[Whew. That’s really, really rough. -egg]

With an estimated 100,000 homeless people living on the streets of Delhi, and 18,000 shelter beds, the city’s nighttime sidewalks are the only bed for tens of thousands of workers.

These workers are doubly cursed: not only homeless, but also denied any place to keep their belongings. They have nowhere to keep a blanket from night to night, so they must pay a few rupees every night for a rented quilt from a “quilt-wallah,” a package deal that comes with the wallah’s protection — bribes to cops and street-sweepers, advice to pickpockets to avoid the wallah’s sleeping customers, sometimes even a nighttime open-air Bollywood screening.

Filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s new documentary “Cities of Sleep” follows the quilt-wallahs and their customers through two years of Delhi’s sweltering summers and frigid winters, providing an intimate look at the tragic deaths of the more than 3,000 unidentifiable workers who expire on the nighttime streets every year; the generosity and desperation of the more fortunate sleepers; the varying approaches of the quilt-makers, which swing from tender to venal.

Desperate for slumber in Delhi, homeless encounter a ‘Sleep Mafia’ (Times of India)

In the execution of their own daily miracles, London’s commuters have learned to withstand vast and unpredictable challenges: track closures; signal failures; engineering works. And they have developed a thick skin. But on that particular Friday, the 11,000 of them who got off at Holborn station between 8.30 and 9.30am faced an unusually severe provocation. As they turned into the concourse at the bottom of the station’s main route out and looked up, they saw something frankly outrageous: on the escalators just ahead of them, dozens of people were standing on the left.

The idea had come about after Len Lau, Vauxhall area manager, had gone to Hong Kong on holiday. Lau noticed that passengers on that city’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) were standing calmly on both sides of the escalator and, it seemed, travelling more efficiently and safely as a result. His report prompted Harrison and her colleagues to wonder whether the same effect would apply at a station such as Holborn, and so they set about arranging a three-week trial.

The theory, if counterintuitive, is also pretty compelling. Think about it. It’s all very well keeping one side of the escalator clear for people in a rush, but in stations with long, steep walkways, only a small proportion are likely to be willing to climb. In lots of places, with short escalators or minimal congestion, this doesn’t much matter. But a 2002 study of escalator capacity on the Underground found that on machines such as those at Holborn, with a vertical height of 24 metres, only 40% would even contemplate it. By encouraging their preference, TfL effectively halves the capacity of the escalator in question, and creates significantly more crowding below, slowing everyone down. When you allow for the typical demands for a halo of personal space that persist in even the most disinhibited of commuters – a phenomenon described by crowd control guru Dr John J Fruin as “the human ellipse”, which means that they are largely unwilling to stand with someone directly adjacent to them or on the first step in front or behind – the theoretical capacity of the escalator halves again. Surely it was worth trying to haul back a bit of that wasted space.

The tube at a standstill: why TfL stopped people walking up the escalators | UK news | The Guardian

[I found the theory, that lead was a major cause of the US crime boom, pretty convincing. This study argues that it was a spurious correlation due to faulty data. On the other hand, one of the major original proponents of the theory makes a decent argument that this study is itself flawed, and the lead theory still has legs. -egg]

One of the more exotic explanations for America’s incredible decades-long drop in crime is the lead theory. As the theory goes, we know that lead exposure is really harmful — it can cause learning disabilities, lower IQs, impulsivity, and aggressive behavior. So when America began taking lead out of its gasoline, it reduced all these bad outcomes — and crime, statistics show, fell right alongside rates of lead exposure.

A new study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology suggests, however, that this correlation may not exist at all, calling the supposed drop in both lead and crime a statistical “artifact” based on faulty crime data. And that means one of the most popular theories about the crime drop could be wrong.

Study: one of the most popular theories for America’s huge crime drop is wrong – Vox

[On the flaws of hairshirt green politics. Interesting food for thought. -egg]

Yes, Virginia, while Walmart, the third largest employer in the world, operates within the free market competing against other shops, internally, the multinational firm is the very model of planning, as are all firms. Highly hierarchical and, yes, dictatorial, but planned with brilliant efficiency by humans nonetheless. As American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson has scandalously suggested, strip out the exploitation of its workers and the lack of democracy, and the stunning logistical wonder that is Walmart actually becomes an example of planning that socialists should study with keen scrutiny. Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, “the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.

Source: Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical / Boing Boing

I am convinced that [virtual reality] is not going to be an extension of cinema or 3-D cinema or video games. It is something new, different, and not experienced yet. The strange thing here is that normally, in the history of culture, we have new stories and narrations and then we start to develop a tool. Or we have visions of wondrous new architecture—like, let’s say, the museum in Bilbao, or the opera house in Sydney—and technology makes it possible to fulfill these dreams. So you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit. In this case, we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.

 

Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality – The New Yorker

[Props to this dude for exposing an extremely invasive technology. -egg]

Three months after the FedEx episode, on August 3rd, the task force descended on an apartment complex near the San Jose airport, rented in the name Steven Travis Brawner. Agents caught Rupard outside the complex, and served a search warrant on his apartment and storage unit later that day. They found $117,000 in US currency, 230 ounces of gold, and 588 ounces of silver, along with the dark gray hoodie tying him to the drop at the train station and a Verizon AirCard tying him to the bank accounts. By the time the case was over, the agents would recover more than $1.4 million.

The suspect was charged with 35 counts of wire fraud, 35 counts of aggravated identity theft, and three other miscellaneous charges — enough to keep him in jail for the rest of his life. Taking his fingerprints three days later, the police finally worked back to his name — not Rupard, or Stout, or Brawner, or Aldrich, or any of the others. His name was Daniel Rigmaiden.

But there was something else, something that wasn’t reported on the seizure affidavit, the complaint, or any of the documents that followed. To track Rigmaiden down, the investigators had used a secret device, one that allowed them to pinpoint their target with far more accuracy than Verizon could. They called it a cell-site simulator, or by its trade name, Stingray. Neither term was found in the court order that authorized its use. The device had to be kept secret, even from the courts.

The Stingray had worked perfectly. Agents traced the suspect’s AirCard back to his apartment and now had more than enough evidence for a conviction. But in the years that followed, that open-and-shut case would turn into something far more complex. Working from prison, Rigmaiden would unravel decades of secrecy, becoming the world’s foremost authority on the device that sent him to jail. By the time he was finished, a covert surveillance device and the system that kept it secret would be exposed to the public for the very first time.

The Dragnet | The Verge

[To be honest, that trend looks kinda questionable to me — I’d like to see a 95% confidence interval on that. But certainly seems to be a negative trend at the very least, and interesting if true. -egg]

Most talk of income inequality focuses on the problems of the very poor or the broader socioeconomic implications of rising inequality. What is less well-known is that income inequality makes us all less happy with our lives, even if we’re relatively well-off.

We examined data from the Gallup World Poll and the World Top Incomes Database and found that the more income is concentrated in the hands of a few, the more likely individuals are to report lower levels of life satisfaction and more negative daily emotional experiences. That is, the higher the share of national income that is held by the top 1%, the lower the overall well-being of the general population. Specifically, we found that a 1% increase in the share of taxable income held by the top 1% hurts life satisfaction as much as a 1.4% increase in the country-level unemployment rate.

 

Source: Income Inequality Makes Whole Countries Less Happy

[From Bruce Schneier, who’s hardly prone to privacy hysteria…]

We accept all of this Internet surveillance because we don’t really think about it. If there were a dozen people from Internet marketing companies with pens and clipboards peering over our shoulders as we sent our Gmails and browsed the Internet, most of us would object immediately. If the companies that made our smartphone apps actually followed us around all day, or if the companies that collected our license plate data could be seen as we drove, we would demand they stop. And if our televisions, computer, and mobile devices talked about us and coordinated their behavior in a way we could hear, we would be creeped out.

We need to do better. We need to have a conversation about the privacy implications of cross-device tracking, but — more importantly­ — we need to think about the ethics of our surveillance economy. Do we want companies knowing the intimate details of our lives, and being able to store that data forever? Do we truly believe that we have no rights to see the data that’s collected about us, to correct data that’s wrong, or to have data deleted that’s personal or embarrassing? At a minimum, we need limits on the behavioral data that can legally be collected about us and how long it can be stored, a right to download data collected about us, and a ban on third-party ad tracking. The last one is vital: it’s the companies that spy on us from website to website, or from device to device, that are doing the most damage to our privacy.

 

The Internet of Things that Talks About You Behind Your Back – Schneier on Security