by Stanford Law School Communications on December 19, 2019 3:52 pm

If you are still in search of the perfect winter break book or podcast, here are a few suggestions from the faculty at Stanford Law School.

For instance, RALPH RICHARD BANKS, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law, suggests The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead:

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead is a good one. This book has relatable characters who experience the cruelty and unpredictability of life, and form a bond that carries them through.

NORA FREEMAN ENGSTROM, professor of law, recommends Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank:

Alas, Babylon

Each family vacation we pick one book to read aloud and last summer we enjoyed a stunner my husband had remembered fondly from his youth, Alas, Babylon. Part Swiss Family Robinson atomic age survival tale, part Cold War history lesson, part (even) comedy, we loved every page. Full of pluck, daring and heart, the book is captivating for young and old alike.

WILLIAM GOULD, the Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, Emeritus, suggests In Hoffas Shadow by Jack Goldsmith:

The big hit of recent months wasIn Hoffas Shadow by Harvard law Professor Jack Goldsmith, whose stepfather was Teamster boss and Hoffas gofer and the FBIs prime suspect as the man who drove Hoffa to his killers. It is written well, in a style that you wouldnt expect from a law professor. Its about Goldsmiths relationship with his stepfather, his reconciliation with the man he had rejected as an impediment to his own advancement and his search for the truth about Hoffas disappearance. Its a book about Hoffa, his hard and violent struggle in the Teamster leadership, his clashes with RFK (whom Goldsmith despises), and his criminal trials. The book gets as close as any to figuring the whodunnit in Hoffas death. The description of the day of his disappearance will have your heart in your mouth.

PAMELA KARLAN, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law, recommends Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClellan, JD15:

You might think you know the place but Carys book will show you things youve never seen before in an almost cinematographic way. Funny, heartbreaking, unforgettable.

DEBORAH SIVAS, the Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law, recommends the NPR podcast Hidden Brain:

Each episode explores the science behind human behavior, but does so in a narrative storytelling fashion that engages a non-expert audience, sometimes making me laugh, sometimes making me cry, but always making me think.

Read more suggestions on the Stanford Law School website.

Excerpt from:
End-of-the-year book and podcast suggestions from Stanford Law School | The Dish - Stanford Report

Never in history have we had so much data at our disposal about human culture and behavior, says Lev Manovich, but as far as most artists and academics from the humanities are concerned, this data is capitalism, so its considered bad, because money is bad.

Manovich is one of the most important thinkers and researchers in the realms of the internet and digital culture today. His 2001 book The Language of New Media laid the theoretical foundations for what we now call digital studies, and helped create the terms we use to think and talk about culture in the digital age, first and foremost the concept of new media. A professor of computer science at the City University of New Yorks Graduate Center, Manovich says he sees himself not as an academic per se, but rather as an artist whose medium is academic articles. He also doesnt really get why people are still reading a book he published so long ago, and says, maybe the professors are just too lazy to read something else so they keep citing it and tell their students to read it too.

Manovich, 59, is hard to pin down. A self-proclaimed contrarian, hes critical of the academic world, although he has had an impressive run as both an academic and an artist, with a career that has in many senses shadowed the digital revolution he writes about prolifically. He began his career as a graphic designer in the 1980s, but is today credited with being one of the first to extend critical theory to the examination of software and its impact on society, and his interests range from digital aesthetics to cultural analysis of video games and analog radar systems. Hes also a digital artist with a keen interest in cinema, and was one of the first to teach and analyze digital filmmaking.

In recent years, Manovich has written a number of popular and academic studies of what he terms contemporary visual culture, which he defines very widely. This has included studying Instagram, and more recently, setting up a cultural analytics lab (based jointly at CUNY and at Caltech) that works with corporate giants like Google as well as such artistic institutions as the Museum of Modern Art to try to bring know-how from the world of computer science for example, the use of big data to the world of culture.For example, the lab analyzed almost 7.5 million Instagram photos that were shared in Manhattan and crossed-referenced them with demographics data to gauge how factors like inequality are reflected visually, in terms of what images are shared on the social media network. In another project, the lab created an interactive digital installation of the streets of New York City, based on 30 million images and data points collected from Instagram. Manovichs work at the MoMa is perhaps the most representative of his thought, and employs data-visualization methods to 20,000 photos held in the museums photography collection to try and used big data to yield cultural findings related to art history.

The underlying logic of his 30-year career can be seen as the attempt to reconcile two worlds that are seemingly irreconcilable: that of art and high culture, on the one hand, and that of computers and digital culture. Though one may seem aesthetic and artistic, and the other pragmatic and analytic, for Manovich, the digital revolution has linked them together: Computers have become the mediator of all of our cultural consumption, and software has become our artistic tool kit.

In the past, each art form had its own medium for expressing itself the photographer had his camera and the writer, his typewriter. Today, however, many forms of art and human creativity manifest almost exclusively through computer software. For Marshall McLuhan, the medium was the message because there were fundamental differences between television and books and radio. Today we live in a world in which films and television are consumed through Netflix, and music and podcasts through Spotify, both of which are accessed through a computer be it a smartphone app or an internet browser. For Manovich that means there are no longer different media as much as there is the new medium of software.

No human being writes anymore, Friedrich Kittler, the philosopher of technology, wrote in 1982, observing that, Today, human writing runs through inscriptions burnt into silicon.

Identity and politics

Manovich was born in 1960 in the Soviet Union, and raised in a Jewish household in Moscow: My parents were scientists and they were very secular, he says. He moved to the United States in the 1980s to complete his doctorate, at the University of Rochester, in visual and cultural studies. Therefore, one might assume that like other emigres from the USSR a younger member of that same cohort is Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, who was born in 1973 Manovich is enamored of American culture. But thats not actually true: With Manovitch, nothing is black or white, and today he has returned to Russia (on sabbatical) to continue his cultural analytics project.

What I find terrifying is that intellectuals in America actually believe what they read in The New York Times, he says, which is to say they treat it as the gospel truth. Russia has many problems, however, Russia is outside of human rationality meanwhile, the U.S. is the most rational place in the world. When I came to America, I felt I was surrounded by robots.

Russia is a very complex country with lots of problems there are many spaces there where people still feel helpless, for example, the court system. But there are also lots of good things. For example, technologically, Moscow is very progressive, it has the best WiFi, Uber works great and Russia is the third-biggest country in terms of Instagram users. So its basically a contemporary country, but its also an authoritarian country so is China, by the way, but China is efficient and Russia is not.

But if you look at The New York Times, they only write about Russia from a negative perspective. So you want to know about the problem with fake news? Its the news is itself that is the problem, because its a very biased view of the world.

To Manovich, journalism is a flawed medium that we shouldnt fetishize. People assume the news is the truth and that fake news corrupted a perfect medium. He says, its not perfect, its flawed because of its business model, which incentivizes negative narratives.

The percentage of negative news is on the rise, he asserts, studies in the 1960s and 70s also found this. Why? Maybe because they need to sell advertisements, but intellectuals and other people think we are living in a time of crisis.

Guys! What crisis? Between 1940 and 1945 there was a crisis there was the Holocaust and the entire world was at war. Now there are only a few local conflicts we live in humanitys best period and every single indicator says so but the media create this sense that thats not true, and so people are depressed.

But nonetheless, the rise of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putins growing global power create the sense that we are on the brink of a social or political crisis and that technology plays a key role in that.

But that has nothing to do with technology! Technology only reflects and permits cultural and social desires.

What do you mean? How does technology reflect social desires?

People want to feel safe, people want to neutralize uncertainty and increase predictability. And into this space, enters technology. Technology is very good at addressing human desires. For example: Authoritarian countries love technology because they love the idea of total control and total surveillance, and in China and Russia theyve embraced the internet more than anyone else.

The problem with this, according to Manovich, is the expectations we have of technology: Dont ask too much of technology and dont try to blame it for everything. In the 1990s, we lived in this optimistic decade, it was the end of the Cold War, the beginning of globalization, etc., and people projected these feelings onto technology and lots of left-wing thinkers, writers and journalists were writing about the internet as being connected to freedom so the internet was seen as a liberation project that works well with left-wing ideas. Twenty-five years later, we are now told that there is a massive social and political crisis, and people now project those feelings onto technology and blame it for that.

So loss of privacy and surveillance are not really a problem?

That is a misunderstanding and a problem of misplaced expectations: People really need to accept the fact that technology is not black or white, but part of our culture and our society. Every technology can be used in thousands of different ways. Just like you go out into the physical world and you see beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. So for me, its the same with technology and the internet and even Facebook.

What is the biggest misunderstanding the general public has about the internet and technology?

Technology is seen as a mechanism that will allow for safety and predictability. So we put cameras everywhere and allow people to read our emails. But what Im trying to say is that the problem is not surveillance, the problem is that people want surveillance. And in some cases it works crime is down in some places because of these cameras. So its not all bad. For example, the Google Assistant does want to help me and make sure I reach my flight on time and it knows I have a flight because it reads my emails. It is in that sense that technology is very good at answering our desires, but the desire for stability and security through technology is the real problem: No one treats the internet as something to experiment with or something that can liberate anymore. Therefore, people are using it to create this very safe and predictable world that is closed and very conventional and it is very depressing.

The problem that occupies Manovich, is the conservative way people look at technology, and the fact that people from the arts and humanities no longer think about computers in creative ways, and even incite against big data instead of finding a way to wrest if from the hands of corporations for their own use.

The 1990s and early 2000s was a very activist period very idealistic, avant-garde, and people created things like Wikipedia. Today we have high-tech and big data but nobody is creating the next Wikipedia perhaps the best of online projects, which gave millions of people access to knowledge. So why is there no new Wikipedia today? Because society has changed and people realize you can make money from technology, not change the world, and thats what they are doing. I love the world, but I feel sad this is very reactionary, the professor says, adding, Think how great the ideas of the early internet thinkers were. People like Ted Nelson who thought about hypertext as a revolutionary force, or even someone like Vanevar Bush, who thought about organizing knowledge in a completely new way.

Both Nelson and Bush wrote texts about technologies that were never realized but that influenced generations of engineers and entrepreneurs. For example, in a seminal text published in The Atlantic in 1945, Bush, who headed headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), suggested creating a desktop system for storing and retrieving the wealth of information created by science. His so-called Memex system (a portmanteau of memory index) is considered a precursor to the desktop computer. Nelson, for his part, coined the term hypertext, as well as the idea of copy/paste, and envisaged a system called Xanadu, with interlinked pages, which foreshadowed the world wide web.

But at the end of the day, the digital revolution didnt actually create a revolution in knowledge like Bush and certainly like Nelson wanted. For example, Wikipedia is written by a relatively small group of predominantly male editors and it seems to me to have recreated many of the biases of the past despite promising to do the exact opposite.

What are you talking about! That is just not true. For millions of people, Wikipedia allowed access to knowledge for the first time. In Russia its used for intellectual debate.Listen, there were always utopian ideas; that is not new and that is not unique to our age and certainly not digital culture. All the problems with Wikipedia, for example, are problems that are related to humanity and have always been there. I wrote some articles on Wikipedia and now I feel ownership over it that is a human issue, not a technological [one].But the internet did something amazing and we in the West either forgot [that] or dont want to talk about that anymore.

China is a good counter example [of a digital revolution]: They built a big firewall, but at the same time, they also developed their own IT industry. They are the only country to do that [built their own discrete internet], and it works for them, and the educated middle class there likes the social credit system, for example [which is intended to give and make public scores on both financial credit and behavior for both individuals and businesses]. From a Western point of view that is very terrifying, but they are clearly saying, we want order and we have to give up some privacy and freedom for that order and at some level they are okay with that.

Life in a photoshopped society

I meet Manovich, a well-built and emotive man, at a stylish hotel in central Tel Aviv. Hes in town its his first time in Israel for the PrintScreen festival, and arrived courtesy of the U.S. Embassy in Israel. Which leads me to ask him if he feels Jewish, and if he had ever wanted to visit here before.

Im a Jew, so obviously I wanted to come to Israel, he says. I even have some family here, so its almost strange that I havent been here yet. But Ill also admit Im one of those Jews whos afraid of other Jews, you know? Like if theres too many of us in one place, someone may try to kill us. But its a strange thing, this idea of Jewish continuity.

Did you feel like you grew up with a Jewish identity?

There is no word I hate more than identity. Personally, yes, Im a proud Jew. My mother raised us to be proud of being Jewish and was proud that our family was living in Moscow from the 19th century, which is rare for Jews. On the other hand, I have never done those genetic tests, and they may be a lie. I dont know what I think about them and if there really is such a thing as a Jewish gene.

Obviously, there is no such thing! Do you not see a connection between genetic testing and identity politics? As if DNA can supply a scientific basis for identity?

Please be careful not to project your own ideas on to me when you write up this interview. I am not one of those intellectuals like [Slavoj] Zizek, who can talk about anything. I dont like talking about things that I havent thought about. But forget that. Im here because I want to fall in love with Tel Aviv and my condition for this interview is that you give me a good recommendation for a place to go out tonight. But I dont want to go to some bar with only teenagers where Ill feel old.

You should go to the Teder [entertainment compound]; its classic Tel Aviv and theres tons of places there, but you may feel old. Im 32 and I also feel a bit old there sometime. But Tel Aviv is amazing.

It feels like you guys are still in the 1990s technology and high-tech are still working for you.

Really? When did digital culture become a cultural force? In the 90s?

The big change came in 2005-2006 with social media. If in the 80s we had maybe 40 people in the entire world doing animation with computers, then today Adobe has 20 million users and there are about one billion photographers on Instagram.

In his 2013 book Software Takes Command, Manovich offers a historical and cultural analysis of software as a creative tool. I look at Photoshop filters like an art historian looks at the Mona Lisa, he says proudly today. Indeed, his book gives a detailed analysis of how Photoshops menu, for example, impacts digital photography ideas that today hes using to critique Instagram.

Do you feel digital culture is by definition a visual culture?

Yes, very much. Today you buy a phone and you are forced to become a photographer. That has both cultural and aesthetic significance. Because now suddenly everyones a photographer and there is an aesthetic that is a direct result of the technological forces behind these new media.

An example of those technological forces can be found in his book, where Manovich recounts how he traveled to South Korea to find the graphic design studio that did the illustrative shots that come with all of Samsungs phones. For him, this small studio in effect created the aesthetic language for an entire generation of photographers who use Samsung phone as a camera.

When I went to Seoul, I met my wife, who was probably the only person in South Korea who had had plastic surgery. When I was there I understood that this is a society that has been photoshopped an airbrushed society and therefore it makes sense they would create this aesthetic because they have this aesthetic of perfection.

Over the past few months, a number of South Korean K-pop stars have committed suicide, most recently Goo Hara, in her case after it was revealed that she had undergone plastic surgery. Is this the price of this aesthetic of perfection?

Maybe, but airbrushing is not new. Photography has always been airbrushed, technology only increases its precision and scale. For example, you look at the photos in old newspapers and they are so airbrushed that for us it looks almost like painting. Photoshop did not invent airbrushing, it only expanded its scale and increased its precision. The Photoshop revolution preserved this aesthetic quality but also made it more wide-scale and more accurate.

The same thing happened with Instagram and camera phones. Photoshop was used only by professional photographers they are the only ones who understood what I was writing about [in the late 1990s] because they felt the change Photoshop created in their field. Meanwhile, Instagram wanted to be used by the general public. But what actually happened? Five, six years into Instagram, all the photos there look super photoshopped everything is filtered and airbrushed, just now its automatic. But Photoshops influence on Instagram is just so clear, and today the goal of Instagram photos is that they look super professional and perfect even though it was set up as an attempt to democratize Photoshop and Flickr, which were scary and intended only for professional photographers.

Do you think Instagram actually democratized photography?

I dont know. If anything, it democratized beauty. But at the aesthetic level, this is a very dangerous thing, people get used to perfection and perfect images. Every picture you see online not to mention in print has been airbrushed and worked on. In the past 20 years, the desire for an aesthetics of perfection has also undergone a process of mass production. Today this aesthetic is actually preserved and enhanced not just through human behavior but also through algorithms and machine learning. When you swipe, you are sorting for the best picture and the algorithm only wants to [reinforce this by showing] you what you will click on, and that creates this situation.

In your most recent works, you have turned your focus to Instagram, attempting to treat it as an arena that is both artistic and big data. You asked: How can I look at a billion photographs at the same time and try to reach some aesthetic or cultural understanding. Do you think the age of human aesthetics is over and now we only have big data aesthetics?

That is not what I think at all and really dont want you to project your own ideas about this post-subject aesthetic onto me. I will give you an answer that will surprise you, because we are both smart Jews: My next text is not about the attempt to look at a million photographs but rather only at one. I want to write about one single Instagram photo and dedicate 60 pages to it.

Why?

Because I want to write about things that move us and I think that today content matters more than ever. Computers cannot see what makes a photograph beautiful and thats what interests me. Today people seem to think that there are too many photos, too many posts, and that content doesnt matter. I think the opposite. Now content matters more than ever before. The single frame, the single post or even a book the perfection of each of these is more important because the competition is so big. People are looking for a point of orientation to grab onto and a book is just such an orienting point.

If I write a book that is good and people read it then that means that it has succeeded despite there being so many blog posts and articles out there. Look at Yuval Noah Harari I dont know if what he writes is actually good scientifically but people are interested in what he has to say, and that is amazing. People read him all over the world.

And what about digital culture and data? Why arent people more interested in that?

Maybe if Id write about money, like [Thomas] Pikkety, and not about culture, people would be more interested and Id be more successful. But forget about that, its not just software and digital culture its data. Ill give you an example. I gave a lecture to PhD students in art and art history; these are the people who are going to go on to become curators at the MoMa and so on. And I tell them about my research into Instagram and they listen politely but at the end of my talk, they ask me: Why are you wasting your time on Instagram, its not art. So I say: What are you talking about, Im interested in contemporary visual culture and thats where its happening.

Do you understand? There are a billion people using Instagram, but for those students, its capitalism and corporations, so its bad and all these people using Instagram are just living in false consciousness. That the only perspective for examining Instagram is not as art or culture, but as an ideology. For them Instagram is just an instrument of ideology, but I hate that bullshit.

Come on, not all of academia is that Marxist. There are social studies that do focus on digital culture.

Of course, but you need to understand that today there are two types or schools of social sciences: the one done at universities, and the one done by corporations. They both miss something, in some sense. Humanities and social sciences only focus on diversity, inclusion and identity trying to challenge the Western canon which is very important and actually great, but its a really bad way to research Instagram and think about software culture. Why? Because it treats these things as capitalistic. And therefore in some strange way, I find myself on the side of the corporations, because they do analysis of human behavior. But there is a massive difference between what Google and Amazon do and what academia does: First of all, they dont publish their results, but more importantly, they have 5,000 data points about every person but they only ask one question: Will they buy something? They look at this data for purely commercial reasons. So Im stuck in this weird position and feel a certain discomfort.

Do you think the digital revolution skipped over the humanities and social sciences?

When did Western society really start thinking critically about itself? Yes, theres Descartes, but during the 18th and 19th centuries, we have this golden age of thought. From Marx to Weber and Freud and Durkheim. All this intellectual output was devoid of data, and toward the 1990s, you start to have this sense that everything that can be thought of has already been thought of. There is this intellectual exhaustion, almost, in academia and in what I call high culture. No one thinks about social structures anymore, no one even thinks about the structure of text anymore. There are no big ontological or social theories anymore except with some giants like [philosopher of science] Bruno Latour, but even he limits himself to talking only about science.

That is the paradox of our time: We can have all the information in the world about everyone with an internet connection, and in the future we will even be able to see what people are reading and even view their brains thinking or reading in real time so you can look at society at scale and in resolutions that in the past were impossible, but it hasnt led to any new theory or research. We have all this big data but we dont really know what to do with it, and we think about it and use it with 19th-century methods. For example, Excel is amazing but spreadsheets have existed since the 19th century and are [an example of] classic capitalistic cognition. I want to tell people to think about data in artistic and creative ways.

You also have a revolutionary project it seems. Do you also want to change the world?

Maybe you are right. My goal is to get people to think about technology differently, to think about digital culture in a less rigid way, and get people to think less in stereotypes. I want to make them see the world in a more complex way because thats the way I see the world. In this sense, I do have a left-wing project but its not connected to changing the world, but rather to a desire to make people more open. In that sense, Im actually more of a contrarian.

Go here to see the original:
Fake news isn't the real problem news is: One of the world's leading internet researchers explains what went wrong - Haaretz

Psychology is a vast field that studies human behavior. There have been many psychologists over the years that have made an impact on the field of mental health. One of the most famous psychologists that we hear about is Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that not all mental illnesses have causes that are due to the body; that mental health issues and problems can stem from our hurdles as children and the trauma weve experienced in life. Freud was one of the founders of psychoanalysis, and he believed in analyzing familial relationships in order to understand ourselves better. However, Freud is not the only famous psychologist that has made an impact on the mental health practices that we see in the world today.

Carl Rogers, who formed person-centered or humanistic therapy, had a huge influence on psychology. He believed that the client could lead a therapy session because he wanted clients to be able to solve their own problems. Rather than being seen as an authority figure, clients could see a therapist as a guide. Humanistic or person-centered therapy focused on the client rather than the therapist being an all-knowing being.

Erik Erikson was a psychologist that talked about human development, and he took Freuds work and expanded upon it. He focused a lot on childhood and adolescence and how those years impacted people later in life.

Jean Piaget focused on intellectual development in children and was integral in cognitive psychology. His focus was specifically on the bridge between childhood development as it went into adolescence. He also focused on epistemology and had a huge influence on cognitive psychology.

Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, did experiments that helped us understand human behavior. You may have heard of the term Pavlovian, and this is the person in history who inspired that term. One of Pavlovs famous experiments included a bell and a dog. After the dog heard a bell and got fed along with the noise consistently, the dog began to associate the bell with being fed. From this experiment, we learned about how our brains make associations and how we can use those associations to influence our behavior.

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist. He was one of the founders of analytical psychology. Jung focused a lot on dreams and the significance of our dreams. He believed in archetypal or archetypical images, so he believed that there were things in our minds that related to mythology or different fairy tales that would influence us. He also believed in the collective unconscious, meaning that there are things that we all experience over different cultures that contribute to our personalities. Jung talked about individuality and the self vs. our parents and family. Jung was very spiritual. He believed in finding the faith that made sense for you.

Elliot Aronsons work focused on motivational systems and finding out what the motivation behind different human behaviors was. Elliot was an American psychologist who is known for his experiments surrounding cognitive dissonance.

To understand human behavior, we need to do research, and one of the things that famous psychologists have done is to assess different human behaviors that help us understand why we do the things that we do. The reason that we have productive therapy methods today is that these famous psychologists laid the groundwork for treatment. If youre interested in learning more about yourself, consider seeing a therapist online or in your local area.

Stock photo ID:1132042401

Originally posted here:
How Famous Psychologists Have Impacted Our Mental Health Over Time - The Good Men Project

Not all AI systems will behave the same, and that could be a big problem.

Theres no such thing as reverse in AI systems. Once they are let loose, they do what they were programmed to do optimize results within a given set of parameters.

But today there is no consistency for those parameters. There are no standards by which to measure how AI deviates over time. And there is an expectation, at least today, that AI systems will adapt to whatever patterns they discover in order to optimize power, performance and whatever other metrics are deemed important.

This is where the potential problems begin, because most of these algorithms are so new that no one really knows how they will age over time, or how they will be affected by the aging hardware on which they run. There are no rules or standard ways to define behavior, and there has been very little research (if any) on how systems that are not safety-critical will behave throughout their lifetime. In fact, its not even clear if research could be effectively conducted these days because the software and hardware are in an almost constant state of evolution. Its like trying to measure the impact of screen time on users with the introduction of the first smartphone.

There seems to be little concern about this across the tech industry. This is exciting new technology, and the amount of compute power that will be available to solve problems in the future probably will dwarf everything that has been achieved so far, at least in percentage terms. There are estimates across the industry ranging from thousands to a million times the performance of todays systems, particularly when the hardware is optimized for the software, and vice versa. Thats a lot of compute power, and thats only a part of the overall picture. Machines will talk to machines, and they will train other machines, and at this point no one is certain what to fix or how to fix it if something goes wrong.

This is always a challenge with new technology, but in the past there was always a human in the loop. In fact, one of the reasons we hear more about AI as a tool, rather than as an autonomous technology, is because some people in key roles are worried about the liability implications of unleashing technology on the world before they know how it will actually behave. Having a human in the loop greatly reduces that liability, particularly if you read through all of the end user license agreements. Machines talking to machines dont have the power of attorney (or at least not yet).

There is a lot to be said for AIs potential, both positive and negative. It is a technology that will be with us for a very long time. It will create jobs and take jobs, and it will restructure economies and human behavior in unexpected ways. On the design side, we will need to learn to utilize the best parts and minimize the worst parts. But it would greatly help if we understood better how to predict its behavior and what caused it to behave in ways that it was not trained to do. When that happens, we also need to know what other systems it communicated with and what the potential impact was on those systems.

Finally, for anyone designing these systems, wed greatly appreciate the addition of an easy-to-find kill switch in case something goes really wrong. Failing gracefully is a nice idea, but not everything goes as planned.

See the original post:
What Will AI Look Like In 10 Years? - SemiEngineering

In order to establish the state of the economy, economists employ various theories. Yet what are the criteria for how they decide whether the theory employed is helpful in ascertaining the facts of reality?

According to the popular way of thinking, our knowledge of the world of economics is elusive it is not possible to ascertain how the world of economics really works. Hence, it is held the criterion for the selection of a theory should be its predictive power.

So long as the theory works, it is regarded as a valid framework as far as the assessment of an economy is concerned. Once the theory breaks down, the search for a new theory begins.

For instance, an economist forms the view that consumer outlays on goods and services are determined by disposable income. Once this view is validated by means of statistical methods, it is employed as a tool in the assessments of the future direction of consumer spending. If the theory fails to produce accurate forecasts, it is either replaced, or modified by adding some other explanatory variables.

Again on this way of thinking the tentative nature of theories implies that our knowledge of the world of economics is elusive. Since it is not possible to establish how things really work, then it does not really matter what the underlying assumptions of a theory are. In fact anything goes, as long as the theory can yield good predictions. According to Milton Friedman,

The relevant question to ask about the assumptions of a theory is not whether they are descriptively realistic, for they never are, but whether they are sufficiently good approximation for the purpose in hand. And this question can be answered only by seeing whether the theory works, which means whether it yields sufficiently accurate predictions.1

The popular view that sets predictive capability as the criterion for accepting a theory is questionable.

We can say confidently that, all other things being equal, an increase in the demand for bread will raise its price. This conclusion is true, and not tentative. Will the price of bread go up tomorrow, or sometime in the future? This cannot be established by the theory of supply and demand. Should we then dismiss this theory as useless because it cannot predict the future price of bread? According to Mises,

Economics can predict the effects to be expected from resorting to definite measures of economic policies. It can answer the question whether a definite policy is able to attain the ends aimed at and, if the answer is in the negative, what its real effects will be. But, of course, this prediction can be only qualitative.2

Economic theory should be able to explain economic activity. However, statistical methods are of no help in this regard. All that various statistical methods can do is just compare the movements of various historical pieces of information. These methods cannot identify the driving forces of economic activity. Contrary to popular thinking, economics is not about gross domestic product (GDP), the consumer price index (CPI) or other economic indicators as such, but about human beings that interact with each other. It is about activities that seek to promote peoples lives and well-being.

One can observe that people are engaged in a variety of activities. For instance, one can observe that people are performing manual work, they drive cars, and they walk on the street and dine in restaurants. The distinguishing characteristic of these activities is that they are all purposeful.

Thus, manual work may be a means for some people to earn money, which in turn enables them to achieve various goals such as buying food or clothing. Dining in a restaurant could be a means to establishing business relationships. Driving a car could be a means for reaching a particular destination. People operate within a framework of means and ends they are using various means to secure ends.

Purposeful action implies that people assess or evaluate various means at their disposal against their ends. At any point in time, people have an abundance of ends that they would like to achieve. What limits the attainment of various ends is the scarcity of means. Hence, once more means become available, a greater number of ends, or goals, can be accommodated i.e., peoples living standards will increase.

Another limitation on reaching various goals is the availability of suitable means. Thus to quell my thirst in the desert, I require water. Diamonds in my possession will be of no help in this regard.

The fact that people consciously pursue purposeful actions provides us with definite knowledge, which is always valid as far as human beings are concerned. This knowledge sets the base for a coherent framework that permits a meaningful assessment of the state of an economy.

For instance, during an economic slump, a general fall in the demand for goods and services is observed. Are we then to conclude that the fall in the demand is the cause of an economic recession?

We know that people persistently strive to improve their life and well-being hence their demand for goods and services is likely to be rising and not declining. Consequently, the decline in general demand is a result of peoples inability to support their demand. Problems on the production side are the likely causes of an observed general fall in demand. Once we have established that the likely causes of the economic slump are associated with supply factors, we can proceed to assess the possible reasons behind this.

The knowledge that people are acting purposefully also permits us to evaluate the popular theory that the motor of an economy is consumer spending i.e., demand creates supply. We know, however, that without means, no goals can be met. However, means do not emerge out of the blue they must be produced first. Hence, contrary to the popular thinking, the driving force is supply and not demand.

Or, for example, to counter an emerging economic slump various experts urge the central bank to increase the pace of monetary pumping. By means of an increase in the money supply growth rate it is held individuals wellbeing is going to be protected. Money however, is not suitable to promote real wealth generation as it can only fulfill the role of the medium of the exchange. On the contrary, an increase in the supply of money is going to undermine the wealth generation process and will set in motion the menace of the boom-bust cycle.

The fact that man pursues purposeful actions implies that causes in the world of economics emanate from human beings and not from outside factors. Thus, contrary to popular thinking, individual outlays on goods are not caused by real income as such. In his own unique context, every individual decides how much of a given income will be used for consumption and how much for investments. While it is true that people will respond to changes in their incomes, the response is not automatic. Every individual assesses the increase in income against the particular set of goals he wants to achieve. He might decide that it is more beneficial for him to raise his investment in financial assets rather than to raise consumption.

One example that Mises liked to use in his class to demonstrate the difference between two fundamental ways of approaching human behavior was in looking at Grand Central Station behavior during rush hour. The objective or truly scientific behaviorist, he pointed out, would observe the empirical events: e.g., people rushing back and forth, aimlessly at certain predictable times of day. And that is all he would know. But the true student of human action would start from the fact that all human behavior is purposive, and he would see the purpose is to get from home to the train to work in the morning, the opposite at night, etc. It is obvious which one would discover and know more about human behavior, and therefore which one would be the genuine scientist3

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Good Economic Theory Focuses on Explanation, Not Prediction Frank Shostak (12/19/2019) - WallStreetWindow.com

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff

Shoshana Zuboffs disturbing, galvanizing The Age of Surveillance Capitalism deserves every comparison that its received to Rachel Carsons Silent Springanother masterwork that laid out, with unforgettable clarity, the degradation of ordinary life held captive to profit-seeking interests. Zuboff coined the term surveillance capitalism, half a decade ago, to describe the unique logic of accumulationrecently pioneered by Google and Facebook and now practiced by every app that secretly scrapes your phone for loose datain which surveillance is a foundational mechanism in the transformation of investment into profit. Surveillance capitalism, Zuboff argues, has insinuated itself through colonialist logic; tech companies wave flags of social improvement while plundering the land of human identity and experience to extract as much valuefor themselvesas they possibly can. We get some rewards from this process, of course, and we are constantly being reminded of them: the Internet connects us, the Internet gives us access to information, the Internet makes life convenient. And so, as the Internet becomes essential to social and economic participation, we are forced to accept the specific, monstrous asymmetry that it allows for, in which all accessible human behavior is converted into data and harvested in a process that was designed to be invisible to us, its value accruing only among a small group of technology capitalists. Under surveillance capitalism, we are alienated not just through the way we are forced to express our labor but through the way we are asked to express our lives. These new architectures, Zuboff writes, feed on our fellow feeling to exploit and ultimately to suffocate the individually sensed inwardness that is the wellspring of personal autonomy and moral judgement. But The Age of Surveillance Capitalism reminds us that the Internets central profit model isnt inevitable, any more than it was inevitable that we allowed our country to be permanently blanketed by pesticides. Surveillance capitalism can be curbed through sustained outrage and regulation, and itll have to be, or else. Jia Tolentino

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells

You may remember David Wallace-Wellss article The Uninhabitable Earth, which was published in New York magazine in 2017a piece so widely shared and hotly debated that it required its own Wikipedia article. The story rendered the abstract threat of climate change in concrete, even cinematic, terms, informing the reader without surrendering an ounce of high-level drama. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming is Wallace-Wellss book-length expansion of the piece, and its just as potent, if infinitely more depressing. At its worst, it could be described as apocalypse porn. At its best, its perhaps the richest inventory of climate-change research yet published. Wallace-Wells makes clear, through a stream of startling factoids, that individual consumption choices can never make the difference that policy changes can. (Our smug organic-produce shopping, in others words, is virtually meaningless.) And yet the tidbit that struck me most was a fairly mundane one. Wallace-Wells writes that higher pollution levels have been strongly linked to premature births and low birth weightsand that the simple introduction of E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems, in the vicinity of toll plazas, by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, just by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars slowed to pay the toll. Though a grim testament to the danger of carbon emissions, the fact that something as simple as E-ZPass could help is also encouraging. There may not be a silver bullet for climate change, but, as Wallace-Wells argues, theres still far too much potential for change for hope to be lost. Carrie Battan

Inside Out: A Memoir, by Demi Moore

The celebrity memoir is very often a noisy thing: from shocking tales of hardscrabble childhoods to juicy, behind-the-scenes dirt on the rich and famous, its not a genre that is known for its subtlety. And, on the face of it, Demi Moores recent autobiography (which she wrote in collaboration with my colleague Ariel Levy, a New Yorker staff writer) could serve as a prime example of the categorys melodramatic contours. Growing up in an emotionally and economically unstable home, the daughter of two charming but shifty narcissists, who were more often than not on the runfrom debt, from the law, from the very notion of parental responsibilityMoore, by sheer force of will, fought her way to become, for a time, Hollywoods highest-paid actress. She also raised three daughters and entered into and then left two high-profile marriageswith the action star Bruce Willis and, later, with the famously younger TV heartthrob Ashton Kutcherall while battling addiction, health and body-image issues, and a persistent sense of self-doubt that left her, as she writes, afraid to be in myself, convinced I didnt deserve the good and frantically trying to fix the bad. I love a good lurid celebrity autobiography as much asand maybe even more thanthe next guy, but as I read Moores I was surprised that what I liked about it wasnt, in fact, its gossipy revelations but the window it provided into the sensitive, reflective interiority of a woman who, for all her worldly success, has always been searching for the self-acceptance that eludes so many of us, whether were famous or not. By the end of the memoir, in a final section titled Surrender, Moore writes, of this quest, The truth is, the only way out is in. It is a tribute to the psychological acuity of this book that I felt the earned honesty of these words deeply. Naomi Fry

How I Became One of the Invisible, by David Rattray

The fearless poet, translator, and scholar David Rattray died shortly after the original publication of How I Became One of the Invisible, in 1992. He was fifty-seven, but he seemed to have lived many lifetimes, taking in as much of the world as he could. Trained at Harvard and the Sorbonne, he had an astonishing gift for language, mastering most of the Western ones and also Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. He became famous at a relatively young age when, as a poetry-obsessed undergrad at Dartmouth, in the fifties, he went to visit Ezra Pound, who was then at St. Elizabeths Hospital, in Washington, D.C. He published an account of the visit, in The Nation, in which he managed to humanize Pound without letting him off the hook for his hatefulness. (One of Pounds former confidants, H.D., said that reading Rattrays article was the first time in more than a decade that she had laughed with affection about the confined poet.) This, in essence, was Rattrays great skill: to extend his zealous, compassionate intellect toward anyone, even those who may not have deserved it. This sensibility drove his work as a translator, bringing the works of Artaud or Hlderin to American readers as an act of empathy. How I Became One of the Invisible, which was reissued this year, by Semiotext(e), is the best kind of autobiographical writing, true to the eccentric digressions and mystical interludes of a life propelled by curiosity. Rattrays own spirit shines through his incredible stories about all the fringe-dwellers he befriended along the waythieves, radicals, artists. Van, his marvelous account of his friendship with the poet Alden Van Buskirk, opens with their first encounter: Rattray shaking Van Buskirk awake from a drunken slumber so that they could talk about poetry. Hua Hsu

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell

Nearly everyone I know whos read Jenny Odells How to Do Nothing had told me that it inspired something akin to a personal crisis. The book, Odells first, is equal parts philosophical self-help and environmentalist tract, and it offers a fresh mode for thinking about life under technocapitalismand also some suggestions for what might be done. Odell is particularly interested in questioning the assumptions and incentives of the digital economy. The perversions that spring from productivity culture (to say nothing of attention as a currency and a resource) are corrosive not only on the individual level, she argues, but on a larger, social scale. She draws comparisons between the Internet and the natural world, making a case for the long-term maintenance of self, community, and place, both online and off. (I see little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thoughts, she writes.) Self-care, in this model, is not commodified self-indulgence; its a form of preservation enacted by reclaiming and reallocating ones attention. Odell is an artist, and her medium, often, is contexthistoricization, depth, analysis. This seems fitting. In a year in which the boundaries of cruelty and indifference stretched and expanded, there was also, among a certain set, a quieting or refocussing. In my own circles, some people disappeared periodically from Twitter and Facebook. A few grew more knowledgeable about plants and birds, or listened, with great conscientiousness, to non-algorithmic public radio. Most importantly, they began to ground themselves locally and socially and to reconsider where they placed value. The personal crises, it seems, had been productive. Anna Wiener

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, by Hanif Abdurraqib

Go Ahead in the Rain is ostensibly a book about A Tribe Called Questa hip-hop group that formed in Queens, in the mid-eighties, and recorded six extraordinary albums before Phife Dawg, one of its founding members, died, in 2016but its ultimately more concerned with the furtive and inscrutable ways that music can rearrange a persons insides. Hanif Abdurraqib is a dexterous and elegant critic, but he understands that the spiritual exchange between artist and fan is sometimes too mysterious to be parsed objectively. So he takes a different approach: between passages detailing Tribes musical evolution and its significance to black Americans coming of age in the nineteen-nineties, Go Ahead in the Rain contains a series of letters from Abdurraqib to members of the band, in which he unpacks his devotion. I, too, have an interest in that which can be felt more than heard, he writes to Q-Tip, one of the bands M.C.s. Abdurraqib is a poet, and he writes with a precise, gorgeous rhythm that makes a reader want to linger on each line. (My copy of the book is dog-eared and highlighted into oblivion.) But what kills me the most is Abdurraqibs empathyfor the people who make the music that sustains us, and also for us, for being sustained. Amanda Petrusich

A Woman Like Her: The Short Life of Qandeel Baloch, by Sanam Maher

Sanam Mahers latest book, which is already out in South Asia and the U.K., and which is being released in the U.S. by Melville House in February, is a remarkable account of the life and death of Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani entertainer who became famous through her bold social-media presence. She was then murdered by her brother, in 2016, for bringing dishonor to the family. Powerfully written and narratively creative, A Woman Like Her is less a conventional biography than it is an examination of modern-day Pakistan. By tracing Balochs brief lifeshe was only twenty-six at the time of her deathMaher, a Karachi-based journalist, provides illuminating glimpses into Pakistans entertainment, modelling, and news industries, and deftly charts the combination of attraction and repulsion with which Balochs fascinating online persona was greeted by Pakistani society. Isaac Chotiner

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing, by John Boughton

I moved to London a little more than a year ago, and one of the books that has best helped me understand my new home is Municipal Dreams, a history of council housing in Britain, by the historian John Boughton. (Though published in 2018, the book was reissued in paperback form this year.) Boughton, who is also the creator of a long-running blog of the same name, provides a deeply informed account of the ways in which local and national governments in the U.K. have or have not sought to provide affordable housing for their citizens. His narrative begins by outlining the political and social idealism that underlay the very first council estate in Britain, the Boundary Estate, a well-planned village of Arts and Craftsstyle tenements built upon cleared slums in Shoreditch, in Londons East End, in 1900. It ends with the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, a high-rise in West London in which seventy-two people lost their lives, in 2017, when the buildings cladding went up in flames. On the way, Boughton narrates the glory years of council-housing construction, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when as much as a third of Britains population rented their homes from their local authorities, and when some of the countrys most thoughtful architects experimented with new styles of living. He also charts the right-to-buy schemes instituted in the nineteen-eightieswhereby residents could go from renters to owners, with mixed results for the urban fabricand takes note of the diminishing commitment in recent decades to building affordable homes. Boughton makes a strong case that public housinglike Britains public health serviceis a valuable good that merits greater investment, both financial and imaginative. He writes, The form and nature of public housing has been unfairly blamed for problems entrenched in our unequal society and exacerbated by the politics which reflect itan observation as true in the United States as it is in the United Kingdom. Rebecca Mead

Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch, by Alexandra Jacobs

In 1964, the actress Elaine Stritchs blazing path through the New York theatre scene hit a rough patch: she was drinking too much champagne; she was lonely; she wasnt booking Broadway jobs like she used to. So she decided to take a year off. According to Stritchs biographer, Alexandra Jacobs, her first plan was to unravel her reputation as a lush by finally, at thirty-nine years old, taking up hobbies that were healthybicycling, learning to play piano. But the call of New York night life was too loud. When a scene-y restaurant named Elaines opened on the Upper East Side, Stritch began to haunt it; several show-biz folk began to joke that it was named for her. (The actual namesake was the proprietress, Elaine Kaufman.) One night, a bartender called in sick, and a customer ordered a brandy stinger. Stritch, announcing that this was her specialty, leapt behind the bar, where she stayed on for several months, razzing celebrity guests (Shelley Winters, Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason) and regaling patrons with the kind of warts-and-all backstage tales that she would later turn into the bravura monologue Elaine Stritch: At Liberty. Sparkling details such as these clink around Jacobss biography, Still Here, like ice in a rocks glass. Stritch, who died in 2014, was a true character, full of piss and vinegar, as Gleason said. It would be possible to write a serviceable book about her life by simply quoting her many one-liners, or by describing her habit of wearing only tights on stage. But Jacobs, an editor of the Styles section of the New York Times, doesnt rely on Stritchs charm to fuel the narrative. Instead, she uses hundreds of interviews and years of research to portray the actress in all her complexity. Stritch was a star but a pill, a life force with a self-destructive streak, a mesmerizing presence who also tended to push away those closest to her. The one time I met her, she yelled at me. I considered it an honor. Rachel Syme

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The New Yorkers Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2019 - The New Yorker

Dr Kat Arney and the Genetics Unzipped team bring you not one but seven mini episodes to enjoy over the holidays. Recorded at the annual Galton Institute symposium New Light on Old Britons held at the Royal Society in London earlier this year, reporter Georgia Mills uncovers the latest research into the early history of the British people.

Who were these ancient Britons? Where did they come from and what were they like? Whats the real story behind the romantic myths about the Celts? And what can modern genetic and archaeological techniques tell us about their lives and loves?

Nick Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum and honorary professor at UCL, is studying the earliest humans in Europe.

Professor Ian Barnes and Dr Selina Brace, ancient DNA researchers at the Natural History Museum in London, discuss how their work on ancient DNA is shedding light on the British population from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age.

Dr Silvia Bello from the Natural History Museum in London is investigating how patterns of human behavior have changed over the last million years.

Professor Sir Walter Bodmer from the Weatherall Institute, Oxford, explains what we know so far about genetic structure and origins of populations of the British Isles.

Dr Lara Cassidy from Trinity College Dublin talks about her work exploring the genomic history of Ireland.

The Celts are one of the most famous and misunderstood people who lived in ancient Britain. Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe from the University of Oxford explores the myths and the reality.

Professor Turi King from the University of Leicester reveals the secrets of the Y chromosome and how the remains of Richard III were identified.

Presented and produced by Georgia Mills for First Create The Media. Visit the Galton Institute website to find out more about the society, or follow them on Twitter @galtoninstitute

Genetics Unzippedis the podcast from the UKGenetics Society,presented by award-winning science communicator and biologistKat Arneyand produced byFirst Create the Media.Follow Kat on Twitter@Kat_Arney,Genetics Unzipped@geneticsunzip,and the Genetics Society at@GenSocUK

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KEARNEY Ron Diamond describes the 10 short animated films of the 21st Annual Animation Show of Shows as kid friendly, but also a bit tough and uncomfortable at times,

Diamond, founder and curator of the festival, calls the selection the best of the best animated short films, created by students and professionals around the world. The festival returns to theaters across North America and features 10 films from seven countries offering an array of highly imaginative, thought-provoking and moving works that reflect the filmmakers unique perspectives and their relationship to the world.

The 83-minute compilation will screen at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 27-28 and 2 p.m. Dec. 29 at The World Theatre, 2318 Central Ave. Admission is $5.

- Kids Michael Frei, Mario von Rickenbach, Switzerland

- Rubicon Gil Alkabetz, Germany

- Portrait of Gil Alkabetz (Rubicon) Marta Trela, Germany

- Five Minutes to Sea Natalia Mirzoyan, Russia

- Rcit de soi (Self-Narrative) Graldine Charpentier, Belgium

- Le jour extraordinaire (Flowing through Wonder) Joanna Lurie, France

- Hounds Amit Cohen, Ido Shapira, Israel

- Portrait of Amit Cohen and Ido Shapira (Hounds) Shlomi Yosef

- The Fox and the Bird (Le renard et loisille) Sam and Fred Guillaume, Switzerland

- Daughter Daria Kashcheeva, Czech Republic.

Personal relationships form the heart of several of the films in this years program, including Daria Kashcheevas International Student Academy Award-winning puppet animation Daughter, a deeply moving exploration of the ties between a father and daughter.

Charting a different, but related, course, The Fox and the Bird by Sam and Fred Guillaume is a beautifully observed fable about an unlikely friendship between the two eponymous characters. Filmmaker Michael Frei and game designer Mario von Rickenbach provide a more clinical view of human behavior in their mesmerizing Kids, which explores the nature of group dynamics.

Diamond said of the art form, Animation is an incredibly versatile medium that allows artists to explore situations and ideas that you wont see anywhere else. From political and philosophical concerns, to the complexities of individual identity and personal relationships, animated short films are uniquely able to capture the many facets of human experience.

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World Theatre to host Annual Animation Show of Shows Dec. 27-28 - Kearney Hub

By Sara Zaske, WSUNews

PULLMAN,Wash. Young adults say that Instagram helps them develop friendships in real life, especially those who are more hesitant to try new experiences, according to a recent study by Washington State University researchers.

In the study published online in Computers in Human Behavior, the researchers analyzed survey responses of nearly 700collegeage adults about their perceptions and use of the socialmedia site.

The analysis found that the young adults liked how Instagram was easy to use as well as the many features of the highly visual platform. This encouraged them to express themselves on the socialmedia site, which in turn led to new and deeper relationships offline.

Our findings are optimistic: that selfdisclosure on Instagram could facilitate friendship development, even if followers were just casual acquaintances at the start, said Danielle Lee, the studys lead author and current doctoral student in WSUs EdwardR. Murrow College of Communication.

The results of the study suggested that Instagram had a greater effect on people who ranked low on the personality trait of openness, meaning they tend to be more reserved and closed to new experiences than those who ranked high in this trait.

Studies have shown that in general people who are not extroverted, who might be somewhat shy, find socialmedia platforms an easier way to interact with other people, said Associate Professor Porismita Borah, coauthor on the paper. Instagram is such a visually rich platform and that really helps in selfpresentation.

A large majority, 71%, of young Americans age18 to 24 use Instagram, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey. As the WSUstudy notes, users can

follow other people on Instagram without their approval, if their accounts are public, allowing for people to interact who dont have strong social ties outside of the platform. Instagram also distinguishes itself from other social networks with its focus on images: users cannot create a post without a visual as they can on Facebook and Twitter. The platform also provides easy ways to control how users present themselves.

In Instagram, you can change the image the way you want with filters and many different tools before posting it, said Borah. Both media richness and userfriendliness come together in Instagram, which is probably what makes it so appealing to the younger generation.

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Instagram's virtual features have real relationship benefits - WSU News

As the world becomes more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA), demand for legal advice is high. Some law schools have responded to messy, global challenges like Brexit and the US-China trade war by giving geopolitics much more prominence on the LL.M. syllabus.

The importance ofgeopoliticalaffairs is reflected in the teaching at Cardiff Universitys School of Law and Politics in Wales, UK. It runs a concentration in international affairs within its LL.M. course that explores a host of contemporary geopolitical challenges affecting the world today, from refugee law and asylum to money laundering and financial crime.

Recentgeopoliticalflashpoints provide us with contemporary case studies from which both the legal and political frameworks can be critically assessed, says program director Reece Lewis.

Because law and politics concern human behavior and affect relations between nations and peoples, geopolitical affairs are an essential element of LL.M. teaching, he says. It enables us to ask whether the present law or the political framework is fit for purpose and how our world could be better.

However, most law schools still include geopolitics as an optional elective module rather than creating fully fledged degrees in the subject. There are, however, a handful of specialized LL.M.s that might be relevant to students interested in geopolitics, such as the International Criminal Justice and Armed Conflict LL.M. at Nottingham University in the UK. Elsewhere, UCLA Law School runs an International Law LL.M., and the Geneva Academy offers an LL.M. in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.

Some law schools argue that geopolitics is ingrained in nearly every subject they teach rather than being siloed as its own topic.

Basil Germond is the director of research training for the faculty of arts and social sciences at the UKs University of Lancaster, which has a law school. He argues that schools should not teachgeopolitics itself; rather they should teach students how to critically assess the importance of geopolitics to explain states actions on the world stage.

He argues that developments in international law must be applied to geopolitical realities, from the discovery of exploitable natural resources in contested maritime spaces, to changes in the regional balance of power.

It is thus crucial for LL.M. students to engage with the political and geographical dimensions of international relations, so as to be in a position to understand and critically assess the strengths and weaknesses of international law, he says.

In addition, another factor behind the rise in geopolitics in LL.M.s is the growing emphasis placed on interdisciplinarity in graduate education, Germond says, explaining that geopolitical courses often encompass law and politics faculty.

On the LL.M. programs at University of Bristol Law School in the UK, students not only explore case studies but can pursue geopolitics through independent research in their dissertations. In addition, geopolitical developments strongly inform the content of modules across the range of LL.M. programs the school offers. These courses include world trade, maritime security, public and global health law.

There are also new LL.M. concentrations that are designed to address geopolitical issues: international law and international relations; and law and globalization. Students undertaking these programmes will explore issues at the cutting-edge of law andgeopolitics, says Keith Syrett, LL.M. director. Bristol has always sought to take an approach to the teaching of law which situates legal norms and principles within a social, economic and political context.

Syrett says the increased focus on geopolitics at law schools reflects the growing number of academic staff working on issues at the interface between geopolitics and law. Those staff are eager to share their knowledge and ideas with a new generation of postgraduates, he adds.

But the subject can be hard to teach because of its breadth and complexity. And the diversity of students on LL.M. courses usually means that instructors have to be aware of cultural sensitivities to geopolitical issues.

Also, Lancasters Germond says that not all LL.M. students are aware of the importance of geopolitics. This needs to be communicated by program directors, he says.

But he notes that the growth in teaching of geopolitics on LL.M. programs is being driven by students career outcomes, even if some are not aware of its importance. Students of international law are likely to work in an environment where their understanding of international politics andgeopoliticsis as important as their knowledge of the very rules of international law, he says, like multinational corporations.

Indeed, geopolitics is not an industry, but graduates with a firm grasp of geopolitics may not only work in law, but in the public sector too, for example in global politics. Others work at NGOs.

With the world looking like an increasingly uncertain place, all industries may have need of geopolitically savvy lawyers in the near future.

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The Growing Importance of Geopolitics in LL.M.s - LLM GUIDE