By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: June 24, 2010

Last weekend China announced a change in its currency policy, a move clearly intended to head off pressure from the United States and other countries at this weekend’s G-20 summit meeting. Unfortunately, the new policy doesn’t address the real issue, which is that China has been promoting its exports at the rest of the world’s expense.

In fact, far from representing a step in the right direction, the Chinese announcement was an exercise in bad faith — an attempt to exploit U.S. restraint. To keep the rhetorical temperature down, the Obama administration has used diplomatic language in its efforts to persuade the Chinese government to end its bad behavior. Now the Chinese have responded by seizing on the form of American language to avoid dealing with the substance of American complaints. In short, they’re playing games.

To understand what’s going on, we need to get back to the basics of the situation.

China’s exchange-rate policy is neither complicated nor unprecedented, except for its sheer scale. It’s a classic example of a government keeping the foreign-currency value of its money artificially low by selling its own currency and buying foreign currency. This policy is especially effective in China’s case because there are legal restrictions on the movement of funds both into and out of the country, allowing government intervention to dominate the currency market.

And the proof that China is, in fact, keeping the value of its currency, the renminbi, artificially low is precisely the fact that the central bank is accumulating so many dollars, euros and other foreign assets — more than $2 trillion worth so far. There have been all sorts of calculations purporting to show that the renminbi isn’t really undervalued, or at least not by much. But if the renminbi isn’t deeply undervalued, why has China had to buy around $1 billion a day of foreign currency to keep it from rising?

The effect of this currency undervaluation is twofold: it makes Chinese goods artificially cheap to foreigners, while making foreign goods artificially expensive to the Chinese. That is, it’s as if China were simultaneously subsidizing its exports and placing a protective tariff on its imports.

This policy is very damaging at a time when much of the world economy remains deeply depressed. In normal times, you could argue that Chinese purchases of U.S. bonds, while distorting trade, were at least supplying us with cheap credit — and you could argue that it wasn’t China’s fault that we used that credit to inflate a vast, destructive housing bubble. But right now we’re awash in cheap credit; what’s lacking is sufficient demand for goods and services to generate the jobs we need. And China, by running an artificial trade surplus, is aggravating that problem.

This does not, by the way, mean that China gains from its currency policy. The undervalued renminbi is good for politically influential export companies. But these companies hoard cash rather than passing on the benefits to their workers, hence the recent wave of strikes. Meanwhile, the weak renminbi creates inflationary pressures and diverts a huge fraction of China’s national income into the purchase of foreign assets with a very low rate of return.

So where does last week’s policy announcement fit into all this? Well, China has allowed the renminbi to rise — but barely. As of Thursday, the currency was only about half a percent higher than its typical level before the announcement. And all indications are that watching the future movement of the renminbi will be like watching paint dry: Chinese officials are still making statements denying that a rise in their currency will do anything to reduce trade imbalances, and prices in the forward market, in which traders agree to exchange currencies at various points in the future, suggest a rise of only about 2 percent in the renminbi by the end of this year. This is basically a joke.

What the Chinese have done, they claim, to increase the “flexibility” of their exchange rate: it’s moving around more from day to day than it did in the past, sometimes up, sometimes down.

Of course, Chinese policy makers know perfectly well that although U.S. officials have indeed called for more currency flexibility, that was just a diplomatic euphemism for what America, and the world, wants (and has the right to demand): a much stronger renminbi. Having the currency bob up or down slightly makes no difference to the fundamentals.

So what comes next? China’s government is clearly trying to string the rest of us along, putting off action until something — it’s hard to say what — comes up.

That’s not acceptable. China needs to stop giving us the runaround and deliver real change. And if it refuses, it’s time to talk about trade sanctions.

through June 26

Michael Benevento

Derk Bergquists

COMMUNITY In an ecosystem known as a cold seep, which thrives on the Gulf of Mexico seabed, tube worms that could be centuries old thrive among corals, crabs, brittle stars and other creatures.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
NY Times Published: June 21, 2010

The deep seabed was once considered a biological desert. Life, the logic went, was synonymous with light and photosynthesis. The sun powered the planet’s food chains, and only a few scavengers could ply the preternaturally dark abyss.

Then, in 1977, oceanographers working in the deep Pacific stumbled on bizarre ecosystems lush with clams, mussels and big tube worms — a cornucopia of abyssal life built on microbes that thrived in hot, mineral-rich waters welling up from volcanic cracks, feeding on the chemicals that leached into the seawater and serving as the basis for whole chains of life that got along just fine without sunlight.

In 1984, scientists found that the heat was not necessary. In exploring the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, they discovered sunless habitats powered by a new form of nourishment. The microbes that founded the food chain lived not on hot minerals but on cold petrochemicals seeping up from the icy seabed.

Today, scientists have identified roughly one hundred sites in the gulf where cold-seep communities of clams, mussels and tube worms flourish in the sunless depths. And they have accumulated evidence of many more — hundreds by some estimates, thousands by others — most especially in the gulf’s deep, unexplored waters.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if there were 2,000 communities, from suburbs to cities,” said Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who studies the dark ecosystems.

The world’s richest known concentration of these remarkable communities is in the Gulf of Mexico. The life forms include tube worms up to eight feet long. Some of the creatures appear old enough, scientists say, to predate the arrival of Columbus in the New World.

Now, by horrific accident, these cold communities have become the subject of a quiet debate among scientists. The gulf is, of course, the site of the giant oil spill that began April 20 with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drill rig. The question is what the oil pouring into the gulf means for these deep, dark habitats.

Seep researchers have voiced strong concern about the threat to the dark ecosystems. The spill is a concentrated surge, they note, in contrast to the slow, diffuse, chronic seepage of petrochemicals across much of the gulf’s northern slope. Many factors, like the density of oil in undersea plumes, the size of resulting oxygen drops and the potential toxicity of oil dispersants — all unknowns — could grow into threats that outweigh any possible benefits and damage or even destroy the dark ecosystems.

Last year, scientists discovered a community roughly five miles from where the BP well, a mile deep, subsequently blew out. Its inhabitants include mussels and tube worms. So it seems that researchers will have some answers sooner rather than later.

“There’s lots of uncertainty,” said Charles R. Fisher, a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University, who is leading a federal study of the dark habitats and who observed the nearby community. “Our best hope is that the impact is neutral or a minor problem.”

A few scientists say the gushing oil — despite its clear harm to pelicans, turtles and other forms of coastal life — might ultimately represent a subtle boon to the creatures of the cold seeps and even to the wider food chain.

“The gulf is such a great fishery because it’s fed organic matter from oil,” said Roger Sassen, a specialist on the cold seeps who recently retired from Texas A&M University. “It’s preadapted to crude oil. The image of this spill being a complete disaster is not true.” His stance seems to be a minority view.

Over roughly two decades, the federal government has spent at least $30 million uncovering and investigating the creatures of the cold seeps, a fair amount of money for basic ocean research. Washington has provided this money in an effort to ensure that oil development does no harm to the unusual ecosystems. Now, the nation’s worst oil spill at sea — with tens of millions of gallons spewing to date — has thrown that goal into doubt.

The agency behind the exploration and surveying of the cold seeps is none other than the much-criticized Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior — not its oil regulators but a separate environmental arm, which long ago began hiring oceanographers, geologists, ecologists and marine biologists to investigate the gulf seabed and eventually pushed through regulations meant to protect the newly discovered ecosystems.

The minerals service is joining with other federal agencies to study whether the BP spill is harming the dark habitats. Scientists say ships may go to sea as soon as July, sending tethered robots down to the icy seabed to examine the seep communities and take samples for analysis.

It is a bittersweet moment for scientists like Dr. MacDonald of Florida State University, who has devoted his career to documenting the ecosystem’s richness and complexity. In an interview, he said the sheer difficulty of trying to fathom the ecological impacts of the spill had left some of his colleagues dejected.

“Once, we had this career studying obscure animals down there,” he said. “And now, it’s looking at this — probably for the rest of my career. It becomes this huge unknown.”

Inky darkness, icy temperatures and crushing pressures conspire to make studying the deep oceans arduous and remarkably costly. Humans are estimated to have glimpsed perhaps a millionth of the ocean floor.

By contrast, people looking at the surface of the gulf have known about the seeping oil for centuries. Spanish records dating from the 16th century note floating oil.

In the early 1980s, scientists investigating the oil seeps wondered if nearby creatures on the seabed might suffer chronic harm from pollution and serve as models for petrochemical risk. They lowered nets about a half mile down and pulled up, to their surprise, riots of healthy animals.

“We report the discovery of dense biological communities associated with regions of oil and gas seepage,” six oceanographers at Texas A&M wrote in the journal Nature in September 1985.

The animals included snails, crabs, eels, clams and tube worms more than six feet long. The founding microbes of the food chain turned out to feed on seabed emissions of methane and hydrogen sulfide — a highly toxic chemical for land animals that has the odor of rotten eggs.

Plants derive energy from sunlight and make living tissue in a process known as photosynthesis. The corresponding method among the microbes of the dark abyss is known as chemosynthesis.

The minerals service proceeded to finance wide expeditions. It issued thick reports in 1988, 1992 and 2002. By then, scientists had discovered dozens of seep communities and found some of their inhabitants to be extraordinarily old.

In the journal Nature, Dr. Fisher of Pennsylvania State University and two colleagues reported that gulf tube worms could live more than 250 years — making them among the oldest animals on the planet.

The latest expeditions have looked at seep communities as deep as 1.7 miles — far down the continental slope toward the gulf’s nether regions. In an interview, Dr. Fisher said investigations of the deeper communities suggested that tube worm species there grew slower and lived longer.

How long? “It’s likely they can live a lot longer,” he answered. “I’m uncomfortable with an exact number, but we’re talking centuries — four, five or six centuries.”

Over the years, scientists have found that the deep microbes not only eat exotic chemicals but also make carbonate (a building block of seashells) that forms a hard crust on the normally gooey seabed. The carbonate crusts can grow thick enough, they say, to reduce the flow of gas and oil through the seep communities and form attachment points for a variety of other sea creatures, especially deep corals and other filter feeders like brittle stars.

By probing the gulf’s deep waters with sound and other imaging technologies, scientists have found evidence for the existence on the northern continental slope of roughly 8,000 regions of hard crust — all, they say, potentially home to old or new seep communities.

On its Web site, the minerals service freely admits “a management conflict” between encouraging oil development and protecting the dark ecosystems. It issued regulations in 1989 and has periodically toughened the rules, most recently in January.

Now, in the wake of the oil disaster, many seep researchers have voiced strong concern about the threat to the dark ecosystems. Dr. Fisher said that thick oil could coat the respiratory structures of the animals and cause them to suffocate, and that high concentrations might otherwise prove toxic.

Samantha B. Joye, a cold-seep scientist at the University of Georgia, told a House science subcommittee on June 9 that the BP blowout represented “an unprecedented perturbation to the Gulf of Mexico system.”

She expressed particular concern about the dispersants that BP is injecting a mile down into the spewing oil — in a largely successful effort to reduce the flow reaching the surface.

Dr. Joye said the surge of oil into subsurface waters could feed microbes that consume oxygen. If their numbers explode, she said, the result could be a spike in oxygen consumption so large that its deep levels drop precipitously.

The dark ecosystems, she noted, “can tolerate reduced oxygen concentrations.” But she cautioned that the BP spill will challenge their tolerance “beyond any previous insult.”

Now, oceanographers are preparing to dive deep to see how the dark communities are holding up. The lessons for oil precautions and regulatory care, they say, could have application not only for creatures in the inky depths of the Gulf of Mexico but also around the world.

“Everywhere they looked, they’ve found them,” said Norman L. Guinasso Jr., director of Geochemical and Environmental Research at Texas A&M. He cited discoveries of seep communities off Angola, Indonesia and Trinidad.

In exploring the gulf, Dr. Guinasso said, scientists are struggling to fathom the strengths and vulnerabilities of some of the planet’s oldest and most novel creatures. “People,” he said, “are still learning.”

thanks to danielle and phil

By ERROL MORRIS
NY Times Published: June 20, 2010

1. The Juice

David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. Fuoco:

ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY,
SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news.

At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington. Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, was wanted in [connection with] bank robberies on Jan. 6 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale. In both robberies, police said, Wheeler was accompanied by Clifton Earl Johnson, 43, who was arrested Jan. 12.[1]

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

In a follow-up article, Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler’s arrest. Commander Ronald Freeman assured Fuoco that Wheeler had not gone into “this thing” blindly but had performed a variety of tests prior to the robbery. Sergeant Wally Long provided additional details — “although Wheeler reported the lemon juice was burning his face and his eyes, and he was having trouble (seeing) and had to squint, he had tested the theory, and it seemed to work.” He had snapped a Polaroid picture of himself and wasn’t anywhere to be found in the image. It was like a version of Where’s Waldo with no Waldo. Long tried to come up with an explanation of why there was no image on the Polaroid. He came up with three possibilities:

(a) the film was bad;

(b) Wheeler hadn’t adjusted the camera correctly; or

(c) Wheeler had pointed the camera away from his face at the critical moment when he snapped the photo.[2]

As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” was published in 1999.[3]

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. But just how prevalent is this effect? In search of more details, I called David Dunning at his offices at Cornell:

DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS: Why not?

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

ERROL MORRIS: Many other areas?

DAVID DUNNING: If you look at our 1999 article, we measured skills where we had the right answers. Grammar, logic. And our test-subjects were all college students doing college student-type things. Presumably, they also should know whether or not they’re getting the right answers. And yet, we had these students who were doing badly in grammar, who didn’t know they were doing badly in grammar. We believed that they should know they were doing badly, and when they didn’t, that really surprised us.

ERROL MORRIS: The students that were unaware they were doing badly — in what sense? Were they truly oblivious? Were they self-deceived? Were they in denial? How would you describe it?

DAVID DUNNING: There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

ERROL MORRIS: Knowing what you don’t know? Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person?

DAVID DUNNING: That’s absolutely right. It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know. [4] Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown unknowns” quote occurred in a Q&A session at the end of a NATO press conference.[5] A reporter asked him, “Regarding terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, you said something to the effect that the real situation is worse than the facts show…” Rumsfeld replied, “Sure. All of us in this business read intelligence information. And we read it daily and we think about it, and it becomes in our minds essentially what exists. And that’s wrong. It is not what exists.” But what is Rumsfeld saying here? That he can be wrong? That “intelligence information” is not complete? That it has to be viewed critically? Who would argue? Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” seem even less auspicious. Of course, there are known unknowns. I don’t know the melting point of beryllium.
berylliumhttp://www.green-planet-solar-energy.com

And I know that I don’t know it. There are a zillion things I don’t know. And I know that I don’t know them. But what about the unknown unknowns? Are they like a scotoma, a blind spot in our field of vision that we are unaware of? I kept wondering if Rumsfeld’s real problem was with the unknown unknowns; or was it instead some variant of self-deception, thinking that you know something that you don’t know. A problem of hubris, not epistemology. [6]

And yet there was something in Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns that had captured Dunning’s imagination. I wanted to know more, and so I e-mailed him: why are you so obsessed with Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns?” Here is his answer:

The notion of unknown unknowns really does resonate with me, and perhaps the idea would resonate with other people if they knew that it originally came from the world of design and engineering rather than Rumsfeld.

If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.

To me, unknown unknowns enter at two different levels. The first is at the level of risk and problem. Many tasks in life contain uncertainties that are known — so-called “known unknowns.” These are potential problems for any venture, but they at least are problems that people can be vigilant about, prepare for, take insurance on, and often head off at the pass. Unknown unknown risks, on the other hand, are problems that people do not know they are vulnerable to.

Unknown unknowns also exist at the level of solutions. People often come up with answers to problems that are o.k., but are not the best solutions. The reason they don’t come up with those solutions is that they are simply not aware of them. Stefan Fatsis, in his book “Word Freak,” talks about this when comparing everyday Scrabble players to professional ones. As he says: “In a way, the living-room player is lucky . . . He has no idea how miserably he fails with almost every turn, how many possible words or optimal plays slip by unnoticed. The idea of Scrabble greatness doesn’t exist for him.” (p. 128)

Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge. The average detective does not realize the clues he or she neglects. The mediocre doctor is not aware of the diagnostic possibilities or treatments never considered. The run-of-the-mill lawyer fails to recognize the winning legal argument that is out there. People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible. This is one of the reasons I often urge my student advisees to find out who the smart professors are, and to get themselves in front of those professors so they can see what smart looks like.

So, yes, the idea resonates. I would write more, and there’s probably a lot more to write about, but I haven’t a clue what that all is.

I can readily admit that the “everyday Scrabble player” has no idea how incompetent he is, but I don’t think that Scrabble provides an example of the unknown unknowns. An unknown unknown is not something like the word “ctenoid,” a difficult word by most accounts, or any other obscure, difficult word.[7] [8] Surely, the everyday Scrabble player knows that there are words he doesn’t know. Rumsfeld could have known about the gaps in his intelligence information. How are his unknown unknowns different from plain-old-vanilla unknowns? The fact that we don’t know something, or don’t bother to ask questions in an attempt to understand things better, does that constitute anything more than laziness on our part? A symptom of an underlying complacency rather than a confrontation with an unfathomable mystery?

I found myself still puzzled by the unknown unknowns. Finally, I came up with an explanation. Using the expressions “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” is just a fancy — even pretentious — way of talking about questions and answers. A “known unknown” is a known question with an unknown answer. I can ask the question: what is the melting point of beryllium? I may not know the answer, but I can look it up. I can do some research. It may even be a question which no one knows the answer to. With an “unknown unknown,” I don’t even know what questions to ask, let alone how to answer those questions.

But there is the deeper question. And I believe that Dunning and Kruger’s work speaks to this. Is an “unknown unknown” beyond anything I can imagine? Or am I confusing the “unknown unknowns” with the “unknowable unknowns?” Are we constituted in such a way that there are things we cannot know? Perhaps because we cannot even frame the questions we need to ask?

DAVID DUNNING: People will often make the case, “We can’t be that stupid, or we would have been evolutionarily wiped out as a species a long time ago.” I don’t agree. I find myself saying, “Well, no. Gee, all you need to do is be far enough along to be able to get three square meals or to solve the calorie problem long enough so that you can reproduce. And then, that’s it. You don’t need a lot of smarts. You don’t have to do tensor calculus. You don’t have to do quantum physics to be able to survive to the point where you can reproduce.” One could argue that evolution suggests we’re not idiots, but I would say, “Well, no. Evolution just makes sure we’re not blithering idiots. But, we could be idiots in a lot of different ways and still make it through the day.”

ERROL MORRIS: Years ago, I made a short film (“I Dismember Mama”) about cryonics, the freezing of people for future resuscitation. [9]

DAVID DUNNING: Oh, wow.

ERROL MORRIS: And I have an interview with the president of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics organization, on the 6 o’clock news in Riverside, California. One of the executives of the company had frozen his mother’s head for future resuscitation. (It’s called a “neuro,” as opposed to a “full-body” freezing.) The prosecutor claimed that they may not have waited for her to die. In answer to a reporter’s question, the president of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation said, “You know, we’re not stupid . . . ” And then corrected himself almost immediately, “We’re not that stupid that we would do something like that.”

DAVID DUNNING: That’s pretty good.

ERROL MORRIS: “Yes. We’re stupid, but we’re not that stupid.”

DAVID DUNNING: And in some sense we apply that to the human race. There’s some comfort in that. We may be stupid, but we’re not that stupid.

ERROL MORRIS: Something I have wondered about: Is there a socio-biological account of what forces in evolution selected for stupidity and why?

DAVID DUNNING: Well, there’s no way we could be evolutionarily prepared for doing physics and doing our taxes at the end of the year. These are rather new in our evolutionary history. But solving social problems, getting along with other people, is something intrinsic to our survival as a species. You’d think we would know where our inabilities lie. But if we believe our data, we’re not necessarily very good at knowing what we’re lousy at with other people.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Maybe it’s an effective strategy for dealing with life. Not dealing with it.

David Dunning, in his book “Self-Insight,” calls the Dunning-Kruger Effect “the anosognosia of everyday life.”[10] When I first heard the word “anosognosia,” I had to look it up. Here’s one definition:

Anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability. [11]

Dunning‘s juxtaposition of anosognosia with everyday life is a surprising and suggestive turn of phrase. After all, anosognosia comes originally from the world of neurology and is the name of a specific neurological disorder.

DAVID DUNNING: An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.” They literally aren’t alerted to their own paralysis. There is some monitoring system on the right side of the brain that has been damaged, as well as the damage that’s related to the paralysis on the left side. There is also something similar called “hemispatial neglect.” It has to do with a kind of brain damage where people literally cannot see or they can’t pay attention to one side of their environment. If they’re men, they literally only shave one half of their face. And they’re not aware about the other half. If you put food in front of them, they’ll eat half of what’s on the plate and then complain that there’s too little food. You could think of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as a psychological version of this physiological problem. If you have, for lack of a better term, damage to your expertise or imperfection in your knowledge or skill, you’re left literally not knowing that you have that damage. It was an analogy for us.[12]

This brings us in this next section to Joseph Babinski (1857-1932), the neurologist who gave anosognosia its name.

(This is the first of a five-part series.)

FOOTNOTES:

1. Michael A. Fuoco, “Arrest in Bank Robbery, Suspect’s Picture Spurs Tips,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 21, 1995.

2. Michael A. Fuoco, “Trial and Error: They had Larceny in their Hearts, but little in their Heads,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 21, 1996. The article also includes several other impossibly stupid crimes, e.g., the criminal-to-be who filled out an employment application at a fast-food restaurant providing his correct name, address and social security number. A couple of minutes later he decided to rob the place.

3. Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, vol. 77, no. 6, pp. 1121-1134.

4. David Dunning may be channeling Socrates. “The only true wisdom is to know that you know nothing.” That’s too bad; Socrates gives me a headache.

5. NATO HQ, Brussels, Press Conference by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, June 6, 2002. The exact quote: “There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are the things we do not know we don’t know.”

6. O.K. I looked it up on Wikipedia. The melting point of beryllium, the fourth element, is 1278 °C.

7. “Ctenoid” comes from one of my favorite books, “Jarrold’s Dictionary of Difficult Words.” I challenged a member of the Mega Society [a society whose members have ultra-high I.Q.s], who claimed he could spell anything, to spell “ctenoid.” He failed. It’s that silent “c” that gets them every time. “Ctenoid” means “having an edge with projections like the teeth of a comb.” It could refer to rooster combs or the scales of certain fish.

8. For the inner logoleptic in all of us, allow me to recommend the Web site:

http://www.kokogiak.com/logolepsy/

One of the site’s recommended words is “epicaricacy.” I read somewhere that the German word “schadenfreude” has no equivalent in English. I am now greatly relieved.

9. Errol Morris, “First Person: I Dismember Mama.”

10. Dunning, David, “Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (Essays in Social Psychology),” Psychology Press: 2005, p. 14-15.

11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia.

12. A purist would no doubt complain that anosognosia has been taken out of context, that it has been removed from the world of neurology and placed in an inappropriate and anachronistic social science setting. But something does remain in translation, the idea of an invisible deficit, the infirmity that cannot be known nor perceived. I can even imagine a cognitive and psychological version of anosodiaphoria. The idea of an infirmity that people neglect, that they do not pay any attention to.

Thanks to Mike Abelson

Christophe Vorlet

By STEVEN JOHNSON
NY Times Published: June 18, 2010

“THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him.

If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in the book.

Amazon calls this new feature “popular highlights.” It may sound innocuous enough, but it augurs even bigger changes to come.

Though the feature can be disabled by the user, “popular highlights” will no doubt alarm Nicholas Carr, whose new book, “The Shallows,” argues that the compulsive skimming, linking and multitasking of our screen reading is undermining the deep, immersive focus that has defined book culture for centuries.

With “popular highlights,” even when we manage to turn off Twitter and the television and sit down to read a good book, there will a chorus of readers turning the pages along with us, pointing out the good bits. Before long, we’ll probably be able to meet those fellow readers, share stories with them. Combating loneliness? David Foster Wallace saw only the half of it.

Mr. Carr’s argument is that these distractions come with a heavy cost, and his book’s publication coincides with articles in various publications — including The New York Times — that report on scientific studies showing how multitasking harms our concentration.

Thus far, the neuroscience of multitasking has tended to follow a predictable pattern. Scientists take a handful of test subjects out of their offices and make them watch colored squares dance on a screen in a lab somewhere. Then they determine that multitasking makes you slightly less able to focus. A study reported on early this month found that heavy multitaskers performed about 10 to 20 percent worse on most tests than light multitaskers.

These studies are undoubtedly onto something — no one honestly believes he is better at focusing when he switches back and forth between multiple activities — but they are meaningless as a cultural indicator without measuring what we gain from multitasking.

Thanks to e-mail, Twitter and the blogosphere, I regularly exchange information with hundreds of people in a single day: scheduling meetings, sharing political gossip, trading edits on a book chapter, planning a family vacation, reading tech punditry. How many of those exchanges could happen were I limited exclusively to the technologies of the phone, the post office and the face-to-face meeting? I suspect that the number would be a small fraction of my current rate.

I have no doubt that I am slightly less focused in these interactions, but, frankly, most of what we do during the day doesn’t require our full powers of concentration. Even rocket scientists don’t do rocket science all day long.

To his credit, Mr. Carr readily concedes this efficiency argument. His concern is what happens to high-level thinking when the culture migrates from the page to the screen. To the extent that his argument is a reminder to all of us to step away from the screen sometimes, and think in a more sedate environment, it’s a valuable contribution.

But Mr. Carr’s argument is more ambitious than that: the “linear, literary mind” that has been at “the center of art, science and society” threatens to become “yesterday’s mind,” with dire consequences for our culture. Here, too, I think the concerns are overstated, though for slightly different reasons.

Presumably, the first causalities of “shallow” thinking should have appeared on the front lines of the technology world, where the participants have spent the most time in the hyperconnected space of the screen. And yet the sophistication and nuance of media commentary has grown dramatically over the last 15 years. Mr. Carr’s original essay, published in The Atlantic — along with Clay Shirky’s more optimistic account, which led to the book “Cognitive Surplus” — were intensely discussed throughout the Web when they first appeared as articles, and both books appear to be generating the same level of analysis and engagement in long form.

The intellectual tools for assessing the media, once the province of academics and professional critics, are now far more accessible to the masses. The number of people who have written a thoughtful response to Mr. Carr’s essay — and, even better, published it online — surely dwarfs the number of people who wrote in public about “Understanding Media,” by Marshall McLuhan, in 1964.

Mr. Carr spends a great deal of his book’s opening section convincing us that new forms of media alter the way the brain works, which I suspect most of his readers have long ago accepted as an obvious truth. The question is not whether our brains are being changed. (Of course new experiences change your brain — that’s what experience is, on some basic level.) The question is whether the rewards of the change are worth the liabilities.

The problem with Mr. Carr’s model is its unquestioned reverence for the slow contemplation of deep reading. For society to advance as it has since Gutenberg, he argues, we need the quiet, solitary space of the book. Yet many great ideas that have advanced culture over the past centuries have emerged from a more connective space, in the collision of different worldviews and sensibilities, different metaphors and fields of expertise. (Gutenberg himself borrowed his printing press from the screw presses of Rhineland vintners, as Mr. Carr notes.)

It’s no accident that most of the great scientific and technological innovation over the last millennium has taken place in crowded, distracting urban centers. The printed page itself encouraged those manifold connections, by allowing ideas to be stored and shared and circulated more efficiently. One can make the case that the Enlightenment depended more on the exchange of ideas than it did on solitary, deep-focus reading.

Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television.

And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make.

Steven Johnson is an author and entrepreneur. His new book, “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation,” will be published in October.

through today June 19

Richard Telles

Terry Khoo, courtesy of Perry Deane Young

Dana Stone and Sean Flynn, riding motorcycles into Communist-held territory in Cambodia on April 6, 1970

By SETH MYDANS
NY Times Published: June 18, 2010

PKHAR DOUNG, Cambodia — “Let’s rock and roll,” said Tim Page, once one of the wild and daring young photographers of the Vietnam War, strapping himself into the front seat of a four wheel drive van.

“Like Flynn and Stone, three intrepid journalists left Phnom Penh on a hot morning headed for Kampong Cham,” he said, narrating his departure recently with two colleagues.

He settled back for the long ride, past the town of Skun, known for its fried spiders, past hypnotic rows of rubber trees, out to this dusty village near the Mekong River where he believed the bones of two missing war photographers, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, were buried.

It was not an unusual journey for Mr. Page. Now 66, he has been on this hunt for years, determined to find answers and to come to terms with the war that has dominated his life.

Just 40 years ago, the missing men had headed down an empty road with their cameras in search of Khmer Rouge guerrillas. They were never heard from again.

Their fate has become one of the enduring mysteries of the war, two young journalists — like movie adventurers — riding their motorbikes into no-man’s-land and losing a bet against fate.

Mr. Flynn, the dashing and glamorous son of the film star Errol Flynn, had in fact briefly been an actor, and he brought an aura with him to Vietnam that gave his disappearance at the age of 28 a mythic quality.

“Sean Flynn could look more incredibly beautiful than even his father, Errol, had 30 years before as Captain Blood,” wrote Michael Herr in his classic book about the war, “Dispatches.”

“But sometimes he looked more like Artaud coming out of some heavy heart-of-darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input!”

Mr. Page had shared some of those journeys into darkness, and his visit to Pkhar Doung was the latest of many forays in what he calls “a 25-year madness” in search of the bones of the man he calls his brother.

Weeks earlier two bounty hunters had made a false claim to have found them, reviving interest in the disappearance and spurring American investigators to step up the search for the missing journalists.

“I don’t like the idea of his spirit out there tormented,” Mr. Page said, a wandering ghost that could only find rest, as many in Asia believe, after proper funeral rites. “There’s something spooky about being M.I.A.”

Mr. Page is also seeking a measure of peace for his own soul, scarred like his body from the traumas of combat, from nearly fatal wounds and the loss of friends, trying to put together what he calls “an enormous jigsaw puzzle, bits of sky, bits of earth.”

“I don’t think anybody who goes through anything like war ever comes out intact,” he said. “I suppose the closure of Sean’s fate also has to do with closure of the whole war experience.”

Theirs was an intimacy forged by shared danger and by what Mr. Page calls the magnetic pull of two only sons searching for a bond.

“We could have been brothers, and felt as though we were,” Mr. Page wrote in a memoir, “Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden.” “We would sit for hours in the same room, hardly speaking yet in total communication, a vibration as intimate as between lovers.”

For Mr. Page a lonely intimacy has continued, and he hears what seems to be the voice of his friend from time to time, the voice of a tormented spirit.

“We have conversations in strange moments, and often enough to remind me of the presence of his spirit,” Mr. Page said on his recent drive to Pkhar Doung. “It’s there but not there, and you’re aware that there’s something somehow lurking, just out of reach.”

He said that as he drives past the rubber trees, whose rapid regular repeated rows create the illusion of some ghostly shifting world in the distance, he often hears his friend’s voice, “What are you doing, man? What are you doing, boy? What are you doing, mate?”

Mr. Flynn’s lost bones and wandering soul are not alone in Cambodia, where as many as a quarter of the population died in the late 1970s during the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge. Many of their remains, like those of Mr. Flynn, are still unidentified in killing fields around the country.

Cambodia was a particularly dangerous place for foreign journalists during five years of war before the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975. At least 37 died or disappeared, including 15, along with Mr. Flynn, in a six-week period in April 1970.

After pursuing various theories and false trails, Mr. Page said he now believes that Mr. Flynn survived for a year after his disappearance and may have been killed by lethal injection at a field hospital here. On a visit last year, Mr. Page recovered some medical vials and turned them over for analysis to the American military office in Hawaii that seeks to recover the remains of missing soldiers.

This new visit to Pkhar Doung did little to solve the mystery. Since the bounty hunters had ravaged the site with a backhoe, the American military office, known by its acronym as JPAC, had sealed it off. Mr. Page was turned away by the local police.

In the future, he said, he planned to talk with nearby villagers who might have some memory of captive foreigners long ago and what became of them.

Even if he never does succeed, Mr. Page said his search had helped him honor both Mr. Flynn and other journalists who died or disappeared in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

His pursuit has inspired a documentary, a new memorial to dead and missing journalists in Phnom Penh, journalism courses for local reporters and most significantly a book called “Requiem,” which includes the work of 135 photographers from all sides who died covering Indochina’s decades of war.

Mr. Page, who grew up in Britain, taught himself photography and covered the war as a freelancer from 1965 to 1969, sending pictures to major American and French publications including Time and Life, Look and Paris-Match.

He became known for his vivid combat pictures and also for the risks he took and the wounds he survived. At the time Mr. Flynn disappeared Mr. Page had suffered his most severe injuries, from a mine explosion that sent shrapnel into his brain and body.

He was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital, he said, but surgeons revived him for a long and painful recovery. The thin borderline between life and death still seems to draw him.

“At the end of the day, the mysticism of it — living, not living — becomes a mystery,” he said, “and I don’t think we are ever privileged except on death’s doorstep to actually understand it.”

He hovers close, though, pouring his energies into his search for the unmarked grave of his friend, then sometimes finding comfort in the quiet of a cemetery.

“It’s always peaceful in a cemetery,” he said. “Everyone there has found rest. All the tribulations of life are over, and you return to the peace of nothingness.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: June 17, 2010

BERLIN

Suddenly, creating jobs is out, inflicting pain is in. Condemning deficits and refusing to help a still-struggling economy has become the new fashion everywhere, including the United States, where 52 senators voted against extending aid to the unemployed despite the highest rate of long-term joblessness since the 1930s.

Many economists, myself included, regard this turn to austerity as a huge mistake. It raises memories of 1937, when F.D.R.’s premature attempt to balance the budget helped plunge a recovering economy back into severe recession. And here in Germany, a few scholars see parallels to the policies of Heinrich Brüning, the chancellor from 1930 to 1932, whose devotion to financial orthodoxy ended up sealing the doom of the Weimar Republic.

But despite these warnings, the deficit hawks are prevailing in most places — and nowhere more than here, where the government has pledged 80 billion euros, almost $100 billion, in tax increases and spending cuts even though the economy continues to operate far below capacity.

What’s the economic logic behind the government’s moves? The answer, as far as I can tell, is that there isn’t any. Press German officials to explain why they need to impose austerity on a depressed economy, and you get rationales that don’t add up. Point this out, and they come up with different rationales, which also don’t add up. Arguing with German deficit hawks feels more than a bit like arguing with U.S. Iraq hawks back in 2002: They know what they want to do, and every time you refute one argument, they just come up with another.

Here’s roughly how the typical conversation goes (this is based both on my own experience and that of other American economists):

German hawk: “We must cut deficits immediately, because we have to deal with the fiscal burden of an aging population.”

Ugly American: “But that doesn’t make sense. Even if you manage to save 80 billion euros — which you won’t, because the budget cuts will hurt your economy and reduce revenues — the interest payments on that much debt would be less than a tenth of a percent of your G.D.P. So the austerity you’re pursuing will threaten economic recovery while doing next to nothing to improve your long-run budget position.”

German hawk: “I won’t try to argue the arithmetic. You have to take into account the market reaction.”

Ugly American: “But how do you know how the market will react? And anyway, why should the market be moved by policies that have almost no impact on the long-run fiscal position?”

German hawk: “You just don’t understand our situation.”

The key point is that while the advocates of austerity pose as hardheaded realists, doing what has to be done, they can’t and won’t justify their stance with actual numbers — because the numbers do not, in fact, support their position. Nor can they claim that markets are demanding austerity. On the contrary, the German government remains able to borrow at rock-bottom interest rates.

So the real motivations for their obsession with austerity lie somewhere else.

In America, many self-described deficit hawks are hypocrites, pure and simple: They’re eager to slash benefits for those in need, but their concerns about red ink vanish when it comes to tax breaks for the wealthy. Thus, Senator Ben Nelson, who sanctimoniously declared that we can’t afford $77 billion in aid to the unemployed, was instrumental in passing the first Bush tax cut, which cost a cool $1.3 trillion.

German deficit hawkery seems more sincere. But it still has nothing to do with fiscal realism. Instead, it’s about moralizing and posturing. Germans tend to think of running deficits as being morally wrong, while balancing budgets is considered virtuous, never mind the circumstances or economic logic. “The last few hours were a singular show of strength,” declared Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, after a special cabinet meeting agreed on the austerity plan. And showing strength — or what is perceived as strength — is what it’s all about.

There will, of course, be a price for this posturing. Only part of that price will fall on Germany: German austerity will worsen the crisis in the euro area, making it that much harder for Spain and other troubled economies to recover. Europe’s troubles are also leading to a weak euro, which perversely helps German manufacturing, but also exports the consequences of German austerity to the rest of the world, including the United States.

But German politicians seem determined to prove their strength by imposing suffering — and politicians around the world are following their lead.

How bad will it be? Will it really be 1937 all over again? I don’t know. What I do know is that economic policy around the world has taken a major wrong turn, and that the odds of a prolonged slump are rising by the day.

opens today

KRABBESHOLM HØJSKOLE

thanks to danielle kays

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

A passport photo of the director Nicholas Ray in later years.

By PATRICIA COHEN
NY Times Published: June 16, 2010

When Nicholas Ray, the pathbreaking filmmaker and director of “Rebel Without a Cause,” died from lung cancer in 1979, he left behind a substantial collection of artifacts that had never, or rarely, been seen. There is, for instance, the original typed treatment for “Rebel” with a bizarre twist that had Plato (played by Sal Mineo in the 1955 film) shoot Jim (James Dean) and commit suicide by falling on a live grenade, as well as an unfinished experimental movie, “We Can’t Go Home Again,” to which Ray devoted the last years of his life.

Now a new finished print of the film is being prepared by Ray’s widow, Susan, for a premiere at the Venice International Film Festival next year to celebrate the centenary of her husband’s birth.

“It was an experimental film, a difficult film and I think a visionary film that is particularly important today,” Ms. Ray said from her home in Saugerties, N.Y., where she has also been organizing the storehouse of original scripts, notes and movie storyboards for a sale. Ray worked on the project from 1972 to 1976 with students he taught at Harpur College at the State University of New York at Binghamton. An early version was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray continued to revise, reshoot and re-edit it until his death. The film employs what Ray called “mimage” (short for multiple image), in which a number of camera images are simultaneously projected on the screen.

With this new showing cinephiles will finally get a chance to judge whether “We Can’t Go Home Again” was an innovative undertaking or a misbegotten enterprise, part of what one film historian has called “a mess of incoherent footage and abortive projects” that occupied Ray in his final years.

In certain respects his ideas were ahead of their time. On screen Ray and the students play versions of themselves, a conceit that smoothly fits into this era of reality television. Today’s digital techniques would also make it easy to create the effects Ray painstakingly tried to achieve on a shoestring budget.

Ray and his students, for example, used Super 8 millimeter and 16 millimeter formats and early video technology, projected the images onto a screen and then refilmed these multiple images using a 35 millimeter camera.

The directors Abel Gance, Jean-Luc Godard, Stephen Frears and Mike Figgis have all used fragmented screens, but, said Marco Müller, the director of the Venice festival, “the sophistication and emotional power of Ray’s multiple images have not yet been matched, even now that digital technology makes this technique immediately accessible.”

Ms. Ray has the original negatives and said she plans to incorporate some unused footage in a new print. Asked whether she feels confident that her changes would reflect Ray’s own judgments, she replied, “I worked on it with him from the beginning.”

She added: “I can’t say with complete honesty what his ultimate vision would have been. I’m not sure he knew. He was like Penelope at the loom: he would get something done during the day and then pull it apart at night.”

During his most productive years in Hollywood, during the 1950s, Ray deeply influenced a generation of filmmakers in the United States and Europe with his dark, emotionally extravagant films, which included “Rebel,” “Johnny Guitar,” “They Live by Night” and “In a Lonely Place.” (The Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Mass., is holding a Nicholas Ray retrospective (which does not include “We Can’t Home Again”) from July 9 to Aug. 9.)

“Le cinéma, c’est Nicholas Ray,” Mr. Godard once declared.

“Rebel Without a Cause,” an emblem of adolescent disaffection, was his best known work. Though the grandiose ending in the treatment was scrapped, a series of 8 ½-by-11-inch storyboards — 53 of them — on which Ray scribbled notes in red ink about dialogue changes and camera positions reveal that his ideal finish was still different from the one that thrilled audiences.

Ray planned to have Plato shot by a sharpshooter from the roof of the planetarium. A close-up sketch of Dean’s face as he hangs onto a ladder and watches the body plummet head first shows the dramatic tension Ray sought to capture in the final frames.

Michael Chaiken, a film archivist, said this ending would have been much more expensive and difficult to shoot, and so Ray changed it at the last minute. Mr. Chaiken is working on the sale of the Ray material with the New York rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz.

There are also finely drawn charcoal storyboards from the last major film Ray directed, “55 Days at Peking” (1963), about the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China. A photograph from 1962 shows the boards tacked onto a wall and Ray sitting beneath them.

Ray was continually plagued by severe alcohol and drug addictions and was effectively banished from Hollywood. But he held on to papers from his glory days there, like his own brown, tattered and heavily annotated script for “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” a 1945 film directed by his friend and mentor Elia Kazan, for whom he served as an uncredited assistant.

Ms. Ray also has a collection of scripts and treatments for uncompleted projects, including designs for flowery, flowing costumes to go with a loose-leaf-bound typed script from 1976 that he wrote with Norman Mailer called “City Blues,” which was supposed to star Rip Torn and the porn star Marilyn Chambers; and material for a film about the Chicago Seven, the organizers of protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Their trial was where the defendants’ firebrand lawyer, William Kunstler, first introduced Ray to Susan.

Ms. Ray said she thinks the showing in Venice will cause a reappraisal of Ray’s later work. “In the years close to his death, he burnt a lot of burnt bridges,” she said. “I think enough time has passed, the damage has been forgotten, and people can appreciate more the prophetic strengths of the body of work.”

Untitled, 2010, Oil, wax and chalk ground on mdf and wood, 17 by 15 inches

closes June 19

Taxter and Spengeman

Image credit: Matt Dorfman

Confessions of a fake businessman from Beijing

By Mitch Moxley
The Atlantic Monthly
July / August 2010

Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.

“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”

I was.

And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”

Six of us met at the Beijing airport, where Jake briefed us on the details. We were supposedly representing a California-based company that was building a facility in Dongying. Our responsibilities would include making daily trips to the construction site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and hobnobbing. During the ceremony, one of us would have to give a speech as the company’s director. That duty fell to my friend Ernie, who, in his late 30s, was the oldest of our group. His business cards had already been made.

Dongying was home to Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, and that’s just about all it has going for it. The landscape is dry and bleak, with factories in all directions. We were met at the airport by Ken, a young Canadian of Taiwanese extraction with a brush cut and leather jacket, whose company, we were told, had been subcontracted to manage the project.

The lobby at our hotel was dimly lit and smelled like bad seafood. “At least we have a nice view,” Ernie deadpanned as he opened the drapes in our room to reveal a scrap yard. A truck had been stripped for parts, and old tires were heaped into a pile. A dog yelped.

Ken drove us to the company’s temporary offices: small rooms with cement floors and metal walls arranged around a courtyard. We toured the facility, which built high-tech manufacturing equipment, then returned to the office and sat for hours. Across the courtyard, we could hear Ernie rehearsing his speech.

The next morning was the official ribbon-cutting ceremony. A stage and red carpet had been set up near the construction site. Pretty girls in red dragon-patterned dresses greeted visitors, and Chinese pop blared from loudspeakers. Down the street, police in yellow vests directed traffic. The mayor was there with other local dignitaries, and so were TV cameras and reporters. We stood in the front row wearing suits, safety vests, and hard hats. As we waited for the ceremony to begin, a foreman standing beside me barked at workers still visible on the construction site. They scurried behind the scaffolding.

“Are you the boss?” I asked him.

He looked at me quizzically. “You’re the boss.”

Actually, Ernie was the boss. After a brief introduction, “Director” Ernie delivered his speech before the hundred or so people in attendance. He boasted about the company’s long list of international clients and emphasized how happy we were to be working on such an important project. When the speech was over, confetti blasted over the stage, fireworks popped above the dusty field beside us, and Ernie posed for a photo with the mayor.

For the next few days, we sat in the office swatting flies and reading magazines, purportedly high-level employees of a U.S. company that, I later discovered, didn’t really exist. We were so important, in fact, that two of the guys were hired to stay for eight months (to be fair, they actually then received quality-control training).

“Lots happening,” Ken told me. “We need people for a week every month. It’ll be better next time, too. We’ll have new offices.” He paused before adding: “Bring a computer. You can watch movies all day.”

Thanks to Andy

Young Family Trust and DC Comics

A page from the graphic novel “Neil Young’s Greendale,” which chronicles a family in changing times.

By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES
NY Times Published: June 15, 2010

They say you can’t go home again, but maybe someone should tell that to Neil Young.

Mr. Young created the fictional Northern California town of Greendale and its residents on his 2003 album of that name, then spun it off into a film and more. Now he’s visiting again, this time in the form of a graphic novel. “I’m happy the story is getting around; I think it’s empowering for young women,” he said during a recent telephone interview from his tour bus as it made its way to Louisville, Ky.

“Neil Young’s Greendale,” as the graphic novel is officially titled, was released this week by Vertigo, a division of DC Comics, and was written by Joshua Dysart, illustrated by Cliff Chiang and colored by Dave Stewart. It focuses on Sun Green, the great-granddaughter of Jay Green, the man who founded Greendale. Through Sun, the artists tell a story about personal responsibility, war and the environment, all themes familiar to Mr. Young. “It’s still pretty current,” he said.

The Greendale townsfolk were originally given life in 2003 in Mr. Young’s 10-track concept album with the band Crazy Horse. That led to a concert tour, an original film and a companion book of lyrics, illustrations and more information about the characters, including the Green women’s special relationship with nature. The graphic novel draws on the various incarnations with a strong helping from the book and suggestions from Mr. Young. “The album is more of a rock-’n’-roll ‘Our Town,’ ” Mr. Dysart said in a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. “The graphic novel is an American fable with strong supernatural elements.”

Mr. Young worked with Mr. Dysart on developing the story line and was incredibly patient when it came to landing the artist. “It took me about a year and a half to get Cliff Chiang,” Mr. Young said.

After being told that Mr. Chiang’s schedule would not be free for sometime, Mr. Young took matters into his own hands. “I found his Web site, and I sent him an e-mail telling him I was going to wait until hell froze over,” he said.

Mr. Chiang recalls getting the message on Super Bowl Sunday in 2008, during the halftime show. It was signed NY. “It took me a second to figure out that NY was Neil,” Mr. Chiang said during a phone interview from his home in Brooklyn. “I thought they had already been working on the book with someone else.”

No. “It had to be Cliff,” said Mr. Young, who noted that he appreciated the artist’s open, clean style. Mr. Chiang has drawn the adventures of the Human Target for Vertigo. He also illustrated a Green Arrow and Black Canary comic book for DC. His personal Web site includes superhero riffs on cover images of film soundtracks: Batgirl in place of Prince in “Purple Rain” and the Teen Titans as “The Breakfast Club,” among them.

Mr. Chiang spent close to two years working on the 160-page graphic novel, from character design work to drawing the pages; it’s printed on recycled paper, Beyond the initial e-mail exchange, however, he had little interaction with Mr. Young.

That was not the case with Mr. Dysart. “Whenever he was in L.A., I would meet with him,” Mr. Dysart said. That included going backstage at the Hollywood Bowl during a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert.

There were several rounds of scripts and revisions, and Mr. Dysart describes Mr. Young as a “phenomenal collaborator” — in sharp contrast to his experience with the singer Avril Lavigne and her “Make 5 Wishes” manga graphic novel, which he scripted for Del Rey. He sent several ideas, one was selected, and then silence, Mr. Dysart said.

“On the one hand, we were able to produce whatever kind of book we wanted,” he said. “On the other hand, it put a weird taste in my mouth about Avril Lavigne. That was not Neil.” (A representative for Ms. Lavigne did not respond to e-mail and phone messages.)

Mr. Young has been so prolific with “Greendale” that certain elements had to be condensed or omitted from the graphic novel. But “knowing that there were going to be a lot of hardcore Neil Young fans looking at this book, I wanted to put in stuff that only they would get,” Mr. Chiang said. One of the “Greendale” songs mentions a black cat; in the graphic novel, it appears in the first shot of Sun’s bedroom. The Imitators, a band mentioned in the album and film, make a cameo appearance in a bar scene.

Mr. Dysart saw Jed Green, the troubled young man who has a tragic encounter with the law, and the town’s mysterious (and malevolent) stranger as two sides of the same coin: the manipulated and the manipulator. Both characters also have a passing resemblance to Mr. Young. “I wish I could come up with a really great intellectual reason for why I wanted to do it, but it just felt right,” Mr. Dysart said.

Other parts of Young lore are evident in a somber funeral procession scene that features a giant Buick Roadmaster hearse. “That’s actually Neil Young’s first car that he nicknamed Mort,” Mr. Chiang said. The trusty vehicle was eulogized in the singer’s “Long May You Run.” Behind Mort is the Linc-Volt, a 1959 Lincoln Continental that Mr. Young has been trying to make more fuel-efficient. “He’s one of the few people who would recognize it immediately,” Mr. Chiang said.

The “Greendale” graphic novel may not be the last readers see of Sun Green. “There are all kinds of things that we talked about doing that aren’t in this book, that have to do with her next episode and her story,” Mr. Young said. “These characters have been designed to last a long time.”

Henry Wessel, Southern California, 1985

Closes June 27

Just as photography has been instrumental in shaping California’s popular image, the state — and San Francisco, in particular — has played a key role in the history of photography as an art form. Reflecting this unusually symbiotic relationship, SFMOMA was one of the first museums in the country to treat photography as an equal to painting and sculpture. In celebration of the museum’s 75 years of engagement with the medium, this exhibition explores the variety and vitality of California’s photographic tradition from the 1840s to the present. Drawn from the SFMOMA collection, it includes Gold Rush-era daguerreotypes and early panoramas of San Francisco, pictures by members of the influential Group f.64, street and documentary photographs, conceptual work from the 1970s, and contemporary photographs. Artists include Ansel Adams, Lewis Baltz, Dorothea Lange, Ed Ruscha, Larry Sultan, Carleton Watkins, Carrie Mae Weems, and many others.

SFMOMA

Rick Friedman for The New York Times

Raymond Kurzweil, founder of Singularity University, futurist and author, at his home in Newton, Mass. Mr. Kurzweil believes humans will one day be able to live forever, with the help of advances in nanotechnology.

By ASHLEE VANCE
Published: June 11, 2010

ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.

The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.

At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.

Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans.

Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.)

The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity, and focuses on introducing entrepreneurs to promising technologies. Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.

Both courses include face time with leading thinkers in the areas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, robotics and computing.

On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all.

“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”

But, of course, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

In the years since the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, violently inveighed against the predations of technology, plenty of other more sober and sophisticated warnings have arrived. There are camps of environmentalists who decry efforts to manipulate nature, challenges from religious groups that see the Singularity as a version of “Frankenstein” in which people play at being gods, and technologists who fear a runaway artificial intelligence that subjugates humans.

A popular network television show, “Fringe,” playfully explores some of these concerns by featuring a mad scientist and a team of federal agents investigating crimes related to the Pattern — an influx of threatening events caused by out-of-control technology like computer programs that melt brains and genetically engineered chimeras that go on killing sprees.

Some of the Singularity’s adherents portray a future where humans break off into two species: the Haves, who have superior intelligence and can live for hundreds of years, and the Have-Nots, who are hampered by their antiquated, corporeal forms and beliefs.

Of course, some people will opt for inadequacy, while others will have inadequacy thrust upon them. Critics find such scenarios unnerving because the keys to the next phase of evolution may be beyond the grasp of most people.

“The Singularity is not the great vision for society that Lenin had or Milton Friedman might have,” says Andrew Orlowski, a British journalist who has written extensively on techno-utopianism. “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”

Peter A. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a major investor in Facebook, is a Singularity devotee who offers a “Singularity or bust” scenario.

“It may not happen, but there are a lot of technologies that need to be developed for a whole series of problems to be solved,” he says. “I think there is no good future in which it doesn’t happen.”

‘Transcendent Man’

In late August, Mr. Kurzweil will begin a cross-country multimedia road show to promote “Transcendent Man,” a documentary about his life and beliefs. Another of his projects, “The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,” has also started to make its way around the film festival circuit.

Throughout “Transcendent Man,” Mr. Kurzweil is presented almost as a mystic, sitting in a chair with a shimmering, circular light floating around his head as he explains his philosophy’s basic tenets. During one scene at a beach, he is asked what he’s thinking as he stares out at a beautiful sunset with waves rolling in and wind tussling his hair.

“Well, I was thinking about how much computation is represented by the ocean,” he replies. “I mean, it’s all these water molecules interacting with each other. That’s computation.”

Mr. Kurzweil is the writer, producer and co-director of “The Singularity Is Near,” the tale of Ramona, a virtual being he builds that gradually becomes more human, battles hordes of microscopic robots and taps the lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz for legal advice and the motivational guru Tony Robbins for guidance on personal interactions.

With his glasses, receding hairline and lecturer’s ease, Mr. Kurzweil, 62, seems more professor than thespian. His films are just another facet of the Kurzweil franchise, which includes best-selling books, lucrative speaking engagements, blockbuster inventions and a line of health supplements called Ray & Terry’s (developed with the physician Terry Grossman).

Mr. Kurzweil credits a low-fat, vegetable-rich diet and regular exercise for his trim frame, and says he conquered diabetes decades ago by changing what he ate and later reprogramming his body with supplements. He currently takes about 150 pills a day and has regular intravenous procedures. He is also co-writer of a pair of health books, “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever” and “Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.”

Mr. Kurzweil routinely taps into early memories that explain his lifelong passion for inventing. “My parents gave me all these construction toys, and sometimes I would put things together, and they would do something cool,” he says. “I got the idea that you could change the world for the better with invention — that you could put things together in just the right way, and they would have transcendent effects.

“That was kind of the religion of my family: the power of human ideas.”

A child prodigy, he stunned television audiences in 1965, when he was 17, with a computer he had built that composed music. A couple of years later, in college, he developed a computer program that would seek the best college fit for high school students. A New York publishing house bought the company for $100,000, plus royalties.

“Most of us were going to school to get knowledge and a degree,” says Aaron Kleiner, who studied with Mr. Kurzweil at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later became his business partner. “He saw school as a tool that let him do what he needed to do.”

Some of Mr. Kurzweil’s better-known inventions include the first print-scanning systems that converted text to speech and allowed the blind to read standard texts, as well as sophisticated electronic keyboards and voice-recognition software. He has made millions selling his inventions, and his companies continue developing other products, like software for securities traders and e-readers for digital publications.

He began his march toward the Singularity around 1980, when he started plotting things like the speed of chips and memory capacity inside computers and realized that some elements of information technology improved at predictable — and exponential — rates.

“With 30 linear steps, you get to 30,” he often says in speeches. “With 30 steps exponentially, you get to one billion. The price-performance of computers has improved one billion times since I was a student. In 25 years, a computer as powerful as today’s smartphones will be the size of a blood cell.”

His fascination with exponential trends eventually led him to construct an elaborate philosophy, illustrated in charts, that provided an analytical backbone for the Singularity and other ideas that had been floating around science-fiction circles for decades.

As far back as the 1950s, John von Neumann, the mathematician, is said to have talked about a “singularity” — an event in which the always-accelerating pace of technology would alter the course of human affairs. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer, computer scientist and math professor, wrote a research paper called “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.”

“Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence,” Mr. Vinge wrote. “Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

In “The Singularity Is Near,” Mr. Kurzweil posits that technological progress in this century will be 1,000 times greater than that of the last century. He writes about humans trumping biology by filling their bodies with nanoscale creatures that can repair cells and by allowing their minds to tap into super-intelligent computers.

Mr. Kurzweil writes: “Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants), the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing all along), at least doubling in power each year.

“Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence,” he continues. “This is the destiny of the universe.”

The underlying premise of the Singularity responds to people’s insecurity about the speed of social and technological change in the computer era. Mr. Kurzweil posits that the computer and the Internet have changed society much faster than electricity, phones or television, and that the next great leap will occur when industries like medicine and energy start moving at the same exponential pace as I.T.

He believes that this latter stage will occur when we learn to manipulate DNA more effectively and arrange atoms and have readily available computers that surpass the human brain.

In 1970, well before the era of nanobot doctors, Mr. Kurzweil’s father, Fredric, died of a heart attack at his home in Queens. Fredric was 58, and Ray was 22. Since then, Mr. Kurzweil has filled a storage space with his father’s effects — photographs, letters, bills and newspaper clippings. In a world where computers and humans merge, Mr. Kurzweil expects that these documents can be combined with memories harvested from his own brain, and then possibly with Fredric’s DNA, to effect a partial resurrection of his father.

By the 2030s, most people will be able to achieve mental immortality by similarly backing up their brains, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, as the Singularity starts to come into full flower.

Despite such optimism, some Singularitarians aren’t all that fond of Mr. Kurzweil.

“I think he’s a genius and has certainly brought a lot of these ideas into the public discourse,” says James J. Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit that studies the implications of advancing technology. “But there are plenty of people that say he has hijacked the Singularity term.”

Mr. Kurzweil says that he is simply trying to put analytical clothing on the concept so that people can think more clearly about the future. And regardless of any debate about his intentions, if you’re encountering the Singularity in the business world and elsewhere today, it’s most likely his take.

Bursts of Innovation

Peter H. Diamandis, 49, is a small man with a wide, bright smile and a thick mound of dark hair. He routinely holds meetings by cellphone and can usually be found typing away on his laptop. He went to medical school to make his mother happy but has always dreamed of heading to outer space.

He is also a firm believer in the Singularity and is a technocelebrity in his own right, primarily through his role in commercializing space travel. At a recent Singularity University lunch, he hopped up to make a speech peppered with passion and conviction.

“My target is to live 700 years,” he declared.

The students chuckled.

“I say that seriously,” he retorted.

The NASA site, the Ames Research Center, houses an odd collection of unusual buildings, including a giant wind tunnel, a huge supercomputing center and a flight simulator facility with equipment capable throwing people 60 feet into the air.

Today, the government operates NASA Ames as a bustling, public-sector-meets-private-sector technology bazaar. Start-ups, universities and corporations have set up shop here, and Google plans to build a new campus here over the next few years that will include housing for workers.

A nondescript structure, Building 20, is the Singularity University headquarters, and most students stay in nearby apartments on the NASA land. Mr. Kurzweil set up the school with Mr. Diamandis, who, as chief executive of the X Prize Foundation, doled out $10 million in 2004 to a team that sent a private spacecraft 100 kilometers above the earth. Google has offered $30 million in rewards for an X Prize project intended to inspire a private team to send a robot to the moon. And a $10 million prize will go to the first team that can sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days at a cost of $10,000 or less each — which, in theory, would turn an expensive, complex lab exercise into an ordinary affair.

Mr. Diamandis champions the idea that large prizes inspire rapid bursts of innovation and may pave a path to that 700-year lifetime.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of if,” he says. “I think it’s a matter of how. You and I have a decent shot, and for kids being born today, I think it will be a matter of choice.”

For the most part, Mr. Kurzweil serves as a figurehead of Singularity University, while Mr. Diamandis steers the institution. He pitches the graduate student program as a way to train young, inspired people to think exponentially and solve the world’s biggest problems — to develop projects that will “change the lives of one billion people,” as the in-house mantra goes.

Mr. Diamandis hopes that the university can create an unrivaled network of graduates and bold thinkers — a Harvard Business School for the future — who can put its ideas into action. Along with that goal, he’s considering creating a venture capital fund to help turn the university’s big ideas into big businesses. As some of their favored student creations, school leaders point to a rapid disaster alert-and-response system and a venture that lets individuals rent their cars to other people via cellphone.

Devin Fidler, a former student, is in the midst of securing funding for a company that will build a portable machine that squirts out a cement-like goop that allows builders to erect an entire house, layer by layer. Such technology could almost eliminate labor costs and bring better housing to low-income areas.

Mr. Diamandis has certainly built a selective institution. More than 1,600 people applied for just 40 spots in the inaugural graduate program held last year. A second, 10-week graduate program will kick off this month with 80 students, culled from 1,200 applicants.

One incoming student, David Dalrymple, is an 18-year-old working on his doctorate from M.I.T.. He says he plans to start a research institute someday to explore artificial intelligence, medicine, space systems and energy. (He met Mr. Kurzweil at a White House dinner, and at the age of 8 accepted the offer to have Mr. Kurzweil serve as his mentor.)

During the spring executive program, about 30 people — almost all of them men — showed up for the course, which is something of a mental endurance test. Days begin at dawn with group exercise sessions. Coursework runs until about 9 p.m.; then philosophizing over wine and popcorn goes until midnight or later. A former Google chef prepares special meals — all of which are billed as “life extending” — for the executives.

The meat of the executive program is lectures, company tours and group thought exercises.

Day 4 includes test drives of Tesla Motors electric sports cars and a group genetic test, thanks to a company called deCODEme. By Day 6, people are annoyed by the BrinBot, which is interrupting lectures with its whirs and sputters. Someone tapes a pair of paper ears on it to try to humanize it. One executive sullenly declines to participate in another robot design exercise because no one in his group will consider making a sexbot.

However much the Singularity informs the environment here, a majority of the executives attending the spring course expressed less interest in living forever and more in figuring out their next business venture or where they wanted to invest.

Robin Tedder, a Scottish baron who lives in Australia and divides his time among managing a personal fortune, racing a yacht and running a vineyard, says he read about Singularity University in an investor newsletter and checked out the Web site.

“What really convinced me to pay the 15 grand was that I didn’t think it was some kind of hoax,” Mr. Tedder said in an interview after he completed the executive program. “I looked at the people involved and thought it was the real deal. In retrospect, I think it’s a very good value.”

Like a number of other participants, Mr. Tedder is contemplating business ventures with his classmates and points to high-octane networking as the school’s major benefit.

Attendees at the spring session came from all over the globe and included John Mauldin, a best-selling author who writes an investment newsletter; Stephen Long, a research director at the Defense Department; Fernando A. de la Viesca, C.E.O. of the Argentinean investment firm TPCG Financial; Eitan Eliram, the new-media director for the prime minister’s office in Israel; and Guy Fraker, the director of trends and foresight at State Farm Insurance.

“We end up cleaning up the mess of unintended consequences,” says Mr. Fraker of his company’s work. He says it makes sense for him to gauge technological trends in case humans can one day gain new tools for averting catastrophes. For example, he’s confident that in the future people will have the ability to steer hurricanes away from populated areas.

Executives in the spring program also heard that some young people had started leaving college to set up their own synthetic biology labs on the cheap. Such people resemble computer tinkerers from a generation earlier, attendees note, except now they’re fiddling with the genetic code of organisms rather than software.

“Biology is moving outside of the traditional education sphere,” says Andrew Hessel, a former research operations manager at Amgen, during a lecture here. “The students are teaching their professors. This is happening faster than the computer evolved. These students don’t have newsletters. They have Web sites.”

Daniel T. Barry, a Singularity University professor, gives a lecture about the falling cost of robotics technology and how these types of systems are close to entering the home. Dr. Barry, a former astronaut and “Survivor” contestant with an M.D. and a Ph. D., has put his ideas into action. He has a robot at home that can take a pizza from the delivery person, pay for it and carry it into the kitchen.

“You have the robot say, ‘Take the 20 and leave the pizza on top of me,’ ” Dr. Barry says. “I get the pizza about a third of the time.”

Other lecturers talk about a coming onslaught of biomedical advances as thousands of people have their genomes decoded. Jason Bobe, who works on the Personal Genome Project, an effort backed by the Harvard Medical School to establish a huge database of genetic information, points to forecasts that a million people will have their genomes decoded by 2014.

“The machines for doing this will be in your kitchen next to the toaster,” Mr. Bobe says.

Mr. Hessel describes an even more dramatic future in which people create hybrid pets based on the body parts of different animals and tweak the genetic makeup of plants so they resemble things like chairs and tables, allowing us to grow fields of everyday objects for home and work. Mr. Hessel, like Mr. Kurzweil, thinks that people will use genetic engineering techniques to grow meat in factories rather than harvesting it from dead animals.

“I know in 10 years it will be a junior-high project to build a bacteria,” says Mr. Hessel. “This is what happens when we get control over the code of life. We are just on the cusp of that.”

Christopher deCharms, another Singularity University speaker, runs Omneuron, a start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., that pushes the limits of brain imaging technology. He’s trying to pull information out of the brain via sensing systems, so that there can be some quantification of people’s levels of depression and pain.

“We are at the forefront today of being able to read out real information from the human brain of single individuals,” he tells the executives.

Preparing to Evolve

Richard A. Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, has followed Mr. Kurzweil’s work and written a science-fiction thriller, “Breakpoint,” in which a group of terrorists try to halt the advance of technology. He sees major conflicts coming as the government and citizens try to wrap their heads around technology that’s just beginning to appear.

“There are enormous social and political issues that will arise,” Mr. Clarke says. “There are vast groups of people in society who believe the earth is 5,000 years old. If they want to slow down progress and prevent the world from changing around them and they engaged in political action or violence, then there will have to be some sort of decision point.”

Mr. Clarke says the government has a contingency plan for just about everything — including an attack by Canada — but has yet to think through the implications of techno-philosophies like the Singularity. (If it’s any consolation, Mr. Long of the Defense Department asked a flood of questions while attending Singularity University.)

Mr. Kurzweil himself acknowledges the possibility of grim outcomes from rapidly advancing technology but prefers to think positively. “Technological evolution is a continuation of biological evolution,” he says. “That is very much a natural process.”

To prepare for any rocky transitions from our benighted present to the techno-utopia of 2030 or so, a number of people tied to the Singularity movement have begun to build what they call “an education and protection framework.”

Among them is Keith Kleiner, who joined Google in its early days and walked away as a wealthy man in 2005. During a period of personal reflection after his departure, he read “The Singularity Is Near.” He admires Mr. Kurzweil’s vision.

“What he taught me was ‘Wake up, man,’ ” Mr. Kleiner says. “Yeah, computers will get faster so you can do more things and store more data, but it’s bigger than that. It starts to permeate every industry.”

Mr. Kleiner, 32, founded a Web site, SingularityHub.com, with a writing staff that reports on radical advances in technology. He has also given $100,000 to Singularity University.

Sonia Arrison, a founder of Singularity University and the wife of one of Google’s first employees, spends her days writing a book about longevity, tentatively titled “100 Plus.” It outlines changes that people can expect as life expectancies increase, like 20-year marriages with sunset clauses.

She says the book and the university are her attempts to ready people for the inevitable.

“One day we will wake up and say, ‘Wow, we can regenerate a new liver,’ ” Ms. Arrison says. “It will happen so fast, and the role of Singularity University is to prepare people in advance.”

Despite all of the zeal behind the movement, there are those who look askance at its promises and prospects.

Jonathan Huebner, for example, is often held up as Mr. Kurzweil’s foil. A physicist who works at the Naval Air Warfare Center as a weapons designer, he, like Mr. Kurzweil, has compiled his own cathedral of graphs and lists of important inventions. He is unimpressed with the state of progress and, in 2005, published in a scientific journal a paper called “A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation.”

Measuring the number of innovations divided by the size of the worldwide population, Dr. Huebner contends that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873. Or, based on the number of patents in the United States weighed against the population, he found a peak around 1916. (Both Dr. Huebner and Mr. Kurzweil are occasionally teased about their faith in graphs.)

“The amount of advance in this century will not compare well at all to the last century,” Dr. Huebner says, before criticizing tenets of the Singularity. “I don’t believe that something like artificial intelligence as they describe it will ever appear.”

William S. Bainbridge, who has spent the last two decades evaluating grant proposals for the National Science Foundation, also sides with the skeptics.

“We are not seeing exponential results from the exponential gains in computing power,” he says. “I think we are at a time where progress will be increasingly difficult in many fields.

“We should not base ideas of the world on simplistic extrapolations of what has happened in the past,” he adds.

‘Deus ex Machina’

Last month, a biotech concern, Synthetic Genomics, announced that it had created a bacterial genome from scratch, kicking off a firestorm of discussion about the development of artificial life. J. Craig Venter, a pioneer in the human genome trade and head of Synthetic Genomics, hailed his company’s work as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

Steve Jurvetson, a director of Synthetic Genomics, is part of a group of very rich, very bright Singularity observers who end up somewhere in the middle on the philosophy’s merits — optimistic about the growing powers of technology but pessimistic about humankind’s ability to reach a point where those forces can actually be harnessed.

Mr. Jurvetson, a venture capitalist and managing director of the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, says the advances of companies like Synthetic Genomics give him confidence that we will witness great progress in areas like biofuels and vaccines. Still, he fears that such technology could also be used maliciously — and he has a pantry filled with products like Spam and honey in case his family has to hunker down during a viral outbreak or attack.

“Thank God we have a swimming pool,” he says, noting that it gives him a large store of potentially potable water.

Mr. Orlowski, the journalist, sees the Singularity as a grand, tech-nerd dream in which engineers, inventors and innovators of every stripe create the greatest of all reset buttons. He says the techies “seem to want a deus ex machina to make everything right again.”

They certainly don’t want any outside interference, and are utterly confident that they will realize the Singularity on their own terms and with their own wits — all of which fits with Silicon Valley’s strong libertarian traditions. Google and Microsoft employees trailed only members of the military as the largest individual contributors to Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign.

The Valley’s wizards also prefer to avoid any confrontation with Washington.

“Dealing with politics means having to compromise and convince people of things and form alliances with people who don’t always agree with you,” Mr. Orlowski says. “They’re not wired for that.”

Increasing Acceptance

Mr. Kurzweil is currently consulting for the Army on technology initiatives, and says he routinely talks with government and business leaders. Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, appears in Mr. Kurzweil’s books and often on the back flaps with celebratory quotations.

Mr. Kurzweil and Mr. Page of Google created a renewable-energy plan for the National Academy of Engineering, advising that solar power will one day soon meet all of the world’s energy needs.

Mr. Kurzweil’s 31-year-old son, Ethan, says his father has always been ahead of the curve. The family had the first flat-screen television and car phone on the block, as well as a phone that could fax photos.

“We also had this thing where you put on a hat that had sensors and it would create music to match your brain waves and help you meditate,” Ethan says. “People would come over and play with it.”

Ethan previously worked for Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world Second Life. These days he’s a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners. A section of the bookshelves in his office has been reserved for multiple copies of his father’s works.

“A lot of what he has predicted has happened, and it’s interesting to see what he’s been saying become more mainstream,” says Ethan, who looks very much like a younger version of his father. “He has a certain world view that he feels strongly about that he thinks is absolutely coming to pass. The data so far suggests it is. He’s incredibly thorough with his research, and I have confidence his critics haven’t thought things through on the same level.”

Indeed, Ethan says, his father is almost, well, accepted.

“He is seen as less weird now,” he says. “Much less weird.”

“Shell,” Vija Celmins’s white-on-white painting of the interior of a shell, is included in “New Paintings, Objects and Prints.”

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: June 10, 2010

Starting in 1977 the artist Vija Celmins devoted a lot of energy to 11 small stones. First she made sure they were fabulously (really) diverse: tiny and darkly smooth as opposed to larger and delicately mottled or glassily angular and crystalline. The largest was brown with white flecks and a white Saturn-like ring. Next Ms. Celmins cast the stones in bronze and over the next five years painted each cast until it was absolutely identical to the original. The piece, “To Fix the Image in Memory,” is a mind-bending, eye-stretching poetic wonder: a universe of visible and invisible differences, a solar system in which each surface presents a galaxy of details. Each stone is a world unto itself — except for its twin.

“To Fix,” now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, brought out the trompe l’oeil implicit in Ms. Celmins’s fastidious depictions of edgeless expanses of ocean waves, star-filled night skies, spider webs and desert floors — quiet, textured fields of artistic labor that balance reality and abstraction. And it placed her obsession with natural structure in real space, side by side with nature.

In Ms. Celmins’s first exhibition of new work since 2001, her trompe l’oeil impulse has gone wild and a bit generic. The show contains nine prints, four paintings and eight sculptures that, in particular, conjure the schoolrooms of long ago. These works consist primarily of slate tablets, some real, others trompe l’oeil versions — that is, covert paintings on tablets of cast bronze, or carved wood or marble. It is extremely difficult to tell. In two cases the tablets are stacked on small tables, made of painted bronze, resembling old school desks; in a third, a painted bronze gun has been placed on top of this arrangement, forming a nature morte.

In four works, one, two or several tablets are grouped, like family portraits, on narrow shelves on the wall, and these works most reward the kind of intense examination that Ms. Celmins’s art invites. Yet while lovely, these works evoke a familiar Americana. And the absence of a dialogue with nature is limiting. Nature is evident in the prints, where night skies hold the majority, and a spider web looks improbably geometric. Ms. Celmins’s natural sublime returns in two wonderful new paintings, “Japanese Book” and “Shell.” One depicts a wrinkled and worn indigo cover that evokes sky, water and stone; the other is a bit of porous whiteness like the side of the moon. Both introduce new universes, opening out to infinity. ROBERTA SMITH

McKee Gallery

745 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street

Through June 25

“Potato House,” 1967

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: June 11, 2010

Sigmar Polke, an artist of infinite, often ravishing pictorial jest, whose sarcastic and vibrant layering of found images and maverick painting processes left an indelible mark on the last four decades of contemporary painting, died Thursday in Cologne, Germany. He was 69.

The cause was complications from cancer, said Gordon VeneKlasen, a partner at the Michael Werner Gallery New York which, along with Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne, has been Mr. Polke’s chief representative for nearly 20 years.

Mr. Polke (pronounced POLL-ka) was nearly as influential as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, the postwar titans who made his own work possible. And ultimately his influence could even exceed theirs through its sheer diversity, stylistic promiscuity and joyful, ruthless exploitation and expansion of the ways and means of several mediums.

He made prints and sculpture and in his youth, and dabbled memorably in Conceptual and installation art, with potatoes being a favored material. His peregrinations in and around the mediums of drawing and photography were extensive, meriting enormous retrospectives and forming second and third careers.

But his main achievement was to be an early and astute adopter of American Pop Art, belying its crisp, consumerist optimism with tawdry materials that added social bite, and with random splashes of paint that implied disorder and the unconscious. His paintings were essentially Conceptual in their skepticism about the very act of painting.

His images rampaged through history, ranging from demure 18th-century prints of an aristocratic astronomer that slyly signaled his interest in optics to images of the watchtowers and barbed-wire fences of Hitler’s concentration camps, stenciled onto banal printed fabric.

The images questioned accepted taste, challenging the viewer to think through how they had been made; their random juxtapositions often seemed to mimic thought itself. In all these ways he opened the door to a freewheeling combination of representation and abstraction that is still playing out.

His first solo exhibition in New York, of paintings made at least a decade earlier, was at the Holly Solomon Gallery in SoHo in 1982, and it jolted the American art scene with news of European painting’s vitality.

Mr. Polke’s antic irreverence was picked up by legions of artists in all mediums on both sides of the Atlantic, among them Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, the team of Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Richard Prince and Lara Schnitger.

Tall, with a commanding presence and caustic wit, Mr. Polke was often fittingly called an alchemist. He had a long face that seemed to call out for a sorcerer’s pointed hat. In photographs, he often appeared to be on the verge of laughter; small, gleaming eyes behind wire-framed glasses and a sharp V of eyebrows added a sardonic if not demonic note.

Indeed, in painting he pursued a form of combustion that was not only visual but also chemical. In the 1960s he experimented with the interaction of fruit and vegetable juices. In the late 1980s he began making paintings by sprinkling silver oxide, powdered arsenic or granulated meteorite over canvases wet with resin. Some changed color over time; others were temporarily altered according to temperature and humidity.

And his large photographic images — many of them based on photos he took during a trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the mid-1970s — often seem to have emerged from a mismanaged laboratory experiment.

For much of his life Mr. Polke made extensive use of recreational drugs. Mushrooms were a frequent motif in his paintings and photographs. Unpredictable behavior was his norm, elusiveness his everyday mode, and provocative answers a matter of course.

He could be completely genial to people not in the art world, but he could also be an art dealer’s nightmare, especially in the early years of his career, when he handpicked the buyers of his works and set high, arbitrary prices.

In an essay in the catalog for Mr. Polke’s 1990 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the German collector Rainer Speck described buying a Polke in 1981 for a very high price that he suspected the artist had set by “doubling his age and adding three noughts.” Mr. Polke turned 40 that year.

When one dealer asked Mr. Polke about an exhibition they had discussed years earlier, he agreed to it on the condition that the dealer promise it would be the gallery’s last. Basically he behaved as if every aspect, ritual and protocol of art and the art world was available for manipulation.

Sigmar Polke was born Feb. 13, 1941, in Oels, in the Silesian region of eastern Germany in what is now western Poland. His family, with five or six children, fled west to Tubingen in 1945 as the Russian Army advanced but still wound up in East Germany as World War II ended. In 1953 they moved to East Berlin and crossed over to West Berlin on the subway. The young Mr. Polke pretended to be asleep to contribute to the air of normality.

The Polkes later settled near Düsseldorf, and Mr. Polke lived there or in nearby Cologne for the rest of his life. He married and divorced twice and is survived by the children of his first marriage, Anna Polke and Georg Polke.

Düsseldorf provided an excellent environment for a budding artist; it was the site of the first postwar exhibition of Dada in 1958. By 1960, its commercial galleries had held solo shows of Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly and it became a meeting place for Fluxus artists like Nam June Paik and George Maciunas starting in 1962.

In 1959 and 1960, Mr. Polke completed a glass-painting apprenticeship, an experience that contributed to his lifelong attraction to transparency. Later, many of his paintings would be on plastic — whether thick or thin, ridged or smooth — which contributed to the eerie clarity of their layering and made them seem two-sided, even when hanging on the wall.

In 1961 he enrolled in the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which was in its most experimental phase at the time. Joseph Beuys was teaching and promulgating art as a social activity, and Dieter Roth and Günther Uecker were professors. Mr. Polke’s fellow students included Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, and in 1963 the three founded a painting movement they called Capitalist Realism. Their first show was in a storefront in Düsseldorf in 1963. Mr. Lueg would later change his name and become the Düsseldorf art dealer Konrad Fischer and would give Mr. Polke two exhibitions.

Mr. Polke’s paintings from this period depicted things like men’s socks, plastic tubs and candy bars in the uninflected style of commercial art. Soon he adapted Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dots, but typically in a rougher, more mechanical version that suggested several trips through a photocopier. He had his first solo show at the Galerie René Block in West Berlin in 1966. In 1970 he had his first show with Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne.

Throughout the 1970s, German painting remained a kind of underground activity, with Beuys and German Conceptual artists like Hanne Darboven getting more international attention.

But in the 1980s Mr. Polke, along with painters like Mr. Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff, signaled a resurgence of painting that was heard around the art world. The experience bred into Mr. Polke a preference for the margins over the mainstream and a relatively modest lifestyle despite his success. He worked without an assistant and lived in Cologne in a warehouse surrounded by his books and his paintings.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau in his element.

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
New York Times
Friday, June 11, 2010

Friday marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who is an absolute hero of mine (and that’s not a word I toss around much).

My most treasured bar mitzvah present was the set of U.S. Divers snorkeling gear given by family friends, the Tanenbaums. That was the brand most associated in America with Cousteau, who had captivated me, well before my 13th birthday, with his books and televised films revealing the wonders of the seas.

I would enter an almost hypnotic state using that diving gear in the Rhode Island summers that followed, marveling as I stalked sea robins amid kelp fronds fringing rocky shores or watched the castanet clap of blue-eyed scallops flicking through beds of sea grass.

Then there was the vivid moment a few hundred yards off a Florida beach where I rose and fell with the waves, meditating on my shadow on the sand below, until I realized there was a second shadow, as long as mine, parallel to mine. I turned to one side and stared into the black eye of an enormous barracuda, which streaked into darker waters with the tiniest flick of its ragged tail fin.

Cousteau had no science degree, but his passion and visual story-telling skills worked like a siren’s call, pulling me into the undersea world. Indirect experience of nature is great, but there’s nothing like getting wet. Indeed, that reality was reflected in the motto of the RV Calypso, the converted minesweeper that was the base of operations for his merry team in their red knit caps: “Il faut aller voir.”

“We must go and see for ourselves.”

One of my biggest frustrations came in the spring of 1977 when I was exploring the Riviera on a break from a semester studying biology and Shakespeare in London. I rode a rented moped to Monaco and, strolling the piers, found the Calypso. The gangplank beckoned.

But I chickened out. Memo to young readers: If you have a chance to meet a hero, don’t hesitate! I’m sure Captain Cousteau was not there, but the sense of lost opportunity still pains me.

His name is being invoked now in discussions of the unfolding oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the shifting chemistry of the oceans through the ongoing buildup of carbon dioxide. He was quick to call out against over-exploitation and pollution of the seas. But his most valuable legacy, to my mind, was simply in submerging cameras, donning Aqua Lungs and introducing millions of people, with a huge dose of exuberance, to a new world.

I guarantee I’m not alone in saying that Cousteau’s legacy endures vibrantly, not only through the Cousteau Society and the work of those among his offspring who are now active marine conservationists and communicators, but also in countless people whose academic or career paths were shaped by his passion and curiosity and urge to share.

As the human influence on the planet crests, we dearly need more communicators working, as he did, to remind us that we are deeply embedded in, and dependent on, a broader community of living things — many of which we barely understand and too often discount.

Here’s to Jacques-Yves Cousteau.