The Compulsive Explainer

The Business of Modeling

From Mother Jones: Five questions for Sara Zell and Ole Schell

This posting is relatively light, but most of my readers like that. It is also a podcast.

Sara Ziff began her career as a top runway model when she was just 14 years old. For a decade, she worked for designers like Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs. Now, Ziff and her partner Ole Schell made a documentary on what modeling is really like backstage. The two of them spoke with assistant editor Jen Phillips about how models are exploited, what it’s like to be on a billboard in Times Square, and about being detained by armed guards for trying to film at a Hollywood party.

My youngest sister has an attractive daughter who was spotted by talent scout in Texas, where they live. The next summer she took her entire family of small children with her to Hollywood, trying to make her hopeful daughter successful. She got a quick education on how sleezy the modelling business really was - and the daughter got a bad case of nerves trying to perform to standards she didn't understand - and that was all they got.

Glamour and Deep Feelings of Inadequacy

I have a young Tico friend who wants a glamorous career in Hollywood desperately: he can't resist the allure of fame and fortune. He is cynical of American culture in general, but not this. He is not the first one to be trapped by Tinsel Town, and he knows that, but he cannot bear to see the problems he is fleeing from: probably deep feelings of insecurity and inadequacy - no doubt bequeathed to him by his parents. The same feelings that drove Norma Jean Baker.

I just finished listening to a book by Richard Russo, an author new to me. His latest: That Old Cape Magic is awesome. It goes into these same problems: the parent and glamour trap (the main character was once a screen writer in Hollywood). This is one of the oldest stories in history, updated for contemporary America. When I first heard it, I immediately hoped it would translated into Spanish - and this would help Latinos understand America - something they do not understand at all - and something that impacts them enormously, economically and culturally.

Their universities should offer courses on it, but do not. Their culture continues to be spell-bound by ours, and they have no way of resisting it. To put it another way: America's most powerful export is American popular culture - in my opinion, the worst part of ourselves.

I was scuba-diving in the Maldives once at a resort that catered to Germans, I was the only American there. What kind of music did they play? The latest American popular music. I was astonished - but I found that true all over Europe. I suppose that is true all over the world - American fashions are now the world's fashions. But I see I have digressed, I started to write about parents and feelings of inadequacy. I would not be surprised to find this also is a world-wide phenomena, it certainly has become so in Costa Rica. Another gift of America: dysfunctional families.

It amazes me that at the same time this tragedy was becoming common on America (in my generation) there was also a nearly-religious belief in family values. The horrible family was being worshiped!

Here again, the vast split in America culture is obvious: the more advanced are well-aware of the problem, and have been for a long time, but conservatives resist this knowledge viciously. (The world vicious is appropriate here.) They insist nothing was wrong with their families-of-origin, and nothing is wrong with America - except for those damn liberals who are trying to destroy the country - and destroy family values! 

Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs?

From Business Week

Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem.

America needs good jobs, soon. We need 6.7 million just to replace losses from the current recession, then another 10 million to spark demand over the next decade. That's 15 million to 17 million new jobs. In the 1990s, the U.S. economy created a net 22 million jobs (a rate of 2.2 million per year), so we know it can be done. Between 2000 and the end of 2007 (the beginning of the current recession), however, the economy created new jobs at a rate of 900,000 a year, so we know it isn't doing it now. The pipeline is dry because the U.S. business model is broken. Our growth engine has run out of a key source of fuel—critical mass, basic scientific research.

The U.S. scientific innovation infrastructure has historically consisted of a loose public-private partnership that included legendary institutions such as Bell Labs, RCA Labs, Xerox PARC XRX, the research operations of IBM IBM, DARPA, NASA, and others. In each of these organizations, programs with clear commercial potential were supported alongside efforts at "pure" research, with the two streams often feeding one another. With abundant corporate and venture-capital funding for eventual commercialization, these research labs have made enormous contributions to science, technology, and the economy, including the creation of millions of high-paying jobs. Consider a few of the crown jewels from Bell Labs alone:

• The first public demonstration of fax transmission (1925)
• First long-distance TV transmission (1927)
• Invention of the transistor (1947)
• Invention of photovoltaic cell (1954)
• Creation of the UNIX operating system (1969)
• Technology for cellular telephony (1978)

In the decades after these initial discoveries, vibrant industries and companies were born. The transistor alone is the building block for the modern computer and consumer-electronics industries. Likewise, DARPA's creation of the Internet (as ARPAnet) in 1969 and Xerox PARC's development of the Ethernet and the graphic user interface (GUI) further developed the transformative computer and Internet industries. The basic research breakthroughs unleashed subsequent cycles of applied innovation that created entirely new sectors of our economy.

But since the 1990s, labs dedicated to pure research—to the pursuit of scientific discovery—have seen funding slowly decline and their mission shift from open-ended problem solving to short-term commercial targets, from pure discovery to applied research. Bell Labs had 30,000 employees as recently as 2001; today (owned by Alcatel-Lucent ALU) it has 1,000. That's symbolic and symptomatic of the broken link in the U.S. business model. With upstream invention and discovery drying up, downstream, industry-creating innovation is being reduced to a trickle.

WWII Destroyed America

This is just the opposite of what you usually hear: that The War is what made America.

In one sense, the standard belief is true: coming out of the war we were the strongest nation in history. We possessed nearly two-thirds of world's gold reserves and more than half of its manufacturing capacity. The US accounted for one-third of the world's exports, the foreign trade balance was in the black, and exports more than doubled imports.  Our economy was so huge the rest of the world didn't hardly matter - we could have gotten along without it. We helped the economies of Germany and Japan recover, after destroying them.

Everything was cheap: food, gasoline, housing, medical care and an education. Jobs were abundant. We had most of the world's oil.

The Great Depression, which we caused, and which had been the chief cause of the rise of Fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan, had been overcome by War - a lesson we never forgot. It also taught us another lesson, one that has been largely overlooked: that affluence was irresistible, and all-important. The political culture that had produced the New Deal, which was focused on strengthening ourselves as a nation - was replaced by the Cold War and a growing aggrandizement of the rich at the expense of everyone else. We were no longer capable of making America better for the common man.

The Great Society never happened because the key ingredient for it: Great Americans, had disappeared in our rush to Get More of everything else. Self-awareness, that most critical of social skills, was overlooked and forgotten. We became things instead of people.

This is clear in retrospect, over fifty years later. Every statistic in the previous paragraph has been reversed. The Era of American Power is over, and Americans as a whole face increasing poverty - the inevitable result of a fall from power. We make this even worse by spending much of our income on maintaining a huge military and engaging in senseless foreign wars. We cannot let go of our belief in the power of war to save us - a direct inheritance of WWII.

Changes That Affect Everyone Involve Everyone

After the fact, people cannot say "The bad guys made us do it." Changes that effect everybody are created by everybody - and it cannot be otherwise. Everyone has to give their approval - although they may not be aware that they are doing so: they just go along with what everybody else is doing. They don't want to stand out and be different - heaven forbid.

As a matter of fact, they don't like to be at all - and that is the core of the problem. The present situation is a mass movement with no people in it at all. 

This may not seem to be the case. I just watched a trailer of Michael Moore's latest movie: Capitalism, a Love Affair. He is pretending to make a "citizen's arrest" of a large Wall Street corporation. He doesn't get very far, because everyone ignores him.

But everybody knows the plot: the Capitalists are the bad guys and the rest of us are good kind. Except this is not true: everyone is involved in our present mess. We all let it happen: some more actively than others, but everybody.

It is not just the people at the top of the power complex, but everybody else. They all need jobs, and they are not going to make any waves. They might even latch onto a little graft for themselves, if they get the chance.

Situations like this have a history of ending badly.

Complementarity

This is an important concept in Quantum Mechanics. I won't attempt to explain its operation there. But it also applies to the ordinary world we live in as large beings.

Novelists use it all the time. I never used to read novels, but now I live a degenerate life, I do - or more likely, I listen to them. The idea is the simply that we are always making decisions about our lives: should we do this, or should we do that? Any living being does this - if it is alive, it is always doing something, deciding, moment by moment what interests it most - and doing that.

"Big deal," you may say, "Why pay any attention to something so simple?" Because, when you scratch below the surface, it is not simple at all - something important has happened: we made a decision, and we can never make that decision again - because that situation will never happen again. The world only works one way - we cannot go back and say "I want to make that decision again: and make it the other way." We can't go back.

We can't even decide not to make a decision, and force other things (perhaps our significant other) to make our decisions for us: we are still making that decision.

We can dream: "I wonder how my life would have been different if I had married someone else." We can only be sure of one thing: it would have been different: we would have lived a complementary life to the one we actually lived.

Nietzsche even postulated that we live the same life over and over, and get a chance to try out those choices. That would be nice.

God or Satan?

Whose company would you prefer?

After reading the first part of Paradise Lost, the choice is easy: Satan. I can't stand God's self-righteousness - and that of his angels, who cannot praise him enough. A worse scene I cannot imagine.

Satan is a familiar type: the CEO of Hell - and I have been there too. It's not my favorite place, but after years in the high-tech world, it is familiar. I suppose school teachers could say the same thing.

The opening scenes, where Satan reviews his troops, would make a fantastic animation. The same could not be said of the following scene in Heaven, which no Walt Disney genius could make believable. The audience would laugh.

Of course Milton was not writing a screen play, and his audience was fully sympathetic to his theology - something that certainly could not be said now. Almost no understands the twisted logic behind the Redemption story.

Milton, for all the fine efforts to revive him, is hopelessly out of date.

Facebook Moves to Improve Privacy and Transparency

From Bits in the NY Times

Lots of people besides me have been complaining about Facebook security. This is a good article:

The changes are in response to an investigation by Canada’s privacy commission, which found that Facebook gave “confusing or incomplete” privacy information to subscribers and gave developers “virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users’ personal information.”

Determinism

I just finished an interesting lecture in my course in Quantum Mechanics. It was about a famous debate between Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr that occurred in the 1920s.

Einstein you know about, even the spell check program knew how to spell his name, and corrected me when I misspelled it. With Neils, I had to look his name up. This is because in addition to being one of the world's greatest physicists, Einstein had a knack for self-promotion. Caricatures of his weird hairdo made him instantly recognizable. Nobody knows what Bohr looked like (like an ordinary businessman). In addition, he was an adopted American, and we were glad to claim him.

However, Einstein accomplished little in the last half of his life. He got off a brilliant start and then stalled. Meanwhile Quantum Mechanics, which he helped start, became more and more successful. Einstein fought this vigorously, and in these debates he challenged Bohr over and over. Eventually, he had to admit that he couldn't find anything wrong with Quantum Mechanics. But he never liked the stuff anyway.

He said "God does not play dice with the universe" Bohr replied "Stop telling God what to do." Let me quote from the course transcript:

You can think of Einstein as the lone genius. Bohr is the leader of a movement. Einstein as a prophet. Bohr as the Pope.

But the day of the lone genius, such as Newton, was over. The era of group movements, or teams, had arrived. And Bohr was the head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, where much of Quantum Mechanics was developed. 

You need know only one thing about Quantum Mechanics: it is nothing like Classical Mechanics. The micro world is nothing like the macro world - but Quantum Mechanics has been completely successful in explaining it. One big difference is determinism: the macro world has it, but the micro world does not. This is what upset Einstein: Relativity is deterministic, so why shouldn't Quantum Mechanics be also?

Determinism states that if enough is known about a system at one point in time, its state at any other point in time can be determined completely. This ignores randomness, which is big part of the universe too - but is ignored by Classical Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics, in the other hand, can only predict probabilities - not exactly what is going to happen, and we have to be satisfied with that.

The reasons why the micro world is not deterministic are many, and form the subject matter for most of the course. At one point I was asking myself: "Do we really need this strange stuff?" Then I remembered semiconductors: the basis for nearly everything in modern computers - and post-modern life. Semiconductors would not have happened without Quantum Mechanics. They are part of the micro world, where things happen differently.

Some British researchers at one point were interested in the properties of ultra-pure crystalline matter - something sensible people were not interested in at all. The result we all know: a revolution in human affairs. Now these ultra-pure materials are mass-produced as a standard industrial process: the starting point for integrated circuits that can contain a whole computer.

Sometimes it pays to pay attention to the way nature really is, not to just what we think she is.

Humans Organizations are Limited in What They can do

We have been brain-washed by positive psychology into believing we can do anything - especially talented groups of us. What we can do is unlimited - for example, send a man to the moon.

The facts are not so flattering. NASA has made some disastrous mistakes - and on further inquiry, it was realized that NASA itself was totally screwed up. And NASA is not alone. Screwed up organizations are common, and will always will be.

This is not to say there are no good organizations, they certainly are. If humans could not organize themselves effectively, they would have died out long ago.

But the amount of organization required for some of our modern technology is very difficult - and may be impossible. An example is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the most ambitious science experiment ever attempted. The amount of talent and planning that went into this was awesome. But when it was turned on it failed - due to a simple solder connection. They never thought to check all the solder connections: a low-tech technology. They just assumed they were all right. Now they find out that many of them are defective. And while this is being fixed the superconducting magnets, in which everything depends, which should have been kept at extremely low temperatures, are slowing going "out of tune" so full power may never be reached.

Take another example: nuclear energy. American and Russian plants have been a disaster, simply because so many things can go wrong. Other countries, such a Japan, have had better success; they are better organized. But there are two problems that will never be solved: waste disposal and weapons production. 

Contrary to what you may have heard, there has been no way developed to dispose of nuclear waste - the most dangerous stuff on earth - and there has been no lack of trying. Wikipedia puts this diplomatically:

The issue of disposal methods for nuclear waste was one of the most pressing current problems the international nuclear industry faced when trying to establish a long term energy production plan, yet there was hope it could be safely solved. A report giving the Nuclear Industry's perspective on this problem is presented in a document from the IAEA (The International Atomic Energy Agency) published in October 2007. It summarizes the current state of scientific knowledge on whether waste could find its way from a deep burial facility back to soil and drinking water and threaten the health of human beings and other forms of life. In the United States, DOE acknowledges progress in addressing the waste problems of the industry, and successful remediation of some contaminated sites, yet some uncertainty and complications in handling the issue properly, cost effectively, and in the projected time frame. In other countries with lower ability or will to maintain environmental integrity the issue would be even more problematic.

If you have time to read the article, you will see what this means. It's a nasty problem.

Weapons production is an even more serious problem. Uranium has to be enriched for power production or weapons production. The same processes are used. It is hard to tell how far it is going - especially if the nation in question doesn't allow outside inspection. 

The end result is certain: nuclear terrorism. It won't happen soon, but it will happen