Search Results for: science

Theorizing the Drone

Grégoire Chamayou | A Theory of the Drone | The New Press | January 2015 | Translated by Janet Lloyd | Originally published in France as Théorie du Drone by la Fabrique Editions, Paris, 2013 | 28 minutes (7,693 words)

 

Below are four chapters excerpted from the book A Theory of the Drone, by French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

 

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Pattern-of-Life Analysis

Enemy leaders look like everyone else; enemy combatants look like everyone else; enemy vehicles look like civilian vehicles; enemy installations look like civilian installations; enemy equipment and materials look like civilian equipment and materials.

—American Defense Science Board

 

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Technology, Privacy, and Searchable Text

The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s.

What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds.

In a brief interview, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, indicated that the government’s ability to automate transcription is still limited.

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Experts in speech recognition say that in the last decade or so, the pace of technological improvement has been explosive. As information storage became cheaper and more efficient, technology companies were able to store massive amounts of voice data on their servers, allowing them to continually update and improve the models. Enormous processors, tuned as “deep neural networks” that detect patterns like human brains do, produce much cleaner transcripts.

And the Snowden documents show that the same kinds of leaps forward seen in commercial speech-to-text products have also been happening in secret at the NSA, fueled by the agency’s singular access to astronomical processing power and its own vast data archives.

In fact, the NSA has been repeatedly releasing new and improved speech recognition systems for more than a decade.

Dan Froomkin writing for The Intercept about how the NSA converts spoken words into searchable text.

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The Debate Over Alternative Medicine

Photo by Pixabay

The Laidlers’ story is a microcosm of the changing debate over so-called alternative medicine and its cousin, integrative medicine. In 2007, Americans spent $2.9 billion on homeopathic medicine, a treatment based on the belief that minuscule amounts of what causes symptoms in a healthy person will alleviate symptoms in someone who is ill. From nutritional supplements to energy healing to acupuncture, treatments outside the medical mainstream are big business. But the vast majority of scientists find much of alternative medicine highly problematic.

The supposed mechanisms of energy healing, homeopathy, and acupuncture are unscientific and violate basic laws of physics and chemistry. Other alternative treatments, including many nutritional supplements, are unproven, unregulated, and occasionally dangerous. This month, the fight came to a very public head when a group of doctors sent an open letter to Columbia University, demanding the school remove Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has used his syndicated TV show to promote integrative medicine, including nutritional regimens, homeopathy, and reiki—a form of energy healing that claims to use “universal life force energy” to “detoxify the body” and “increase the vibrational frequency on physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels.” But at the same time, integrative medicine has pushed such techniques into the mainstream.

Alan Levinovitz, writing in Wired about the fight over alternative medicine, and Jim Laidler, a man who first turned to alternative medicine after both of his sons were diagnosed with autism.

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Venom That Heals: How a Swarm of Bees Saved One Woman’s Life

Photo via Flickr (Umberto Salvagnin | CC BY 2.0)

For three days, she was in pain. Then, she wasn’t.

“I had been living in this… I call it a brown-out because it’s like you’re walking around in a half-coma all the time with the inflammation of your brain from the Lyme. My brain just came right out of that fog. I thought: I can actually think clearly for the first time in years.”

With a now-clear head, Ellie started wondering what had happened. So she did what anyone else would do: Google it. Disappointingly, her searches turned up very little. But she did find one small 1997 study by scientists at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, who’d found that melittin killed Borrelia. Exposing cell cultures to purified melittin, they reported that the compound completely inhibited Borrelia growth. When they looked more closely, they saw that shortly after melittin was added, the bacteria were effectively paralysed, unable to move as their outer membranes were under attack. Soon after, those membranes began to fall apart, killing the bacteria.

Convinced by her experience and the limited research she found, Ellie decided to try apitherapy, the therapeutic use of materials derived from bees.

Her bees live in a “bee condo” in her apartment. She doesn’t raise them herself; instead, she mail orders, receiving a package once a week. To perform the apitherapy, she uses tweezers to grab a bee and press it gently where she wants to be stung. “Sometimes I have to tap them on the tush a little bit,” she says, “but they’re usually pretty willing to sting you.”

She started on a regimen of ten stings a day, three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Three years and several thousand stings later, Ellie seems to have recovered miraculously. Slowly, she has reduced the number of stings and their frequency – just three stings in the past eight months, she tells me (and one of those she tried in response to swelling from a broken bone, rather than Lyme-related symptoms). She keeps the bees around just in case, but for the past year before I talked to her, she’d mostly done just fine without them.

Christie Wilcox on Ellie Lobel, a woman with Lyme disease whose health has recovered after being attacked by a swarm of Africanised bees, in a March 2015 article in Mosaic. Lobel now works with a bee farm and has a business selling bee products, using the proceeds to support bee preservation efforts and Lyme disease research.

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Rest in Peace: Stories About Death Care

I. I’ve been thinking: What would my life look like if I were not afraid of death? Thinking too closely about not existing, not having a consciousness, sends me spiraling into a panic attack. Protestant Christians believe in an afterlife—a heaven, a hell. I did, too, for a while. I was confident, fervent, about heaven. I was no longer afraid to die. Now I’m not so sure. Nothingness scares me, but so does an eternity spent somewhere else.

A month ago, I shared a reading list about architecture. My pick from The Stranger was about Katrina Spade, an  archeologist from Seattle interested in environmentally friendly, community-centered death care: city centers dedicated to composting human beings and reuniting their bodies with nature. It’s called the Urban Death Project. A few days ago, Spade debuted her fundraising campaign to make the project a reality.

I studied artist Iris Gottlieb’s drawings of plants and fungi and Spade’s architectural plans. I liked the idea that the composting hubs would be unique to each city—much like libraries, which take on aspects of their communities while serving the same essential purpose worldwide, Spade explained. Reading the details of Spade’s proposal, I felt genuinely moved, and, for the first time in a decade, peaceful. Read more…

The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much

Ashley Guidry with Sandy, a wild-caught bottlenose dolphin, at Gulf World.

Tim Zimmermann | Longreads | April 2015 | 25 minutes (6,193 words)

 

Panama City Beach, Florida is set on the alluring waters of the Gulf Of Mexico, in northwestern Florida. It’s a town of cookie-cutter condos and sprawling outlet malls, built almost entirely on the idea that blazing sun, a cool sea, white sand beaches, and copious amounts of booze are an irresistible formula for human happiness (or at least a pretty damn good time). Everything about the place—from the ubiquitous fast food, to the endless chain stores, to the Brobdingnagian miniature golf courses—is designed to anticipate and then slake the vast and relentless array of human desires.

Prime among the entertainment offerings is Gulf World Marine Park. It sits on Front Beach Road, the main drag that parallels the seafront, and promises sun-addled or bored families a respite from the nearby beach. By day you can swim with dolphins (“guaranteed”) or watch them perform the standard flips and tricks in a show pool, check out the sharks and stingrays, or watch the sea lions act goofy. By night you can watch “Illusionist Of The Year” (it’s not clear who made the designation) Noah Wells unleash his “Maximum Magic.” “It’s Always Showtime At Gulf World” says the marketing department. And that’s true: The entire place shuts down for only two days a year (Thanksgiving and Christmas).

Gulf World is not SeaWorld; it’s much smaller, less expensive, (though a family of four will still fork over $96 just to get past the gate), and there are no killer whales. But it is more typical of the 32 marine parks that keep dolphins and do business in the United States, and it’s these local parks which happen to house the vast majority of the captive dolphins (according to Ceta-Base, which tracks marine parks, there are currently some 509 dolphins at marine parks in the U.S.; about 144 are located at SeaWorld). If SeaWorld is the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey when it comes to marine mammal entertainment, Gulf World is one of the many small, local carnivals that do a pretty decent trade out of the limelight. And Gulf World happens to be where Ashley Guidry—a brassy blonde with minimal experience, and a simple application accompanied by a Polaroid—happened to land a job in April 2001, at the age of 27. Read more…

When the British Museum Reading Room Was Bohemian London’s Most Happening Spot

Inside the British Museum. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

It’s counterintuitive to think of the British Museum as a happening spot, but for a long time its reading room served as a premier gathering place for London’s brainy bohemians. In the 1880s, these included radicals like George Bernard Shaw, Henry Havelock Ellis, and Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s youngest daughter. They worked there, and they talked during smoke breaks and visits to Bloomsbury tea shops. They moved fluidly between politics and the arts, deploring factory conditions as fervently as they dissected Ibsen’s plays. The reading room was a vital seedbed for such Victorian-era social-reform causes as women’s rights and trade-union organizing.

It was also a pickup scene. Edward Aveling, a science lecturer, playwright, and political activist—and a notorious flirt—described the reading room as “in equal degrees a menagerie and a lunatic asylum” and made a tongue-in-cheek proposal that it be segregated by sex so as to bring about “less talking and fewer marriages.”

Karen Olsson writing in Bookforum about a new biography of Eleanor Marx. Eleanor Marx’s relationship with her longtime partner Edward Aveling was among the liaisons fostered in the reading room. The reading room in question has since closed; according to Olsson, its library holdings were transferred elsewhere in 1997.

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The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg

Elissa Schappell | The Paris Review | 1995 | 63 minutes (15,685 words)

  
We’re excited to reprint Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg.” The piece was first featured on the site in 2013 as a Longreads Member Pick, and originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review. It was later anthologized in the Paris Review’s 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community:

Of all the literature classes I have ever taken in my life Allen Ginsberg’s “Craft of Poetry” was not only the most memorable and inspiring, but the most useful to me as a writer.
First thought, best thought.
It’s 1994 and I am getting my MFA in fiction at NYU. I’m sitting in the front row of a dingy classroom with a tape recorder and a notebook. The tape recorder is to record Allen Ginsberg, the big daddy of the Beat’s “Craft of Poetry” lectures for a feature I’m writing for The Paris Review. No. Lectures is the wrong word—Ginsberg’s thought operas, his spontaneous jet streams of brilliance, his earthy Dharma Lion roars—that’s what I’m there to capture. His teaching method is, as he explains it, “to improvise to some extent and it have it real rather than just a rote thing.”
It was very real.
The education Ginsberg provided me exceeds the bounds of the classroom, and far beyond the craft of poetry. Look inward and let go, he said. Pay attention to your world, read everything. For as he put it, “If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”
—Elissa Schappell, 2013

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The news that Allen Ginsberg was going to be teaching at New York University was passed around campus like a joint, making some people giddy and euphoric, others mildly confused, and still others paranoid—teachers and students alike. The waiting list to get into the class was extraordinary not only in length, but for the sheer number of times students eagerly checked to see if they had moved up. As a graduate student in the creative writing program I was given first dibs. I was curious to meet Ginsberg, curious to see how he would commandeer the Craft of Poetry class, which in the past had been taught by Galway Kinnell and William Matthews. The following excerpts were culled from a diary I kept during the semester. Read more…

The Answer Is Never

Illustration by Devon Kelley-Yurdin

Sabine Heinlein | Longreads | April 2015 | 16 minutes (3,886 words)

 

One time, when I was in my early twenties, I shared a hospital room with a mother of many. I had a skin infection that wouldn’t respond to oral medication, and the 50-something-year-old woman had severe, inexplicable hives. Our main topic of conversation revolved around neither of our ailments. It was about my not wanting to have children. She was insistent, which seemed ironic considering her hives flared up whenever her family visited her on Sundays. I eventually compromised with the woman. Okay, I said, I will put off my decision until I reach my thirties. “You are starry-eyed,” she huffed. “You young women want it all. But you can’t have it all!” Maybe, I thought, some of us don’t want it all. Read more…

Buried Alive in a Grain Silo

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Erika Hayasaki | December 2014 | 2,554 words (10 minutes)

 

Four years ago, Erika Hayasaki learned about the death of two young men in a corn grain bin accident in the Midwest. Over the next two years, while pregnant and later with her then-six-month-year-old daughter and husband in tow, she left her life in Los Angeles to visit Mount Carroll, Illinois, population 1,700, to capture the story. Her interest, however, wasn’t so much in rehashing the deaths of the two young men, but in telling the story of the survivor, Will Piper, who nearly died trying to save his friends from the deadly pull of the grain bin, and whose life took a surprising turn after the accident. The following is an excerpt from Hayasaki’s story, Drowned By Corn, which describes the lives of the young workers before the accident. Read more…