Lewis Lapham and the Fate of the Book

Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Machine-Made News

Posted by Lewis Lapham at 6:08pm, April 22, 2012.

[Tom Engelhardt writes, an an introduction to Lewis Lapham's article. . .] A decade ago, I wrote a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, about the world I had worked in for a quarter-century.  I already had at least some sense, then, of what was bearing down on the book.  Keep in mind that this was a couple of years before Facebook was launched and years before the Kindle, the Nook, or the iPad saw the light of day.  Still, back then, for my novel’s characters — mostly authors and book editors like me — I imagined an electronic book-in-the-making, which I dubbed the “Q.”  It was the “Q-print,” officially, with that initial standing for “quasar”– for, that is, a primordial force in the universe.

When one of my younger characters, an editorial assistant, unveils it — still in prototype form — it’s described as “a sleek, steno-pad sized object… a flickering jewel of light and color.”  And he imagines its future this way: “Someday it’ll hold a universal library and you’ll be able to talk with an author, catch scenes from the movie, access any newspaper on earth, plan your trip to Tibet, or check out a friend on screen, and that probably won’t be the half of it.”

An older publishing type, on the other hand, describes its possibilities in this fashion: “In a future Middlemarch, the church will offer public service ads when Casaubon appears, the drug companies will support Lydgate, and architectural firms can pitch their wares while Dorothea reorganizes the housing of the poor.”  A decade later, that may still be a little ahead of the game, but not by so much.  The inexpensive version of the Kindle is awash in ads by now and, books and all, the iPad, of course, is a riot of activity.

Don’t think of me, though, as the Nostradamus of online publishing . . . (click here for the rest of this article).

Scott Turow On Why Amazon Is Bad For Books

[The article below gives solid reasons for fearing Amazon's monopolistic position.  Here is another aspect of the fear, akin to the fear of Walmart and its treatment of workers. ]

Salon / By Laura Miller

Why We Should Fear Amazon

Author Scott Turow on why the online mega-retailer is bad for books.

March 14, 2012  |

Late last week, the Justice Department warned Apple and five of the nation’s largest publishers that it was planning to sue them for price fixing. At issue is the agency model, a method of wholesaling e-books in which the publisher sets the retail price and the retailer takes a 30 percent cut. Most print and many e-books are sold under the traditional wholesale model, in which publishers sell books at a discounted price, and the retailer can resell them for whatever price it likes.

The unnamed player in this drama is Amazon, which had been selling e-books at a loss until two years ago, when the iPad came along and publishers used the emergence of the new device to pressure the online megaretailer into adopting the agency model, too. If Amazon wanted to sell e-books from the Big Six (as the six largest book publishers are called), it could no longer sell those titles for $9.99.

Publishers actually make less money with the agency model, so why have they insisted on it? The change was designed to limit the growing dominance of Amazon over American book retailing. On Monday, Scott Turow — the bestselling author of “Presumed Innocent” and other legal thrillers, and the president of the Authors Guild — posted a letter to members on the Guild’s web site. In it, he pronounced the Justice Department’s actions bad news for authors, “grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture,” and (contrary to first impression) ominous for book consumers. I called him up to find out more.

What are some of the Guild’s problems with Amazon?

First of all, so that I don’t get dismissed as an ingrate, I should say that Amazon has been a boon for bestselling authors. Authors get paid on the basis of the cover price for a hardcover book. By discounting, which is something that chain stores started and Amazon continued, they have lowered the barriers to book buying in ways that have been personally extremely beneficial to me.

Because you get paid the same amount regardless of how much the retailer charges for the book, and the discounting encourages more people to buy the book?

Exactly. These are not personal complaints. There are lots of things about Amazon for which they deserve credit. They’re innovative. There are lots of very, very happy Amazon customers. I’m not here to dispute that Amazon has been personally good for me or to say that they haven’t been, so far, good to their customers.

So what’s the problem?

The concern is that they are getting so large and they compete so ruthlessly that there’s a lot of fear for what the world with Amazon in charge is going to look like.

The Guild’s beefs with Amazon became pronounced over the issue of the resale of new titles some years ago. This was something that Amazon pioneered. They would sell you a [just-released] book on Day One, buy it back from you on Day Two, and then resell it to another customer on Day Three. This was legal, but certainly not what anybody ever intended.

Traditionally, in hardcover, that’s been basically a split of the proceeds between the author and publisher. (An aside: That’s something we’re fighting with publishers about in the digital world.) So Amazon decides to go into competition with the publishers by reselling the book they just bought. The publisher gets paid nothing, and neither does the author. It’s a pure profit for Amazon.

Now, the reason you don’t see used bookstores within new bookstores is that the used books compete with the new books and the publishers supplying the new books would object. Either you’re doing business with me or you’re competing with me. I’m not going to sell you books so you can take some percentage of sales.

The problem of course was the Amazon had gotten so big that publishers were afraid to resist that. It’s not the mere fact that they’re competing [with their own suppliers]. I can certainly understand that it’s good for consumers to be able to buy a book two days later at a lower price. It’s the fact that the publishers were afraid to dismiss Amazon.

Which is what they would do with a regular retailer who was doing the same thing but had viable competitors?

Right, and of course, Amazon was undercutting authors in the process. We tried to persuade them to just window this [delay making used copies of brand-new books available for a period of time, the way the release of the DVD of a movie is delayed until after it has played in theaters]. That didn’t work. It was a muscle-flexing exhibition by Amazon, saying, “We’ve got so much market power, you guys can’t do what you’ve traditionally done and take your goods elsewhere. We represent at least 30 percent of the book market.”

I don’t like losing sales, but the real problem is at the margins. Midlist authors have been struggling to survive for decades now. If you start eating into the publishers’ returns, then at the bottom of the food chain, those books are just not going to get published. We have seen that happen.

Are there other examples of Amazon using its predominance?

They now control the print-on-demand market. That’s when you buy a book and only then does a service print a copy — literally on demand. [This is a method used by academic and small presses, as well as by authors with otherwise out-of-print books.] Amazon bought a POD service called BookSurge. Then they informed their customers — university presses and some other publishers who the Guild had organized to do POD for Authors Guild members — that they would not list their books on Amazon’s site unless they paid BookSurge more for their services.

I don’t know how they defend themselves on this one. That’s another very ominous sign to the book industry and authors.

What about their history with e-books?

They deserve a lot of credit for the Kindle, for yoking e-ink with this nationwide wireless network. It’s a great innovation. And they said to the publishers, “It’s really important to us in introducing this platform that e-books appear at the same time as the hardcover edition.” Publishers said, “Oh, we’ve seen your tricks before, Amazon! Why would we ever do that?”

So Amazon says, “We’ll pay you the same amount we pay you on a hardcover.” So publishers think that sounds fine, how can they complain about that? They agree and are then stunned when Amazon announces that they’re going to sell every e-book at a loss, for $9.99. That’s an average loss of $4 to $5 a book.

Why would Amazon do that?

I suppose they could argue they were doing it to sell devices and that may well have been one of their intentions. It had the additional benefit of making it much harder for any of their competitors to enter the market.

For example: A lot of people have the habit of going into a physical store, looking at books and then turning around and buying the e-book wirelessly from Amazon. Had it not been the case that you had to sell an e-book at a $5 loss, bookstores would have been able to say, “Sure, bring your device with you and we’ll sell you the e-book right here.”

Bookstores are pretty hard-pressed by book discounting as it is, and the idea of selling ebooks at a loss made it impossible for them to enter the marketplace in competition with Amazon.

What about the proprietary format of Kindle? Didn’t that also make it hard for competing e-readers to enter the market?

You couldn’t read all those books you bought from Amazon on a competitor’s device — you can now, if you have an iPad, but you couldn’t then.

The nook is widely regarded as the better e-reader device, but if you’ve accumulated a library of Kindle titles, you can’t take them with you if you decide to switch. [Technically, you can, but most users would find this quite challenging.]

Barnes and Noble developed the nook because they really had no choice but to compete with Amazon. They were struggling at that point, and I personally don’t think they’d have been able to survive while losing $5 on every book. There simply were not a lot of people jumping into that market to compete, not with the prospect of losing $5 on every book sale. From the outside, it looks like the pricing was not just a loss leader on the devices, but a way to discourage competition.

How did Amazon’s e-book pricing affect authors?

One way that 25 percent of net became the standard royalty for e-books was because publishers said, “We all know they can’t go on selling e-books at a loss forever and sooner or later this pricing structure has got to change.” They told authors they couldn’t agree to a different royalty because everyone knew that Amazon wouldn’t be paying them $14 to $15 per title indefinitely.

You’re implying that Amazon planned eventually to use the consumer’s habituation to $9.99 books to force publishers to charge Amazon lower wholesale prices for books. They’ve tried to do that recently with some small presses, removing their titles from Amazon unless the presses agree to sell their books at rock-bottom wholesale prices. And publishers would have no choice but to agree because every other competitor would also have been driven out of the market by Amazon’s predatory pricing?

Certainly, that’s what publishers assumed.

The other thing Amazon could have done once they had the market to themselves — and this is virtually inevitable — is that they would have raised prices to consumers.

That’s part of the less-known history behind anti-trust laws. Once a large company has spent its capital to fund predatory pricing and drive its competitors out of business, there’s no reason to keep selling for cheap. The low prices don’t last.

Right. Look, if what they’re into is maximizing profits, then if they were to have a monopoly there’d be no rationale not to use the monopoly power to increase prices to consumers. Now, if I were on the other side, working for Amazon, I’d say “Show me where I’ve done that.”

Presumably, they haven’t done it yet because they haven’t achieved the monopoly yet. Historically, that’s what monopolies always do.

Correct. That is historically what monopolies do. There is plenty of precedent for that. It’s only rational to fear what they’re going to do with this accumulation of power.

Again, the concern from the author’s perspective is that e-books are putting a tremendous downward pressure on the price of books in general. That’s putting tremendous pressure on publishers to survive. And I think a world in which online book selling is driving bookstores out of existence is a pity.

How did Amazon respond to the entrance of Apple and the agency pricing system?

Apple offered to sell books on the iPad using the agency model — which is what they use for iTunes — and the publishers one by one agreed to that. Then they told Amazon they were going to follow this new model, and that they were going to produce the e-books themselves rather than Amazon doing so.

When the first publisher, John Sargent [of Macmillan], told them that, Amazon responded by removing the buy buttons not just from all of Macmillan Publishing’s e-books — about which you can say, yeah, there’s a legitimate dispute — but from their print books, too. Paper, physical books! It was another demonstration of their ability to abuse their market power.

They used their market power over an item where pricing was not in dispute to punish a publisher for taking what Amazon regards as an unfavorable position in a different market.

Why should where their books are bought make a difference to authors?

New authors traditionally are nurtured by bookstore personnel, especially in independent bookstores. These people literally hand sell books to their customers, by saying, “I’ve read this. I think you’re going to love it.” Not to mention the fact that a bookstore is a small cultural center in a community. That’s definitely a loss.

Again, my concern is for the sake of literary diversity. If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It’s not that people won’t burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline — but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease.

When that decreases, the diversity of the literary culture decreases. The store of new ideas and the richness of the discussion all decreases.

Further reading

Scott Turow’s letter to the Authors Guild membership

The Wall Street Journal on the Justice Department’s threat to sue Apple and five book publishers for price fixing

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia” and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.

The Apostate: A New Yorker Exposé Of The Church Of Scientology


The Apostate
Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology.
by Lawrence Wright February 14, 2011

On August 19, 2009, Tommy Davis, the chief spokesperson for the Church of Scientology International, received a letter from the film director and screenwriter Paul Haggis. “For ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego,” Haggis wrote. Before the 2008 elections, a staff member at Scientology’s San Diego church had signed its name to an online petition supporting Proposition 8, which asserted that the State of California should sanction marriage only “between a man and a woman.” The proposition passed. As Haggis saw it, the San Diego church’s “public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California—rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state—is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us.” Haggis wrote, “Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.” He concluded, “I hereby resign my membership in the Church of Scientology.”
Haggis was prominent in both Scientology and Hollywood, two communities that often converge. Although he is less famous than certain other Scientologists, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, he had been in the organization for nearly thirty-five years. Haggis wrote the screenplay for “Million Dollar Baby,”. . . Click here to read more[

[The New Yorker article is huge;  if you want a "Cliff's Notes" version, try this "What You Need to Know" article. -- LR]

Borders Closes 5 Chicago Stores

[As someone whose livelihood was put in jeopardy by the "bookstore wars," the battle between the big box bookstores that hit Chicago in the early 80's, I have reason to cast a jaundiced eye at the bankruptcy of Borders.  Those of us who speculated about the challenge of the superstores at that time had a greater respect for Borders than for Barnes & Noble.  There was a reason for that.  Borders started as an independent.  They were renowned for their wide selection of books.  We also hated their methods as they began to expand: sort of a franchise operation, all claiming to be independent of each other, so that Borders the original could claim a distributor's discount to their franchised stores.  When Barnes & Noble decided to go into the superstore business (it is amusing that their official history claims they invented the superstore), they did so with such a capital investment, such a rush, that Borders was left far behind despite their head start.

In Chicago, they claimed control of the market first with their flagship store on Michigan Avenue.  While Barnes & Noble pursued a suburban strategy, they surrendered Chicago dominance to their competitor.  For a time Barnes & Noble sought space on Michigan Avenue, in Streeterville, in the plagued development of Block 37, ultimately to settle for a college store in conjunction with DePaul on State Street.  They pursued a college store strategy securing the locations at Loyola, Northwestern and University of Chicago before the downtown DePaul store.  And as the two behemoths slugged it out, they both foundered, like heavyweights too topheavy to make it through 15 rounds, exhausted in the battle.  In August, 2010 Barnes & Noble put itself up for sale and languished for lack of a buyer.  Various rumors surfaced that the two chains would merge, that Barnes & Noble would go into chapter 11 along with Borders, rumors that are still out there.  A bankruptcy index last week speculated that, despite strong holiday sales the look for Barnes & Noble is not great.  Others speculate that the closing of 30% of Borders stores will aid Amazon and Barnes & Noble.    Looking at the statistics, while Borders has over 600 stores (before the closings), Barnes & Noble has more than 1300 (if you include both the college and retail divisions).  Should Chapter 11 hit Barnes & Noble, the shock wave of closings would be extraordinary.

There will be 6,000 unemployed Borders workers on the streets as their stores close. That is something none of us should gloat over, regardless of our personal experience with the chain bookstores.  Something similar could happen with Barnes & Noble.   It's true that in the past 10 years the chains have become worse than ever.  Walking into a Barnes & Noble is like walking into a tomb for books, despite the  number of book cases.  Amazon, the "Kindle" and on-line bookselling has something to do with it: the underlying story is the electronicization, the digitization of the industry which makes a bricks and mortar strategy incomprehensible on the scale of the superstores. The other question that anyone ought to consider:  after years of an economic battle which decimated the independent book industry, the loss of 30% of the chain stores will leave a "bricks and mortar" void that takes a strategic view to overcome.  -- Lew Rosenbaum]

From WGNTV.com:

Borders Group Inc filed for bankruptcy protection and said it would close about one-third of its bookstores, including about half of its Chicago area stores. 

According to Chicago Breaking Business, “five of eight stores in Chicago will close, including the one at North Avenue and Halsted Street, as well as those in Lincoln Park, Uptown, Lincoln Village and Beverly. The Hyde Park store is in the process of closing and will shut its doors on March 7. This means the only Borders superstore left in the city will be in the Loop.

Borders stores in Evanston, Mount Prospect, Deerfield, Bolingbrook, St. Charles, Crystal Lake, McHenry, DeKalb and Matteson are also slated for closure. Outside of Illinois, locations in Merrillville, Ind., and Fox Point, Wis., will be closing.”

All 200 closings will be superstores, and about 6,000 jobs will be affected, the company said. It has the option of closing up to 275 in all, according to court documents. It said the stores it wants to close lose a combined $2 million a week. The closings will start by Saturday. The company said it will honor gift cards.

From WBBM news:  The following Borders Bookstores will be closing:

• 2817 N. Clark St., Chicago
• 755 W. North Ave., Chicago
• 4718 N. Broadway, Chicago
• 2210 W. 95th St., Chicago
• 6103 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago
• 1700 Maple Ave., Evanston
• 7100 W. Forest Preserve Dr., Norridge
• 909 N. Elmhurst Rd., Mount Prospect
• 4824 W. 211th St., Matteson
• 49 S. Waukegan Rd. , Deerfield
• 3539 E. Main St., St. Charles
• 161 N. Webber Rd., Bolingbroook
• 221 Richmond Rd., McHenry
• 600 Northwest Highway, Crystal Lake
• 2704 Southlake Mall, Merrillville, Ind.

Meet Egypt’s New Leaders — Esam Al-Amin in Counterpunch

From Stalemate to Checkmate

Meet Egypt’s Future Leaders

By ESAM AL-AMIN published Feb. 9, 2011 in Counterpunch

O Youth, today is your day so shout
No more slumber or deep sleep
This is your time and your place
Bestow on us your talents and efforts
We want Egypt’s youth to hold fast
As they resist the aggressor and outsider

Egyptian Poet Ibrahim Nagi (1898-1953)

On June 6, 2010, soft-spoken businessman Khaled Said, 28, had his dinner before retreating to his room and embarking on his daily routine of surfing the Internet, blogging, and chatting with his friends on different social websites. Several days earlier, he had posted a seven-minute online video of Alexandria police officers dividing up confiscated drugs among themselves.

When his Internet service suddenly was disrupted that evening, he left his middle class apartment in the coastal city of Alexandria and headed to his neighborhood Internet café. As he resumed blogging, two plain-clothes secret police officers demanded that he be searched. When he inquired as to why or on whose authority, they scoffed at him while blurting out: emergency law. He refused to be touched and demanded to see a uniformed officer or be taken to a police station.

According to eyewitnesses, within minutes they dragged him to a nearby vacant building and began to severely beat up his tiny body, eventually smashing his head on a marble tabletop. His body was subsequently dumped in the street to be retrieved later by an ambulance that declared him dead. According to his mother, Leila Marzouq, his body was totally bruised, teeth broken, and skull fractured.  Click here to read the entire article.

Uncle Sam’s House of Horrors: Richard Neville in Counterpunch

[This story is bad enough.  Click this link to see the film, on line in its entirety.  In the aftermath of the Vietnam war, Phillip Knightley reviewed the history of modern war and concluded that truth was The First Casualty, also the title of his classic book. ]

January 5, 2011 Counterpunch

Smashing Plato’s Cave

Unlocking Uncle Sam’s House of Horrors

By RICHARD NEVILLE

The secrecy-busting by Wiki-leakers may take years to play out in the corridors of power, but there are signs on the ground that citizens are finally rubbing the sleep from their eyes. It’s an Aha moment: “They’ve been lying to us all this time”. And so they have; law-breaking with impunity, instigating  wars, abetting torture, renditions, secret jails; destroying documents, conspiring to steal DNA from diplomats, slaughtering civilians on several continents, plus much else besides and … weirdly… getting away with it. For how much longer?

Citizens today resemble the chained prisoners in Plato’s cave, mesmerized by the shadowy flickering on the wall, or on our TVs, which we mistake for reality. The images are illusions.  In Plato’s famous parable, a prisoner escapes from the cave and discovers the ‘real

Plato's Cave

world’ in all its heartbreak and glory, which he seeks to reveal to the inmates. The revelation is unwanted and the escapee is branded a lunatic.

This tale can be viewed from today’s perspective, where prisoners of the US military are shackled night and day, brutally beaten, tortured, humiliated, even “disappeared” until they lose all hope of re-entering  a world they once knew. Many prisoners are innocent, and – according to numerous accounts – many of the guards are psychopaths.

In October 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan, an ill educated Australian searching for adventure, David Hicks, tried to flee. Previously he had enlisted in the Kosovo Liberation Army, then fighting against the Serbs in the Balkans, and allied with NATO. Hicks saw no action. A confused and uneducated but idealistic young man, he later sought to fight on the side of the Kashmiri people but changed his mind.  He had been briefly fascinated by Islam. Hicks was picked up by a Northern Alliance soldier and sold to US operatives for US$5000. As he states in his memoir, Guantanamo, My Journey, the brutal beatings began on day one in Afghanistan and he feared for his life. Like many others traded for cash, he is hooded, shackled, interrogated at gun point, repeatedly kicked, punched in the face, treated to mock executions and sodomized with a “large piece of white plastic” as a US soldier snarls “extra ribbed for your pleasure”.  The sadism is breathtaking – and this is just the beginning.

Hicks was among the first batch detainees to arrive at Guantanamo. Plonked on a lump of cement in a barbed wire cage, he is forbidden to look at his jailers . The only authorized positions are to sit or lie in the middle of the cage staring at a fixed spot in the sky or the concrete. The slightest variation provoked an attack from the Instant Reaction Force, who beat offenders to pulp, often accompanied by dogs.

Everything about Guantanamo is shameful and sick – including the inability of President Obama to wipe it from the face of the Earth. The observations of Hicks on his six years of cruel and unusual punishment are corroborated by numerous sources. Not a single soldier has been held to account, not even the ones who murdered three prisoners by stuffing rags down their throats.

Hicks strongly denies that he had any involvement with al-Qaeda and of course he would, and says he had not even heard of the organization until he was taken to Cuba. However, at a camp in in Afghanistan, he had met Osama Bin Laden which of course begs the question of what sort of camp it was and this understandably excited U.S intelligence. However, does this justify the repugnant behavior that has come to light at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere? Think seriously about this, and if the answer is yes, then we are not who we claim to be.

When Major General Geoffrey Miller arrived at the facility, torments multiplied. “We were no longer entitled to toilet paper”, writes Hicks, “We were not allowed soap to wash our hands, yet still expected to eat with our fingers”. Inmates suffered prolonged solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, forced medication, forced nudity, pepper sprays, exposure to severe cold and “torture of a sexual nature”. It was Miller who introduced attack dogs, and when he was transferred to Abhu Ghraib, he again put them to work. Among the unforgettable series of porno tableaus created by the prison’s night shift, Miller’s dogs can be seen menacing inmates. (At his retirement ceremony in the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes in 2006, Miller was honoured by the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, Gen. Richard Cody.)

After 9/11, Neo McCarthyism took hold, traumatizing the media mainstream and reducing its reporters to war mongering hacks.  In rare moments, when excesses of the US military spilled onto the TV news, such the massacre of children in Afghanistan or the shooting of journalists in Baghdad, an “expert” was corralled to provide “context”.

Thanks to Wikileaks, a range of NGOs, independent  film makers, investigative web sites and a handful of defiantly un-embedded reporters, there is a shift in the wind. In John Pilger’s latest film, The War You Don’t See, you do surprisingly see a range of media heavies apologizing for biased reporting. “I didn’t really do my job properly,” BBC reporter Rageh Omaar admits to Pilger. “I’d hold my hand up and say that one didn’t press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough.” Omaar describes how British military propaganda successfully manipulated coverage of the fall of Basra, which BBC News reported as having fallen “17 times”. This coverage, he says, was “a giant echo chamber”.

Veteran CBS news anchor Dan Rather tells Pilger “there was a fear in every newsroom in America, a fear of losing your job… the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise.” Rather said the war turned reporters into stenographers and that had “journalists questioned the deceptions that led to the Iraq war, instead of amplifying them, the invasion would not have happened”.  This view is reportedly shared by a number of senior journalists interviewed by Pilger.

Australia’s media fell head first into the propaganda trap, excited by Shock and Awe and hosting discussions with Pentagon experts, who claimed precision bombing in Baghdad would reduce civilian casualties.  The crushing of Falluja and other atrocities were scarcely mentioned.

John Pilger, whose film "The War You Don't See" indicts the media for not portraying the real war.

The War You Don’t See was screened in Britain in late December and quickly migrated to YouTube <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7wXhN5h_Pg> and beyond. The response is astonishing. Scales are falling from the eyes of a new generation: I’m speechless, brokenhearted, and appalled at our own complicity… 90% Civilian deaths! …I could have watched another 3 hours more and still want more. … Awesome video, thank you all so much…!! Unfortunately, to stop all this, we have to re-think our entire concept of society, authority and personal responsibility and ability… And so on and so on.

Even those close to the US military have been jolted into re-assessing their mission, as in this confession by Tim King from Oregon’s Salem-News. “On the verge of understanding my own role in promoting the US wars overseas as a former embedded reporter, John Pilger’s new program shoved me right off of the cliff of ignorance, into a painful valley of understanding. I always thought I had a moral ‘out’ because even though I was a Marine, the only thing I ever shot in a war was my television camera. But as it turns out, when I confront this demon; I discover quite clearly that however small in comparison to some reporters, I was part of the problem.

In this age of terror it is time to focus on homegrown terrorists who pose as saviors; the gutless assassins of the CIA and its secret affiliates, flinging Drones at impoverished tribes, killing the good and the bad and the babies, just like in Vietnam.

As noted by anthropologist Maximilian Forte, the real war on terror is “in fact a global counterinsurgency program directed at all of us. We live in a regime of global occupation, where psychological warfare, assaults on human rights, and increasingly dictatorial state powers are directed against citizens, not just foreign “enemy combatants”.

In Plato’s cave the inmates are more at ease with illusions than the truth, much like today. Over the last decade millions have turned a blind eye to the stinking system of deception, torture and wholesale slaughter that has infected the West. Indifferent to treaties, conventions and the rules of war, the US government is a blot on the landscape of the future, a sleazy exterminator who never sleeps, addicted to war; unmoved by the carnage it creates.

The US Government proclaim a passion for freedom, even as they seeks to eliminate the freedom of others, such as Julian Assange, for exposing the inglorious exploits of its military, as it murders bystanders with a volley from a helicopter, followed by a chuckle.

Now  raining down from cyber space are revelations on what’s really been happening, as opposed the fairy tales told on TV. They provide a window of information. So what are we going to do about it?

Richard Neville lives in Australia, the land that formed him. In the Sixties he raised hell in London and published Oz. He can be reached at rneville@ozemail.com.au

The Internet and Industry: New Book Describes the History of the Communications Industry

[The historical development of the communications industry is presented here in a review by David Leonhardt.  What seems especially valuable is the author's recognition of the interplay of government and industry, the privatization of all things communicable. The author concludes by saying: "The Internet, to take one example, may now be the world’s communications network. But it started as a Defense Department project. As “The Master Switch” artfully shows, the government often has a role that no company will play on its own."   - Lew Rosenbaum]

 

From Hobby to Industry

By DAVID LEONHARDT

Published: December 10, 2010

Shortly after the United States developed the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer realized the country would need a new kind of weapons laboratory. This lab would maintain and improve the military’s arsenal rather than create new weapons. It would be called Sandia National Laboratories and placed not far from Los Alamos.

Enlarge This Image

Illustration by Harry Campbell  THE MASTER SWITCH

The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

By Tim Wu
366 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95

Initially, the University of California ran the lab, but President Truman soon decided to transfer its operation to the entity he thought could best run it during the nascent cold war: AT&T. “In my opinion,” Truman wrote to an AT&T subsidiary in 1949, “you have here an opportunity to render an exceptional service in the national interest.” AT&T ended up running Sandia until the early 1990s.

It was one of the more extraordinary instances of Ma Bell’s involvement with Uncle Sam. The company owed its very existence to a favorable federal patent ruling in 1878, which saved it from an early death at the hands of Western Union, the dominant telegraph company then trying to crush its new rival. A little more than a century later, Washington broke up AT&T. But regulators soon allowed many of the company’s parts to merge back together. This consolidation, Tim Wu argues in “The Master Switch,” probably allowed the Bush administration to conduct its wiretapping program in secret for so long.

AT&T is the star of Wu’s book, an intellectually ambitious history of modern communications. The organizing principle — only rarely overdrawn — is what Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, calls “the cycle.” “History shows a typical progression of information technologies,” he writes, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew.

The story covers the history of phones, radio, television, movies and, finally, the Internet. All of these businesses are susceptible to the cycle because all depend on networks, whether they’re composed of cables in the ground or movie theaters around the country. Once a company starts building such a network or gaining control over one, it begins slouching toward monopoly. If the government is not already deeply involved in the business by then (and it usually is), it soon will be.

Wu argues that it has little choice.  [Read more by clicking here]

Teaching for Social Justice Curriculum Fair Saturday Nov. 20

Register  on line for the TSJ 10th annual curriculum fair at this URL — complete opening keynote/plenary, workshops, resource tables and curriculum exhibits program is now listed on line.

 

10th Annual Teaching for Social Justice Curriculum Fair!

 

(En Español)
We are very excited that this November 20, 2010 will be the 10th Annual Teaching for Social Justice Curriculum Fair,  co-sponsored by Rethinking Schools. This year’s theme is “Another Education is Possible, Another World is Necessary!”

In “science fair” format, and completely grassroots volunteer-organized, the Curriculum Fair will provide over 600 educators, activists, parents, youth & community members with a space to share curricula, resources, and inspiration. We’ll be making friends & building relationships, exploring ideas & projects, connecting our histories & struggles. All in a spirit of social justice and education for liberation.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2010
10:00AM – 5:00PM

Doors open at 9:30am

Orozco School

1940 W. 18TH Street (map & directions)

Chicago, IL

R.I.P.: Four Giants Laid to Rest. Their Contributions Are Our Legacy

From The Guardian comes this report.  [That he was an "uncompromised and uncompromising communist" is not the only reason I appreciated Saramago's work.  The inventiveness of his form always advanced the complexity of his content.  For myself, the sadness that I can not look forward to a new Saramago novel is tempered only by the gratitude for the many I have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy -- Lew Rosenbaum]:

José Saramago obituary

Saramago at his home in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain. Photograph: Martinez De Cripan/EPA

Nobel prize-winning author whose popular works addressed heavyweight themes

• Amanda Hopkinson
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 June 2010 17.28 BST

José Saramago, who has died aged 87, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1998 and was Portugal‘s most prolific and best-known 20th-century writer. More widely read in Europe and Australia than in North America, and with print runs of 150,000 in Portugal and Brazil, these supposedly difficult and unarguably heavyweight works, on ponderous themes, have become major sellers.

Saramago once said that: “If I had died when I was 60, I would have written nothing.” While this effectively glosses over his first major success in fiction (with the novel Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia – A Manual of Painting and Calligraphy – in 1977) and a number of volumes of poetry, plays and essays, there was little in Saramago’s background, or even his early career, to suggest a flowering of success at the age when many are contemplating retirement.

He was born into a humble rural household in the small village of Azinhaga. The family moved to Lisbon when he was two, and Saramago left school early to contribute to the household bills by working as a mechanic. Gradually, he progressed through numerous jobs towards his central literary interest. He worked as a draughtsman, publisher’s reader and freelance translator, and in the editorial and production departments of a publishing house. He also worked on several newspapers, including a stint as a literary reviewer for Serra Nova and, after the death of the dictator António Salazar in 1970, as political commentator on the Diário de Lisboa.

Political wranglings, and Saramago’s own uncompromised and uncompromising communism, were at least partly responsible for his being fired in 1975. The following year, he devoted himself exclusively to his books. “Being fired was the best luck of my life,” he said. “It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.”

He had, of course, been writing since his youth, but literature had seemed a pretentious option for a child from an illiterate background.  Click here to read the rest of this story.

More links on Saramago:

• José Saramago: a life in writing
• 2006: Saramago’s first interview with an English newspaper
• Maya Jaggi: José Saramago, master of what-ifs

Related

21 Jun 2010 José Saramago, master of what-ifs | Maya Jaggi

25 Apr 2008 Blindness set for first sight at Cannes

16 Feb 2008 Review: Death at Intervals by José Saramago

15 Mar 2007 Craig joins Moore on Meirelles’ Blindness

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From the Associated Press:

’60s anti-war rocker Tuli Kupferberg dies in NYC

By FRANK ELTMAN (AP) – 2 days ago

Tuli Kupferberg, a founding member of the underground rock group and staple of 1960s anti-war protests, the Fugs, has

FILE - In this July 16, 2003 file photo, 1960s anti-war rocker Tuli Kupferberg is seen in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York. A founding member of one of the first underground rock groups, the Fugs, Kupferberg, died Monday, July 12, 2010, in a Manhattan hospital at 86. (AP Photo/Stephen Chernin, File)

died.

Kupferberg, who had suffered strokes in the past year, died Monday in a Manhattan hospital, said his friend and bandmate Ed Sanders. He was 86.

“I think he will be remembered as a unique American songwriter,” Sanders told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home in Woodstock, N.Y. “Tuli had an uncanny ability to shape nuanced lyrics.”

Sanders, who is writing a new memoir about the Fugs, said he visited his friend in the hospital on Thursday. Although Kupferberg was clearly ailing, he leaned into his ear and sang him the lyrics to a Fugs classic, “Morning, Morning,” Sanders said.

“And then I said, `goodbye,’” he said.

Kupferberg’s contributions were recognized in January when Lou Reed, Sonic Youth and others appeared at a benefit concert in Brooklyn to help pay for some of his medical expenses. He was too ill by then to attend the show, but recorded a 10-second video message, according to the New York Times, thanking the audience.

“Now go out there and have some fun,” he said. “It may be later than you think.”  Click here to read more.

Click here to read the New York Times article on Kupferberg.

_________________________________________________________

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports:

Harvey Pekar, Cleveland comic-book legend, dies at age 70

Published: Monday, July 12, 2010, 11:05 AM     Updated: Tuesday, July 13, 2010, 11:44 AM

Joanna Connors, The Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio — Harvey Pekar’s life was not an open book. It was an open comic book.

Lonnie Timmons III, The Plain DealerCleveland comics legend Harvey Pekar was found dead shortly before 1 a.m. today. He was 70.

Pekar chronicled his life and times in the acclaimed autobiographical comic book series, “American Splendor,” portraying himself as a rumpled, depressed, obsessive-compulsive “flunky file clerk” engaged in a constant battle with loneliness and anxiety.

Pekar, 70, was found dead shortly before 1 a.m. Monday by his wife, Joyce Brabner, in their Cleveland Heights home, said Powell Caesar, spokesman for Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller. An autopsy will be conducted to determine the cause of death.

Pekar and Brabner wrote “Our Cancer Year,” a book-length comic, after Pekar was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1990 and underwent a grueling treatment. He was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, and also suffered high blood pressure, asthma and clinical depression, which fueled his art but often made his life painful.

“American Splendor” carried the subtitle, “From Off the Streets of Cleveland,” and just like Superman, the other comic-book hero born in Cleveland, Pekar wore something of a disguise. He never stepped into a phone booth to change, but underneath his persona of aggravated, disaffected file clerk, he was an erudite book and jazz critic, and a writer of short stories that many observers compared to Chekhov, despite their comic-book form.  Click here to read the entire story.

Harvey Pekar Links

• The Pekar Project
• The Harvey Heads: A tribute
• “American Splendor”: The Movie
• Friends remember Pekar: Entertainment Weekly
• Pekar’s last interview, with blogtalkradio.com

Previous Plain Dealer coverage

• Harvey Pekar’s jazz opera to be performed this month in Oberlin
• Cleveland comics legend Harvey Pekar toasted with 70th birthday `Harvey Heads’ collection
• Opera splendor, as Harvey Pekar views it

______________________________________________________________________________

The Guardian reports:

Carlos Monsiváis obituary

Popular Mexican writer admired for holding his country’s political elite to account

Mexican writer, critic and essayist Carlos Monsiváis was frequently interviewed for his wit and near-encyclopedic knowledge, often while at home surrounded by clutter and cats. Photograph: Saul Lopez/EPA

• Jo Tuckman
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 June 2010 19.04 BST

The writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, who has died at the age of 72, made Mexico understandable to Mexicans – or at least helped them laugh about it. He was admired for the intelligence and the intricate ironies of his prose, recognised for his principled support of leftwing causes, and famed for his crumpled appearance and adoration of cats. It is a measure of how popular he was that even the favoured targets of his acerbic wit rushed to include themselves among his admirers upon news of his death. Felipe Calderón, the country’s rightwing president, announced: “We Mexicans will miss his critical, reflective and independent vision.”

Born in Mexico City just nine years into the 71-year-long rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Monsiváis belonged to a generation of writers that includes Carlos Fuentes and José Emilio Pacheco. He was less well known than them internationally, but arguably even more revered at home. Part of his appeal was the ease with which he entwined highbrow references with frankness, sincerity and a fascination with popular culture. His rejection of airs and graces endeared him further to an audience far wider than the one usually enamoured of the intelligentsia.  Click hear to read the entire story.

May 23 Automation and Robotics News from Tony Zaragoza

Automation and Robotics News–May 23, 2010

Highlights: Teleprescence robots, Marketing automation, Robot marries couple, Automation industry growth, arguments for and against robots taking jobs, robot kindergarten teachers, US, European and Japanese space robots, more on X37B, ONION: Robot March on Washington, DARPA’s “Minority Report” Fantasies, DNA robot, and a FREE BOOK DOWNLOAD.

Click the Archives for links to articles below: http://academic.evergreen.edu/z/zaragozt/arnews.htm

CNET

• DNA robots spin gold in molecular factory

Tim Hornyak Fri May 14 2010

Scientists have developed microscopic bots composed of DNA that can follow instructions and work together like an assembly line.

• The telepresence robots are coming

Daniel Terdiman, Tue May 18 2010

A $15,000 robot from Anybots called QB is designed to help companies with remote offices save on communications costs.

GOOGLE

• Human error hounded poll automation

BusinessWorld Online – 5/16/10

“Automation was never really autonomous from human participation… That’s [human participation] where the errors are cropping up.

• Comelec proves critics wrong

By RAYMUND F. ANTONIO

May 11, 2010, 7:51pm

They were criticized, they were under extreme pressure, and they were almost ostracized. But in the end, the Commission on Elections (Comelec), its officials and staff had the last laugh. Doomsayers and critics were silent – at least for now – as their worst predictions that there would be massive cheating and failure of elections in the May 10 polls did not come to pass.

• Ind. seeks OK to double size of hybrid area

The Associated Press - Ken Kusmer - May 11, 2010

INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana’s human services agency hopes to receive federal approval soon to roughly double the size of the area where it is adding welfare workers to fix problems with its privatized, automated intake system, a spokesman said Tuesday. The Family and Social Services Administration wants to add 11 western and southern counties to what it calls its “hybrid” solution of using more face-to-face contact to complement the call centers, document imaging and other automation that many welfare clients have had problems with.What Is Marketing Automation, and Why Does It Matter to You?

• MarketingProfs.com (subscription) - Jep Castelein - May 11, 2010

Recently, a new type of online marketing system, marketing automation, has become popular. What is it, how does it work, and should you adopt it?

• Robot Pharmacists Are Picking Your Medications—Literally

Singularity Hub (blog) - Christopher de la Torre - May 9, 2010

Dispensing medicine is about to get more efficient. New Jersey’s Holy Name Hospital is using robot pharmacists to package, store and dispense medications, while an automated system at an Ohio children’s hospital is preparing I.V. drugs for patients. Automation in medicine is reducing human error and cutting costs, and because these robots can handle pills in a fraction of the time it takes humans, we should be noticing a lot more of them around real soon. Be sure to check out one of these robo-pharmacists in the video below. Robot pharmacists are doing what humans can do, and better—at least when it comes to sorting medication. Augmenting human abilities and performing critical daily functions are nothing new for robots—in fact, that’s usually what artificial intelligence is built to do, and it’s how automation is gaining ground in medicine. General Electric has developed software that can track patients’ history and suggest treatments in real time. Intuitive Surgical’s DaVinci robot regularly performs prostate removals and hysterectomies, albeit under the guidance of human hands. Meanwhile, doctors can now monitor their patients’ hearts and review exam results with smart phones, and recently we told you about how a California medical center ordered 100 iPads to keep its personnel current. All of these technologies are aimed at  increasing efficiency and reducing mistakes. Robot pill-pickers can’t claim the sleekest of designs—some look like computers before IBM invented desktops—but they do get the job done.

• Bringing Automation to Solar Manufacturing

IndustryWeek - May 11, 2010

While the significance of robot automation in the manufacturing of solar cells is obvious, determining which fits a specific process may not. The U.S. has set 2015 as a goal to reach grid parity, which means the point in which solar electricity is equal to grid electricity. Many other nations predict reaching it as soon as 2010. But no matter what your thoughts on regulatory involvement, it is clear there will be a resurgence in investment, development and innovation within the photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing community throughout the world—and it will largely be driven by technology. Finding the most effective tools and processes is paramount. While the significance of robot automation in the manufacturing of solar cells is obvious, determining which fits a specific process may not.  Robotic Automation’s Impact Robots in the photovoltaic manufacturing process are important due to their ability to significantly reduce costs while continuing to increase their attractiveness compared to manual labor. Richard Swanson, CTO of SunPower, a large-scale manufacturer of solar technology, described automation’s impact through the prism of economies of PV manufacturing in terms of labor.

• Tokyo couple married by robot

BBC News - 5/16/10

The couple decided to use the robot as they are both connected with Japan’s thriving robotics industry. Since robots had brought them together in the first …

• ‘Phantom Ray’ robot stealth jet rolls out

Register - Lewis Page - May 11, 2010

US arms’n'aerospace goliath Boeing yesterday held a public unveiling of its “Phantom Ray” jet-fighter sized robot …

• Robots bring telepresence to stay-at-home workers

Times Online - May 11, 2010

Mr Goecker does not need to be there in person – he lives thousands of miles away in Indiana – because his robot is there every day, acting as his eyes,

• Robot With Laser to Zap Weeds Automatically in Chemical Free Control of Pesky …

Before It’s News - Alton Parrish - May 9, 2010

No more chemicals for fighting weeds in professional gardening! A fully automated unit drives over a field, a camera recognizes weeds sprouting up and a laser beam takes care of the rest. This science-fiction scenario is actually being researched at the Zentrum Hannover eV (LZH) and the Institute for Biological Production Systems (IBPS) at the Leibniz University Hannover.

• Automation will return to double-digit growth in 2010

Drives & Controls - May 19, 2010

Sales of industrial automation equipment during the first quarter of 2010 probably grew by 25% more than a year before, according to a new analysis by IMS Research. It expects an equally strong second quarter – buoyed by robust order books resulting from restocking and new orders – and predicts that even a flat second half of the year will result in close to double-digit revenue growth for most product areas. According to a new type of assessment by IMS – looking for the first time at the entire global market for industrial automation  equipment, including motors – revenues dropped by around 14.3% last year to $74.9bn, from $87.4bn in 2008 (with market shares of the leading players shown below).

• Computers To Take Human Jobs, Shutdown Global Economy? Get Ford’s Book Free

Singularity Hub (blog) - Aaron Saenz - May 21, 2010

I got my copy of The Lights In The Tunnel for free, and now you can too. Martin Ford’s recent book discusses the growing capability of artificial intelligence and robotics to replace workers at all salary levels and what a sharp rise in automation may mean for the global economy. Ford believes that without drastic adjustments to the way the market is structured, automation could bring the whole system crumbling down. In the interest of boosting sales and spreading the message, The Lights In The Tunnel is now being offered free for download as a PDF via its website. As I mentioned upon reviewing the book this past winter, I don’t agree with Ford’s conclusions, but I do think he is one of the few authors spending time exploring the long term and potentially extreme consequences of what automation could mean. That’s important.

• Robot subs deployed in search for oil under gulf’s surface

MiamiHerald.com - Sara Kennedy - May 18, 2010

Scientists at Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium on Monday were in the process of launching the first of three torpedo-shaped robots equipped to hunt for oil underwater in the Gulf of Mexico. The robots, measuring about six feet long and with little wings, have in the past been used to search for red tide, but now will be hunting for oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, according to Gary Kirkpatrick, a Mote senior scientist.

• Robot Teachers Introduced In South Korean Kindergartens

NTDTV - May 20, 2010

Lucky students at 50 kindergartens in South Korea have the opportunity to test out the latest educational aid – robot teachers. Known as the “R-learning”

• Ingestible Surgical Robots—Hard To Swallow Concept?

Singularity Hub (blog) - Christopher de la Torre - May 20, 2010

Medical robots are advancing at phenomenal speed, and within years micro-sized robots could be assisting surgeons with operations from inside their patients. Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna’s CRIM Lab in Italy has developed a robot called ARES (Assembling Reconfigurable Endoluminal Surgical System) that will be assembled inside the human body. This modular design is leading the way for a new breed of device that may one day take the place of our most trusted surgeons’ hands. ARES may only be a concept at present, but the project represents amazing new possibilities in the field of robotic surgery.

• Efforts to Field New Kinds of Ground Robots Have Had Little Success

National Defense Magazine - Stew Magnuson - May 17, 2010

The life-saving qualities of ground robots have been touted since explosive ordnance disposal teams began widely using them at the outset of the Iraq invasion in 2003. But since then, other applications for the potentially life-saving technology have not reached Iraq or Afghanistan. Their predicted influx into the battlefield has stalled. That’s not to say that research into myriad applications hasn’t continued. But so far, the experiments have not made the transition to the current fights. Acceptability on the part of senior military leaders is one of the major roadblocks, officials said at the National Defense Industrial Association ground robotics conference in Miami.

• Europe Sends Huge New Robot Space Freighter to Launch Site

Space.com - May 17, 2010

Europe’s second robotic space cargo vessel is headed for its South American launch site in preparation for a delivery mission to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year. The Automated Transfer Vehicle 2, or ATV-2, a cargo ship built by the European Space Agency (ESA), is slated to launch toward the station in December. ESA has named the new spacecraft after German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler. The first in the disposable robotic cargo ship fleet was named Jules Verne. It flew a successful debut flight in 2008 and destroyed itself intentionally at the end of its mission.

• Japanese space yacht Ikaros launches on Venus mission

Daily Mail - Claire Bates - May 21, 2010

The space agency has proposed that the Japanese government send a wheeled robot to the moon in five years and build the world’s first lunar base by 2020.

• Is it dangerous to let unmanned drones fight our wars for us? – P.W. Singer …

Slate Magazine - P.W. Singer - May 19, 2010

As I sat there trying to piece it all together, it felt like I, Robot (the Isaac Asimov novel, not the crummy Will Smith movie) had come true.

• Singer Versus Smith on “Robot Rights” and Human Exceptionalism

First Things (blog) - May 18, 2010

Back in December, Peter Singer and Agata Sagan wrote a piece in the Guardian arguing on behalf of robot rights.  I took exception here as SHS, my headline being, “Robots Will Never be People and Should Never Have Rights.” Singer and Sagan have now taken exception to my exception in the humanist magazine, Free Inquiry (no link), with “No Rights for Robots? Never?” (June/July 2010).

• Robot military shuttle X37B- More questions than answers

DigitalJournal.com - Paul Wallis – 5/23/2010

While the furor has raged around the scrapping of the space shuttles, the military shuttle X37B has been percolating in the background. It looks like a shuttle, but smaller. It’s a very functional design, too. Some amateur space watchers spotted the highly unpublicized X 37B in its 255 mile high orbit, producing a grudging amount of semi-information. It actually took off last month, and the silence on its mission and uses has been thunderous. The information about X37B available so far indicates the thing has an endurance of up to nine months. That’s huge, by spacecraft standards which have measured flights in no more than weeks in the past. X37B also has its own slightly coy Wiki. For a spacecraft described as an orbiter, it has a lot of grunt, even in theory. It can carry “a payload”, which is sort of in the “Duhhh…” range as information, but it’s also configured like the shuttle payload bay.

• Robots Speak Out Against Asimov’s First Law Of Robotics

The Onion (satire) - May 17, 2010

WASHINGTON, DC—More than 200000 robots from across the US marched on Washington Monday, demanding that Congress repeal Asimov’s First Law of Robotics.

• The Army’s First Combat Robot – Operational by 2015

Defense Update - May 18, 2010

According to Lt. Colonel Jay Ferriera, Product Manager Unmanned Ground Vehicles, a key system for the ARV-A-L is the Autonomous Navigation System (ANS) being developed by General Dynamics Robotics Systems. ANS is scheduled to be ready for Integrated Qualification Testing on these robotic vehicles in 2012, anticipating initial operational capability with an airborne, air-assault or light brigade by 2014.  Featuring an integrated weapons and reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) package the ARV-A-L (designated XM1219) will support the dismounted infantry’s efforts to locate and destroy enemy platforms and positions. This robotic platform will support both anti-tank and anti-personnel weapons systems that to be remotely operated by network linked soldiers.

RIA

• AUTOMATICA, the International Trade Fair for Automation and Robotics will Open its Gates Again!

Posted: 05/12/2010

From June 8 to 11, 2010 AUTOMATICA will bring all areas of robotics and automation under one roof. The aim of the trade show is to present the entire value-added chain in robotics and automation. Only here you can meet the experts and decision makers from all around the world.

IEEE AUTOMATON BLOG

Do Robots Take People’s Jobs?

Jeanne Dietsch // Tue, May 11, 2010

Technology taking jobs is a notion that probably dates back to the invention of the wheel. After all, it took four bearers to carry the emperor and only one to pull a chariot! The problem is that most people stop thinking after the first domino falls instead of following the chain of events further on. Let’s continue the chain: Once the wheel is invented, more people can travel comfortably, goods can be carried farther, better roads are built and commerce thrives. A few bearers of the ruling class have to find new work, the remainder of the world benefits and thousands of jobs are created.

ROBOTS PODCAST NEWS FORUM

• Artificial echolocation

Markus Waibel on 21 May 2010, 08:37

In a first step, the team mounted miniature wireless microphone sensor on six Egyptian fruit bats. This allowed them to record the bats’ double-click echolocation calls, and its returning echoes, during the bats’ flight.  The team then went on to create an ultrasonic loudspeaker and electronics that accurately reproduces the bats’ clicks. Their system recreates the bats’ natural acoustic gain control which allows bats to emit high-intensity calls, while still hearing the weak echoes returning from surrounding objects.

WIRED–Danger Room

• Darpa’s Self-Learning Software Knows Who You Are

Katie Drummond, May 21, 2010

Software systems could one day analyze everything from blurry war-zone footage to the subtle sarcasm in a written paragraph, thanks to two unassuming scientists who are inspired by biology to make revolutionary strides in intelligent computing. Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus, both computer science professors at New York University, are the brains behind “Deep Learning,” a program sponsored by Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research agency. The idea, ultimately, is to develop code that can teach itself to spot objects in a picture, actions in a video, or voices in a crowd. LeCun and Fergus have $2 million and four years to make it happen. Existing software programs rely heavily on human assistance to identify objects. A user extracts key feature sets, like edge statistics (how many edges an object has, and where they are) and then feeds the data into a running algorithm, which uses the feature sets to recognize the visual input.

• Darpa Wants Code to Spot ‘Anomalous Behavior’ on the Job

Noah Shachtman, May 20, 2010

Can software catch a cyberspy’s tricky intentions, before he’s started to help the other side? The way-out researchers at Darpa think so. They’re planning a new program, “Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination” or SMITE, that’s supposed to “dynamically forecast” when a mole is about to strike. Also, the code is meant to flag “inadvertent” disclosures “by an already trusted person with access to sensitive information.” “Looking for clues” that suggest a <http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/solicit/baa/RFI-SN-10-46_PIP.pdf>turncoat or accidental leaker is about to spill (.pdf) “could potentially be easier than recognizing explicit attacks,” Darpa notes in a request for information. But even that simpler search won’t be easy. “Many attacks are combinations of directly observable and inferred events.” Which is why SMITE’s program managers are interested in techniques to figure out “the likely intent of inferred actions, and suggestions about what [that] evidence might mean.” That goes for “behaviors both malicious and non-malicious.” Step one in starting that process: Build a ginormous database to store all kinds of information on would-be threats. “The next step is to determine whether an individual or group of individuals is exhibiting anomalous behavior that is also malicious.” That’s a toughie — something anomalous in one context might be perfectly normal in another. One possible solution, the SMITE paper adds, could be detecting “deceptive” activities, which are a sign of cyberspying. Or cheating on your taxes. Or carrying on an office affair. Or playing World of Warcraft on the job. Depending on the situation.

• Pakistani Site: Drones Only Killed One Terrorist in 2010 (If You Don’t Count Taliban)

Noah Shachtman, May 18, 2010

Read one American analysis, and you’ll be told that U.S. drones haven’t killed a single civilian in Pakistan this year. A look through one pair of local eyes yields a very different result, however. According to the website Pakistan Body Count, America’s drones have only hit a single terrorist in 2010, while slaying dozens and dozens of innocents.

• Israeli Microbot Fires Pencil-Sized Rockets to Stop Bombs

Noah Shachtman, May 17, 2010

This teeny little robot is the size of a toy truck — just 50 square inches. It’d be cute, almost, if it wasn’t armed with “dozens” of eight-inch rockets. The world’s militaries have been gun-shy about letting armed robots roam around the battlefield; they’re always a danger the machines will malfunction and ruin some pesky human’s day. But Rafael, Israel’s state-owned arms-maker, is betting that its miniature Pincher robot might be allowed into warzones as a tool for neutralizing roadside bombs.

• Gitmo Shutdown Means More Drone Strikes, Officials Claim

Noah Shachtman, May 19, 2010

The White House has essentially forced the Pentagon and the CIA to fire off more and more drone strikes in Pakistan, because of “executive orders to ban secret CIA detention centers and close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.” It’s one of a number of remarkable assertions military and intelligence officials make to Reuters’ Adam Entous in this monster of an article.

• Report: Secret Space Plane Likely an Orbiting Spy

Noah Shachtman, May 14, 2010

When the U.S. Air Force launched its secret space plane last month, speculation about the X-37B’s true purpose ran wild.  Some conjectured that it might be a prototype for an orbiting bomber. Others warned of “a johnny-on-the-spot weapons platform to take out the satellite assets of an enemy.” Prominent members of the Russian military establishment screamed that Moscow needed to build up its own space arsenal, ASAP. The British press, meanwhile, made dark insinuations about “the testing of new laser weapon systems” in space. The reality is probably less exotic. In all likelihood, the space plane is another way for the American military to spy on its foes from on high. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Secure World Foundation, provided to Danger Room.

ROBOTICS TRENDS

• Work Anywhere: Robots to Replace Business Travel Telepresence goes mobile withe introduction of Anybots QB.

By Robotics Trends Staff

05.19.2010 — Anybots enters the mobile telepresence market with QB, a web accessible mobile platform that provides a physical presence for remote workers.

• Welcome to the Age of Interactive Robotics and Entertainment

By Robotics Trends Staff

05.19.2010 — What is robotic dinosaur museum installations could interact with visitors? What if the dinosaurs stalked the visitors? Visit the Field Museum in Chicago to find out. On May 26, 2010 KumoTek Robotics will launch a first of its kind interactive robotics exhibit at the historical Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. The exhibit will feature huge life-like dinosaurs manufactured by Kokoro Japan and integrated with the latest in interactive robotics technology from KumoTek.  Visitors will experience firsthand what it’s like to be stalked by prehistoric creatures of varying proportions, and can even bear witness to an interactive robotic performance between predator and prey.

• Synchronized Swimming for Submarines

By Robotics Trends Staff

05.18.2010 — Clark School of Engineering studies schooling fish to improve motion coordination in unmanned vehicle teams. Nature shows and Caribbean vacation commercials often depict a school of fish moving as a single entity to avoid obstacles and elude prey. Engineers hope to give unmanned mini-submarines, mini-helicopters and other autonomous vehicles the same coordinated movement.

WSJ

• They Walk. They Work. New DNA Robots Strut Their Tiny Stuff.

05/13/10

For the first time, microscopic robots made from DNA molecules can walk, follow instructions and work together to assemble simple products on an atomic-scale assembly line, mimicking the machinery of living cells, two independent research teams announced Wednesday.

• Robots Have a Place When Used by Trained Surgeons

05/10/10, Opinion

New surgical innovations are always highly prized. However, your article “Surgical Robot Examined in Injuries” (page one, May 5) illustrates that the evaluation of the virtues of new instruments takes time and effort.