Shooting Wide Open

In my water research, reading about states fighting over water allotments, I’ve begun to wonder about our need for borders. Are our geo-political borders really representative of the needs of different groups of people, reflective of actual demographics, or are they mostly arbitrary? I’ve wondered whether it’s possible to map according to fluctuating lines of various statistical, demographic or economic boundaries instead.

Yesterday I found some indication that others think the same way! Tim De Chant writes a blog called Per Square Mile blog that deals with the advantages of living in dense population centers. In a recent post, he talks about the idea of redrawing the USA based on meaningful rather than geo-political borders:

A recent paper by a group of geographers, sociologists, and mathematicians has again reconsidered the layout of the lower 48 states. Though they don’t go so far as to propose a replacement map, their study sought to determine which of today’s borders have real meaning. To do so, they used bill tracking data from the site Where’s George. If you’ve handled a $1 bill in the last decade, chances are one came stamped with a short note and a URL. Upon visiting the site, you’re prompted to enter the bill’s serial number and report your current ZIP code. On the surface, it seems like a curiosity. But buried within is a trove of anonymous data on human movement and interaction.

Data from the tracked dollar bills revealed a map that in most ways is drastically different. Though there are 48 states, the researchers found evidence of only about 12 distinct regions. The Midwest remained largely in tact, as does New England. But Pennsylvania was split in two by the Appalachian Mountains, while the southern half of Georgia was given over to Florida (which in turn lost part of its panhandle to a new Gulf shores region). And as far as Where’s George data is concerned, most of the western United States is indistinguishable.

It’s a bit of an incomplete thought, but our understanding of allegiances and complex issues may be very different if our visual and conceptual understanding of geography reflected various overlapping layers of demographics and statistics rather than single two-dimensional maps. Adding a third dimension to our ability to manipulate data may change how we see the world.

And perhaps we wouldn’t be so tribal in our handling of conflict. Just a little food for thought.

It’s in times like these that we need a man named Hans who cries out for empathetic behavioral change rather than dependence on purely technological cures. He’s a great example of what a difference good public outreach can be for any field. You must watch til the end:

Hans Rosling, you are a great man. Every new talk he gives I fall a little harder.* There is also a documentary about him (from Swedish TV?), if you’re interested. It’s not a work of art – I’ve never seen another documentary start with a statistician putting on his pants – but it gets interesting in the middle. Citing the change in child mortality rates in Egypt in the last the last 25 years, he observes that often journalists miss slow trends in favor of splashier discrete events.

I saw another criticism of journalism today: Why Don’t Journalists Link to Primary Sources? This is in the Bad Science blog written by Ben Goldacre of the Guardian. He talks about several distortions of recent health studies in particular, but his general points are interesting:

If we had a culture of linking to primary sources, if they were a click away, then any sensible journalist would have been be too embarrassed to see this article go online. Distortions like this are only possible, or plausible, or worth risking, in an environment where the reader is actively deprived of information.

…They count on it being inconvenient for you to check. It’s also an interesting difference between different forms of media: most bloggers have no institutional credibility, and so they must build it, by linking transparently, and allowing you to easily double check their work.

I’m not sure I buy this. Good sources like the BBC do link to the primary studies. The problem is that it’s almost always inconvenient for readers to check, not because there is no link, but because no one has that amount of time to double check every single article they come across even if the sources are available. Perhaps you can make the argument that a bit of crowdsourcing will be in play here so that even if no individual catches all the distortions, on average, the net at large will spot all egregious errors, but there’s a problem even then. When some piece of news or rumor as it were goes viral, the correction that follow rarely does.

These two things make me wonder about the value of real-time news reporting. While it is certainly valuable to learn that there has been a nuclear incident in Japan, isn’t the real value of that news the discussion it starts about nuclear power and the more in-depth analyses that follow? There doesn’t seem to be a balance right now before long form journalism and fast paced news. I think this is probably true for photojournalism too.

* New hero: Hans Rosling.

Wayne Bremser did an interesting post on Oscar Grant’s cellphone photo of James Mehserle before Grant was shot in the back by Mehserle. Despite my interest in the case, I hadn’t realized that Mehserle had taken out his taser at multiple points in the encounter. The photo indeed proves he had. Does this mean that he knew the difference between the two weapons, contrary to what he claimed in court? Or does this only prove that he in fact meant to reach for his taser a third time and in the heat of the moment came up with the wrong weapon? It’s infuriating that we can have photographic evidence, yet intentions remain ambiguous. It’s not a popular opinion, but I think the jury reached the right verdict. How can you possibly prove without reasonable doubt what a man’s intentions were?

Wayne also points to another case where a victim captured a shot of his killer, this one in the Philipines, where a local politician inadvertently photographs a gunman as he is about to be shot.

Get out those band photos. And the Irony.

Classes are over, portfolios are turned in. A list of my own – tentative summer plans:

- rock the Yellowstone hotspot
- work in school photo lab
- use grant to shoot
- process backlog
- install better website template (get Fusion! found album together too?)
- pick up a little Max
- go to World Expo

!

So for now once again I leave you to the WordPress bot.

Wow.

1. We really don’t like web as a medium. Can you please force our sites visitors to print out a copy of every page? We want our page to be more tangible.
2. I recently spent about 2 months designing an identity and packaging for a new sports product, only to be told at the last minute the client had been to see a psychic and the psychic didn’t think the logo would bring the client good luck, i was then handed a piece of paper which had a pencil drawing on of a new logo (drawn by the psychic) and had to start everything from scratch.
3. So, you’re saying that it will take 2 days to complete this illustration. If we give you the project today, can we have it tomorrow afternoon at half the price?
4. I don’t want gay people looking at the site! can you do it with CSS3?
5. See this Myspace page, I want our website to look like that. Can you also make it play music? You can take away the stop button, I’ve seen it done before.
6. I’m branding myself with this font. My website has to be in Papyrus! The text and everything!
7. No, I said that everything on the site should be in all caps. That’s how important the message is.
8. Can you change the paperclip in Word to a cat?

- From Clients From Hell

I’m so glad I don’t work in web design…

David Bailey is fed up with fashion photography. “D’you know,” he rages, “any model over the age of 23 has to be touched up these days. Twenty-three? It’s f***ing ridiculous but that’s what you have to do for American Vogue and it’s getting to be the same over here.”

British fashion photography has lost its edge, he reckons. “They want shoots that look like a shop window in Knightsbridge. They always have the same kind of dead-looking girls. It isn’t interesting and the girls aren’t interesting. Because they aren’t girls. They’re androids. Airbrushed and cleaned up and not real. And you can’t tell any more who took the photographs. You used to be able to tell; there was character to the pictures. You could tell this was a [Helmut] Newton or that was a Beaton or a Horst or whatever. A Bailey woman has a distinct look. A Bailey woman is a real woman of flesh and blood and sex.”

- David Bailey: still snapping away at 71

I need to lighten up, not the least because for the past day workmen have been pounding and sawing away upstairs like it’s an endless hallway of doors and angry door-bangers. It sounds like a hoard of lumberjacks with power saws chasing a T-Rex through a Home Depot. Can’t a girl scan in peace? So here’s something for ya… Yes, it’s already happened: The Squirrelizer.

And some very silly photos. Click to go to the source… but actually, you probably don’t want to click.

Notice the expressions on the pig’s face and the woman’s face. Har har. (Thanks to Adrian for the non-fail animals!)

Clever Crows Prove Aesop’s Fable Is More Than Fiction:

Researchers presented four crows with a challenge from Aesop’s fable “The Crow and the Pitcher”: a container of water not quite full enough for the birds to reach with their beaks. Just like Aesop’s crow, all four birds figured out how to raise the water level by dropping stones into the glass. The crows also selectively chose large pebbles over small ones, and quickly realized that dropping rocks into a container of sawdust didn’t have the same effect.

(Thank, Danielle!)

Arguments in the California Supreme Court on Prop 8 reminded me of a little experiment in young people’s expectations of the division of labor in parenting. A few weeks ago, Harry Brigman posted the results from a very telling sociological exercise at Crooked Timber, a very lively collaborative academic blog.

For simplicity, let’s assume there are 3 main parenting arrangements:

F = father does most of the work
M = mother does most of the work
E = evenly shared work

Each year, Brigman asks his undergraduates to choose the parenting arrangment they expect in their own future family lives, and which arrangement they expect the majority of their 5 closest friends to fall into. He then tallies the percentages for male and female students. He claims that the numbers don’t vary much through the years:

MS = male students
FS = female students

Self
MS – F: 0%; M: 85%; E: 15%
FS – F: 10%; M: 25%; E: 65%

Friends
MS – F: 0%; M: 85%; E: 15%
FS – F: 0%; M: 75%; E: 25%

So in short, most young males expect their partners to shoulder much of the parental responsibility, expect their friends households to be exactly the same, and certainly don’t see themselves as the main care-giver, while most young women seem to believe that their own households will be egalitarian yet expect their friends to end up in mother led arrangements. Most interesting are the 10% who believe their own partners will shoulder the burden that nobody’s else’s would.

Brigman points out the inevitable conflict lying dormant in these differing expectations. I wouldn’t call myself a feminist in the very political sense, but one can only hope that couples discuss these things before deciding to form a household.

The barreleye fish can rotate its eyes upward and literally look through its own transparent head to see objects positioned above it! The rest of its body looks like your regular opaque fish, but the head dome is transparent. You can see its internal organs. A bit from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute press release:

Ever since Macropinna microstoma was first described in 1939, marine biologists have known that its tubular eyes are very good at collecting light. However, the eyes were believed to be fixed in place and seemed to provide only a “tunnel-vision” view of whatever was directly above the fish’s head. A new paper by Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler shows that these unusual eyes can rotate within a transparent shield that covers the fish’s head.

Most of the time, the fish hangs motionless in the water, with its body in a horizontal position and its eyes looking upward. The green pigments in its eyes may filter out sunlight coming directly from the sea surface, helping the barreleye spot the bioluminescent glow of jellies or other animals directly overhead. When it spots prey, the fish rotates its eyes forward and swims upward, in feeding mode.

Lucky researchers, but the fish was less fortunate. It “survived for several hours in a ship-board aquarium.” One day we will find a way to study deep sea critters without killing them.

Bonus round: there is also the frogfish which has leg-like fins, an off-centered tail and bounces around on the sea floor chaotically. You can see this particular species at the California Academy of Sciences if you’re in San Francisco. Good luck getting it to bounce around for you though. A tip for the frugal: go during a Thursday Nightlife event, where you get the benefit of music (a bit loud and clubby), drinks and talks. Parts of the aquarium are in nighttime/rest mode and the events are 21+, but admission is $10 instead of $25. There are also some photos related to the issue of climate change being displayed. They are strictly what you would expect for this type of venue, but worth a look if you’re going anyway.