Tag: news

SF Author David Brin, Prof. Jane Bambauer, Prof. Mark Lemley, and I …

We had a very interesting and enjoyable preliminary private conversation on the subject a couple of weeks ago (just for The Practice Effect), and I much look forward to this public version. Please join us! Here are the details:

UCLA Law’s AI Pulse Project and University of Arizona TechLaw present:

The Brinternet: A conversation with futurist and science fiction author David Brin and Professors Jane Bambauer, Mark Lemley, and Eugene Volokh, moderated by Professor Ted Parson

What: Is the dominant advertising-supported business model for Internet news and opinion unsustainable?  In a pair of essays published on Evonomics, David Brin says yes. But alternative models, including subscriptions and paywalls, also increasingly appear unrealistic for most apps and content producers. Can micropayments (in the 1 to 5 cent range) solve this problem?

When: this Friday, September 18, 2020, 2:00 – 3:00 PM Pacific time.

Register to attend here.

Panelists:

David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international best-selling novels include The Postman, Earth, and recently Existence. His nonfiction book about the information age—The Transparent Society—won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

Jane Bambauer is a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. Prof. Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, and questions the wisdom of many well-intentioned privacy laws. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Prof. Bambauer’s own data-driven research explores biased judgment, legal education, and legal careers. She holds a B.S. in mathematics from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and is affiliated faculty in the Symbolic Systems program. Prof. Lemley teaches intellectual property, patent law, trademark law, antitrust, the law of robotics and AI, video game law, and remedies. He is the author of eight books and 181 articles, including the two-volume treatise IP and Antitrust.

Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and an academic affiliate at the law firm Mayer Brown LLP. He teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic, and has taught copyright, criminal law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. He has been writing on the Internet and the law since 1995.

Edward A. (Ted) Parson (Moderator) is the Dan and Rae Emmett Professor of Environmental Law, faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and the director of the AI Pulse Project at UCLA School of Law.

Background reading: 

Advertising Cannot Maintain the Internet. Here’s the “Secret Sauce” Solution.

Beyond Advertising: Will Micropayments Sustain the New Internet?

Neither micro- nor macropayments are required to attend this conversation.

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Reviews: The Nest and No Escape

loder-thenest2

After 27 years of memorable work in films by Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-Wai, among many others, Jude Law can still surprise us. In The Nest, he gives one of the strongest performances of his career, playing a man whose life has evolved into a shaky edifice of lies, too many of which he has come to believe himself. Law brings a subtle emotional charge to the picture without unbalancing its carefully controlled tempo, and he’s wonderfully well-supported by his costar, the brilliant Carrie Coon (The Leftovers).

The Nest is writer-director Sean Durkin’s first movie since his well-regarded 2011 film Martha Marcy May Marlene (he’s spent most of his time since then producing). The story is set in the mid-1980s. Rory O’Hara (Law) is an expatriate English stock trader now working on Wall Street, and his wife Allison (Coon), an American, is raising their two children, Samantha (Oona Roche) and Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell), on a large, leafy estate. They are prosperous exurbanites—Allison teaches horse riding to well-off local kids—but not prosperous enough for Rory: He wants to uproot the family and return to his native London to take a new job that he says has been offered to him by his old employer, the avuncular Arthur Davis (Michael Culkin).

As is usually the case with Rory’s plans, everything is not what it seems. Arthur didn’t call Rory and invite him back—Rory called Arthur to ask for the job. And the job isn’t really what Rory is interested in. He’s actually scheming to help another company buy out Arthur’s operation and turn it into a global powerhouse —at great financial benefit to Rory, of course.

The relocation to England is agreeably compressed: After the introductory New York scenes, we simply see the family trying to settle into their new home—a way-too-big manor in the Sussex countryside, which Rory has rented for an amount of money he’d rather not discuss. Before long, Allison realizes that their bank account is running dry. Then their telephone service is turned off. Rory keeps bobbing and weaving—there’s “a huge check coming,” he says. But it never materializes.

The story proceeds in a succession of rich scenes: an awkward visit to Rory’s semi-estranged mother (Anne Reid), a gruesome episode with a dead horse, a heartbroken taxi ride (peak Jude Law), and a dinner party that careens completely off the rails when Allison publicly runs out of patience with her husband. (“You’re so full of shit,” she tells him.)

Through all of this, we can see the slow death of Allison’s feelings for her husband passing wordlessly across Coons’ face. It’s a riveting performance, especially when Allison takes in yet another of Rory’s latest brainstorms and delivers the judgment of terminally fed-up spouses throughout the ages. “You’re exhausting,” she tells him.

No Escape

No Escape has the hunched and gasping air of an old-school torture-porn movie (it much resembles Eli Roth’s Hostel films). But there’s no torture! Or rather, there is torture, but you mostly don’t see it—somebody’s always standing in the way when an ear gets lopped off, or an arm gets severed. There’s some very claustrophobic tension, and a good bit of glopping around in the guts of a fresh corpse, but generally, this movie is torture lite.

Like Videodrome, another picture it resembles, No Escape has something to say about modern media—although not enough to amount to a message, really. The protagonist is a hyper-successful vlogger named Cole (Keegan Allen, of Pretty Little Liars). Cole has spent 10 years traveling the world in search of photogenic kicks and he’s built an audience of millions for his web series ERL (“Escape Real Life”). Now, he and his team—three co-adventurers plus Cole’s girlfriend, Erin (Holland Roden, of Teen Wolf)—are flying first-class to Moscow, where a wealthy fan named Alexei (Ronen Rubenstein) has devised an evening of extreme thrills for them. (Alexei is said to be “next-level loaded,” and he’s the object of the movie’s funniest line: “This guy is so rich that everything he does is legitimately the best.”)

The venue for Alexei’s big night out is an abandoned prison (or something), furnished with all the familiar horrors: an Iron Maiden, an electric chair, a rack, and a Houdini-style glass cabinet with water hose hooked up. Naturally, there are also tables filled with torture implements and gore-slicked goons hulking about in black leather butcher aprons. Once each of his companions has been situated in one of the torture devices, Cole is given one hour to free them all—while a world-wide audience of freaks and troglodytes giggles along under their rocks.

Cole’s mission is exceedingly difficult, as you might imagine, but—spoiler—not impossible. Writer-director Will Wernick—whose last movie was simply called Escape Room—keeps the nonsense moving along, and thanks to cinematographer Jason Goodell, the movie looks a lot better than it needed to. The switcheroo ending, however, is not something that Eli Roth would’ve signed off on.

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“They Could Have Contained It” – Outgoing US Ambassador Accuses China Of Trying To ‘Cover Up’ Wuhan COVID-19 Outbreak

“They Could Have Contained It” – Outgoing US Ambassador Accuses China Of Trying To ‘Cover Up’ Wuhan COVID-19 Outbreak

Tyler Durden

Fri, 09/18/2020 – 07:17

Former Iowa Governor and outgoing US ambassador to China Terry Branstad had some harsh words for his one-time friend, Chinese President Xi Jinping. During an interview with CNN, Brandstad accused Xi and China of mishandling the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan which sparked a global pandemic: “What could have been contained in Wuhan ended up becoming a worldwide pandemic,” Branstad said.

This is one of the harshest rebukes Branstad has ever delivered against China and President Xi, whom Branstad has known since the mid-1980s, when both men were relatively low-ranking government officials. This isn’t the first time Branstad has had to push back against Beijing; in the last few months alone, Branstad has denounced Beijing’s decision to expel American journalists, as well as the forced passage of the Hong Kong ‘national security’ law, and the closure of an American consulate in Chengdu (retaliation for the closure of a Chinese consulate in Texas that was reportedly a “nest of spies”).

This accusation is extremely harsh, and echoes President Trump’s aggressive rhetoric about holding China responsible for the pandemic. President Xi, meanwhile, has pledged to deliver aid – in the form of vaccines, and financial assistance – to poorer countries struggling with the virus.

Speaking to CNN in Beijing on Friday, Terry Branstad, a former longtime Iowa governor, agreed with President Donald Trump that China was to blame for the pandemic, adding that the “Chinese system was such that they covered it up and even penalized the doctors who pointed it out at the beginning.”

Echoing criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party made by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other White House officials, Branstad also blamed China’s system for leading to a spike in tensions and a degrading of one of Washington’s most consequential bilateral relationships.

Branstad’s comments come just days after a “rogue” Chinese scientist accused Beijing of silencing doctors speaking out about the virus, which she says was ‘man-made’ inside a lab in Wuhan. Her comments were immediately censored by Facebook. The ambassador’s decision to resign took the world by surprise, though he pointed out that he had served in the role longer than the prior three ambassadors.

His departure comes just days after Beijing threatened to impose unspecified restrictions against senior American diplomats after President Trump signed an EO targeting CCP officials and Chinese businessmen allegedly involved with human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Asked by CNN if he would campaign for Trump, Branstad said he would, if asked.

He told CNN that he was keen to get back home, pointing out that he had been in the role “longer than the previous three ambassadors.”

Asked whether he will campaign on behalf of Trump, who may be relying on Branstad to help swing key Midwestern states, the ambassador said that “if the President asks me to appear at some of his events, I will, as I did in 2016.”

Branstad was one of the first ambassadors appointed by Trump. His decades-old relationship with Xi was cited as a critical to the appointment, reflecting President Trump’s push to build a “personal” relationship with the Chinese president.

However, the administration’s unprecedented and aggressive approach has driven the bilateral relationship between the world’s two largest economies into a new ‘Cold War’. Branstad is set to leave the office by the end of next month, leaving the US without a top diplomat in China during the 2020 presidential vote.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3knheF4 Tyler Durden

Reviews: The Nest and No Escape

loder-thenest2

After 27 years of memorable work in films by Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-Wai, among many others, Jude Law can still surprise us. In The Nest, he gives one of the strongest performances of his career, playing a man whose life has evolved into a shaky edifice of lies, too many of which he has come to believe himself. Law brings a subtle emotional charge to the picture without unbalancing its carefully controlled tempo, and he’s wonderfully well-supported by his costar, the brilliant Carrie Coon (The Leftovers).

The Nest is writer-director Sean Durkin’s first movie since his well-regarded 2011 film Martha Marcy May Marlene (he’s spent most of his time since then producing). The story is set in the mid-1980s. Rory O’Hara (Law) is an expatriate English stock trader now working on Wall Street, and his wife Allison (Coon), an American, is raising their two children, Samantha (Oona Roche) and Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell), on a large, leafy estate. They are prosperous exurbanites—Allison teaches horse riding to well-off local kids—but not prosperous enough for Rory: He wants to uproot the family and return to his native London to take a new job that he says has been offered to him by his old employer, the avuncular Arthur Davis (Michael Culkin).

As is usually the case with Rory’s plans, everything is not what it seems. Arthur didn’t call Rory and invite him back—Rory called Arthur to ask for the job. And the job isn’t really what Rory is interested in. He’s actually scheming to help another company buy out Arthur’s operation and turn it into a global powerhouse —at great financial benefit to Rory, of course.

The relocation to England is agreeably compressed: After the introductory New York scenes, we simply see the family trying to settle into their new home—a way-too-big manor in the Sussex countryside, which Rory has rented for an amount of money he’d rather not discuss. Before long, Allison realizes that their bank account is running dry. Then their telephone service is turned off. Rory keeps bobbing and weaving—there’s “a huge check coming,” he says. But it never materializes.

The story proceeds in a succession of rich scenes: an awkward visit to Rory’s semi-estranged mother (Anne Reid), a gruesome episode with a dead horse, a heartbroken taxi ride (peak Jude Law), and a dinner party that careens completely off the rails when Allison publicly runs out of patience with her husband. (“You’re so full of shit,” she tells him.)

Through all of this, we can see the slow death of Allison’s feelings for her husband passing wordlessly across Coons’ face. It’s a riveting performance, especially when Allison takes in yet another of Rory’s latest brainstorms and delivers the judgment of terminally fed-up spouses throughout the ages. “You’re exhausting,” she tells him.

No Escape

No Escape has the hunched and gasping air of an old-school torture-porn movie (it much resembles Eli Roth’s Hostel films). But there’s no torture! Or rather, there is torture, but you mostly don’t see it—somebody’s always standing in the way when an ear gets lopped off, or an arm gets severed. There’s some very claustrophobic tension, and a good bit of glopping around in the guts of a fresh corpse, but generally, this movie is torture lite.

Like Videodrome, another picture it resembles, No Escape has something to say about modern media—although not enough to amount to a message, really. The protagonist is a hyper-successful vlogger named Cole (Keegan Allen, of Pretty Little Liars). Cole has spent 10 years traveling the world in search of photogenic kicks and he’s built an audience of millions for his web series ERL (“Escape Real Life”). Now, he and his team—three co-adventurers plus Cole’s girlfriend, Erin (Holland Roden, of Teen Wolf)—are flying first-class to Moscow, where a wealthy fan named Alexei (Ronen Rubenstein) has devised an evening of extreme thrills for them. (Alexei is said to be “next-level loaded,” and he’s the object of the movie’s funniest line: “This guy is so rich that everything he does is legitimately the best.”)

The venue for Alexei’s big night out is an abandoned prison (or something), furnished with all the familiar horrors: an Iron Maiden, an electric chair, a rack, and a Houdini-style glass cabinet with water hose hooked up. Naturally, there are also tables filled with torture implements and gore-slicked goons hulking about in black leather butcher aprons. Once each of his companions has been situated in one of the torture devices, Cole is given one hour to free them all—while a world-wide audience of freaks and troglodytes giggles along under their rocks.

Cole’s mission is exceedingly difficult, as you might imagine, but—spoiler—not impossible. Writer-director Will Wernick—whose last movie was simply called Escape Room—keeps the nonsense moving along, and thanks to cinematographer Jason Goodell, the movie looks a lot better than it needed to. The switcheroo ending, however, is not something that Eli Roth would’ve signed off on.

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Immortality, Inc. 

minisimmortalityNationNationalgeographic

Former CNN bureau chief Chip Walter starts his book Immortality, Inc., an examination of the wild dreamers and wealthy financiers striving for human immortality, at Alcor. That’s where heads and bodies of the dead lie frozen, awaiting a possible future in which they can be revived.

Alcor’s customers are still dead, and no magic bullet treatments have meaningfully halted or reversed the cellular and bodily decay we know as aging. The most important thing we’ve learned is that calorie restriction (or treatments that emulate its effects) seem the most promising, if not joyous, path to life extension.

Like space travel, human life extension has seen loads of visionary speculation spun and cash burned with promises mostly unfulfilled. Walter ends his book convinced that Silicon Valley moneymen and their scientist partners are indeed on the cusp of using genomics and artificial intelligence to deliver a near-endless human life; his reporting doesn’t quite deliver on the optimism. But if aging is halted or reversed it will be because of the manias of his subjects, a small group of people and companies—including Google and Human Longevity Inc. (co-founded by Human Genome Project superstar Craig Venter)—with enough wealth to risk wagers on the impossible.

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RTJ4

minisRTJ4

In times of crisis, pop culture often takes on inadvertent meaning, reflecting and refracting the darkness of the times. But few works can manage the eerie prescience of RTJ4, the rowdy, angry, superbly calamitous fourth album by hip-hop duo Run the Jewels, which chronicles a chaotic world in semi-apocalyptic meltdown, beset by police abuse and racial injustice.

The album was released in early June, just days after protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police turned destructive in cities across the country. Although it had been in the works for years, the music seemed like it had been willed into existence as a byproduct of the demonstrations.

In the album’s haunting centerpiece, “Walking in the Snow,” Killer Mike raps about the gruesome spectacle of police violence and the performative online outrage that often seems to follow: “And every day on evening news they feed you fear for free/ And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/ And till my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, ‘I can’t breathe’/ And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV/ The most you give’s a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy.”

The lyrics were so on-the-nose that Run the Jewels member El-P had to clarify that they’d been recorded the previous year—an uncanny reminder that the present crisis actually began long ago.

 

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Immortality, Inc. 

minisimmortalityNationNationalgeographic

Former CNN bureau chief Chip Walter starts his book Immortality, Inc., an examination of the wild dreamers and wealthy financiers striving for human immortality, at Alcor. That’s where heads and bodies of the dead lie frozen, awaiting a possible future in which they can be revived.

Alcor’s customers are still dead, and no magic bullet treatments have meaningfully halted or reversed the cellular and bodily decay we know as aging. The most important thing we’ve learned is that calorie restriction (or treatments that emulate its effects) seem the most promising, if not joyous, path to life extension.

Like space travel, human life extension has seen loads of visionary speculation spun and cash burned with promises mostly unfulfilled. Walter ends his book convinced that Silicon Valley moneymen and their scientist partners are indeed on the cusp of using genomics and artificial intelligence to deliver a near-endless human life; his reporting doesn’t quite deliver on the optimism. But if aging is halted or reversed it will be because of the manias of his subjects, a small group of people and companies—including Google and Human Longevity Inc. (co-founded by Human Genome Project superstar Craig Venter)—with enough wealth to risk wagers on the impossible.

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RTJ4

minisRTJ4

In times of crisis, pop culture often takes on inadvertent meaning, reflecting and refracting the darkness of the times. But few works can manage the eerie prescience of RTJ4, the rowdy, angry, superbly calamitous fourth album by hip-hop duo Run the Jewels, which chronicles a chaotic world in semi-apocalyptic meltdown, beset by police abuse and racial injustice.

The album was released in early June, just days after protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police turned destructive in cities across the country. Although it had been in the works for years, the music seemed like it had been willed into existence as a byproduct of the demonstrations.

In the album’s haunting centerpiece, “Walking in the Snow,” Killer Mike raps about the gruesome spectacle of police violence and the performative online outrage that often seems to follow: “And every day on evening news they feed you fear for free/ And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/ And till my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, ‘I can’t breathe’/ And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV/ The most you give’s a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy.”

The lyrics were so on-the-nose that Run the Jewels member El-P had to clarify that they’d been recorded the previous year—an uncanny reminder that the present crisis actually began long ago.

 

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