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Art That Really Touches You

Composer Alexis Kirke creates music that changes in response to listeners’ physical states, as tracked by biosensors. Others are working on similar experiments:

In 2011, tech firm Sensum debuted its interactive horror film Unsound at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. The firm uses galvanic skin response sensors to alter film content to heighten – or reduce – emotional reaction to it. For my own short film, Many Worlds, algorithms use brainwaves, muscle tension, perspiration and heart rate in a selection of the audience to adjust the story in real time, choosing the most appropriate of the film’s four narratives to maximize intensity.

Writing this kind of multiple narrative is a challenge, and one that science fiction author Hannu Rajaniemi has tackled with technologist Samuel Halliday for an e-book project called Neurofiction. The first short story, Snow White is Dead, has 48 different narrative paths, selected automatically based on the results of an EEG brainwave monitor attached to the computer on which the e-book is being read. “Readers have been enthusiastic – several commented that they found the story very moving,” says Rajaniemi.

Mental Health Break

A very NSFW love letter on this magical day of romance. I pissed myself:

Caffeinated Kids

Under-12s are drinking a lot less soda and a lot more coffee than they used to, according to a recent study in Pediatrics (pdf). Rachel Feldman investigates:

Why are kids guzzling down coffee instead of cola? Once considered part of a healthy diet, soda consumption has increasingly been tied to childhood obesity and behavioral problems. Marketers are left swinging between offering “natural” products and pushing their diet soft drinks as an alternative to calorie-heavy regular soda. But studies have found that the fake sugar in diet soda could actually make people more hungry, and wreck their bodies’ ability to react to the real thing—so kids end up packing on the pounds anyway.

Our perception of coffee has gone in the other direction. In moderation, most studies now suggest, coffee itself is actually pretty good for you. But it’s the rest of what’s in that cup that worries health experts. Coffee historian Mark Pendergrast told MarketWatch that speciality coffee shops like Starbucks have made the drink “hip and cool,” but the drinks that appeal most to kids are only distant cousins of a black cup of Joe. “The milk and added sugar [in drinks like the Starbucks Frappuccino] cut the acidity and make it more palatable for children,” he said, “and for adults, for that matter.” These fats and sugars counteract the potential benefits of drinking coffee.

Corruption On Ice

Last night, Russian figure-skater Evgeni Plushenko withdrew from competition due to injury. Leonid Bershidsky provides background:

Plushenko, 31, has recently suffered one setback after another. After winning silver in Vancouver – and complaining loudly about the judging – he missed most top-level tournaments because of injuries. Last year, he crashed to the ice at the world championships and had to pull out. It took complex spine surgery to get him back on his feet, and in January, 2014, he lost to 18-year-old Maxim Kovtun at the Russian national championship. According to the Russian Figure Skating Federation’s own rules, Kovtun was supposed to travel to Sochi, but, after much debate, officials decided to send Plushenko, anyway. The 18-year-old was deemed too inexperienced and erratic, because of a woeful failure at the 2014 European championships.

The larger symbolism of Plushenko flaming out:

[T]he choice of an injured star over a talented youth and disregard for rules are typical of the way top-level sports are managed in today’s Russia. The Soviet system of selecting and training young athletes, which served as a model for the frighteningly effective Chinese sports machine of today, is gone. The few remaining stars brought up by that system, including Plushenko, are squeezed relentlessly for their few remaining drops of gold.

Julia Ioffe zooms out:

Some Russians are wondering if this isn’t just a symptom of Putin’s Russia, where connections and closeness to the power elite guarantee you positions and privileges that you might not otherwise land.

As I wrote in my cover story last week, this is why many younger, ambitious Russians feel that they’re suffocating: the old men at the top just won’t let go of their thrones and let the young’uns take a stab at things. “This is what we call, is there a path for young people, or like the vetrical of power,” one Russian tweeted tonight, referring to the Putinist power structure, referred to as the “vertical.” “People don’t rotate out until they utter the words, ‘I’m tired, I’m leaving.’” (This is what then-old man Boris Yeltsin said before handing power over to Vladimir Putin.)

She follows up:

Plushenko, despite his precarious health, talked his way onto the Russian Olympic skating team in closed-door meetings. Talked, not skated. (Plushenko is a talented skater, but he’s one hell of a diva and, during the 2010 Olymipcs in Vancouver, his public ranting and whining and complaining were virtually all I wrote about.) But Plushenko is also one of a coterie of athletes and artists that are loyal Kremlin hacks, understanding that, these days, there is pretty much only one side of the bread that’s buttered in Russia. These athletes and artists perform at official functions, they support the Kremlin line when needed, and, as a result, are wealthy, privileged people, existing in a plane far above the rest of their countrymen—and, often, the law.

(Photo: Evgeny Plyushchenko of Russia leaves the stadium after his injury at a warm up during the Men’s Figure Skating Short Program on February 13, 2014 in Sochi, Russia. By Vladimir Rys Photography/Getty Images)

The Olympics Takes Our Gold

Gleckman asks, “Why is the U.S. Olympic Committee a tax exempt organization?”:

USOC isn’t the only sports behemoth to enjoy tax-exempt status. The National Football League, the National Hockey League, the Professional  Golfers Association, and other big-bucks professional sports leagues are also tax-exempt–though under a different code subsection than USOC.  Last year, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) introduced a bill to take away the tax-exemption for the pro outfits. It has gone nowhere.

USOC is somehow different, perhaps because it so successfully clings to the myth of the amateur athlete who competes for the love of sport, and not the big bucks.

Comwarnercablecast

Representatives from Comcast and Time Warner, when reached for comment. http://t.co/uG90ix5IUG—
Wil Wheaton (@wilw) February 13, 2014

Daniel Gross explains the news of Comcast trying to buy Time Warner Cable for $5.2 billion as “a defensive move—on the part of both companies”:

[T]he big cable companies have been losing customers and market share for years. According to the National Cable Television Association, there were 56.4 million cable subscribers in 2012, down from 66.9 million in 2001. Time Warner, which is concentrated in savvy, wealthy markets like Los Angeles and New York, has been hit particularly hard.  As I noted It’s cable business is eroding like a New Jersey beach. In each of the last seven quarters, Time Warner Cable has lost a significant number of residential video subscribers—a total of 1.27 million subscribers, or nearly 10 percent. That’s pretty stunning.

Now, rapid growth in the other components of the triple play—high-speed internet and voice service—has helped mask the decline of Time Warner Cable’s core business. But those services cost less than cable. And in the most recent quarter, it looks as if those numbers barely budged.

Susan Crawford doesn’t like the deal:

The reason this deal is scary is that for the vast majority of businesses in 19 of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the country, their only choice for a high-capacity wired connection will be Comcast.

Comcast, in turn, has its own built-in conflicts of interest: It will be serving the interests of its shareholders by keeping investments in its network as low as possible — in particular, making no move to provide the world-class fiber-optic connections that are now standard and cheap in other countries — and extracting as much rent as it can, in all kinds of ways. Comcast, for purposes of today’s public , is calling itself a “cable company.” It no longer is. Comcast sells infrastructure subject to neither competition nor a cop on the beat.

Judis is on the same page:

Monopolies make it more difficult for new entrants to compete. As a result, they allow the larger companies to raise prices without fearing a loss of market share. Since deregulation in 1996, cable prices have risen at about three times the rate of inflation. According to a study from the Free Press, prices for expanded cable service (what most consumers purchase) went up five percent from 2008 top 2013 –almost four times the rate of inflation. Monopolies also allow companies to neglect service to consumers. The American Customer Satisfaction Index rated Comcast and Time-Warner the two worst cable and broadband companies.

Monopolies can also have a corrosive effect on related industries. The big cable companies have been able to squeeze cable content providers—even to cut off access to customers, as Time-Warner did with CBS last fall.  If they also own content providers, as Comcast does, they can harm rival content providers—as Comcast seems to be doing to Netflix.

John Cassidy dismisses the “old and tired argument” that Netflix and Apple are threatening the cable business:

I’ve been writing about the cable industry since the late nineteen-eighties, and something has always been about to destroy it. For a time, the threat was satellite television; then it was the Web; now it’s Netflix or YouTube. But it never materializes. With their quasi-monopoly franchises, and the ability to charge their customers for everything from voice mail to remote controls—look closely at your cable bill—the cable companies get bigger and more profitable every year. No wonder Comcast’s stock price has quintupled since 2009. (Time Warner Cable’s stock has gone up even more.)

What we need is a new competition policy that puts the interests of consumers first, seeks to replicate what other countries have done, and treats with extreme skepticism the arguments of monopoly incumbents such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable. But will we get it?

Morrissey wonders if the government will allow the deal to go through:

Then there is the question of Comcast’s connections to content producers. Comcast owns NBC, for instance, a deal that raised a few eyebrows but still managed to gain regulatory approval. Its size would make them much more competitive on pricing over Charter and Cox, and that plus their hold on NBC’s assets might be just a little too much for the White House to ignore, even for the politically-connected Comcast. This has anti-trust written all over it, especially for Democrats who have played the populist-progressive card more and more.

But Matthew Klein claims the merger will be good for consumers:

The networks consistently raise prices about 10 percent a year on average, irrespective of the state of the economy. By contrast, the typical cable bill only goes up by about 5 percent a year. Cable companies have eaten the difference by lowering their margins and cutting costs elsewhere, but there are limits to both processes. … Merging the two biggest cable operators might give them more bargaining power with the networks, especially if it encourages DIRECTV and Dish Network Corp. to consolidate the satellite business. Saving money on content would allow the enlarged Comcast to improve Internet access and speed — areas in which the U.S. lags behind other rich nations.

Drum quibbles with Klein’s argument:

I’d normally take Klein’s side of this except for one thing: would a bigger Comcast really have more negotiating clout than they do now? I guess that’s possible, but they have a helluva lot of clout already. No network can afford to be shut out of Comcast’s market for long. So it’s not clear to me that a bigger Comcast would really do much for the rest of us.

Brian Fung puts the merger in context:

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of the recent net neutrality court decision that made it legal for Internet providers to block or throttle Web traffic. While there’s no concrete evidence yet that this is occurring, the ruling inherently gives ISPs such as Comcast greater control over how consumers experience the Internet. As a result of the merger, Comcast will be taking on 8 million TWC subscribers, all of whom will be newly subject to Comcast’s bandwidth policies.

That the cable industry is consolidating isn’t really a surprise. But a merger of this magnitude is going to have major downstream effects.

It could also lead to new, cumbersome regulations:

There’s a danger that Comcast will be able to use its growing power over broadband to undermine competitive threats such as Netflix. We don’t know exactly how large Comcast needs to be before it will be able to do this. But the larger it gets, the greater the cause for concern. And it’s much easier to block a merger before it happens than to seek the breakup of a company after it has merged.

Lastly, Sargent weighs the options for better telecom regulation:

There are two basic solutions to this problem: either run telecoms as a regulated monopoly, like how land lines used to work, or break up the telecom trusts within individual markets to force them to compete with each other. Both have upsides and downsides, but the point is that government action will be required either way. This is another reason to keep prevent pointless mergers — to level the power imbalance between regulators and colossal corporate conglomerates.

This will be a tough lift, but I think it’s still possible to do. Telecom capacity is relatively cheap, by infrastructure standards — and for Pete’s sake, Romania somehow manages to have the third-fastest internet in the world. It’s easily within reach, if we can get our act together. It should be a key goal of progressive lawmakers.

Unfriending Facebook, Ctd

A reader defends the site against earlier comments:

Today is my 73rd birthday, and I’ve been having a tremendous Facebook birthday party. Admittedly, there are some “friends” who sent me e-mails, and there have been a few phone calls and a few mailed cards. But by and large, the acknowledgment on Facebook has been one of today’s thrills for me. This is a reason that I find Facebook so important in my life. There is no way I could manage the quality of my relationships without it.

On that note, a reader from our Facebook page:

I have quit just about everything else social media but unfortunately, FB has become the default for keeping in touch with my elderly relatives – because it is relatively easy for them to use – and other extended family.

The first reader adds:

Some of my Facebook friends have died, and yet they still have Facebook pages. I notice that, for example, I can go to their page on their birthday and say something appropriately memorable about the person. And others do the same. Rather like comments after an obituary.

More defenders sound off:

Your reader wrote, “Another big reason for wanting to leave Facebook comes down to many of my Facebook friends who don’t exercise good editorial control: either don’t know when to keep their ‘Facebook mouths’ shut, or don’t open their Facebook mouths at all.”

You know who else is showing poor editorial control? This guy! Facebook gives you, the reader, incredible editorial control. First off, don’t accept friend requests from every pompous high school buddy or depressed ex-girlfriend. Second, if you’ve got that one friend who only posts amazing vacation photos or trolling Obama comments, hide him/her on your feed. In this regard, Facebook is a lot like real-life relationships: you gotta weed folks out sometimes.

Another sighs:

Oh, for God’s sake. I bet folks said similar things about telephones. (“You can’t really communicate with someone you can’t look in the eye!”) As with anything, it’s a question of moderation. There will always be people who overshare and people whose desperation is exacerbated by something like Facebook. Step away from it occasionally, call people on the phone once in a while.

I think Facebook is fun. It’s a great way to share cool things with friends. As a musician, it gives me a semi-easy way to promote stuff. Sometimes I get strung out on it, but mostly I don’t. If you believe that people’s lives are as fab as their Facebook pics, then you also believed that people’s Christmas letters gave an accurate picture of their year. Relax, people!

Ask Reza Aslan Anything: How Jesus Stood Apart

In the second video from writer and scholar Reza Aslan, he explains the revolutionary nature of Jesus’ message:

In a followup, Aslan notes how unlikely it was that this message endured after Jesus’ death:

In yesterday’s video, Reza imagined how the Jesus would have reacted to a modern Catholic Mass. He is the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and, most recently, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, which offers an interpretation of the life and mission of the historical Jesus. Previous Dish on Zealot here, here and here, as well as Fox News’ treatment of Reza here and here.

Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

What The Hell Just Happened In Kansas? Ctd

A reader thinks everyone should chill a little:

I just read your post on the absurd anti-gay bill that has passed the Kansas House of Representatives. As an adopted Kansan, I just want to take a moment to assure you that its chances of becoming law are not good. You ask in your post whether there are Republicans willing to oppose this new strategy. Fortunately, state senate president Susan Wagle, a conservative Republican herself, has spoken out against the bill, and in addition to her own opposition, she states a belief that a majority of senate Republicans won’t back it. Kansas has developed a (well-deserved, unfortunately) reputation in the past few years for crazy politics, but this might be the line even our current crop of politicians won’t cross.

Another relays a money quote from Wagle:

“A strong majority of my members support laws that define traditional marriage, protect religious institutions and protect individuals from being forced to violate their personal moral values. However, my members also don’t condone discrimination.” This is huge. As a Kansas resident, I’ve seen the legislature take a hard right turn in the last few years, especially with respect to the cultural wedge issues of abortion and legal treatment of gay people. The Kansas Senate turning against this kind of bill is even more evidence that the deepest red states in America are growing more supportive of their gay brothers and sisters.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Yesterday, in passing, Aaron let slip the following: “Oh, I renewed today, by the way.”

“You didn’t bother to renew until today?” I asked incredulously.

“Well, I didn’t need to and I wasn’t getting any prompts, but then I saw the little red button at the top right and realized it no longer said ‘Subscriber’.”

See the marital support I get? Then today, after the Dish sent out an email of thanks that reached Aaron’s in-tray, I got an email in response:

Awww… you’re welcome, honey. How very heartfelt and personalized.

Which is simply to say: if you meant to renew and never got around to it, or if you’re still winging it and waiting for the little dog to pop up, you’re no better than my husband. But that excuse just wore out. Subscribe here!

On the latest revenue front, we’ve now reached a tantalizing $99,778 in revenue this February, which is just short of the $105,500 in revenue in all of last February – and we’re not even at Valentine’s Day yet. Help us match last year by the middle of the month. Subscribe!

Today I harrumphed as the Guardian – yes the lefty anti-capitalist Guardian – is now disguising corporate public relations as journalism. In fact, there is no real distinction between the two at all any more:

Many news outlets have kept their journalists far away from the native content creation process. However, Guardian Labs will maintain no such separation. Explained Pemsel: “It’s one thing to say, go to a journalist and say, we’d like you to write that. We would never do that. But we have people working in television and technology and film and general news, and they have ideas. It would be sort of mad not to tap into that knowledge.”

Madness indeed! I worried that religious liberty was being overly infringed by well-intentioned liberals; and pondered the Schmittian roots of Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s amoralism. Oh, and the inspiring tale of Mr Dong’s Flappy Bird. And the puerile joy I got from writing those words.

The most popular post of the day was Dick Cheney Has No Regrets; followed by The Guardian Now Shares “Values” With Unilever.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Graves are surrounded by floodwater at St Deny’s Church on February 13, 2014 in Severn Stoke, Worcestershire, England. By Rob Stothard/Getty Images.)