From Quartz, a story about the end of Bourne and Shepherd, the 176-year-old photo studio in Kolkata, India:
I meet scores of people who ask me the same things and I always have the same answers. I had nothing to do at the studio anymore. There weren’t any customers I could talk to either. The world over, photography, especially artistic photography, is dying out. There is no future in it anymore.
Sad, interesting, poignant, inevitable.
Gandhi, who is held in high esteem by those who swear by his knowledge of equipment and photography, never took up photographic assignments, but preferred to build relationships with his customers. “I belong to that school of thought that treats its customers with utmost respect,” he said. “Even if they do not end up buying anything, they should have a good experience at the studio. A positive word-of-mouth publicity is the best you can get in this business.” The philosophy, along with the art of photography, was severely tested in the world of impersonal shopping malls and ill-informed staff.
Also sad, interesting, poignant… and I hope impersonal shopping malls and ill-informed staff are not the enduring aspects of the world we are left with as these old-school institutions die off.
But it’s possible that when we look back over the sweep of this most unusual campaign, we’ll mark this week as a significant turning point: the time when journalists finally figured out how to cover Donald Trump.
We’ll see.
Put together this series of developments coming one after together, and I suspect that many journalists are deciding that the way to cover Trump is just to do it as honestly and assiduously as possible, which would itself be something almost revolutionary.
And incredible – isn’t that is the essence of journalism?
But it is perhaps ironic that after all this time of wondering how to cover this most unusual candidate, Trump has shown the press that the best way to do it is to cover him like every candidate should be covered. That means not just planting a camera at his rallies and marveling at how nuts it all is, but doing to work to fully vet his background, correcting his lies as swiftly and surely as they can, exploring what a Trump presidency would actually mean, and generally doing their jobs without letting him intimidate them.
Maybe the press has not been taking a Trump candidacy seriously – he seems to skate by without the press halting the media train more than occasionally to ask, “I’m sorry, would you repeat that?… Yeah, you are fucking nuts.” As Todd Gitlin commented about Michael Grynbaum’s recent New York Times piece:
Grynbaum wrote of “Mr. Trump’s unrivaled ability to hijack a news cycle, a trait that producers are not yet sure how to handle.” Really? What are producers paid for? How hard is it to handle a candidate’s attempt to “hijack a news cycle?”
Or maybe it’s something else. Say I’m a cynic, but I’m not sure it’s in the interest of the media to have one candidate thoroughly debunked and battered months before the election, and therefore, they are letting him go for now. In fact, CBS CEO Les Moonves may have justified this suspicion:
It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.
Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now?… The money’s rolling in and this is fun.
I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.
“Conservative Muslims loved that he became a Muslim, and people on the left loved that he defied the establishment,” said Munther Dajani, a professor of political science at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem.
The American champion was held up as paragon for emulation in mosques as well as in the Arab street. Neighborhood imams would invoke his sayings in sermons and cite him as a person of faith and principle.
Ali was an inspiration throughout the Muslim world, and was held in high regard by public figures across the political spectrum in the U.S. (though that was not always the case), truly an exceptional feat.
In the past few years, the iPhone maker has recruited a team of medical experts to help guide its strategy as it moves into health care. Its team currently includes Divya Nag, a former biotech entrepreneur, and Mike O’Reilly, an anesthesiologist who runs the ResearchKit platform. Apple has not disclosed the total number of employees who work on its health care products and services.
While so many are talking about Apple’s secretive car project, the company’s efforts in the healthcare space don’t seem to be getting the attention they probably should. This work could have a much more immediate impact for the company. It certainly seems like the Apple Watch will benefit and become more capable in this area. And Tim Cook isn’t exactly being hush-hush about it.
Feinstein’s Democratic colleagues on the Intelligence Committee - along with some key Republicans - backed away. The House never got on board.
The White House demurred, too, and:
The CIA and NSA were ambivalent, according to several current and former intelligence officials, in part because officials in the agencies feared any new law would interfere with their own encryption efforts.
Some follow up to Marco arment’s piece likening Apple’s fate to BlackBerry’s due to gains in the field of artificial intelligence by competitors. Apple sure does seem to be taking AI seriously, if we can believe the latest speculation and possible leaks.
There is a narrative that Apple has not understood AI very well. I assert this is based upon not understanding a number of remarkable acquisitions. It started with Siri, Emotient and Perceptio, VocalIQ and perhaps a number of not yet disclosed AI acquisitions.
And he links some of the company’s latest advances to their purchase of Vocal IQ in late 2015:
VocalIQ built astounding technology that no doubt you and I will use every day, some day soon.
Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces, hoping that these will become the next thing that our devices are for. If they’re right — and that’s a big “if” — I’m worried for Apple.
If AI is a capability that can’t be bought and brought or augmented in-house, and if this is “the next thing that our devices are for,” and if Apple is in fact not working hard on this right now, he may be right to worry. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google may have an advantage in AI – especially Google since they mine so much personal data. But as Marco notes in the article’s footnote:
It’s possible to build tons of useful services and smarts by just using public data, like the web, mapping databases, business directories, etc., without any access to or involvement from the user’s private data.
Given Apple’s well-known effort to protect customers’ privacy (something I value greatly), I think that is clearly the direction they will go. Taking full advantage of public data and possibly data you opt-into for their use seems like something they are just beginning to do well.
In thinking of how often I use Siri, which is only one piece of Apple’s ecosystem that harnesses AI, I don’t use it as often as I had anticipated. One big reason is because I don’t like people seeing me talk to my phone or watch! I must not be the only one; I don’t often see others using it, either. Around the house and when I go for walks in my rural neighborhood, though, I use it more, especially for dictation. Dictation works very well in iOS and has become a killer feature for me to “take notes” when I get ideas.
Anyway, it seems like this will take years to play out, so maybe time is not against Apple as much as Marco suggests.
