This Stylish Girl

Wanting to Be Here Again

Even if it's only with occasional photos, I want to be back here again documenting our life in all its precious and hard moments.

Science Pursuing Profit

(Sorry about the odd formatting. I was trying to make the long quotes clearer.)

The following is a rather long quote from Life is a Miracle by Wendell Berry"

"One used to hear a great deal about 'pure science.' The universities, one was given to understand, were full of scientists who were disinterestedly pursuing truth. 'Pure science' did not permit the scientist to ask so crude and pragmatic a question as why this or that truth was being pursued; it was just assumed, not only that to know the truth was good, but that, once the truth was discovered it would somehow be used for good. This is a singularly naive view of science (as it would be of any human enterprise), but it survived at least into the early days of space exploration, when a lot of aficionados of so-called high technology assumed that NASA existed to sponsor voyages of pure discovery: to learn whatever might be learned, to take pictures of the earth and other planets, and to provide extremely expensive mystical experiences to astronauts. Some people believed that this enterprise was really a sort of spiritual quest, and would always remain above the gross concerns of, for example, the military-industrial complex. It would promote instead renewed tenderness toward our 'planet' by such devices as pictures of half of said planet, taken at a distance that reduced it to a blue bauble something like a Christmas tree ornament. In our foolish insistence on substituting technology for vision, we forget that we are not the first to have seen "the whole earth" from such a distance. Dante saw it (Paradiso xxii, 133-154) from a higher level of human accomplishment, and at far less economic and ecological cost, several hundred years before NASA.
The possibility of pure science was significantly diminished, surely, by the time early scientists had invented metallurgy and then gunpowder, and it diminished steadily from then on. By now, when the possibilities of application have so enormously multiplied and the greed of corporations has grown so elaborate that they wish to patent discoveries before they have been discovered, it appears safest to assume that all sciences are 'applied.' Science may at times have been altruistically applied. But even such nominally altruistic sciences as medicine and plant-breeding have now become so deeply interpenetrated with economics and politics that their motives are at best mixed with, and at worst replaced by, the motives of corporations and governments."


I don't agree with all of the above, primarily that people thought NASA missions ever were intended to promote pure science. They were a reaction to Sputnik and the cold war, after all. But Berry's thesis that almost all science now is "applied" and corrupted by the profit or military motive strikes a chord with me.

Two articles from the New Yorker in the past couple weeks have disappointingly confirmed this point. In both, young scientifically-gifted computer scientists quickly turn from altruistic research to entrepreneurship and then abandonment of their better motives toward profit.

In the January 5, 2015 issue is an article called "The Virologist". At first I thought it would have something to do with viruses that causes illnesses. But this article was about an entrepreneur who knows how to make web pages "go viral."

The man, Emerson Spartz (now age 27), realized at a young age that he had a knack for identifying how to attract eyes to content, and he decided that eyes=influence. "The more influence you had, the more impact you could create... The ability to make things go viral felt like the closest that we could get to having a human superpower." He elaborated, "I realized that if you could make ideas go viral, you could tip elections, start movements, revolutionize industries." One of his employees agreed and added a moral aspect, "A tremendous amount of media attention means a lot of power. We're lucky that Emerson [Spartz] is inherently a good person, because if you had someone that smart who wasn't? Lord knows what would happen." And they seem to be correct, highly effective videos are recruiting young disenfranchised people around the world to leave their homes and fly to Syria to join ISIS.

But Emerson's company is relatively benign. He has used his intelligence to create a company that makes millions of dollars attracting eyes to advertising. His newest site is called Dose, as in a dose of vitamins or perhaps Vicodin. "A bored teen-ager absent-mindedly clicking links will eventually end up on a site like Dose. Sparz's goal is to make the site so 'sticky'--attention-grabbing and easy to navigate--that the teen-ager will stay for a while. Money is generated through ads--sometimes there are as many as ten on a page." But Dose doesn't create this content. The company creates algorithms that measure what is trending online. Then they steal the content, test a number of catchy headlines with another algorithm, and plaster the most successful one onto Facebook until it becomes the "hottest" viral page.

In today's world according to Spartz, "the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it's quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that's fine. Not everybody has to change the world."  Change the world to what end? True, he is spreading ideas, those that are the most banal, commercial and base.

The next article, "We Know How You Feel" (New Yorker, Jan 19, 2015) might be even more depressing because it profiles a young woman who created a company hoping to help people.

Back in the article about Mr. Spartz, Kathleen Sweeney, who teaches courses about viral media at the New School summed this trend up well. "There's a difference between 'I want to change the world' and 'I want to change the world, and along the way I want to make millions of dollars.'"

Rana el Kaliouby was an inspired, determined young woman. She made her way from Egypt to the most elite labs of MIT on pure initiative. There she worked with her mentor to investigate how computers can read human emotion. She excelled in her research and findings. She eventually hoped to develop a way for people with autism to get emotional cues from a small camera/computer device that would help them navigate the social world.

It was not long before the commercial world heard of her breakthroughs. The director of MIT's Media Lab eventually encouraged her to leave academia and build a company, Affectiva. According to the article, the director "argued that the marketplace would make the technology more robust and flexible: a device that could work for FOX could also better assist the autistic. It was possible, he said, to build a company with a 'dual bottom line'--one that not only did well but also changed people's lives."

Soon corporations were flocking hoping to spy on their employees or know how their customers are feeling. Soon the new CEO was "steering the company away from assistive technology and toward market research." An early researcher at the company was quoted in the article saying, "We began with a powerful set of products that could assist people who have a very difficult time with perceiving affect and producing affect. Then they started to emphasize only he face, to focus on advertisements, and on predicting whether someone likes a product."

Since then  the company's product Affdex has been used to test thousands of ads per year. Kaliouby works with Millward Brown, a global market research company, to record and analyze hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world on Web cams. Its programs analyze the nuances of emotion. According to the article, Kaliouby predicted that, "before long myriad devices will have an 'emotion chip' that runs constantly in the background, the way geolocation works now in phones. 'every time you pick up your phon, it gets an emotion pulse, if you like, on how you're feeling,' she said. 'In our research, we found that people check their phones ten to twelve times an hour--and so that gives this many data points of the person's experience.'"

While surfing the web, playing computer games, and logging into our digital lives, we have created an "economy of the bartered self." According to the article, in 2013 MA Representative Mike Capuano proposed the We Are Watching You Act that would let consumers know when sensing was taking place allow them to disable it. Verizon, Samsung, and an industry association began lobbying against it. He could not get a hearing for his bill.

The article ends with Kaliouby seeming to justify the shift from assistive technology to commerce her company has made.

"Kaliouby doesn't see herself returning to autism work, but she has not relinquished the idea of a dual bottom line. 'I do believe that if we have information about your emotional experiences we can help you be in a more positive mood and influence your wellness... I think there is an opportunity to build a very, very simple app that pushes out funny content or inspiring content three times a day... It can capture the content's effect on you, and then you can gain these points--these happiness points, or mood pints, or rewards--that can be turned into virtual currency. We have been in conversations with a company in that space. It is an advertising-rewards company, and its business is based on positive moments... And they monetize these moments."

Perhaps the company belongs to Emerson Spartz. But it could be any one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of startups trying to monetize and enhance our emotional experience while crowding out true community and our engagement with the natural world.

Decorate with Tissues?

Need I say more?

This is some pretty sad marketing. Perhaps the creatives are imagining you have a very sentimental holiday needing tissues while you watch It's a Wonderful Life with your family. That would be better than suffering through Christmas with a drippy nose or allergies when you visit friends with pets.

Consumer or Citizen

I'm switching gears a little here.

Late October, November and early December have been spent in much the same way as in previous years. Picking cranberries and turning them into sauce. Making a hearty Thanksgiving meal from CSA veggies and great stock from the turkey bones, etc. I felt it would be kind of repetitive posting that stuff again.

Instead, I've been toying with the idea of posting my impressions of the marketing and political messages that come my way. My sources are limited since I rarely watch commercial TV or listen to anything but public radio. I don't go to malls and have tried to limit the catalogs and marketing that comes to my mailbox.

Still our world is filled with messages to consume and the detritus of that consumer lifestyle.

This came into my mailbox this week:

 An unsolicited plastic sleeve containing a cardboard flyer with coupon, a styrofoam pad and a plastic and foil Nutella container with less that .5 oz of product. The entire mailer weighted 1.5 oz. This week I found a blog about a zero waste living. While I'm not there yet, I do compost, recycle everything I can and try to reduce and reuse what I buy. Getting things like this in the mail doesn't help (and in fact makes me quite angry). I plan to send a critical email to the company that makes Nutella asking them not to market in this way. They will probably get far fewer complaints than the number of people who will use the coupon to make a purchase. Nutella, by the way, while marketed as a nut spread has sugar and palm oil as its first 2 ingredients.

In My Kitchen and Colorful Yard

 This week I'm again joining Heather at Beauty that moves in her kitchen.

A beautiful purple cauliflower from our CSA share.

It caused me to get a bit artistic. Of course, once it was cooked I was too excited to eat it to take a photo.

The following photo is of an apple/apricot chutney I made with a friend. She had the recipe from her mother, but didn't know how to can. I offered a pleasant afternoon canning lesson in exchange for a couple jars, a wonderful exchange. I'd say I became a knowledgeable canner last year when I did lots of canning with friends. We bought hundreds of pounds of peaches and apples and learned together. I've learned a new skill and fun method of saving and sharing with others. Priceless!

Here's some chutney. It reminds me of fall and looks great set against our most glowing maple.

I've been distracted by the yard. I pause from the food photographs for a bit of local color.

Our sky was too cloudy to see the early morning lunar eclipse, but later it looked like this.

The reflection of my favorite tree in a newly washed window.

These are some photos from a couple weeks ago when the share was full of tomatoes. The gratin was for a pot luck dinner we attended. Too bad I again forgot to take an after picture. It was beautiful cooked too. And delicious with purple potatoes, tomatoes, and zucchini. The underlayer was made of sauteed leeks, and it was topped with Emmental and panko.

Gratin in progress. A good use for my mandolin.

Parsley is my best crop this year. Too bad we don't like it very much.

A rather fussy but delicious lunch, tomato sandwich and salad with cabbage, beets and blue cheese.

This week in the Kitchen

 This week I'm joining Heather's weekly In the Kitchen update:

Veggies and berries are dominating our kitchen this month. We get a weekly vegetable share from the wonderful Siena Farm. Here is the latest one:

These food photos combine the end of last week's share and some of this week's.

I shredded 1 1/2 lbs of Chioga and red beets for a sweet, hearty pasta dish. The video is from the New York Times and is easy to follow.



 
 

Chopped radicchio and kohlrabi went into a wonderful salad* one night. Another night I roasted kohlrabi and potato "fries". If you're not familiar with kohlrabi, it's like a round broccoli stem.



For one week's favas I peeled, steamed, peeled again and sauteed with butter and salt. Delicious but a lot of work. The following week, I oiled and grilled the whole pods, and then we popped out and ate the favas like edamame. Yummy and much easier.


 

On the grill along with the fava pods were maple glazed carrots. They start cooking on the stove with butter and salt. Then you put on a little syrup and move to the grill to roast and concentrate and caramelize the sweetness. 
A lovely foccacia that my hubby brings home from Bricco Bakery in Boston's North End rounds out the meal.



I like to make this type of salad with corn, beans, peppers, green onion or garlic, cilantro, lime... whatever is handy.



Now onto the plentiful berries and cherries.
I've been buying the cherries on sale in the supermarket. We've been eating them with many meals, and I've been pitting and freezing them for smoothies and snacking through the year.




We grow our own raspberries and I pick about a pint or so each morning and evening. We snack on them and I freeze them until there's enough for making jam.

 * Kohlrabi Salad  adapted by Anna Sortun from Yotam Ottolenghi's book Jerusalm

3 medium kohlrabi (2/3 pounds / 750 grams)
1 tablespoon fresh mint leaves, large ones, torn

1 head of radicchio, roughly cut and washed

1/4 teaspoon sumac

Dressing:

2 large tablespoons Greek yoghurt

2 large tablespoons sour cream

1/2 small garlic clove, finely grated

2 scallions, finely minced, white part only

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

fresh ground black pepper to taste

Peel the kohlrabi and cut them into 2/3 inch dice, and place in a large mixing bowl.

Mix the dressing ingredients until smooth.

Add dressing to kohlrabi. Place in serving bowl, top with mint leaves, spoon over radicchio and serve.

(I chopped and added radicchio to the salad)

Perennial Edible Plants

It's been a long time. The seasons have progressed from the cold of winter into the greening spring. While I've planted new specimens in the gardens, it is the perennials I'm most thrilled with. Yet again without much effort from me, here comes the rhubarb, the asparagus is multiplying, the strawberries are spreading, and the raspberries are thicker than ever.

This spring I've added a new bed with blueberries. I've planted a gooseberry bush. I am watching the garlic I planted last fall grow tall and strong. These type of plants are the ones I want to surround me. Ones that return and enrich me year after year as I feed them with compost and caring.

feathery asparagus plants at the edge of their bed

leeks to the right, garlic to the left

chives in the foreground, rhubard behind

strawberries coming along

A Sweet Valenversary

Yesterday was our anniversary, and today is Valentine's Day. I always joke that we got married on Valentine's weekend so my husband would never forget our anniversary. He never does. Last year for our 20th, we spent a lovely snowy weekend in a luxurious B&B. This year (21) was more low key although equally snowy. But I love giving my husband and kids a little extra love, a few more hugs and lots of yummy sweet treats.

The beaded Valenversary card from our kids.

My sweet boy helped me bake some thumbprint cookies.

We used our homemade raspberry jelly. Yum.

Finished cookies were a little crumbly but very yummy.

I made little pocket book cards for the kids, my mom and other friends.
The idea came from Making Handmade Books by Alisa Golden.

The holiday haul: french lollipops, Lindt chocolate bars in the kids favorite flavors,
and dark chocolate covered almonds. The card shows a photo D took of us in a wavy
reflection on the Prudential Building during last's years snowy B&B outing.

Wishing you all have a sweet, delicious Valentine's day.

Turn, Turn, Turn A tribute to Pete Seeger

On my way to church last Sunday morning, I picked up the detritus of our McCulture, a plastic bottle, a can, and a discarded coffee cup, all likely thrown from car windows. I went into the building, recycled the waste, washed my hands, and went up into the sanctuary.

There my ears heard Pete Seeger's Turn, Turn, Turn, and my mood turned. The  music was why I had come to church early. I knew we'd be singing Pete Seeger anthems, and I sought to fill my heart with his hopeful spirit. He had died a few days earlier, yet his spirit lives on in his songs.



The previous evening I had watched PBS's American Masters program about Pete Seeger's life. Against the odds of fascism, racism, political hypocrisy and environmental degradation, he fought using music and love. I came to church to sing together with the congregation and catch his spirit, catch the power of many voices calling for change and peace together.

Every day there are new inescapable stories about poisoned rivers and droughts, extreme weather and sea level rise. That morning I had read about the severe drought in California. Earlier in the week there had been stories about the decline of Monarch butterfly populations and the threat to bees from monoculture fields of GMO crops. There was a story about a report released by the State Department declaring that proceeding with the Keystone pipeline would not harm the environment. 

Monday I gathered with others at the corner of routes 20 and 27, right in front of our church, to hold signs and protest the pipeline. I tried to bring Pete Seeger's positive attitude that things will change.

It is so hard to read story after story about what human industrialism is doing to the environment. Perhaps soon the weight of the stories along with more and more visible signs of climate change will lead far more people to take action. Attitudes, even those of our leaders, can change. After all Pete Seeger, who had been brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee and charged with contempt of Congress and blacklisted in the 1950s and 60s, received the Natioanal Medal of the Arts in 1994.

I attended a lecture late last month where the speaker Charles Eisenstein, an environmental economist, talked about a change in people's attitudes occurring quicker than we might anticipate. He supposed that for many, the change had already occurred. But few are ready to admit it and take action. He posited that already few people believe stories told to us by mainstream media, corporations, or even our government. When we drive among the ugly strip malls along the sides of our four lane streets, we are repulsed by the ugliness. Here I paraphrase Eisenstein who asked, How is it that 5000 years of architectural advancement could lead to this? Do we believe the slogan on the billboard? Do we believe the Congressmen denying scientific facts?

Do we really believe the repeated story of American exceptionalism? Are Americans citizens in a land of broadening democracy and opportunity or are we mere consumers? Last Sunday evening I spent time at a Superbowl party. Ads costing companies millions of dollars played. They didn't convince me that Coke is better than Pepsi or that I'll love McDonalds. Did they convince anyone? Yet a hundred million people watched this game absorbing its message of commercialism and conflict. I watched too, but the next day I stood with about 50 people holding signs to protest a pipeline that will further enable inefficient dirty energy to be pulled from the ground and its carbon dioxide to further pollute our air. I stood with those turning to a different story.

Parking

I was back at the Pine Brook Conservation area today with my camera. I noticed bright green moss, the only colorful thing among the brown leaves, grey bark and gloomy sky. There were puffball mushrooms along the trail spreading their spores with the slightest jostle. There was fragile ice along the shore. I saw the bottom half of a mouse on top of a broken stump. The raptor with the other half was no where to be seen.

I went to take pictures of some out-of-place Americana turned to sculpture: a jumble of old, rusted cars at the bottom of a ridge. I'll have to investigate how they got there. It will be a new urban myth or ghost story.

Please leave a comment if you can identify the make, model and year of these fine vehicles.