[KAIST ITC] Smart E-Book Interface Prototype Demo – YouTube.

The gradual adoption of the affordances of paper for digital readers makes us wonder which will be next, and which are so unique they can’t be replicated in some way.

[Video via Jeremy Rue]

The good senator from Vermont and I probably agree on more issues than disagree. But we do disagree on his Protect Intellectual Property Act, also known as PIPA. You may have heard of PIPA, or its more notorious House counterpart, SOPA.

Many notable web sites have gone dark or posted messages of opposition to the proposed legislation due to its potential pernicious consequences. (There are plenty of analyses of the effects of this legislation; this one, for example). Suffice it to say that SOPA and PIPA represent credible threats to free speech and innovation.

Senator Leahy introduced this bill. I’m disappointed that Leahy, in particular, introduced it. Yes, he’s a longtime supporter of intellectual property protections. Fair enough. Nothing wrong with that; after all, I benefit from copyright. Of late, he’s taken a defensive position on it: It’s interesting to see his webpage on the topic of IP is full of PIPA justifications and clarifications, and some of his recent press releases have stated outright that Wikipedia, reddit, et al, wouldn’t be affected by PIPA. To which point, again, I point you to this analysis.

The irony in all of this, for me, comes from Senator Leahy’s professed enthusiasm for technology. His use of the web has been a point of pride, and his office still reminds people that he is “the second senator to launch a website.” He’s called—or calls himself—the “cyber senator” for goodness sake (I’ve associated that label with him for years). Why? For “his ongoing leadership on issues related to the Internet and technology.”

Indeed. It must be confounding for the Cyber Senator to be responsible for legislation that, under its current proposed status, is merely anathema to the tech industry, but, if passed and enacted, could be poison to it.

Two days ago, we learned that Kim Jong Il had died two days earlier.

This morning, I was struck by the photo below of the Kims in a stark, imposing hall, looking at a scale model of a Pyongyang neighborhood. Students of the Kim dynasty, or of totalitarian architecture, or power dynamics, or James Bond films, can find plenty to puzzle over in it. I think it’s remarkable.

Where so many images of Kim Il Sung make him seem jolly and benevolent, here he is unsmiling and thoughtful. Where the flood of recent images of Kim Jong Il seem to show him simply going through the motions (viewing a parade, viewing a grocery store) here he looks decisive and driven. I haven’t found a date for this picture, but I’d guess it’s from the early 1980s. The cues—a discussion of matters of governance, the resonance of wearing the same outfit, the omnipresent aides and military attendants—seems to me intended to symbolize Kim Jong Il’s gradual, inevitable inheritance of authority.

Like any government, the Kim regime carefully managed its image. I can recall seeing exactly zero images of some recumbent Kim luxuriating in a comfy, private chamber; but very many images of power and populism, whether they were military parades, official portraits, Mass Games, or factory tours. All that with a good dose of hyodo (효도), the Confucian concept of filial piety that is extremely important in Korea and is arguably exploited in the continued veneration of Kim Il Sung.

A few decades ago, the Kim Dynasty of North Korea had a lot more competition in the dictator department. (Not that the world has ever lacked, including now.) But did Kim Il Sung, in his time, ever really penetrate the American cultural consciousness in quite the same way that other post-World War II leaders did? I’m not sure. I tend to remember Kim the elder in a pale blue or gray suit with a broad smile and pants pulled up high; his image may have been too paternal and jolly, too normal, when it came to the superficial visual language of power and corruption as interpreted by Western eyes. No leopard-skin toque, no laureled uniform, no glowering, beturbaned mien.

Kim Il Sung died when I was 14, so I may simply have been oblivious to his place in Western culture. But there’s no denying the celebrity of his son Kim Jong Il. When the father passed away, he left the foundation of a nuclear program in place that his son has grown into a worrying operation. The axis of evil designation added to the currency of Kim as a major player, punching well above his weight. With the spotlight, and the country, and the attention of a whole bunch of other countries, in Kim Jong Il’s grasp, he also gained an odd cultural power. Sunglassed, high-haired, and wearing single-color ensembles, his image and epic weirdness became an internet commodity, transmitted around the world to a global audience hungry for the stories of its rulers’ benighted opulence and indulgence that so contrasted with the deprivation of those they ruled. From that perspective—the one of images and absurdity and iconic camp—the whole thing seemed like a sad caricature of the anti-Communist propaganda (itself a sort of caricature) inculcated in those of us who grew up during the Cold War.

It was easy to point and laugh. Unless you were North Korean.

*************
Addendum: It’s not clear, yet, what we’ll think of Kim Jong Il’s successor, Kim Jong Un. We don’t know if he’ll be a reformer or a conservative, if he’ll be weird or as normal as the head of a nepotistic autocracy can be. This young, Western-educated man supposedly loves basketball and studied computer science. I assume that he has grown up using the internet in some way—the thing that helped make his father a pop-culture figure in the last decade—and thus will be the first in this generation to have his own nuclear arsenal.

[Images via The Atlantic's In Focus roundup of Kim Jong Il pictures. Well worth a look.]

Still, we’re all pretty accustomed to it, no? In LOLing e-mail forwards and cobbled-together personal websites, that kind of thing.

I was browsing through some PDFs of evidence from the November 17th Congressional hearing on Solyndra (weekend reading) and saw this e-mail from George Kaiser:

Much hay was made of these e-mails by Republican partisans. George Kaiser, according to Forbes, is worth some $10 billion, and is the 89th richest man on the planet. He’s also a major Obama supporter, and his foundation reportedly owned a third of the famously failed solar panel manufacturer Solyndra. The conspiracy-minded among us (and you don’t even have to be all that suspicious) might see the potential for inappropriate benefits when it came to the federal government’s pre-bankruptcy support of Solyndra.

In any case, there are a few Kaiser e-mails sprinkled throughout the evidence that House staffers threw online. Yet the partisans failed to point out the detail that would have dealt the most devastating blow: His e-mails are all in Comic Sans.

It’s the Sealegs amphibous vehicle.

Like many, I find the Occupy encampments incredibly interesting—if perplexing at times—and I think there’s a lot of merit in the larger “We are the 99 Percent” concept, which will surely last longer than the occupations. I think both efforts have done much to highlight questions of economic inequality, political corruption and collusion, and state power. There’s a good argument that the Occupy message is lately drifting to one of state power at the expense of the economic argument. But I think these messages are all of a piece. After all, it highlights the government’s enforcement priorities (it’s easier to arrest a bunch of tangible protesters standing in a street than a bunch of financial wizards practicing monetary alchemy) as well as a more metaphorical theme of how powerful interests will scramble to retain a status quo that maintains and consolidates their own power.

By resisting or subverting conventional tactics and rules the movement displayed a kind of strategic brilliance. A few examples:

• It highlights immediate economic problems like the housing crisis and homelessness (they’re living in tents!), spiraling prices (particularly the University of California protests), and, especially, joblessness. After all, who else would have the time for this kind of effort?
• It is grounded in the concept of the peaceful sit-in, which harkens back to the American civil rights movement and, even before that, Gandhi. So it has that sheen of righteousness, particularly when that sheen is a coating of pepper spray.
• It promotes overt creativity in the face of opposition, whether symbolic (Cal’s balloon-borne tents; the 99% bat signal) or practical (the people’s mic, which started as a way to get around a prohibition on megaphones in Zucotti Park; the choice of Zucotti itself, whose confusing public-private legal status they exploited to great effect for almost two months)
• It makes a mockery of the current political system by highlighting how that system has made a mockery of democracy. I’d argue this is the overarching message that encompasses the Wall Street gripes, the fairness issues, the democracy rhetoric, the tension between order and the rights of speech and assembly, etc.  And it’s not even a new idea, really.

As the major occupations seem to be winding down and the movement (possibly) reaches a turning point, it’s that last bullet point that I think of when I hear exasperated observers say this movement is not legitimate until it starts organizing phone banks to call congressman, starts letter writing-campaigns and the like. Those are fine things to do, and if done smartly (targeting the rare undecided, open-minded politician), still have potential. But set aside the occasional Occupier’s rhetoric about starting a true revolution and a new kind of government; by staying outside of conventional political tactics, they sidestep the lobbyists and special interests and the politicians themselves. A lot of commentators says Occupy needs to grow up and get overtly political. It’s the classic “reform from the inside” argument used to justify political expedience. But if the political system is rigged to disenfranchise citizens, as the occupiers convincingly argue, then they’d just be setting themselves up for failure.

And a bonus example of politicians behaving badly from 2009 when opposition were upset at the GNP’s relaxing media ownership rules:

Earlier this month, the president of South Korea visited the United States. Remember that? They went to a General Motors plant. They had a state dinner featuring Texas rib eye. Harold (of Harold and Kumar) sat across from Barack Obama.

Busting out the tuxes with my dad - going to state dinner at white house. Unreal.

13 October 2011 12:51 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@JohnTheCho

John Cho

Just before Lee arrived, Congress had ratified the Korean-US Free Trade Agreement, considered the largest such agreement in the US since NAFTA. Korea has not yet approved it and when a Korean reporter asked Obama if he was concerned given the political opposition in Korea, Obama said he had President Lee Myung Bak’s assurances that it would be passed by the National Assembly. (They don’t call Mb “the bulldozer” for nothing.)

The agreement was set in motion by Lee’s predecessor, but Lee has had his eye on this deal for years. His decision to lift South Korea’s ban on American beef (sparked by the discovery of mad cow disease in the US beef supply five years earlier) is believed to have been a strategic move to make the prospects of a trade agreement more appealing to the US. It also led to the great Seoul beef protests of 2008 and the ensuing political and civil rights fallout. You get a sense of the scale of these protests in the photo of candle-carrying demonstrators below (image from WBUR).

But still, the fractured opposition parties, along with labor, environmental, farming, and other groups are steadfastly opposed to the FTA in its current form. And while Lee’s Grand National Party will almost certainly be able to ram the agreement through parliament over their objections, if need be, they might be a little leery of such a move at this moment.

This is where the lunches come in. School lunches, more precisely.

This summer, Seoul was in the grip of a political firestorm over whether or not the city should provide children with free lunches. On one side was the city council and liberal politicians, who had passed a free lunch program to cover every one of the more than 800,000 primary and middle school students in the city. On the other side was Mayor Oh Se Hoon, a member of the conservative Grand National Party (like President Lee), who argued only the neediest students should qualify. It was an issue that played on concerns over class, economics, and social welfare. Mayor Oh tearfully staked his career on the issue, pledging to resign if voters rejected an August referendum to block the larger plan. They rejected it. He resigned.

Seoul contains about a fifth of the entire population of Korea, so running the city is an influential position. Before he was president, Lee was the mayor of Seoul.

The political gamesmanship in the runup to the election centered mainly on three contenders: Na Kyung Won, the Grand National Party and establishment candiate (who would have been Seoul’s first female mayor); Park Won Soon, an independent, liberal candidate who is a civil rights lawyer and community activist; and Ahn Cheol Soo, an MD/PhD physiologist-turned-software tycoon-turned-professor who is basically every Korean parent’s (or aspiring youth’s) dream-vision of professional achievement. Among his 11 books is one titled “My Mother, Who Fostered My Ability.” He would likely have been the leading mayoral candidate and is considered a viable presidential candidate.

But he didn’t run, and instead threw his support behind Park, who then won last Wednesday’s special election. (The main opposition party failed to muster a candidate of its own, suggesting just how fractured and shambolic the non-GNP political spectrum is, and making the Park victory that much more impressive.) The fallout has been interesting. Mayor Oh obviously hurt his chances for higher office due to his miscalculation. Na, the GNP mayoral candidate, had won the endorsement of Park Geun Hye, a politician and daughter of an assassinated president; Na’s loss is viewed as hurting Park’s chances in the 2012 presidential election. The results are viewed as an expression of disapproval of Lee’s current government (Korean presidents only get a single five-year term). The opposition is feeling emboldened. And Ahn’s own status has obviously been boosted even higher for backing the winner. As the JoongAng Daily notes, it has GNP politicians worried:

The Grand National Party’s defeat in the Seoul mayoral by-election has scared the party off from pushing through the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement, and its ratification is more imperiled now than ever.

It’s not clear just how imperiled it is (probably not very much). The opposition itself isn’t new; these groups have been unhappy at the prospects for years, though Park’s victory is a reason to feel recharged. The consensus—among the media, at least—is that passing the FTA is going be a real brawl. Not in some metaphorical way. We’re talking fists, furniture, maybe even fire extinguishers and hammers.

The JoongAng explains:

In Korea, the minority in the assembly resorts to physical brawls when the majority party tries to railroad through bills, using violence as a kind of filibuster. But the brawls are unpopular with the public, which blames the majority party for not trying hard enough to compromise with the opposition.

After losing the mayoral by-election this week, GNP lawmakers are much too fearful of losing their seats in next April’s general election to be seen in a brawl over the FTA.

Reporters are positively rubbing their hands in anticipation. As the lede of a Wall Street Journal blog post says, “The Korean-U.S. free trade agreement started with brawls and protests in the streets in 2006. And it now appears certain it will end with brawls and protests in the National Assembly next week.”

So what does Korea’s physical politics look like? A good example comes from 2008, when the GNP worked on FTA details behind closed doors. Closed doors that they then blocked with furniture:

So we’ll see if any viral video comes out of next week’s Korean National Assembly. As for those school lunches, Mayor Park signed free-lunch funding into law on his first day. And President Lee probably never knew that his visit to America coincided with our own National School Lunch Week.

[Bonus: I just found some old video of Seoul's city council members pushing each other around over school lunches! I've embedded it in the next post, along with video of 2009's notorious (but unrelated) parliamentary media-law brawl.]

I haven’t worked with Jack. I barely know him. We’ve met twice, both times at an investigative journalism conference, where people hover around him in ever-tightening orbits until they get to talk with him, and I skulk around with the other young journalists waiting for our openings. I enjoyed meeting him; he’s a nice guy. It’s an odd feeling referring to him as “Jack” in a public setting like this, because that makes it sound like we’re buddies. We do follow each other on Twitter, which might have sounded like weird nonsense a few years ago, but which now means something. (I consider it a badge of honor, no matter how easy it is to hit the “follow” button; as far as I know, Jack is careful about whom he follows.)

Four people were laid off at Slate yesterday, and Jack Shafer was one of them. Shafer is good at Twitter, and the news is still bouncing around over there. It’s gotten a lot of attention among the chattering classes.

While we’re talking about layoffs, also yesterday, 20 people lost their jobs at newspapers around St Louis, and the Bay Area News Group announced 120 would be cut during an upcoming consolidation. Media is a tricky business these days.

What might might explain the widespread public reaction to the Slate layoffs are that these are journalists with a national audience whose personalities came through in their work. Mass layoffs at newspapers can still feel anonymous (unless, of course, you’re the laid-off or in their circle of friends and family). But guys like Noah and Shafer, who I’ve been reading since college more than a decade ago, bring the concept of professional instability back into sharp relief.

They’ve had an opportunity many other journalists would love to have, and I’d say they earned it. Juliette Lapidos is a sharp, efficient observer; check out her recent piece on the politics of Parks and Recreation, one of those I-wish-I’d-written-that articles. I happen to follow June Thomas on Twitter, where she has an offbeat kind of charm and seems to watch a lot of television. It was Tim Noah who got me hooked on Slate. His forthcoming book on inequality in America will surely be required reading. Though he ranges widely and seems to have had a much different background than me, reading him on topics like class and status was to be reminded of where I came from (or don’t come from). And if any one writer kept me coming back to Slate as an avid reader, it was Shafer.

Shafer has written about this sort of thing in the past. Earlier this summer, he even collected two columns‘ worth of notes from journalists who’d been fired! A couple years ago, he wrote about the wave of buyouts across media, which is now uncomfortably resonant:

The “retirement” of the buyout brigade has the added benefit of loosening the ugly stranglehold the boomers have over the press. I may be risking self-extermination by advocating wholesale boomer expulsion, but there are just too many of us—especially the older variety—in top slots for journalism’s good. The sheer weight of our presence blocks the promotion of the next generation of talented journalists to the most desirable beats.

We like our nice salaries, we enjoy our benefits and vacation time, we dig our place in the pecking order, and we expect to live forever. So why should we leave? Our intransigence not only gives our product a rancid boomer tang—who can blame nonboomers for being repulsed?—it tends to stifle innovation.

Ouch! But Classic Jack. Shafer didn’t fall into that professional groove (nor his colleagues), and his point is as easily applied to tenured professors or others who ease into a late-mid-career doldrum. I don’t think anyone, young or old, begrudged his role at Slate, except maybe Rupert Murdoch, if Murdoch deigned to notice. And as the American Journalism Review profile published yesterday points out, he writes like a much younger writer. (Aside: a favorite part of that piece is the sullen-sounding contribution from Tom Goldstein, dean of the journalism school I attended despite carefully reading Shafer’s thoughtful evaluation of j-schools.)

So I figure Jack Shafer will land on his feet. It might take some time, as these things do. He’s gotten more positive recommendations and fantasy job offers in the last day than I’ve gotten my whole life. If I had the right publication and a budget, I’d hire him. (Fantasy job offer.) Wouldn’t you? Look at the tweets where people imagine Jack’s reaction to the outpouring of online adoration, or how he should be the one to cover it, or where he should go next. It’s like people have a Jack Shafer Platonic Ideal and finally have a reason to spill it all over Twitter. I smell a fan-fiction opportunity here. Jack, capitalize on this.

And so, for whatever it’s worth, even though last night Jim Cramer tweeted the following,

Hitting the night spots in Bismarck. Shocked about Shafer, loved that guy.

24 August 2011 6:08 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@jimcramer

Jim Cramer

I muddle on somehow and continue to refer to Shafer in the present tense.

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Wait! I do have something specific to thank Jack Shafer for:

Last Sunday, as Tripoli was overrun with rebel fighters, I ruminated:

Curious what will they do with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber returned to Gaddafi's benevolent embrace.

21 August 2011 3:12 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@telesle

Tim Lesle

Which Jack then re-tweeted (technically modify-tweeted, if you wondered what the MT meant):

MT @telesle: What will they do with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber returned to Gaddafi's benevolent embrace.

21 August 2011 3:13 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@jackshafer

Jack Shafer

And that was then retweeted by someone on Twitter called @morgfair:

Who turns out to be Morgan Fairchild. And then she followed me. Welcome aboard, Morgan! I’m not sure how to describe what I’m feeling,* but I appreciate the follow.

And we still don’t know what will happen with al-Megrahi.

Good luck, Jack!

*Update: It’s cool! In retrospect, I think I’m just humble-bragging.

I put together a chart of examples through history of the price tag we’ve put on human life. The chart isn’t online, but you can see it if you buy the magazine, formatted with that digital-looking font you see on receipts. The published version is shortened and formatted for the magazine, but if you’re curious about the rough version I turned in, you can see it below.

Not wanting to leave well enough alone, I also got in touch with David Friedman. Friedman is a professor at Santa Clara University’s law school and a self-described “anarchist-anachronist-economist.” He teaches this class that looks incredibly interesting called Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. A section of it is on ancient Iceland, and his 1978 paper on Iceland’s legal and political institutions during the saga era was the source for one of the weregild figures in the chart.

We’re constantly making decisions that value life, whether we realize it or not. That’s an inherent aspect of the risks we take on a daily basis, whether it’s jaywalking (value of time saved vs risk of getting hit by a bus) or digging into that second slice of pie. What’s more, we’re constantly applying values to the lives of others, such as in the cost-benefit analyses of safety and regulations.

“People are often uncomfortable with the idea of giving life a finite value,” says Friedman, “But if they really believed the value of their own live was infinite they would weigh less, drive more carefully, adjust their behavior in lots of ways that give up other values in order to reduce the risk of dying.”

And he argues that price isn’t, by definition, infinite: “If you imagine someone trying to buy all of your life now–your heart for transplant, say–it seems unlikely that you would sell. But the reason is not that your life is infinitely valuable but that the money you would be paid with is worthless to a corpse, which is what you will be after selling your life.”

You really can’t take it with you.

Not that others can’t use it after you’re gone. Friedman added an interesting point about how we calculate awards in death lawsuits: when somebody’s survivors are awarded money after a death, the figure fails to include the value of the life to the person who died.

How much would somebody have to pay you for your own life? It may not be infinite, but it would certainly be substantial, right?

“Modern law gets it strikingly wrong by ignoring the largest part of the value of most lives–their value to the person whose life it is,” he says. “Under traditional common law, that value could not be sued for because the claim died with the claimant. Modern survivor statutes allow other people, such as the victim’s family, to sue for the cost to them of his death, but still leave out the cost to him of his death. Well, that’s the figure that’s left out, the value that’s lost, in a settlement.”