened by Bono’s renewed passion for the social gospel, only hinted at during the mid-’80s by his now-famous cry “Thank God it’s them instead of you” in Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Today U2’s music challenges people to stand up from their comfortable lives and look into the eyes of the oppressed, who were the concern of Jesus’ ministry.
Through decades of conversations with some of the greatest activists, economists, and political leaders of the 20th and 21st centuries — Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, and Mother Teresa, among others — Bono has made overcoming debt for developing countries a mandate for his life. That vision began with Live Aid in 1985 and Bono’s 1986 trip to work with various development organizations in Ethiopia with his wife, Alison Stewart.
Taking seriously the commission of Leviticus 25:10 — “Proclaim liberty throughout the lands and to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you” — Bono became actively involved with such programs as Drop the Debt, End AIDS Now, and Jubilee 2000 and galvanized a vision of responsive activism that brought secular and Christian groups together rather than letting them remain sectarian. Today he is co-founder and spokesperson for the ONE campaign, one of the most influential anti-poverty and debt-relief organizations committed to collaborating with the private sector, faith-based organizations, and government agencies.
For theologians, one indication of what a church values is the way in which a community of faith worships together. Similarly, transformational leaders gather people together in ways that exemplify what they value and seek to embody. From their earliest concerts, U2 has seen the gathering of people as an opportunity to invite people into causes larger than the music and spectacle of typical rock shows.
During the 1983 “War” tour, members of the band waved a white flag to challenge their audience to look beyond mere nationalism and embrace a larger humanitarian spirit. And during the 2005 “Vertigo” tour, thousands of lit cell phones texted support for African relief work through the ONE campaign. Now, during the current 360° tour, audience members line the stage choosing to wear a mask with the face of the imprisoned Burmese Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi during the song “Walk On” as a sign of solidarity, demonstrating how U2 has continued to lead its fans into acts of selflessness and social action that many churches would do well to emulate.
The closing tracks of U2 albums usually function as benedictions and “songs of sending” — an overt turn to the liturgical and a direct assessment of Christendom and the Christ that can sometimes get lost within it.
Whether it is the direct biblical quotation in “40” from War, or the reframing of Pilgrim’s Progress for the e-generation in “The Wanderer” from Zooropa, or the whispering cry of the Psalmist in “Wake Up Dead Man” from Pop, or the call of grace from All That You Can’t Leave Behind — U2 continues to draw its productions to a close with an invitation to something more, more than words and music can convey. This is continued in How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb with the final song “Yahweh”:
Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don’t make a fist …
Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I’m waiting for the dawn
The band became superstars in the late ’80s singing about the already-but-not-yet character of God’s reign in “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and they now seem to rest in the assurance that amidst the uncertainty and pain in this life, to paraphrase Rattle and Hum, Love has indeed come to town, and for now maybe that is what we need the most. As Bono sings in “A Man and a Woman” from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb:
You can run from love
And if it’s really love it will find you
Catch you by the heel
But you can’t be numb for love
The only pain is to feel nothing at all
How can I hurt when I’m holding you?
Bono once asked Christian songwriter Michael W. Smith if he knew how someone could dismantle an atomic bomb — a question that would lead to the title of U2’s 2004 album. After Smith replied that he didn’t, Bono simply answered, “Love. With love.”
And this is what U2 has given us as probably the highest watermark for transformational leadership — that in the end, the world will change when we truly learn to love it as Jesus did. Jesus did not call us to evoke change through willpower or blind agendas. Rather, akin to St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13, change will come when we realize that of all virtues a leader can offer us, the greatest of these is love.
View a video of Keuss' Day of Common Learning presentation at iTunesU.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
The Purposes of Political Combat
You have been paralyzed into stasis by the status quo, which has injected its subtle toxins into your bloodstream by means of radio frequencies between 530 and 1700 kilohertz and a lone television cable-news channel, whose incomprehensible power overruns the combined effect of two others like it; nightly newscasts on three broadcast channels; and the vast majority of newspapers and magazines in the United States. Rallies of surly citizens claiming the mantle of Revolutionary War Bostonians in the spring of 2009 and rude questioners at political gatherings with elected officials home from Washington in the summer of 2009 were harbingers of the inexplicable political reversal that has since been made flesh by electoral defeats in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and polling numbers suggesting a catastrophe in the offing for President Barack Obama’s party come November, when elections for all 435 House seats and 33 Senate seats take place.
How can this be, my America? You had given Obama and the Democrats a nearly free hand; not since 1977 had the political balance in Washington been tilted so completely to the advantage of one of the two parties. Seventy million cast their ballots for Obama, and on that same night, Democrats won a 78-seat majority in the House of Representatives and (after much recounting) the 60 seats in the Senate they needed to enact legislation almost at will. Under such circumstances, partisanship should no longer have had any meaning or held any sway, for, O my America, you asked for change, and you gave the change agents the power they needed to enact change; but after only a few months, the works got all gummed up. It will now require procedural tricks and sleights of hand to effect the very change you sought—and in effecting it, and thereby following your will, Democrats may seal their own fate in this election year. Thus has partisanship worked its ugly dark magic, turning the political system upon itself when the verdict of the electorate in November 2008 should have been final.
_____________
The preceding paragraphs re-present a distillation of liberal thought about the political circumstances of the present moment. The degree of bafflement liberals express at the surprisingly perilous position in which Barack Obama and the Democrats find themselves is understandable; after all, such peril was nearly unimaginable to everyone just a year ago. The results of the 2008 election had been so decisive, the condition of the post-Bush Republican party so parlous, and the double wound to the Right caused by the difficulties of the Iraq war and the financial meltdown so infected that Obama and his party appeared to have an all but free hand.
Indeed, the combined effects of a war gone sour and the capitalist system’s apparent self-immolation seemed to Obama and his team to have brought a decisive end to one ideological era and inaugurated a new period in which the American people were now consciously and explicitly seeking liberal activism from their politicians.
It was by no means an unreasonable presumption. The 2008 election, with its 53-46 margin in favor of Obama, and his victory in the unlikely states of Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana, followed on the 2006 midterms, in which Democrats crushed Republicans and regained control of both chambers for the first time in 12 years. Both elections were cast as, and indeed seemed to be, referenda on the failures of the Right—not just standard political failures, but failures on a grand scale that invalidated the modern conservative governing project.
Those failures were considered moral ones, expressed in the political and personal corruption in which Republican politicians had engaged and around which much of the 2006 elections seemed to revolve. They were seen as economic, with Republicans shouldering the blame for the economic meltdown of 2008. And they were thought managerial, in the decision to go to war partly on the basis of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and then the failure to do what was necessary to win that war. Liberals and leftists were tireless in arguing that these failures were not coincidental but linked, that they shared a common root—the essential heartlessness and soullessness of the Republican party and the conservative movement. And the electorate appeared to respond exactly as they had hoped it would.
It therefore seemed only logical that the thoroughgoing rejection of the Right was pretty much the same thing as an endorsement of the ideas and policies of the anti-Right. After all, liberals had had to concede as much when things had gone against them, hadn’t they? For years following the 1994 congressional election, a common presumption in political circles was that the United States had proved itself to be a “Center-Right nation,” at least as far as the voting public was concerned. Leftist thinkers like Thomas Frank found themselves compelled to devise a theory to explain why Americans chose to vote in ways injurious to their own supposed best interests. “The matter with Kansas,” Frank said in his bestselling 2004 analysis, was that its people had been conditioned to respond to hot-button cultural stimuli on matters like abortion rather than to support redistributionist economic policies designed to improve their own well-being. The same line of argument had been offered a decade earlier about Southern and urban ethnic voters by the reporters Thomas and Mary Edsall in their 1992 book, Chain Reaction—only in that case, the Edsalls said, the stimuli had been primarily racial.
It had further become axiomatic in liberal circles from the 1970s onward that the Right had secured the superior political posture on matters of security, regarding both crime at home and America’s position abroad, by ginning up (knowingly in a state of cynicism, or desperately due to personal neurosis, or innocently as a result of stupidity) a state of peril in relation to supposed threats that were little or no threat at all—Cuba, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union. The terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 came as an almost undisguised blessing for the Right, according to one version of this theory popularized in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11; they became a means of generating new security fears, most especially fear of Iraq, which made possible the engagement in an unnecessary war whose purpose was to rally people ’round the flag and the Republican president—until things went horribly wrong.
Bombarded by these various catalysts, the argument ran, the American people had entered into a period of unreason in which they reacted to averse changes in their lives and communities by embracing symbols of power and authority rather than insisting on concrete and specific political changes that would make their lives better and easier. The most telling statement of this theme came from Barack Obama during his run for the Democratic nomination in early 2008, when he said of rural voters that
our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
These words were revealing not only in the condescension he displayed toward the very people he insisted his campaign was designed to help but also in the way they expressed Obama’s—and, by extension, the specific Left-liberal attitude he both embodies and exemplifies—distrust of and contempt for politics itself.
I am using the word politics to describe the arena of public policy, in which matters involving the direction of the United States are hashed out. Players in the arena range in size and import from the president to an individual voter, from the Senate majority leader to a school-board member in his home state of Nevada, from Charles Krauthammer to a commenter on a blog or a caller to a radio show. The arena is host to conflicts over matters large (weapons systems) and small (the food pyramid), bitterly disputed (abortion) and barely discussed (depreciation schedules), of historical import (war) and entirely evanescent (a la carte cable pricing). But conflicts are what they are, and politics is how they are adjudicated.
The great military strategist Clausewitz once said that “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” but the opposite is true as well. In a stable republic like the United States, in the 145 years since the end of the Civil War, Americans have managed not to war with each other because we have come to accept implicitly that we handle our disagreements in the arena of politics.
And that has led to another implicit acceptance, which is that the system cannot afford to have us arguing, as Henry Kissinger described North Vietnamese negotiating tactics, over the shape of the table. So with very few exceptions, we operate by consensus on the legitimacy of the essential architecture of the government. And because time is finite and there are limits even to the natural human drive to disagree, our politics actually function with a great deal of overall consensus, a consensus driven by the overall stability of the body politic. Among elected politicians, even the pacifistically inclined find it necessary to vote for increases in the defense budget, while those inclined toward libertarianism will support Social Security increases and extensions of unemployment insurance. That may not be their inclination, but they are compelled to it by the logic of a stable political system.
When a stable political system finds itself in imbalance, however, something more complicated and unpredictable begins to happen. Principled differences will tend to crystallize every now and then around one or two events or issues or pieces of proposed legislation. The crystallization almost always occurs when one party or ideological tendency attempts, or is thought by the other party or ideological tendency to be attempting, to extend the bounds of the consensus in such a way that it shifts into something else. Once the conflict crystallizes, all bets are off, and the games in the arena begin.
This is what politics is at its core. Now, elections are the primary vehicle for the conduct of politics, because they are adjudicated at a given time and place and feature a winner and a loser. The methods used to win elections and defeat rivals are always in low odor in a democracy, because they are confrontational and impolite and lack nuance. But those methods work, and so they are used. The odd part is that the people who use them successfully, politicians and their staffs and consultants, often want to limit these methods exclusively to election seasons; they want to believe that there is a time to run for office and a time to govern, and the time for governing ought to function under different rules. According to this way of thinking, “politics” is something low, while governing is something high; you engage in politics because you have to in order to secure the power to engage in governing, which is your sworn and devoted duty.
Thus it was that Barack Obama could invite his 2008 rival, John McCain, to a health-care summit in February 2010 and greet McCain’s criticisms of the president’s health-care bill by saying, “Let me just make this point, John. Because we’re not campaigning anymore. The election is over. We can spend the remainder of the time with our respective talking points going back and forth. We were supposed to be talking about insurance.”
McCain wanted to discuss the particulars of the health-care legislation passed by the House and Senate. The purpose of the health-care event was to create some form of momentum that would help Obama and his vision for health-care reform carry the day. Nonetheless, Obama had determined that the conversation at that point was to be about “insurance.” He was annoyed at McCain’s effort to introduce political considerations into the discussion. Such a thing was lowering, the stuff of campaigning. “The election is over,” said the president. Two weeks later, speaking heatedly before a crowd in Pennsylvania, he insisted that “the time for talk is over.”
Talk is politics. Governing is action.
By saying “the time for talk is over,” Obama was echoing his own words a year earlier about the $787 billion economic-stimulus proposal he was then trying to work through the legislative process: “The time for talk is over, the time for action is now.” At every step of the way in the course of pushing his relentlessly ambitious domestic agenda, Obama has invoked this duality: His opponents want to fight; he wants to do. They are playing politics; he is above politics.
The obvious objection to my argument here is that Obama doesn’t mean this; in belittling his opponents and their propensity to talk, he is playing politics himself, attempting to throw them on the defensive. But the habitual nature of his response, and the response of those who support him, to the populist uprisings against his agenda over the past year suggests he is not the least bit disingenuous.
Obama really does seem to believe that the opposition to his core policies—the creeping nationalization of health care, the effective nationalization of the American automotive industry, the imposition of onerous regulations on energy production, and the expiry of tax cuts that will lead to gigantic effective increases—is not principled. Rather, such opposition deserves to be dismissed as bad faith—the efforts of the status quo, big business, and the politicians in their pockets. Or it is to be explained away as evidence of psychological or spiritual impairment created by the wounds inflicted upon sorry and ignorant souls who are being manipulated by forces beyond their control.
How is it that Obama can fail to see that changes of the magnitude he is seeking would compel those who believe that those changes are dangerous—who honestly believe that they are bad for the country and whose belief is grounded in powerful ideas about how society should be ordered—to marshal their forces to do whatever is in their power to prevent them from taking place? And that it would be wise not to dismiss or belittle the energy and resolve of the opposition, but rather to take their full measure and plan accordingly?
Obama’s failure may reside in his contempt for politics. For the national counter-assault against Obama is a manifestation of democratic politics as they ought to work. A rather vague promise of change during his presidential campaign morphed afterward into an agenda of astonishing size with an astonishing price tag. The passage of a $700 billion bank bailout supported by Obama before the election was followed by his $787 billion stimulus package. No sooner had that $1.5 trillion been committed than the president began advocating cap-and-trade legislation that would cost $800 billion through the election in 2012. And then came health care, with a cost of, at the barest minimum, $900 billion over 10 years, and very likely double that or more.
Americans did not take this grandiose and ruinously destructive plan on faith, nor should they have. A majority of them may have voted for change, but that change was change from something, from George W. Bush primarily, and not necessarily change toward something, toward a wholesale revision of the relation between the state and the economy. In response to Obama’s call for an end to talk and a time for action, an engaged and concerned citizenry used whatever political means were at hand—from spontaneous rallies following a financial consultant’s call on a little-watched cable-TV show for a revival of the Boston Tea Party, to a Senate victory in Massachusetts for a candidate promising to be the 41st vote to block health care.
In using politics to slow down and thwart him, Obama’s rivals are not simply talking. They are acting as citizens in a democratic republic. When challenged by their president, they, too, decided that the time for talk was over and the time for action had begun.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
Card Issuers Retreat From Niche Plastic
By ROBIN SIDEL
![[CARDS PIC]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tLwmZT2LRNAShJ6zCpVNeJ3_VX-G6dIFBq3p17OP7_SRt2B0jd3M8xqkbzNAT8tbrou16sqofIQxzFdSNConiLaI-4y1bgryfxJkgWHPOerbfmrvY4m7ahNe_rTr-1tLAo9oJQEgYVWsZXfCAzEo7f=s0-d)
Getty Images The Starbucks Duetto Visa card was launched with optimism in 2003, above. Now it's being dropped.
Credit-card companies are pulling the plug on some of the specialized, rewards-loaded plastic they pitched to consumers when credit was easy and wallets were wide open.
Next week, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. will drop the Starbucks Duetto Visa card after it failed to attract enough customers to make the credit card financially viable for the New York bank. J.P. Morgan recently terminated credit-card deals with beauty retailer Avon Products Inc., the University of Maryland, the New Jersey Devils of the National Hockey League, and the Detroit Pistons and Orlando Magic of the National Basketball Association.
Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., also among the giants of the U.S. credit-card industry, are reducing the number of niche-appeal cards. Bank of America, of Charlotte, N.C., now has about 4,400 affinity cards, typically pitched through college alumni associations, social groups and charities, down from 5,000.
"Issuers are taking a long, hard look at what they're offering and focusing on getting [the] best cards into [the] best customer hands," said Megan Bramlette, a managing associate at Auriemma Consulting Group, a financial-services consulting firm that specializes in credit cards and other payment forms.
When times were good, card issuers made it easy for Americans to fill their pockets with plastic stamped with the label or logo of retailers, colleges and professional associations. Such cards typically lure customers with rewards programs, rebates and discounts. Most cards can be used anywhere, but the rewards-related goodies are tied to the brand that is emblazoned on the plastic.
Co-branded and affinity cards have become too expensive as credit-card companies try to reduce expenses amid the surge in late payments and delinquencies by card users. Issuers usually pay partner firms or groups an upfront fee and percentage of profits throughout the term of the contract.
Banks also fund the bulk of rewards programs and maintain customer accounts.
The retreat by J.P. Morgan Chase's unit is part of an effort to stem card-related losses that are expected to haunt the company for the rest of this year. Chase now has about 110 co-branded credit cards, down from more than 200, and expects to eliminate more cards this year.
The Starbucks Duetto card, offered with coffee company Starbucks Corp., generated lots of buzz when it was introduced in 2003 because customers could use it either as a traditional credit card anywhere or turn it into a prepaid card by loading money onto it and using it at Starbucks.
"It was difficult to get the type of scale behind the program that we wanted," said Gordon Smith, who runs J.P. Morgan's credit-card business. "It was innovative and creative, but if these cards are small, there isn't much earnings power for the partner or the bank."
Chase is keeping its most successful partner cards, including those offered with Continental Airlines Inc. and Marriott International Inc. The bank also recently entered a new card partnership with Hyatt Hotels Corp.
Analysts said such cards are among the most successful specialized cards because customers typically have solid credit histories and often use them for the bulk of their spending in order to receive free trips and hotel stays.
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Last fall, Citigroup dropped a three-year-old Home Depot Inc. co-branded card called Home Depot Rewards that could be used anywhere. The card "didn't resonate with customers as we had hoped," said Bill Johnson, who runs the bank's card-partnership programs. Instead, the bank is continuing to promote its private-label Home Depot card, which can be used only in Home Depot stores.
Citigroup also is wrestling with jeweler Zale Corp. over the terms of its credit-card contract. The bank has threatened to terminate the contract early unless the chain, hit hard by sluggish sales, pays Citigroup a $6 million penalty. The contract is set to expire next year.
For retailers, the loss of card partnerships means they must now find new ways to retain customers. In addition to Chase, Royal Bank of Canada also is breaking off its relationship with Starbucks for its Canadian loyalty card. A Starbucks spokeswoman said the company is planning to introduce a new loyalty program soon.
Write to Robin Sidel at robin.sidel@wsj.com