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We are moving from modernist calculation toward postmodernist simulation, where the self is a multiple, distributed system.
There are many Sherry Turkles. There is the "French Sherry," who studied poststructuralism in Paris in the 1960s. There is Turkle the social scientist, trained in anthropology, personality psychology, and sociology. There is Dr. Turkle, the clinical psychologist. There is Sherry Turkle the writer of books - Psychoanalytic Politics (Basic Books, 1978) and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon & Schuster, 1984). There is Sherry the professor, who has mentored MIT students for nearly 20 years. And there is the cyberspace explorer, the woman who might log on as a man, or as another woman, or as, simply, ST.
All of these Sherry Turkles have authored a new book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, published November 30 by Simon & Schuster. Life on the Screen tells how the computer profoundly shapes our ways of thinking and feeling, how ideas carried by technology are reshaped by people for their own purposes, how computers are not just changing our lives but changing our selves.
This story is borne of Turkle's past decade of research. In a series of pizza parties for MUDders in the Boston area, Turkle found conversations quickly turning to multiple personae, romance, and what can be counted on as "real" in virtual space. She soon turned to the world of Internet Relay Chat, newsgroups, bulletin boards, and commercial online services. She also examined the burgeoning cyberspace lives of children and teenagers.
What has she found? That the Internet links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think and the way we form our communities. That we are moving from "a modernist culture of calculation toward a postmodernist culture of simulation." That life on the screen permits us to "project ourselves into our own dramas, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star.... Computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual. We are using life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity."
Turkle's own metaphor of windows serves well to introduce the following samplings from her new book. Those boxed-off areas on the screen, Turkle writes, allow us to cycle through cyberspace and real life, over and over. Windows allow us to be in several contexts at the same time - in a MUD, in a word-processing program, in a chat room, in e-mail.
"Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system," Turkle writes. "The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds, that plays many roles at the same time." Now real life itself may be, as one of Turkle's subjects says, "just one more window."
As recently as 10 to 15 years ago, it was almost unthinkable to speak of the computer's involvement with ideas about unstable meanings and unknowable truths. The computer had a clear intellectual identity as a calculating machine. In an introductory programming course at Harvard University in 1978, one professor introduced the computer to the class by calling it a giant calculator. Programming, he reassured the students, was a cut-and-dried technical activity whose rules were crystal clear.
Such reassurances captured the essence of what I call the modernist computational aesthetic. It's the computer as calculator: no matter how complicated a computer might seem, what happened inside it could be mechanically unpacked. Programming was a technical skill that could be done a right way or a wrong way. The right way was dictated by the computer's calculator essence. The right way was linear and logical. This linear, logical [model] guided thinking not only about technology and programming, but about economics, psychology, and social life. Computational ideas were one of the great modern metanarratives, stories of how the world worked that provided unifying pictures and analyzed complicated things by breaking them down into simpler parts. Computers, it was assumed, would become more powerful, both as tools and as metaphors, by becoming better and faster calculating machines, better and faster analytical engines.
From today's perspective, the fundamental lessons of computing are wrong. Programming is no longer cut and dried. Are you programming when you customize your word-processing software? When you design "organisms" to populate a simulation of Darwinian evolution in the computer game SimLife? Or when you build a room in a MUD so that opening a door to it will cause "Happy Un-Birthday" to ring out on all but one day of the year?
The lessons of computing today have to do not with calculation and rules, but with simulation, navigation, and interaction. The very image of the computer as a giant calculator has become quaint and dated. Fifteen years ago, most computer users were limited to typing commands. Today they use off-the-shelf products to manipulate simulated desktops, draw with simulated paints and brushes, and fly in simulated airplane cockpits.
Today's computational models of the mind often embrace a postmodern aesthetic of complexity and decentering. Mainstream computer researchers no longer aspire to program intelligence into computers but expect intelligence to emerge from the interactions of small subprograms.
In the games in the Sim series (SimCity, SimLife, SimAnt, SimHealth), you try to build a community, an ecosystem, or a public policy. The goal is to make a successful whole from complex, interrelated parts. Tim is 13, and among his friends, the Sim games are the subject of long conversations about what he calls Sim secrets. "Every kid knows," he confides, "that hitting Shift-F1 will get you a couple of thousand dollars in SimCity." But Tim knows that the Sim secrets have their limits. They are little tricks, but they are not what the game is about. The game is about making choices and getting feedback. Tim talks easily about the trade-offs in SimCity - between zoning restrictions and economic development, pollution controls and housing starts.
SimLife is Tim's favorite game, because "even though it's not a videogame, you can play it like one." By this he means that as in a videogame, events in the Sim world move things forward. ("My trilobytes went extinct. They must have run out of algae. I didn't give them algae. I forgot. I think I'll do that now.") He is able to act on a vague intuitive sense of what will work even when he doesn't have a verifiable model of the rules underneath the game's behavior. When he is populating his universe in a biology laboratory scenario, Tim puts in 50 each of his favorite creatures, such as trilobytes and sea urchins, but puts in only 20 sharks. ("I don't want 50 of these, I don't want to ruin this.") Tim can keep playing even when he has no idea what is driving events. For example, when his sea urchins become extinct, I ask him why.
Tim: I don't know, it's just something that happens.
ST: Do you know how to find out why it happened?
Tim: No.
ST: Do you mind that you can't tell why?
Tim: No. I don't let things like that bother me. It's not what's important.
"Your orgot is being eaten up," the game tells us. I ask Tim, "What's an orgot?" He doesn't know. "I just ignore that," he says. "You don't need to know that kind of stuff to play."
I am clearly having a hard time hiding my lifetime habit of looking up words that I don't understand, because Tim tries to appease me by coming up with a working definition of orgot. "I ignore the word, but I think it is sort of like an organism. I never read that, but just from playing, I would say that's what it is."
The orgot issue will not die: "Your fig orgot moved to another species," the game informs us. This time I say nothing, but Tim reads my mind: "Don't let it bother you if you don't understand. I just say to myself that I probably won't be able to understand the whole game any time soon. So I just play it."
I begin to look through dictionaries, in which orgot is not listed, and finally find a reference to it embedded in the game itself, in a file called READ ME. The file apologizes for the fact that orgot has been given several and in some ways contradictory meanings in this version of SimLife, but one of them is close to organism. Tim was right enough.
Children are comfortable with the idea that inanimate objects can both think and have a personality. But they no longer worry if the machine is alive. They know it is not. The issue of aliveness has moved into the background as though it is settled. But the notion of the machine has expanded to include its having a psychology. In talking about computers in a psychological way, children allow computational machines to retain an animistic trace, a mark of having passed through a stage in which the issue of the computer's aliveness was a focus of intense consideration.
Children also grant new capacities and privileges to the machine world on the basis of its animation if not its life. They endow artificial objects with properties, such as having intentions and ideas, previously reserved for living beings.
Granting a psychology to computers can mean that objects in the category "machine," like objects in the categories "people" and "pets," are fitting partners for dialog and relationship. Although children increasingly regard computers as mere machines, they are also increasingly likely to attribute qualities to them that undermine the machine/person distinction.
Children develop the two concepts in parallel and take what they understand to be the computer's psychological activity (interactivity as well as speaking, singing, and doing math) as a sign of consciousness. But they insist that breathing, having blood, being born, and, as one put it, "having real skin" are the true signs of life. Children today contemplate machines they believe to be intelligent and conscious yet not alive.
These children who so effortlessly split consciousness and life are forerunners of a larger cultural movement. Adults, less willing than children to grant that today's most advanced computer programs are even close to conscious, no longer flinch from the very idea of a self-conscious machine. Even a decade ago, the idea of machine intelligence provoked sharp debate. Today, the controversy about computers does not turn on their capacity for intelligence but on their capacity for life. We are willing to grant that the machine has a "psychology," but not that it can be alive.
People accept the idea that certain machines have a claim to intelligence and thus to their respectful attention. They are ready to engage with computers in a variety of domains. Yet when people consider what if anything might ultimately differentiate computers from humans, they dwell long and lovingly on those aspects of people that are tied to the sensuality and physical embodiment of life. It is as if they are seeking to underscore that although today's machines may be psychological in the cognitive sense, they are not psychological in a way that comprises our relationships with our bodies and with other people. Some computers might be considered intelligent and might even become conscious, but they are not born of mothers, raised in families, they do not know the pain of loss, or live with the certainty that they will die.
The 13-year-old Tim thinks that SimLife, unlike videogames and computer programming, is useful. "You get to mutate plants and animals into different species. You get to balance an ecosystem. You are part of something important." Tim thinks that the "animals that grow in the computer could be alive," although he adds, "This is kind of spooky."
Robbie, a 10-year-old who has been given a modem for her birthday, puts the emphasis not on communication but on mobility in considering whether the creatures she has evolved on SimLife are alive. "I think they are a little alive in the game, but you can turn it off and you cannot save your game, so that all the creatures you have evolved go away. But if they could figure out how to get rid of that part of the program so that you would have to save the game ... if your modem were on, [the creatures] could get out of your computer and go to America Online."
Sean, 13, who has never used a modem, comes up with a variant on Robbie's ideas about travel. "The creatures could be more alive if they could get into DOS. If they were in DOS, they would be like a computer virus and they could get onto all of your disks, and if you loaned your disks to friends, it would be like they were traveling."
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I studied children's ideas about aliveness in dealing with stationary computer objects, the focus of children's thinking had shifted to an object's psychological properties. Today, in children's comments about the creatures that exist on simulation games, in talk about travel via circulating disks or over modems, in talk of viruses and networks, movement is resurfacing as a criterion for aliveness. Children widely assume that the creatures on Sim games have a desire to move out of the system into a wider digital world.
The creatures in simulation space challenge children to find a new language for talking about them and their status, as do mobile robots that wander about, making their "own decisions" about where to go. When MIT professor Rodney Brooks asked his 10-year-old daughter whether his mobots, or mobile robots, were alive, she said, "No, they just have control." For this child, and despite her father's work, life is biological. You can have consciousness and intentionality without being alive. At the end of the 1992 Artificial Life Conference, I sat next to 11-year-old Holly as we watched a group of robots with distinctly different "personalities" compete in a special robot Olympics. I told her I was studying robots and life, and Holly became thoughtful. Then she said unexpectedly, "It's like Pinocchio. First, Pinocchio was just a puppet. He was not alive at all. Then he was an alive puppet. Then he was an alive boy. A real boy. But he was alive even before he was a real boy. So I think the robots are like that. They are alive like Pinocchio [the puppet], but not like real boys."
In the early 1970s, the face-to-face role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons swept the game culture. The term "dungeon" persisted in the high-tech culture to connote a virtual place. So when virtual spaces were created that many computer users could share and collaborate within, they were deemed Multi-User Dungeons or MUDs, a new kind of social virtual reality. (Some games use software that make them technically MUSHes or MOOs, but the term MUD has come to refer to all of the multi-user environments.)
MUDs are a new kind of virtual parlor game and a new form of community. In addition, text-based MUDs are a new form of collaboratively written literature. MUD players are MUD authors, the creators as well as consumers of media content. In this, participating in a MUD has much in common with scriptwriting, performance art, street theater, improvisational theater, or even commedia dell'arte. But MUDs are something else as well.
As players participate, they become authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction. Since one participates in MUDs by sending text to a computer that houses the MUD's program and database, MUD selves are constituted in interaction with the machine. Take it away and the MUD selves cease to exist: "Part of me, a very important part of me, only exists inside PernMUD," says one player. Several players joke that they are like "the electrodes in the computer," trying to express the degree to which they feel part of its space.
All MUDs are organized around the metaphor of physical space. When you first enter a MUD, you may find yourself in a medieval church from which you can step out into the town square, or you may find yourself in the coat closet of a large, rambling house. For example, when you first log on to LambdaMOO, one of the most popular MUDs on the Internet, you see the following description:
The Coat Closet. The Closet is a dark, cramped space. It appears to be very crowded in here; you keep bumping into what feels like coats, boots, and other people (apparently sleeping). One useful thing that you've discovered in your bumbling about is a metal doorknob set at waist level into what might be a door. There's a new edition of the newspaper. Type "news" to see it.
In the MUDs, virtual characters converse with each other, exchange gestures, express emotions, win and lose virtual money, and rise and fall in social status. A virtual character can also die. Some die of "natural" causes (a player decides to close them down), or they can have their virtual lives snuffed out. This is all achieved through writing, and this in a culture that had apparently fallen asleep in the audiovisual arms of television. Yet this new writing is a kind of hybrid: speech momentarily frozen into artifact, but curiously ephemeral artifact. In this new writing, unless it is printed out on paper, a screenful of flickers soon replaces the previous screen.
The anonymity of MUDs gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try out new ones. MUDs make possible the creation of an identity so fluid and multiple that it strains the limits of the notion. Identity, after all, refers to the sameness between two qualities, in this case between a person and his or her persona. But in MUDs, one can be many.
A 21-year-old college senior defends his violent characters as "something in me; but quite frankly I'd rather rape on MUDs where no harm is done." A 26-year-old clerical worker says, "I'm not one thing, I'm many things. Each part gets to be more fully expressed in MUDs than in the real world. So even though I play more than one self on MUDs, I feel more like 'myself' when I'm MUDding." In real life, this woman sees her world as too narrow to allow her to manifest certain aspects of the person she feels herself to be. Creating screen personae is thus an opportunity for self-expression, leading to her feeling more like her true self when decked out in an array of virtual masks.
MUDs imply difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation. Such an experience of identity contradicts the Latin root of the word, idem, meaning "the same." But this contradiction increasingly defines the conditions of our lives beyond the virtual world. MUDs thus become objects-to-think-with for thinking about postmodern selves. Indeed, the unfolding of all MUD action takes place in a resolutely postmodern context. There are parallel narratives in the different rooms of a MUD. The cultures of Tolkien, Gibson, and Madonna coexist and interact. Since MUDs are authored by their players, thousands of people in all, often hundreds at a time, are all logged on from different places; the solitary author is displaced and distributed. Traditional ideas about identity have been tied to a notion of authenticity that such virtual experiences actively subvert. When each player can create many characters in many games, the self is not only decentered but multiplied without limit.
As a new social experience, MUDs pose many psychological questions: If a persona in a role-playing game drops defenses that the player in real life has been unable to abandon, what effect does this have? What if a persona enjoys success in some area (say, flirting) that the player has not been able to achieve? Slippages often occur in places where persona and self merge, where the multiple personae join to comprise what the individual thinks of as his or her authentic self.
Doug is a Midwestern college junior. He plays four characters distributed across three different MUDs. One is a seductive woman. One is a macho, cowboy type whose self-description stresses that he is a "Marlboros rolled in the T-shirt sleeve kind of guy." The third is a rabbit of unspecified gender who wanders its MUD introducing people to each other, a character he calls Carrot. Doug says, "Carrot is so low key that people let it be around while they are having private conversations. So I think of Carrot as my passive, voyeuristic character." Doug's fourth character is one that he plays only on a MUD in which all the characters are furry animals. "I'd rather not even talk about that character because my anonymity there is very important to me," Doug says. "Let's just say that on FurryMUDs I feel like a sexual tourist." Doug talks about playing his characters in windows and says that using windows has made it possible for him to "turn pieces of my mind on and off.
"I split my mind.... I can see myself as being two or three or more. And I just turn on one part of my mind and then another when I go from window to window. I'm in some kind of argument in one window and trying to come on to a girl in a MUD in another, and another window might be running a spreadsheet program or some other technical thing for school.... And then I'll get a real-time message that flashes on the screen as soon as it is sent from another system user, and I guess that's RL. RL is just one more window, and it's not usually my best one."
Play has always been an important aspect of our individual efforts to build identity. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called play a "toy situation" that allows us to "reveal and commit" ourselves "in its unreality." While MUDs are not the only "places" on the Internet in which to play with identity, they provide an unparalleled opportunity for such play. On a MUD one actually gets to build character and environment and then to live within the toy situation. A MUD can become a context for discovering who one is and wishes to be. In this way, the games are laboratories for the construction of identity.
Stewart, a 23-year-old physics graduate student, uses MUDs to have experiences he can't imagine for himself in RL. His intense online involvements engaged key issues in his life but ultimately failed to help him reach successful resolutions.
Stewart's real life revolves around laboratory work and his plans for a future in science. His only friend is his roommate, another physics student whom he describes as even more reclusive than himself. For Stewart, this circumscribed, almost monastic student life does not represent a radical departure from what has gone before. He has had heart trouble since he was a child; one small rebellion, a ski trip when he was a college freshman, put him in the hospital for a week. He has lived life within a small compass.
Stewart is logged on to one MUD or another for at least 40 hours a week. It seems misleading to call what he does there playing. He spends his time constructing a life that is more expansive than the one he lives in physical reality. Stewart, who has traveled very little and has never been to Europe, explains with delight that his favorite MUD, although played in English, is physically located on a computer in Germany and has many European players.
On the German MUD, Stewart shaped a character named Achilles, but he asks his MUD friends to call him Stewart as much as possible. He wants to feel that his real self exists somewhere between Stewart and Achilles. He wants to feel that his MUD life is part of his real life. Stewart insists that he does not role play, but that MUDs simply allow him to be a better version of himself.
On the MUD, Stewart creates a living environment suitable for his ideal self. His university dormitory is modest, but the room he has built for Achilles on the MUD is elegant and heavily influenced by Ralph Lauren advertising. He has named it "the home beneath the silver moon." There are books, a roaring fire, cognac, a cherry mantel "covered with pictures of Achilles's friends from around the world.
"You look up ... and through the immense skylight you see a breathtaking view of the night sky. The moon is always full over Achilles's home, and its light fills the room with a warm glow."
Beyond expanding his social world, MUDs have brought Stewart the only romance and intimacy he has ever known. At a social event in virtual space, a "wedding" of two regular players on a German-based MUD I call Gargoyle, Achilles met Winterlight, a character played by one of the three female players on that MUD. Stewart, who has known little success in dating and romantic relationships, was able to charm this desirable player.
On their first virtual date, Achilles took Winterlight to an Italian restaurant close to Stewart's dorm. He had often fantasized being there with a woman. Stewart used a combination of MUD commands to simulate a romantic evening - picking Winterlight up at the airport in a limousine, driving her to a hotel room so that she could shower, and then taking her to the restaurant and ordering veal for her.
This dinner date led to others during which Achilles was tender and romantic, chivalrous and poetic. The intimacy Achilles experienced during his courtship of Winterlight is unknown to Stewart in other contexts. "She's a very, she's a good friend. I found out a lot of things, from things about physiology to the color of nail polish she wears." Finally, Achilles asked for Winterlight's hand. When she accepted, they had a formal engagement ceremony on the MUD.
At the engagement, Winterlight gave Achilles a rose she had worn in her hair; Achilles gave her 1,000 paper stars.
Although Stewart participated in this ceremony alone in his room with his computer and modem, a group of European players actually traveled to Germany, site of Gargoyle's host computer, and got together for food and champagne. Many of the 25 guests at the German celebration brought gifts and dressed specially for the occasion. Stewart felt as though he were throwing a party. This was the first time that he had ever entertained, and he was proud of his success. In real life, Stewart felt constrained by his health problems, his shyness and social isolation, and his narrow economic straits. In the Gargoyle MUD, he bypassed these obstacles, at least temporarily.
The psychological effects of life on the screen can be complicated: a safe place is not all that is needed for personal change. Stewart came to MUDding with serious problems, and for Stewart, playing on MUDs led to a net drop in self-esteem. MUDs did help Stewart talk about his troubles while they were still emotionally relevant; nevertheless, he is emphatic that MUDding has ultimately made him feel worse about himself. MUDding did not alter Stewart's sense of himself as withdrawn, unappealing, and flawed.
While Stewart has tried hard to make his MUD self, the "better" Achilles self, part of his real life, he says he has failed. He says, "I'm not social. I don't like parties. I can't talk to people about my problems." The integration of the social Achilles, who can talk about his troubles, and the asocial Stewart, who can only cope by putting them out of mind, has not occurred. From Stewart's point of view, MUDs have stripped away some of his defenses but have given him nothing in return. In fact, MUDs make Stewart feel vulnerable in a new way. Although he hoped that MUDs would cure him, it is MUDs that now make him feel sick. He feels addicted to MUDs: "When you feel you're stagnating and you feel there's nothing going on in your life and you're stuck in a rut, it's very easy to be on there for a very large amount of time."
Stewart cannot learn from his character Achilles's experience and social success because they are too different from the things of which he believes himself capable. Despite his efforts to turn Achilles into Stewart, Stewart has split off his strengths and sees them as possible only for Achilles in the MUD. It is only Achilles who can create the magic and win the girl. In making this split between himself and the achievements of his screen persona, Stewart does not give himself credit for the positive steps he has taken in real life. Like an unsuccessful psychotherapy, MUDding has not helped Stewart bring these good experiences inside himself or integrate them into his self-image.
Relationships during adolescence are usually bounded by a mutual understanding that they involve limited commitment. Virtual space is well suited to such relationships; its natural limitations keep things within bounds. As in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which takes place in the isolation of a sanatorium, relationships become intense very quickly because the participants feel isolated in a remote and unfamiliar world with its own rules. MUDs, like other electronic meeting places, can breed a kind of easy intimacy. In a first phase, MUD players feel the excitement of a rapidly deepening relationship and the sense that time itself is speeding up. "The MUD quickens things. It quickens things so much," says one player. "You know, you don't think about it when you're doing it, but you meet somebody on the MUD, and within a week you feel like you've been friends forever."
In a second phase, players commonly try to take things from the virtual to the real and are usually disappointed.
Gender-swapping on MUDs is not a small part of the game action. By some estimates, Habitat, a Japanese MUD, has 1.5 million users. Habitat is a MUD operated for profit. Among the registered members of Habitat, there is a ratio of four real-life men to each real-life woman. But inside the MUD the ratio is only three male characters to one female character. In other words, a significant number of players, many tens of thousands of them, are virtually cross-dressing.
What is virtual gender-swapping all about? Some of those who do it claim that it is not particularly significant. "When I play a woman I don't really take it too seriously," said 20-year-old Andrei. "I do it to improve the ratio of women to men. It's just a game." On one level, virtual gender-swapping is easier than doing it in real life. For a man to present himself as female in a chat room, on an IRC channel, or in a MUD, only requires writing a description. For a man to play a woman on the streets of an American city, he would have to shave various parts of his body; wear makeup, perhaps a wig, a dress, and high heels; perhaps change his voice, walk, and mannerisms. He would have some anxiety about passing, and there might be even more anxiety about not passing, which would pose a risk of violence and possibly arrest. So more men are willing to give virtual cross-dressing a try. But once they are online as female, they soon find that maintaining this fiction is difficult. To pass as a woman for any length of time requires understanding how gender inflects speech, manner, the interpretation of experience. Women attempting to pass as men face the same kind of challenge.
Virtual cross-dressing is not as simple as Andrei suggests. Not only can it be technically challenging, it can be psychologically complicated. Taking a virtual role may involve you in ongoing relationships. You may discover things about yourself that you never knew before.
Case, a 34-year-old industrial designer who is happily married to a co-worker, is currently MUDding as a female character. In response to my question, "Has MUDding ever caused you any emotional pain?" he says, "Yes, but also the kind of learning that comes from hard times.
"I'm having pain in my playing now. Mairead, the woman I'm playing in MedievalMUSH, is having an interesting relationship with a fellow. Mairead is a lawyer, and the high cost of law school has to be paid for by a corporation or a noble house. She fell in love with a nobleman who paid for her law school. [Case slips into referring to Mairead in the first person.] Now he wants to marry me although I'm a commoner. I finally said yes. I try to talk to him about the fact that I'm essentially his property. I'm a commoner ... I've grown up with it, that's the way life is. He wants to deny the situation. He says, 'Oh no, no, no.... We'll pick you up, set you on your feet, the whole world is open to you.' But every time I behave like I'm now going to be a countess some day ... as in, 'And I never liked this wallpaper anyway,' I get pushed down. The relationship is pull up, push down. It's an incredibly psychologically damaging thing to do to a person. And the very thing that he liked about her that she was independent, strong, said what was on her mind, it is all being bled out of her."
Case looks at me with a wry smile and sighs, "A woman's life." He continues: "I see her [Mairead] heading for a major psychological problem. What we have is a dysfunctional relationship. But even though it's very painful and stressful, it's very interesting to watch myself cope with this problem. How am I going to dig my persona's self out of this mess? Because I don't want to go on like this. I want to get out of it.... You can see that playing this woman lets me see what I have in my psychological repertoire, what is hard and what is easy for me. And I can also see how some of the things that work when you're a man just backfire when you're a woman."
Case further illustrates the complexity of gender swapping as a vehicle for self-reflection. Case describes his RL persona as a nice guy, a "Jimmy Stewart type like my father." He says that in general he likes his father and he likes himself, but he feels he pays a price for his low-key ways. In particular, he feels at a loss when it comes to confrontation, both at home and in business dealings. Case likes MUDding as a female because it makes it easier for him to be aggressive and confrontational. Case plays several online "Katharine Hepburn types," strong, dynamic, "out there" women who remind him of his mother, "who says exactly what's on her mind and is a take-no-prisoners sort."
For Case, if you are assertive as a man, it is coded as "being a bastard." If you are assertive as a woman, it is coded as "modern and together."
Some women who play male characters desire invisibility or permission to be more outspoken or aggressive. "I was born in the South and taught that girls didn't speak up to disagree with men," says Zoe, a 34-year-old woman who plays male and female characters on four MUDs.
"We would sit at dinner and my father would talk and my mother would agree. I thought my father was a god. Once or twice I did disagree with him. I remember one time in particular when I was 10, and he looked at me and said, "Well, well, well, if this little flower grows too many more thorns, she will never catch a man."
Zoe credits MUDs with enabling her to reach a state of mind where she is better able to speak up for herself in her marriage ("to say what's on my mind before things get all blown out of proportion") and to handle her job as the financial officer for a small biotechnology firm.
"I played a MUD man for two years. First I did it because I wanted the feeling of an equal playing field in terms of authority, and the only way I could think of to get it was to play a man. But after a while, I got very absorbed by MUDding. I became a wizard on a pretty simple MUD. I called myself Ulysses and got involved in the system and realized that as a man I could be firm and people would think I was a great wizard. As a woman, drawing the line and standing firm has always made me feel like a bitch and, actually, I feel that people saw me as one, too. As a man I was liberated from all that. I learned from my mistakes. I got better at being firm but not rigid. I practiced, safe from criticism."
Zoe's perceptions of her gender trouble are almost the opposite of Case's. While Case sees aggressiveness as acceptable only for women, Zoe sees it as acceptable only for men. These stories share a notion that a virtual gender swap gave people greater emotional range in the real. Zoe says: "I got really good at playing a man, so good that whoever was on the system would accept me as a man and talk to me as a man. So, other guys talked to Ulysses guy to guy. It was very validating. All those years I was paranoid about how men talked about women. Or I thought I was paranoid. Then I got a chance to be a guy and I saw that I wasn't paranoid at all."
Virtual sex, whether in MUDs or in a private room on a commercial online service, consists of two or more players typing descriptions of physical actions, verbal statements, and emotional reactions for their characters. In cyberspace, this activity is not only common but, for many people, it is the centerpiece of their online experience.
On MUDs, some people have sex as characters of their own gender. Others have sex as characters of the other gender. Some men play female personae to have netsex with men. And in the "fake-lesbian syndrome," men adopt online female personae in order to have netsex with women. Although it does not seem to be as widespread, I have met several women who say they present as male characters in order to have netsex with men. Some people have sex as nonhuman characters, for example, as animals on FurryMUDs. Some enjoy sex with one partner. Some use virtual reality as a place to experiment with group situations. In real life, such behavior (where possible) can create enormous practical and emotional confusion. Virtual adventures may be easier to undertake, but they can also result in significant complications.
Martin and Beth, both 41, have been married for 19 years and have four children. Early in their marriage, Martin regretted not having had more time for sexual experimentation and had an extramarital affair. The affair hurt Beth deeply, and Martin decided he never wanted to do it again. When Martin discovered MUDs he was thrilled. "I really am monogamous. I'm really not interested in something outside my marriage. But being able to have, you know, a Tiny romance is kind of cool." Martin decided to tell Beth about his MUD sex life and she decided to tell him that she does not mind. Beth has made a conscious decision to consider Martin's sexual relationships on MUDs as more like his reading an erotic novel than like his having a rendezvous in a motel room. For Martin, his online affairs are a way to fill the gaps of his youth, to broaden his sexual experience without endangering his marriage.
Other partners of virtual adulterers do not share Beth's accepting attitude. Janet, 24, a secretary at a New York law firm, is very upset by her husband Tim's sex life in cyberspace. After Tim's first online affair, he confessed his virtual infidelity. When Janet objected, Tim told her that he would stop "seeing" his online mistress. Janet says that she is not sure that he actually did stop.
"The thing that bothers me most is that he wants to do it in the first place. In some ways, I'd have an easier time understanding why he would want to have an affair in real life. At least there, I could say to myself, 'Well, it is for someone with a better body, or just for the novelty.' It's like the first kiss is always the best kiss. But in MUDding, he is saying that he wants that feeling of intimacy with someone else, the 'just talk' part of an encounter with a woman, and to me that comes closer to what is most important about sex.
"First I told him he couldn't do it anymore. Then, I panicked and figured that he might do it anyway because, unlike in real life, I could never find out. All these thousands of people all over the world with their stupid fake names ... no way I would ever find out. So, I pulled back and said that talking about it was strictly off limits. But now I don't know if that was the right decision. I feel paranoid whenever he is on the computer."
This distressed wife struggles to decide whether her husband is unfaithful when his persona collaborates on writing real-time erotica with another persona in cyberspace. And beyond this, should it make a difference if unbeknownst to the husband his cyberspace mistress turns out to be a 19-year-old male college freshman? What if "she" is an infirm 80-year-old man in a nursing home? And even more disturbing, what if she is a 12-year-old girl? Or a 12-year-old boy?
TinySex poses the question of what is at the heart of sex and fidelity. Is it the physical action? Is it emotional intimacy with someone other than one's primary partner? Is infidelity in the head or in the body? Is it in the desire or in the action? What constitutes the violation of trust?
And once we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibility? And even more basic: Who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies? And is it different in different cyberspaces? These questions are equally central for thinking about community. What is the nature of our social ties? What kind of accountability do we have for our actions in real life and in cyberspace? What kind of society or societies are we creating, both on and off the screen?
When people adopt an online persona they cross a boundary into highly charged territory. Some feel an uncomfortable sense of fragmentation, some a sense of relief. Some sense the possibilities for self-discovery, even self-transformation. Serena, a 26-year-old graduate student in history, says, "When I log on to a new MUD and I create a character and know I have to start typing my description, I always feel a sense of panic. Like I could find out something I don't want to know." Arlie, a 20-year-old undergraduate, says, "I am always very self-conscious when I create a new character. Usually, I end up creating someone I wouldn't want my parents to know about.... But that someone is part of me."
Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes ... about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. - Donna Haraway
As we stand on the boundary between the real and the virtual, our experience recalls what the anthropologist Victor Turner termed a liminal moment, a moment of passage when new cultural symbols and meanings can emerge. Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity. When Turner talked about liminality, he understood it as a transitional state, but living with flux may no longer be temporary. Technology is bringing postmodernism down to earth itself; the story of technology refuses modernist resolutions and requires an openness to multiple viewpoints.
Multiple viewpoints call forth a new moral discourse. The culture of simulation may help us achieve a vision of a multiple but integrated identity whose flexibility, resilience, and capacity for joy comes from having access to our many selves. But if we have lost reality in the process, we shall have struck a poor bargain. In Wim Wenders's film Until the End of the World, a scientist develops a device that translates the electrochemical activity of the brain into digital images. He gives this technology to his family and closest friends, who are now able to hold small battery-driven monitors and watch their dreams. At first, they are charmed. They see their treasured fantasies, their secret selves. They see the images they otherwise would forget, the scenes they otherwise would repress. As with the personae one can play in a MUD, watching dreams on a screen opens up new aspects of the self.
However, the story soon turns dark. The images seduce. They are richer and more compelling than the real life around them. Wenders's characters fall in love with their dreams, become addicted to them. People wander about with blankets over their heads the better to see the monitors from which they cannot bear to be parted. They are imprisoned by the screens, imprisoned by the keys to their past that the screens seem to hold.
We, too, are vulnerable to using our screens in these ways. People can get lost in virtual worlds. Some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion. It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk. We must understand the dynamics of virtual experience both to foresee who might be in danger and to put these experiences to best use. Without a deep understanding of the many selves that we express in the virtual, we cannot use our experiences there to enrich the real. If we cultivate our awareness of what stands behind our screen personae, we are more likely to succeed in using virtual experience for personal transformation.
The imperative to self-knowledge has always been at the heart of philosophical inquiry. In the 20th century, it found expression in the psychoanalytic culture as well. One might say that it constitutes the ethic of psychoanalysis. From the perspective of this ethic, we work to know ourselves in order to improve not only our own lives, but those of our families and society. Psychoanalysis is a survivor discourse. Born of a modernist worldview, it has evolved into forms relevant to postmodern times. With mechanistic roots in the culture of calculation, psychoanalytic ideas become newly relevant in the culture of simulation. Some believe that we are at the end of the Freudian century. But the reality is more complex. Our need for a practical philosophy of self-knowledge has never been greater as we struggle to make meaning from our lives on the screen.


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Czechs elect president by ballot for 1st time
For the first time, citizens of the Czech Republic are electing a president, and their nine choices to replace euro-skeptic Vaclav Klaus run the full gamut: from veteran politicians to an artist whose entire body is tattooed.
If no candidate for the largely ceremonial post achieves a majority during the voting on Friday and Saturday - a likely scenario - the top two finishers will face each other in a runoff in two weeks' time.
"What I like about this is that common people have a say now," said Jiri Trojanek, a voter in Prague. "That it's not just in the hands of politicians."
Former leftist Prime Minister Milos Zeman and Jan Fischer, who led a caretaker government as prime minister in 2009-10, are the favorites, according to polls.
Unlike Klaus, both Zeman and Fischer have a more positive approach to the European Union, which the Czech Republic joined in 2004.
Klaus, a conservative, has repeatedly criticized the EU as too centralized, and warned that excessive regulation by Brussels may suppress competition.
Zeman is attempting to stage a return to power after he retired following a failure in the 2003 presidential election.
A chain smoker with a soft spot for alcohol, Zeman made international headlines as prime minister with outspoken comments. For example, he compared late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Adolf Hitler, drawing condemnations from the EU and the Arab League.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, Zeman and his interior minister said they believed that hijacker Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in April 2001. That purported meeting was cited as evidence of a possible al-Qaida connection to Iraq. The 9/11 commission later said such a meeting never happened.
By contrast, Fischer, a former head of the Statistics Office, gained significant popularity as prime minister avoiding controversies.
Since Czechoslovakia officially split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 1993, the republic has had two presidents elected by Parliament: Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus. But bickering during those votes led the legislature to give that decision to the general public.
Klaus' second and final five-year term in office expires March 7.
Under the Czech constitution, the president has the power to pick the prime minister based on a general election and to appoint members of the Central Bank board. With the approval of Parliament's upper house, the president also appoints Constitutional Court judges.
Otherwise the president has little executive power and the country is run by the government chosen and led by the prime minister.
Other candidates competing in the presidential election include the current foreign minister, former and current lawmakers, and an actress.
Vladimir Franz, a renowned classical music composer and painter with no experience in politics looks like a dark horse of the presidential race, with a poll putting him at the third place. The fact that the professor at the prestigious Academy of Performing Arts in Prague has his body tattooed all over is no obstacle for his many admirers.
He's a favorite among young people who see him as an opposition to a political establishment they consider corrupt.
"I don't know if I'll make the second round, but the most important thing is that the nation is waking up," Franz said after casting his ballot in Prague on Friday.
Associated Press video journalist Adam Pemble in Prague contributed.

subset: commoncrawl


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Robert Browning#32 on top 500 poets
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Andrea Del Sarto
But do not let us quarrel any more,
No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?
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text:
a-amino-b-phenyl-propionic acid
There may be benefits that have not yet been proven through research.
Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid. It is found in high-protein foods. It may improve memory and learning ability. It may enhance mood and alertness. It may help treat some types of depression. It's been used to help treat schizophrenia and Parkinson disease.
Phenylalanine is used in some artificial sweeteners. It tends to decrease appetite. It's been used to treat obesity.
It's also claimed to boost pain tolerance in premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and migraine headaches.
The FDA says that the supplement may be harmful.
High levels of phenylalanine are linked with the genetic issue phenylketonuria. In infants with this issue, high levels of phenylalanine cause intellectual problems. It can also lead to seizures and delays in development.
Pregnant women with the condition who don't avoid phenylalanine during pregnancy may give birth to a baby with signs of phenylketonuria.
Don't take this supplement if any of these are true:
You have phenylketonuria
You have melanoma (pigmented type)
You have tyrosinemia (type I or II)
You take monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs)
You are pregnant or breastfeeding
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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People with inflammatory bowel disease commonly believe that stress can trigger their symptoms, and a new study suggests they may be right.
Canadian researchers found that among 552 bowel-disease patients they followed for a year, the risk of a symptom flare-up increased when patients were feeling particularly stressed.
The findings, reported in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, lend support to what many people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have believed to be true.
IBD refers to a group of conditions marked by chronic inflammation in the intestines, leading to symptoms like abdominal pain and diarrhea. The major forms are Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.
The precise cause of the conditions is unclear, but they are thought to involve an immune system overreaction that injures the body's own intestinal tissue. While stress does not cause IBD, it is one of the environmental factors suspected of triggering symptom flare-ups in some people.
Studies show that many people with IBD feel that stress worsens their symptoms, but there has been relatively little scientific evidence of that.
"This is among the first evidence to show that the perception of stress had a direct association with disease course," Dr. Charles N. Bernstein, the lead researcher on the new study, told Reuters Health in an email.
"We are proposing that, based on this study and other emerging data, that clinicians make more of an effort to identify and manage psychological problems and stress that patients may have," said Bernstein, who directs the IBD Clinical and Research Center at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
The findings are based on 552 men and women with Crohn's disease or colitis who completed surveys every three months for one year. The surveys asked about, among other things, symptom flare-ups, stressful events and perceived stress -- that is, how well patients felt they could deal with their daily stresses.
Overall, 174 patients reported a symptom flare-up during the study period, meaning they had a three-month period of symptoms after having been symptom-free the previous three months.
The researchers found that patients' risk of a symptom flare-up increased by more than two-fold when they had reported high levels of perceived stress in the preceding three-month period.
Of patients who reported a flare-up, 52 percent had had high perceived stress levels in the preceding three months, compared with 29 percent of those who remained symptom-free.
On the other hand, certain other factors suspected of triggering IBD symptoms showed no relationship to flare-ups. Those factors included use of antibiotics or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory painkillers -- such as aspirin and ibuprofen -- and infections such as colds, pneumonia and urinary tract infections.
There are biological reasons to believe that a person's response to stress would trigger or worsen IBD symptoms, Bernstein and his colleagues note.
The sympathetic nervous system, which jumps into action during times of stress, acts on the lining of the colon, and might exacerbate existing inflammation. There is also evidence that stress hormones may help harmful bacteria take up residence in the intestines, which might, in turn, affect symptoms.
If stress does trigger IBD symptoms in some people, then it's possible that learning better ways of managing stress would help stave off flare-ups. Bernstein suggested that people who feel that stress is a trigger of their symptoms talk with their doctors about it.
"Patients with IBD should feel willing to discuss stress with their physicians," he said, adding that doctors are increasingly recognizing the effect stress may have on the disease.
SOURCE: American Journal of Gastroenterology, online April 6, 2010.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.


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The University of Washington's Professional and Continuing Education program is now offering a professional certification program for iPhone and Mac development. The program, developed in conjunction with the UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering, as well as an advisory board chock full of top-notch Mac developers, consists of three classes, through which you can earn a "Certificate in iPhone and Cocoa Development." We talked to Kristi Palmer, Program Manager of Academic Programs for University of Washington Educational Outreach, about the genesis of the program and what the plans are for the future.
Chuck Toperek, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Addison-Wesley, was a big proponent of the program, according to Palmer. "Chuck had a major role in the program launch, and his introductions to the world-class rock-star advisory board," she told Ars. The program's advisory board is sort of a who's who of indie Mac developers, including Brent Simmons (NewsGator), Gus Mueller (Flying Meat), Ken Case (OMNI Group), and Chris Parrish (Rogue Sheep). It also includes Joe Jones from Microsoft's Mac BU, Joe Heck from Disney Interactive, and Greg Robbins from Google. Toporek, Daniel Pasco, Bill Moorehead, Hal Mueller, Erik Turnquist, and UW Vice Provost David Szatmary round out the board.
This board defined the course objectives and topics, designed to prepare someone to develop great iPhone and Mac apps. "The instructors and the Board have advocated going with a longer program, despite alternate models like the free Stanford course on iTunes U," Palmer told Ars. "The reason is that we can really go deep, prepare people for real-world issues, and create the type of developers that folks would really wish to have on their technical teams." The only prerequisite is some experience programming in language such as C, C++, .NET, or Python.
The full certificate program consists of three courses, which includes a total of 90 contact hours. The first, "Programming in Objective-C and the Cocoa Framework," is designed to give students a good foundation in Objective-C, the Cocoa frameworks, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, and some of the more common APIs like Core Data. The second course, "Developing with the iPhone SDK," covers the iPhone-specific UI and code design patterns. By then end of the course, students should be able to plan and lead development of an iPhone OS app from start to finish.
"Now that you know solid skills in both desktop and iPhone platforms, how do you get to be great at it?" Palmer said. "Make it efficient, fast? Improve speed, response, performance?" That's all covered by the third course, "Advanced Cocoa Development for Mac OS X and iPhone." This course covers such topics as tweaking the Xcode environment, tuning Core Data stores, maximizing network performance, building and using external frameworks, source code management, and building custom UIs.
"Our first offering has filled very, very quickly—we're already close to capacity after only having registration open for about 2 weeks, so the chances are really good that we'll offer another section," said Palmer. The first section begins in late September and runs through November, and is offered in downtown Seattle. "A second section would be likely to start in winter, January, in Bellevue, Washington." Those who are interested in signing up for just the second or third courses, though, can register for them separately—those begin in winter and spring quarters, respectively.
For those who aren't conveniently located near one of UW's campuses, though, there are hopes of expanding the course into an online offering. "My best guess is that an online program would become available next year, but the specifics of what it will look like are still vague," explained Palmer. "I think we can find a way to offer a great model, with richer resources than some of the typical university distance learning programs."
The certification program is the only one like it we're aware of in the US for Mac and iPhone development. Each course qualifies for three continuing education credits, so it can be a useful addition to an existing degree, but the certificate itself would be a plus for those looking to move into development but who perhaps only have a cursory programming background. "We're really excited to be able to offer the program, and we've had phenomenal assistance from the Board, all terrifically impressive folks." Given the popularity of iPhone development, and with it a resurgence in Mac development, it would be great to see such programs proliferate beyond UW campuses.
Further Reading:
- The complete course descriptions and schedules for UW's program are available online.
- There is also background on the course instructors, which currently includes Kris Markel, Hal Mueller, and Chris Parrish.


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Louisa Fletcher is not your average 21 year old university...
Complicated Love4716515
- by heyitsanne
- Rating:
- Published: 7 Mar 2014
- Updated: 22 May 2014
- Status: In Progress
This story talks about two teens, who find their way to each other and fall in love. But both of them have problems, will they ruin their relationship or will they share them? Find out by reading ''Complicated Love.''
Not a fanfiction. Please do not copy this story.
Not a fanfiction. Please do not copy this story.
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There has a been a persistent, infrequent bug in the management of merged Google+ Pages for local where the owner of the page is unable to access the management of the page and receives a 500 Error from Google. Google knows about the bug but has been unable to quash it as of yet.
Kaleh, a Top Contributor in the Google for Business forum with lots of experience on the Plus side of the house had this to suggest.
Another option to try (based upon a report in a Google+ Discuss Forum topic) is accessing the following modified version of the URL:
If you have experienced this bug let me know whether this work around solves the problem.Google+ Page 500 Error Bug & Work Around by Mike Blumenthal


text:
To extend the brake posts up on pro size frames to line up with 20" x 1 1/8"(or 3/8")
Contact us in-store, by phone or on our socials for any questions you may have. Add us on Facebook and Instagram as we post new products, events, competitions and other news on a weekly basis.
Call (07) 5511 9076
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Mon - Fri: 10am-6pm
Saturday: 10am-2pm
Closed Sundays and most Public holidays (Check social media) .
1/11 Station Street, Nerang
4211, Queensland Australia


text:
Kane is host of the nationally syndicated Club Kane, a Sunday night music radio program which launched in March 2010 with Premiere Networks and airs nationwide on Top 40 stations from 7 p.m. to midnight local time. Each week, Kane plays chart-topping songs, debuts new music and takes requests as he welcomes listeners to his on-air party. Broadcasting live from Washington, D.C., he also discusses pop culture, music and entertainment, and features candid conversations with music artists and celebrities.
Kane is also host of The Kane Show, the top-rated morning radio program which airs from 6 - 10 a.m. ET on Hot 99.5 in Washington, D.C., as well as a nationally syndicated afternoon program of the same name, which can be heard on WFLZ/Tampa, Fla; WLDI/West Palm Beach, Fla.; KHFI/Austin, Texas; WQEN/Birmingham, Ala., and KISS XM.
Growing up in Danbury, Conn., Kane's love for radio began in high school when he interned for WKCI-FM/KC101 in New Haven. Upon graduation, Kane was accepted to Syracuse University's School of Visual and Performing Arts, where he pursued a career in advertising and design. During that time, he volunteered at the university's radio station Z89, and hosted the most-listened-to evening show in Central New York on WWHT/Hot 107.9.
Kane moved to Tampa, Fla., in 1998 to host the evening show on WFLZ/93.3 FLZ. Within the first year, The Extreme Show with Kane spread to 17 cities nationwide, five nights a week. In March 2003, Kane was named host of the legendary Open House Party, a live, Sunday night program that was nationally syndicated in more than 150 markets. He later returned to 93.3 FLZ where he served as program director and afternoon host. In October 2006, Kane joined Hot 99.5 in Washington, D.C., as host of The Kane Show. The morning program is currently ranked #1 in the market with Adults 18-34. While continuing to host that successful program, he also hosts an afternoon show of the same name, which can be heard in several markets as well as XM Satellite Radio.
Kane received the 2009 FMQB "Morning Show of the Year" Award in the CHR category, and previously won a Radio Music Award for "CHR Air Personality of the Year" and A.I.R. Awards for "Best Evening Drive Show" and "Best New Talent."
Throughout his career, Kane has spoken to every major artist from Usher to Britney Spears, and 50 Cent to Mariah Carey. He also hosted his own television show.
Kane speaks regularly to elementary and middle schools about the importance of education and volunteers his time to various events throughout Washington, D.C. He's an accomplished artist and aviation enthusiast, and is finishing work on his pilot's license. Kane lives in Gaithersburg, Md., with his wife Natasha and daughter Samantha, along with two dogs and a cat.


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Some days there's news to be had, and some days all you can do is shake your head when a governor like Ed Rendell stereotypes working moms and single women all in a breath. Luckily, there are governors like David Paterson, who is really pissed about sexism in the legal profession (and in the New York State court system). And there are friends like Latoya Peterson of Racialicious who go interview kick-ass women about terrorism, public health and Star Wars so that we can tie it all together on one neat little progressive package of knowledge.
LATOYA: And here's Johnny!
MEGAN: I would never have expected that as your nickname!
LATOYA: LOL. Megan, we have a lot to cover today. The headlines seem good AND I got to talk to Lorelei about national security and terrorism. But first...
MEGAN: Ed Rendell is an insensitive, sexist jerk.
LATOYA: That seems to be going around lately. It's so textbook too — of course Napolitano must be a career woman, she has no family! I liked Campbell Brown's response.
MEGAN: I think it's a communicable disease, passed around by slapping one another's asses in the locker room.
LATOYA: Agreed. We should pass a no-locker-room-ass-slapping ordinance on Capitol Hill.
MEGAN: She is pretty awesome. But, no, it has to stop earlier! Ed Rendell didn't become a sexist late in life. He caught the bug early on! It's rotted his brain, like the syph.
LATOYA: You know, some people just can't be helped. But he should watch his back. Obama is bringing a lot of career women with him.
MEGAN: And some of them even have families and yet can totally do their jobs!!!
LATOYA: Come on Megan — you know they are all just exceptions to the rule.
MEGAN: Right. Women, being less smart and productive than men, have to give up on a family or a social life and work 19-20 hours a day just to kick ass at their jobs. If they have a family, well, they're really just superwomen. Maybe having kids makes you more productive? If you're a woman, that is.
LATOYA: Yup, because obviously, men don't have any help — they just have the aptitude. It's not like there's some kind of system cough patriarchy cough that gives them options and supports their careers working 19 and 20 hour days. But some men seem have resisted some of that conditioning. Did you see David Paterson getting all worked up that no women were nominated to the NY Court of Appeals Judge position?
MEGAN: He's so fucking hot when he's getting all angry.
"What we really wanted to do is just publicly acknowledge ... the disappointing fact that they spanned the globe and couldn't find a woman in New York state that was qualified to serve as the chief judge," he said.
LATOYA: You know, for someone who got drop kicked into the position, Paterson is kicking some ass.
MEGAN: Can you believe that the big boys of old New York politics didn't want him?
LATOYA: Oh, I have a few ideas why. But too bad suckas! Paterson is going to milk this 'till the cow is bone dry! In other news, Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen thought she was being "punked" when she got a congrats call from Obama so she hung up on him. Twice.
"I thought it was one of the radio stations in South Florida playing an incredible, elaborate, terrific prank on me," Ros-Lehtinen told the newspaper. "They got Fidel Castro to go along. They've gotten Hugo Chavez and others to fall for their tricks. I said, 'Oh, no, I won't be punked."'
You know, we always talk about the toll MTV takes on the youth of America — but obviously, there is an unseen victim of reality TV shenanigans.
MEGAN: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen wasn't scared of being the next Chavez on the radio, she was scared of being the next Palin, thinking she was talking to Sarkozy.
LATOYA: Hahahah — good point, I had forgotten that one.
MEGAN: Or she's just heniously insecure:
When an amused Obama called again, Ros-Lehtinen he was either "very gracious" to reach across the aisle by contacting her, or "had run out of folks to call, if you are truly calling me."
LATOYA: Ladies and Gentleman, I present to you the GOP.
MEGAN: I mean, the top Republican woman in Congress and the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — the week after a major terrorist attack AND the week Obama is announcing his team to work on foreign affairs — and she doesn't know why he would call her. Ladies, when I say things like "don't undervalue your contributions at work to people," this is what I'm talking about.
LATOYA: Word. She is not doing any favors to the cause. But now, let's chat about someone else who is rocking it out for women. As you know, Megan, I'm more social justice inclined. I only follow politics because I have to.
MEGAN: Yeah, I'm an addict.
LATOYA: So, I've been reading the terrorism reports with some interest and I had a ton of questions. Luckily, I happen to know a national security expert.
Lorelei Kelly (Washington, DC): Lorelei Kelly is a national security specialist working to educate elected leaders and the American public about security challenges revealed by 9/11. She is the Policy Director of the Real Security Initiative of the White House Project, a non-partisan organization whose mission is to increase the influence of women in media, culture and politics. [Note - she just left this gig, and is working with various military groups to draft National Security recommendations for the new administration.] Kelly's professional background includes teaching at Stanford University's Center on Conflict and Negotiation, working as Senior Associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a DC think tank, and working on bipartisan national security in Congress. She founded "Security for a New Century" a study group that supports cutting-edge knowledge on foreign policy and defense issues for Congressional members and staff. Kelly attended the Air Command and Staff College program of the US Air Force as well as programs at the National Defense University and Army War College. She co-authored, with Dr. Elizabeth Turpen, a handbook for citizens entitled "Policy Matters: Educating Congress on Peace and Security" and produced a civil-military dialogue guide entitled "A Woman's Guide to Talking About War and Peace" with Dana Eyre USAR. She blogs regularly at democracyarsenal.org and www.huffingtonpost.com
I called her up last night, and we talked about the media, national security, where we are screwing up on terrorism, and what people can actually do.
MEGAN: Other than put their heads in the sand or use people's fears to increase the power and invasiveness of the state's security apparatus?
LATOYA: LOL — exactly. Some people seem to have noticed that move isn't working so well. So check this out — according to Lorelei, there has been no debate on the military budget since 1985. It is difficult to define, people don't want to talk about it, and it is not auditable" — we essentially can't measure what we are getting for what we are spending. Currently, the defense budget is 700 billion, the DoD just asked for 500 million more, and war spending is not counted in this budget.
MEGAN: Well, and part of the problem is that there is no public debate on the military budget, and much of it remains utterly classified as though knowing what we spend on porta-potties in Iraq will help the terrorists win. At best, we get a big number that no one really listens to and no explanation of what it was spent on.
LATOYA: Exactly. And when I talked about government graft earlier in the year, I pointed out how there are defense contractors who are not performing the services they are paid for and yet they can phone a friend and start bidding on contracts again.
MEGAN: And not just bidding, either. Winning. I mean, bidding is for companies that aren't well-connected enough to the Administration to finagle no-bid contracts for themselves.
LATOYA: That's true too! And the worst part is that what we are doing isn't working. Lorelei told me, "Generals coming back from Iraq that say maybe 20% of the problems there have military solutions. All the rest of the problems are about rule of law, girl's education, ideological alternatives, governments that work." She also broke down a big failure in counter terrorism measures that explains why we are wasting so much money:
"It's like spending 9 billion dollars on missile defense (which has never worked). This year, we spent 9 billion - the number is over 130 billion since it started in the 80s. But we don't secure docks and ports, we only apply maybe 400 million to that, and we only inspect 6 to 7% of ports." Lorelei mentions that most terrorists are able to move freely between ports, mainly because of their lack of oversight. And if terrorists were to try to move questionable materials, the port system is the safest as the security is so lacking. "The biggest thing is that our government loans out inspectors to areas that need the help - but since we haven't funded the program, transnational shipping is vulnerable. We have to be there with alternatives at every level."
MEGAN: We need to stop calling it "missile defense" and go back to calling it "star wars" because that was much more effective at conveying to people the fact that it was incredibly expensive and a cool idea that we don't have the capacity to do.
LATOYA: Good point. From now on, we will always refer to it as Star Wars for the purposes of Crappy Hour.
MEGAN: Also, let us point out that where we are citing part of it in Eastern Europe is also causing a large part of our diplomatic problems with Russia. So we are citing a Star Wars site in order to protect our European allies from getting nuked by a pissed off Russia, thus pissing off Russia and tempting them to aim their nukes at our allies in Western Europe.
LATOYA: Lorelei also points out that a friend on the ground (in Afghanistan) told her that a tarp set up in Afghanistan could defeat a 2 million dollar plane. She said "We are fighting this battle with the wrong tools. Whenever terrorist attacks have been foiled, it's come from Scotland Yard, Interpol, or the FBI. It's really local police work. This stuff is preventive work."
MEGAN: And that's not even to mention the need to actively cooperate with the Russians to secure nuclear materials to keep them out of the hands of terrorists eager to use a suitcase nuke or dirty bomb, which could then be snuck in through one of our ill-secured ports.
LATOYA: Oh right - speaking of Europe and Russia, Lorelei made a good point on how the nature of warfare as changed:
"The threats used to come from strong states. Now they come from weak states. The paradigm has been turned on its head. Pakistan is far more dangerous than N. Korea - with N. Korea, we can talk in a way that we know. There's one guy who you know is in charge and who exercises control. Pakistan doesn't have any centralized power - [a threat] could come from anywhere."
MEGAN: As India just found out.
LATOYA: Yeah, and how do you fight that? They are trying to talk to the government and Pakistani government is like "Yo - we don't know!"
MEGAN: Well, the parts of the Pakistan government willing and enabled to talk that was, indeed, not involved that is.
LATOYA: Yeah, that's a problem too. And before I forget, remember that article Anna sent through on the WMDs on Tuesday?
MEGAN: I mean, with all the pirates from Somalia running around trying to hijack cruise ships and stealing oil tankers and shit... Failed and weak states are seeming way more dangerous than Russia. You mean the one where we're about to get it? Yeah, how could I forget.
LATOYA: Well, the first thing Lorelei said when I sent her the link was:
"These kinds of reports are easily oversensationalized. It's really important not to lump all of these things together. Chemicals are very different from nuclear, which are very different from biological. Biological terrorism by pandemic disease can either be natural (an accident) or man introduced. The best response to a biological attack is the hospital staff in your era. The problem is there is never enough - enough communication between labs and hospital teams, enough beds, enough doctors, enough of anything."
MEGAN: Well, that's totally not depressing at all, and about what we said about it the other day, too.
LATOYA: By the way, Lorelei also gave me a link we can use to check your state's preparedness for a biological or chemical attack. They rank all the state heathcare systems. In short: We're screwed. But back to the cashflow — according to Lorelei ""A lot of the Homeland Security money went to "hardening" security. What they call it in government is the better mousetrap." We build these things instead of upgrading our work on TB, AIDS, and Malaria which become pandemics that can spread and cause nationwide chaos.
MEGAN: Yeah, we are pretty much just completely fucked. If I hadn't already driven through Kansas, I would say I was gonna move to Kansas to be safe, but I have, so I don't wanna.
LATOYA: Oh I know. When I worked on the Hill, I thought about moving every time we had a terror drill. If something happened, we would be so screwed. And we aren't VIPs!
MEGAN: I sort of disagree, in that we need to be able to watch and chew gum at the same time as a government. As you pointed out earlier, there are major infrastructure flaws that need fixing and those cost money. Thing is, AIDS, malaria and TB are all the purview of Health and Human Services which, luckily, didn't end up at DHS when it was formed (run, FEMA, run away!!). We need to be funding both.
LATOYA: They are — but they also dovetail into terrorism, as in, what's easiest to spread? Again, we're dropping tons of cash on Star Wars, while the terrorists are bombing cars, hijacking planes, and running up on people with machine guns. I think it's time to reevaluate.
MEGAN: AIDS are malaria are, technically, kind of hard to spread. Are they going to breed infected mosquitoes, smuggle them in and release them? Run around pricking everyone in NY with dirty needles?
LATOYA: Again, depends. But like Lo said, they are all different things. Chemical/Biological/Nuclear all have to be evaluated and dealt with separately. But your point I think goes back to evaluating risk. What poses the greatest risk to the citizenry?
MEGAN: True, but I think conflating AIDS funding with terrorism funding hits on one of my pet Washington peeves, which is how people try to tie their pet issue to the thing most likely to generate funding rather than arguing its merits.
LATOYA: No, I agree the tying funds to something unrelated is an annoying Washington tic. But these things are related.
MEGAN: I don't deny the public health crisis, or the need to spend more money on prevention and research on major diseases, but malaria is of virtually no risk to the U.S. population.
LATOYA: Umm...you sure? I just got my health insurance back.
MEGAN: Yeah, I'm sure.
LATOYA: Before then, if there was an outbreak of anything, I might die. I can't remember my last vaccinations.
MEGAN: There are few vaccinations you need as a grown-up other than a tetanus booster, Hep and a flu shot. I, at least, am too old for Gardisil, so there you go.
LATOYA: But then again, I come from a state where a kid died from a tooth abscess, just because of a lack of dental care, so maybe I'm just paranoid like that.
MEGAN: That was so sad! I remember that case. It's such an argument for expanding SCHIP coverage.
LATOYA: It actually did. They named the new dental bus thing we have after that kid, and it lead to Maryland increasing what dentists are paid with Medicaid so more dentists will accept poor patients. So while I would love to think we're immune to things like Malaria, TB, and other things we thought we cured, you never really know. Like TB — we're okay, and the rate is dropping in the US but there is some disturbing news about TB along the border and drug resistant strains in Latin America. Lorelei mentioned ""We're so stuck [in an old way of thinking] - the first thing we do is build a wall." (See Mexico). "There is a mentality that you can contain threats in today's world. And we have to realize we can't - it is no longer possible."
MEGAN: Well, no one argues that we cured malaria or TB, but malaria hasn't been an issue here in a really, really long time. But, I'm all for raising Medicare reimbursement rates, expanding SCHIP coverage, increasing medical research funds, all that stuff. We just don't have to tie it to terrorism to do it, I think.
LATOYA: So we need to look at that. We may not have to tie it to terrorism, but the two agencies should work in tandem. Just like an increased TB risk may have something to do with securing our border with Mexico.
MEGAN: Drug-resistant diseases are sort of a scourge of health care, in part because so many people — particularly in the developing world where care is lacking —- don't finish their course of antibiotics, they stop taking it when they feel better or they take them when they don't need it. Of course, if we talk about drug resistant TB and securing the border, you know it will inflame prejudices when there's been exactly one case of a Mexico businessman who had it and came here and never infected anyone.
LATOYA: Very true. We also talked about the IMF/World Bank and the relationship between capitalism and democracy, but it's about that time Megan.
MEGAN: It is, but for whatever reason Breton Woods made me start singing the song "Norwegian Wood" in my head, so I will go hum that to myself while I post this.
LATOYA: And now, you made me think of Haruki Murakami. Now I just want to read instead of work.


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New wave of Silicon Valley travel apps emerges to challenge Orbitz, TripAdvisor
Summer's in full effect, which means it's time to hit the road. And it goes without saying that you're not alone: Elizabeth Becker, author of "Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism," reports that the number of worldwide tourists hit 1 billion last year.
"The travel and tourism industry," she said, "is poised to become the biggest business sector in the world."
Silicon Valley, naturally, is taking notice. And in the same way technology has disrupted standbys such as guidebooks and travel agents, a new breed of startups is cropping up to offer alternatives built around social media and search.
"It's still too hard for consumers to find a place to stay," said Drew Patterson, CEO of Mountain View-based Room 77. He cites the typical horror story of a traveler who books a room on discount site Priceline "and gets stuck between the elevator and ice machine."
Room 77 debuted two years ago to offer travelers more details about rooms before booking, including the floor plans and views. The site has since evolved into a search engine that folds in content from a number of older travel sites -- like TripAdvisor reviews and rates from such vendors as Hotels.com and, yes, Priceline.
"I only have to go to one site," said Phillip Deland of Pleasanton, a business manager at a chemical analysis company who's used Room 77 for business trips in the United States and abroad.
The site gets a cut when users book rooms via one of those older online retailers like Hotels.com. But Patterson said those "retail" travel sites are losing their edge with consumers, due in large part to the convenience factor Deland cites.
"You're seeing this very broad shift in the market from retailers to search, because a search engine gives consumers a better answer," Patterson said. "We've got an engineering team full of ex-Googlers."
Travel search engines, he added, racked up 500 million searches last year. That goes a long way toward explaining why Priceline in November bought search site Kayak (where Patterson was an early executive) for $1.8 billion and why Expedia in January led a $30 million funding round for Room 77.
Another popular new search site is San Francisco's Hipmunk, which focuses on flights, but also has added hotel bookings. Co-founder Adam Goldstein cooked up the idea while a member of MIT's debate team; arranging group travel to competitions in Turkey and Botswana, he said, "was agony. All the sites offered nearly identical prices. It didn't make any sense."
His solution: Rating search results using an "agony index" that shows a flight's duration and number of stops, along with the price. The site also presents options like the cost and time needed for a plane trip versus traveling the same route via train.
"It's a great user experience," said Matthew Dorr, a tech investment banker in San Francisco who first read about the site in a tech blog last year. He likes the fact that when Hipmunk compares prices across various booking sites, they all appear in the same window rather than in separate pop-ups, as on Kayak.
Goldstein added that while his company's business model mirrors Connecticut-based Kayak's, taking a slice of each fare booked, Hipmunk also integrates your online calendar -- to show, for instance, a hotel near the meetings you've got scheduled.
The former Apple (AAPL) intern freely admits he and his co-founder, Steve Huffman, knew nothing about the travel business when they started Hipmunk. But because Huffman had previously founded news-sharing site Reddit (and sold it for millions to Condé Nast), he gained access to venture backers such as Ignition Partners, which had invested in Expedia.
While Goldstein declined to specify how many people use the site, he said they perform millions of searches a month. About a third of those searches come from mobile devices, which he said reflects the "younger, technologically hip" demographic that he believes the traditional travel industry underserves.
In another effort to woo those tech hipsters, Hipmunk displays lodging options from Airbnb (a fellow alumnus of startup incubator Y Combinator) alongside those of the older hotel booking sites.
Also backed by Y Combinator is a newer entrant in the travel search space, GetGoing, which offers personalized flight searches -- or, if you're not quite sure where to go, will suggest options based on queries as general as the word "beaches."
In fact, the notion of helping travelers decide where to go and what to do is behind a growing number of next-generation travel sites and apps. One of the current heavyweights in the space is San Francisco's Gogobot, launched in 2010 by veterans of MySpace and Yahoo (YHOO). The site's 2.5 million registered users can troll their Facebook and Twitter networks for recommendations on lodging, dining and destinations.
"You can kind of see where everybody else is going," said Karen Le, a civil engineer in San Jose who calls the site better organized and more trustworthy than other recommendation engines like TripAdvisor and Yelp.
Becker, the author, said first-generation online travel tools like Travelocity and Hotwire have helped revolutionize the industry and driven down costs. "Now that people believe they are their own best travel agents and can book everything online," she said, "the number of new apps will only increase."
A closer look at a few of the latest travel apps:
Offers itinerary recommendations tailored to your Facebook profile
Austin-based service helps travelers find mom-and-pop bars and restaurants so they don't feel like tourists.
App tells you which city your friends are in and helps schedule meeting times and places
Collaborative marketplace simplifies planning of group trips.
Founded by ex-Google engineers in Berlin, app makes recommendations that change as you wander around.
"Social discovery" app came out of stealth mode in late May with funding from Google Ventures


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he's so fuzzy, he's so great
You can't make this stuff up.
My friend the Maritime Security Expert says that the Japanese have no sense of irony. She said this after working outside Tokyo for six months. She said this again when giving me a keychain shaped like Prime Minister Koizumi (it looks like a caricature, with an enlarged head relative to the rest of his body). "It could have been Winnie the Pooh," she said. "Makes no difference."
But surely, surely, SURELY Koizumi knew that it would be considered ironic if he sang "Love Me Tender" to Lisa-Marie. I mean, who goes to Graceland and manages not to smirk?
Then again. There are people who take Elvis really, really seriously. Four years ago we went to Graceland for our annual girls' weekend. Unfortunately, we inadvertently scheduled the weekend for the 25th anniversary of Elvis' passing from this mortal coil. I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that I don't ever expect to again see that many Elvis impersonators of such diverse ancestry. (Oooh! Apparently they have a professional organization! Must be a great place to trade tips on applying pomade and avoiding getting tangled up in the wings on your American Eagle jumpsuit.) Nor do I ever again want to have see so many floral renditions of Elvis at a graveside. Ever.
I hope Koizumi had a good time. It sure sounds like he did. It would've been better if he'd sung "In the Ghetto," but then the president would have had an awkward p.r. moment. Me, I'm still a little miffed that Velvet Elvises are for sale at neither Graceland nor the Elvis Presley Birthplace in Tupleo, Mississippi (Don't ask. Tupelo was too far.). But my attorney tells me you can take a photo and have a velvet anyone made in Nuevo Laredo. Or you can go to this website and get yourself turned into Velvet Elvis. So there's hope.


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Gargling lemonade boosts self-control, study shows
Many of us wish we could have a little more self-control, such as those trying to curb their snacking or smoking intake. A new study suggests gargling lemonade might do the trick -- for a little while.
The study, published online Oct. 22 in Psychological Science, found gargling a sugary beverage increased participants' performance on tasks that measures short-term self-control.
For the small study, researchers at the University of Georgia enlisted 51 students and gave them two self-control tests.
The first test asked students to meticulously cross out the letter "E" from a page of statistics, a task which has been shown to deplete one's self control.
Then they were given a "Stroop" test, in which words that spelled out the name of colors were shown in different colors. Participants are asked to tell the tester which color is on the screen. However people are more prone to read the word, thus saying the color correctly would reflect a measure self-control.
Before the Stroop test, half the students were asked to rinse their mouths with sugary lemonade, while the other half used Splenda-sweetened lemonade. The researchers found those who swigged with the sugary drink were much faster at correctly stating the color instead of the word.
However the researchers emphasize the test only measured short-term self-control.
"The research is not clear yet on the effects of swishing with glucose on long-term self-control," study author Dr. Leonard Martin, a professor of psychology at UGA, said in a press release. "So, if you are trying to quit smoking, a swish of lemonade may not be the total cure, but it certainly could help you in the short run."
Martin said because people didn't need to consume the drink, the trial suggests sugar stimulates carbohydrate sensors found in the tongue, which signal the motivational centers of the brain to "tell your body to pay attention." That stops the automatic response, which in this case was reading the words on a screen.
"It is the self-investment," Martin said. "It doesn't just crank up your energy, but it cranks up your personal investment in what you are doing. Clicking into the things that are important to you makes those self-related goals salient."