Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 15: Coming HomeIn this final chapter of "A World of Conflict," Kevin Sites returns home to the U.S., only to confirm what he suspected -- that in the year that he was gone little had changed.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 14: Israel-Hezbollah WarThe war between Israel and Hezbollah shook the landscape in the Middle East.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 13: Sri LankaKevin Sites covered Sri Lanka as violence erupted between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels, pushing a nation with so much to lose back to the brink of all-out war. In rebel-held territory Sites interviewed Tiger fighters about their tactics and reported on the many effects of war still seen in the region.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 12: Nepal and KashmirKevin Sites covered Nepal during a time of sweeping political change that followed mass nationwide protests, forcing the autocratic King to cede power.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 11: Child BrideIn Afghanistan, Kevin Sites met a 12-year-old girl named Gulsoma, whose incredible story of resilience resonated with millions of people worldwide. She was only six years old when she was sold to a neighbor family in Kandahar as a child bride.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 10: AfghanistanReporting from Afghanistan in spring 2006, more than four years after the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban, Kevin Sites found that war is not over in the country.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter Nine: ChechnyaIn Chechnya during the winter of 2005-2006, Kevin Sites reported on a region still reeling from lingering conflict between Russia and Islamic separatists. The conflict engulfed Chechnya in the 1990s, and even now, half of the population is yet to return. Those that have eke out a living amid the rubble.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter Eight: Iran
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter Seven: IsraelIn Israel, Kevin Sites interviewed Kinneret Boosany, a victim of a suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv cafe in 2002.
When in doubt, blame the latest technology. Socrates thought the advent of writing would wreak havoc on the powers of the mind. Christian theologians denounced the printing press as the work of the devil. The invention of the telephone was supposed to make letter-writing extinct, and the arrival of the train — and later the car and plane — was going to be the death of community.
Now comes a technological bogeyman for the 21st century, this one responsible for a supposed sharp uptick in American shallowness and credulity: the Internet and its digital spawn. Witness the wave of books and essays implicating the wired world in a sudden rise in uncritical thinking and attention deficits. In a recent Atlantic Monthly cover story, Nicholas Carr asks: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (A: No, but it makes a handy scapegoat for an inability to cope with information overload.) Lee Siegel's Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob suggests that the Web makes us both moronic and narcissistic (not that a moron can be expected to know what a narcissist is). Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age is a tiresome indictment of multitasking. And in The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), Mark Bauerlein delivers a grim assessment of the state of young minds, rattling off statistics about faltering education and using such figures to buttress his assertion that the Internet, videogames, and IMs all serve to numb and dumb.
To be sure, there is plenty of evidence that ignorance and irrationalism are rampant. Pernicious fallacies have found a purchase among educated people who ought to know better: Vaccines cause autism, Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of 9/11, power lines give you cancer, cell phones kill honeybees, and global warming is a scam orchestrated by tree-hugging liberals.
Yes, it must be acknowledged that the Web provides remarkably easy access to such bogus ideas. On top of that, there's the human tendency to seek out information that supports preexisting assumptions, a behavior psychologists have dubbed homophily. The Web magnifies this echo-chamber effect.
But the latest crop of curmudgeons fail to acknowledge that there is not much new in this parade of the preposterous. The US has a long and colorful history of being taken in by the erroneous and irrational: Salem witches, the "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, phrenology, and eugenics are just a few choice examples. The truth is that Americans often approach information — online and off — with a particular mindset. "Antirational junk thought has gained social respectability in the United States during the past half century," notes Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason. "It has proved resistant to the vast expansion of scientific knowledge that has taken place during the same period." Jacoby argues that long-standing American values like rugged individualism and the need to question authority have metastasized into reflexive anti-intellectualism and disdain for "eggheads," "elites," and pretty much anyone who might be described as credentialed. This cancerous irrationalism isn't pretty, but it isn't technology's fault, either.
On the contrary: The explosion of knowledge represented by the Internet and abetted by all sorts of digital technologies makes us more productive and gives us the opportunity to become smarter, not dumber. Think of Wikipedia and its emergent spinoffs, like Wiktionary. Imperfect as they may be, the collective brainpower contained within these kinds of sites — and the hunger for learning and accurate information they represent — is something human history has never known before. (Even Encyclopedia Britannica will soon be accepting user contributions.) Or consider the Public Library of Science: By breaking the publishing industry's choke hold on the circulation of scientific information, this powerful online resource arms scientists and the masses alike with the same data, accelerating new discoveries and breakthroughs. Not exactly the kind of effect one would expect from a technology that's threatening to turn us into philistines.
It's naive to think that the digital age will magically remedy stupidity. We need better schools as well as a renewed commitment to reason and scientific rigor so that people can distinguish knowledge from garbage. The Web is not an obstacle in this project. It's an unparalleled tool for generating, finding, and sharing sound information. What's moronic is to assume that it hurts us more than it helps.
David Wolman (davidwolman.com) wrote about new ways of viewing autism in Wired issue 16.03.
The daguerrotype process had a relatively short commercial life span of about two decades. A major reason was that innovators capitalized on "France's gift to the world" and started improving the process immediately. Better emulsions and better developing and fixing solutions improved image quality and reduced exposure times. Replacing the metal matrix for the emulsions with glass-plate negatives -- and eventually celluloid -- and printing the images on paper all helped shape more than a century of film photography.
But the sudden release of the previously secret process created a worldwide mania for having one's image "done." This was especially true in the United States, as you can see in the following examples.
Daguerreotypes were objects of pride, so the subjects usually posed in their finest clothes, whether their Sunday best or uniforms. The image was fixed on a polished metal surface, which was usually covered with a thin plate of glass for protection and enclosed in a frame or case.
This relatively large example occupies a full, standard-size daguerreotype plate, 9 by 7 inches. Although the names of the subject might be lost (because everyone knew it was Uncle Albert), the photographer's name often appeared in a corner of the plate or on the frame or case.
More typical was a sixth-plate daguerreotype, occupying one-sixth of a standard plate, or 3.25 x 3.25 inches. Exposure time could be several minutes, and it's hard to hold a smile for that long, so photographers usually instructed subjects to hold their mouths in a flat, noncommittal mien.
If you think these folks look uncomfortable (or worse), you try sitting like that, unflinching, for two minutes.
This sixth-plate image (3.25 by 3.25 inches) had a more elaborate case, and the subject appears proud of his queue.
Whether this was some sort of fraternal group, merchants' association or just gentleman songsters off on a spree, we know naught. It would be hard to make out the tiny faces in a sixth-plate, so this group portrait was exposed on a half-plate, 6 by 4.75 inches.
Pvt. Jemison served in the 2nd Louisiana Regiment of the Confederate Army. While fighting in the Peninsula campaign under General J.B. Magruder, Jemison was killed in the battle of Poindexter's Farm (aka the Battle of Malvern Hill, Virginia in July 1862).
The battle was a tactical victory for the Union, though Union Gen. George McClellan in typical fashion failed to make good use of it. For Pvt. Jemison, the battle was a disaster.
This unidentified woman sat by a table, a longstanding artistic convention in portraits of women. The book at her elbow may be a Bible.
The unidentified girl may be holding a daguerreotype case. That would put her in touch with the "magic" while she had to sit stock-still for several minutes. The object might also be her favorite storybook, a similar attempt at pacification. Or, following the conventions of painted portraits, it could be a child's prayer book or a reading primer.
Mid-1840s daguerreotypes cost anywhere from $2 to $5 ($55 to $140 in today's money), so you can see why families treasured them and held on to them. Those daguerreotype cases also helped preserve them.
A paper note with this daguerreotype says: "Hosea Curtice." That's may be the guy in the picture, but maybe it's the name of the owner, or a name that the guy in the picture wanted to remember. Best bet: It's him, all right.
President Lincoln sat for an albumen photograph, which was then duplicated as a daguerreotype. It's framed in a leather case with a push-button clasp.
A moving steamship or riverboat would have been hard to capture with the long exposures a daguerreotype needed. But a steamship at a landing, perhaps with crew, officers and passengers ready and willing to pose, now there's a subject!
What more can we say?
These guys' job was to drove, or herd, the oxen. These oxen appear to be yoked for the purpose of hauling something. Tough job all around.
Shai Agassi looks up and down the massive rectangular table in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom and begins to worry. He knows he's out of his league here. For the last day and a half, he's been listening to an elite corps of Israeli and US politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals debate the state of the world. Agassi is just one of 60 sequestered in a Washington, DC, hotel for a conference run by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Among the participants: Bill Clinton, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, and two past directors of the CIA.
It's December 2006. Scheduled to speak in a few minutes, Agassi gets nudged by the Israeli minister of education: "Be optimistic," she tells him. "We've got to close with an upbeat tone." Agassi thanks her. Optimism won't be a problem.
At 38, Agassi is the youngest invitee. Just after the dotcom boom, SAP, the world's largest maker of enterprise software, paid $400 million for a small-business software company he started with his father; now he's SAP's head of products and widely presumed to be the next CEO. But he's not here this morning to talk about business software. Instead, his topic will be the world's addiction to fossil fuels. It's a recent passion and the organizers invited him to counterbalance the man speaking now, Daniel Yergin, the famed energy consultant and oil industry analyst. Yergin gives them his latest thinking: Energy independence is unattainable. Oil consumption will continue to rise. Iran will get richer. It's not exactly what this audience wants to hear.
Now it's Agassi's turn. He starts off uncharacteristically nervous, stammering a bit. He's got something different, he says. A new approach. He believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good. Point by point, gaining speed as he goes, he shares for the first time in public the ideas that will change his future—and possibly the world's.
Agassi has dark hair, light brown eyes, and a square jaw. He's a careful speaker, holding back until the right moment before delivering his thoughts. He's partial to dramatic pauses, especially if he's about to explain how the future is going to look—something he does all the time. People often think he's kidding, partly because he always has a slight, wry smile. But when the pause ends, what follows—no matter how far-fetched—is never a joke. At his first executive board meeting at SAP, a company that had grown dominant by moving slowly and conservatively, Agassi suggested nearly a dozen heretical ideas. He said SAP should give away its hardware and software for free—just charge for IT support. He said SAP should make its database business open source to undermine Oracle. The other board members laughed: The new kid was a cutup! But they stopped when SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner looked around the table and said, "He's the only guy making sense here."
Agassi's interest in energy is new. In 2005, he joined Young Global Leaders, an invitation-only group for politicians and businesspeople under 40. The four-day induction seminar was held at the Swiss ski resort of Zermatt. Between lectures, YGLs like Skype cofounder Niklas Zennström and NBA star Dikembe Mutombo pledged to find ways to "make the world a better place" by 2020. Agassi's assignment was the environment, and he quickly focused in on climate change.
Most left the event and just poked around in their own industries, looking for small tweaks and improvements. But Agassi wanted something bigger. Back home in Silicon Valley, his day job involved coaxing SAP into the Web 2.0 era. But after Zermatt, his nights were devoted to dinners with energy experts, books on energy policy, and sessions on Wikipedia, learning everything he could about the carbon economy. Getting off oil was the key, he decided. But how? He started by looking at cutting energy usage in the home, then moved to a more tempting target: transportation. Was hydrogen the answer? What about embedding power in the street—like slot cars? Could more be done with biofuels? Agassi kept a running file on his home PC and began working on a series of white papers.
The problem, he decided, was oil-consuming, CO2-spewing cars. The solution was to get rid of them. Not just some, and not just by substituting hybrids or flex fuels. No half measures. The internal combustion engine had to be retired. The future was in electric cars.
This was hardly an original insight; electric cars had been the future for over 100 years. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Electric Vehicle Company was the largest automaker in the US, with dealers from Paris to Mexico City. But oil, in the end, supplanted volts on American highways because of one perennial problem: batteries. Car batteries, then and now, are heavy and expensive, don't last long, and take forever to recharge. In five minutes you can fill a car with enough gas to go 300 miles, but five minutes of charging at home gets you only about 8 miles in an electric car. Clever tricks, like adding "range extenders"—gas engines that kick in when a battery dies—end up making the cars too expensive.
In early June, Wired's Daniel Roth talked with Israeli president Shimon Peres about Better Place, the greening of Israel, his obsession with Israel's burgeoning solar industry, and the problems that come with turning a vision into a reality. An edited excerpt:
Wired: Was the message of getting off oil something you were concerned about before?
Peres: I thought that the greatest problem of our time was oil. Oil on one hand is polluting the land, and on the other hand it's financing terror. They say jokingly that the Middle East is divided into these kind of countries: the oily countries and the holy countries. We are obviously a holy country. We don't have oil. We don't have water.
Wired: You brought Better Place and Renault together. Did you expect them to form this partnership?
Peres: I never worried about it. My great advantage is that I'm ignorant. My own mentor was David Ben-Gurion. He used to say all experts are experts for things that did happen. There are no experts for things that may happen.
Wired: Before Israel publicly announced its Better Place rollout, I was told that you and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were going to announce that Israel was going to declare complete energy independence. But the announcement was much more modest. What happened?
Peres: It's not the end of the story. I am now pushing solar energy and introducing the new environmental approach to life. It's foolish: Why should we hang on oil when we can hang on the sun? The sun is much more permanent, more democratic, and there's plenty of it. I'm feeling that our technology will miniaturize the equipment of the solar energy and reduce the cost. So I'm very glad that we started. Israel is going to be a green country. That's our ambition. And our ambition is to do it as soon as possible.
Wired: So can Israel become a clean tech global power?
Peres: Israel, you know, is too small of a country to become a world market and too small a country to become a great world producer, but we have enough scientists per square kilometer to become a world laboratory. And smallness has its own advantages; when you are small you can be really daring, you can be a pilot plant. You cannot, for example, try a car like Shai Agassi's in Texas. It is too large and would be too costly and complicated. Here we can do it on a human scale and eventually extend it and expand it.
Wired: Do you see any "peace dividends" coming out of the clean tech push?
Peres: Oh yes. Ecology forces us to cooperate. Water is not disciplined, the air doesn't ask for visas to fly from one place to another place, and if seas are beginning to die, all partners have to save them. So today the economy is very much a matter of environment, and environment is an independent force that is not committed to borders or rules or conventions. And nature is impatient. You cannot say: I'm going to negotiate pollution for 10 or 20 years. Pollution won't wait for you. Pollution is not a political force; it's a force of nature.
Agassi dealt with the battery issue by simply swatting it away. Previous approaches relied on a traditional manufacturing formula: We make the cars, you buy them. Agassi reimagined the entire automotive ecosystem by proposing a new concept he called the Electric Recharge Grid Operator. It was an unorthodox mashup of the automotive and mobile phone industries. Instead of gas stations on every corner, the ERGO would blanket a country with a network of "smart" charge spots. Drivers could plug in anywhere, anytime, and would subscribe to a specific plan—unlimited miles, a maximum number of miles each month, or pay as you go—all for less than the equivalent cost for gas. They'd buy their car from the operator, who would offer steep discounts, perhaps even give the cars away. The profit would come from selling electricity—the minutes.
There would be plugs in homes, offices, shopping malls. And when customers couldn't wait to "fill up," they'd go to battery exchange stations where they would pull into car-wash-like sheds, and in a few minutes, a hydraulic lift would swap the depleted battery with a fresh one. Drivers wouldn't pay a penny extra: The ERGO would own the battery.
Agassi unveiled the outline of his vision for the crowd at the Saban event: a new kind of infrastructure, with ubiquitous charge stations, that was not only simple and logical but potentially profitable, too. As he talked, he read the body language of the audience—they were leaning forward, they were nodding—and he fed off it, layering on details. A country like Israel, he told them, could get off oil by simply adopting his new bus