Notable pieces on Trayvon Martin

I think the jury basically got it right. The only real eyewitness to the death of Trayvon Martin was the man who killed him. At no point did I think that the state proved second degree murder. I also never thought they proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he acted recklessly. They had no ability to counter his basic narrative, because there were no other eye-witnesses.

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I think the message of this episode is unfortunate. By Florida law, in any violent confrontation ending in a disputed act of lethal self-defense, without eye-witnesses, the advantage goes to the living. 

From Ta-Nehisi Coates on the killing of Trayvon Martin. More from Coates here:

In trying to assess the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, two seemingly conflicting truths emerge for me. The first is that based on the case presented by the state, and based on Florida law, George Zimmerman should not have been convicted of second degree murder or manslaughter. The second is that the killing of Trayvon Martin is a profound injustice.

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It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself. This is not our system malfunctioning. It is our system working as intended. To expect our juries, our schools, our police to single-handedly correct for this, is to look at the final play in the final minute of the final quarter and wonder why we couldn't come back from twenty-four down.

From Amy Davidson at The New Yorker: What Should Trayvon Martin Have Done? 

There is an echo, in what people say Martin should and shouldn’t have done, of what people say to women when bad things happen to them in dark places. Why did you walk that way, why were you out in the rain? Why did you walk in the direction of the man instead of running? Why did you think you had the privilege to go out and get candy for a child? You didn’t; you should have known. It shouldn’t be that way. A woman should be able to walk on a dark street in Florida, or anywhere. That she might not be able to doesn’t make a similar restraint on Martin any more reasonable—one injustice doesn’t vindicate another—and, in a way, only adds to the pain. One of the answers, among the most mortifying, and rightly underlying the rage at the verdict, is that Trayvon Martin wasn’t supposed to act like a man.

He wasn’t quite one, yet. He was a child, who had just turned seventeen. He was learning how to be a man—and he had some reasonable guides in his parents, as we have learned through watching their utter dignity throughout the trial. That night, though, Martin was just guessing.

Finally, from Obama's speech:

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.

Obama is at his best, in my opinion, when speaking on issues like this, as in what I consider his best speech, the one on race and Reverend Wright (PDF). 

I was in France when the Zimmerman verdict came in, and at that moment the issue of race was fresh on my mind. I'd had brunch with my friend Michelle, a Chinese American, who has been living in Paris for a few years. She noted that a strain of anti-immigrant sentiment had been running through the city and country for some time, and she often had to make clear that she was an American and not an immigrant from China as the Chinese were among the target immigrant groups for such French resentment. An exception, she said, was being or seeming Japanese.

Her words echoed in my head later that day when my friends and I were strolling near the Louvre. Three of the four of us were Chinese American. A guy walking past us about a hundred feet away shouted an epithet in our direction. I looked over my shoulder, uncertain who it was directed at, and the guy made eye contact with me. This time he paired the insult with an unmistakeable hand gesture, a couple sharp jabs of his index finger directed at my face.

This is not to condemn France or Paris based on the actions of one ignorant guy as we had an otherwise amazing time all throughout the country. But it was a vivid reminder of anti-immigrant sentiments that are prevalent in many countries throughout the world, and of how in many more places in the world than the ones I typically move in that race is one of the most powerful shapers of one's context that exists.

We are still far from a race-blind world, and how tragic it must be to to be in a double bind in which one of your choices is to deny who you are.

Glass half full?

Mr. Cowen, who is also an occasional contributor to the Sunday Business section of The New York Times, is more skeptical about a short-term takeoff, focusing instead on what he sees as a brightening, longer-term picture of the United States economy.

The recent surge in domestic oil and gas production signals “the start of a new era of cheap energy,” he said, while less expensive online education programs could open the door to millions of people who have been priced out of more traditional academics.

At the same time, Mr. Cowen said, he now expects subtler improvements in the country’s economic well-being that will not necessarily be reflected in statistics like gross domestic product, but will be significant nonetheless.

For example, slower growth in the cost of health care will be a boon for the government and businesses, but will actually subtract from reported economic activity. “It’s like the music industry,” he said. “Revenues are lower at record companies but the experience for listeners is better.”

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“The great stagnation will end for a lot of people but not everyone,” Mr. Cowen said. “I think there will be great breakthroughs but the distribution of those gains will go to owners of capital and intellectual property.”

The ongoing debate about whether we're in the nascent days of some third industrial revolution, driven by the connective fabric of the Internet, or the Great Stagnation.

Being a macroeconomist seems like a fruitless enterprise, like being a fortune-teller, but I agree with the sentiment that the returns to owning capital are greater relative to the value of one's own labor than in the past.

Emotional expression in 20th century books

I'm not sure what to make of the data presented in this study of the frequency of emotion words in books, but it's intriguing. 

We also found a general decrease in emotional word usage in the past decades up to the present, which was observed also in fiction writing on its own. We interpret this as a genuine decrease in the literary expression of emotion, but an alternative explanation could be that mood words have changed, rather than decreased in usage, through the  century. This seems unlikely to explain the observed decrease, however, because we used contemporary word lists, analyzed recently in Twitter data to characterize recent events [24], any bias of which should have increased in usage towards the present.

Our results also support the popular notion that American authors express more emotion than the British. Somewhat surprisingly, this difference has apparently developed only since the 1960s, and as part of a more general stylistic differentiation in American versus British English, reflected similarly in content-free word frequencies. This relative increase of American mood word use roughly coincides with the increase of anti–social and narcissistic sentiments in U.S. popular song lyrics from 1980 to 2007 [6], as evidenced by steady increases in angry/antisocial lyrics and in the percentage of first-person singular pronouns (e.g., I, me,mine), with a corresponding decrease in words indicating social interactions (e.g., mate, talk,child) over the same 27-year period [6].

As these findings appear to genuinely reflect changes in published language, a remaining question is whether word usage represents real behavior in a population, or possibly an absence of that behavior which is increasingly played out via literary fiction (or online discourse).

The joy-sadness curve, in particular, caught my eye. World War II seemed to cause a big spike in sadness, and the early 80's were a rough time too, though I have no idea why.

I wonder if the n-gram data from Google will include stickers and emoji for future generations to analyze. 

Digital editing and photojournalism

The 2013 World Press Photo Award was given to Paul Hansen for this photo.

What you're seeing there is not the RAW photo, though, but one that has been touched up digitally. This invited criticism from some other photographers who are wary of the role of digital editing in the sphere of photojournalism. 

One of the leading firms in the area of digital darkroom services is 10b Photography, profiled in this overview of the controversy surrounding the Hansen photo. 

Photographers upload 50 to 100 images a day onto 10b's server. Palmisano begins by making automatic corrections to the photos on his computer, a process in which he hardly pays any attention to the image itself.

Then the detailed work begins. He darkens areas along the upper edge of one image to draw the viewer's eye toward the lower part. In a photo depicting a soldier in the foreground, he carefully and manually enhances the gun. In another photo, he makes the shocking and luminous red of a bleeding wound seem less glaring. The supposed original, he says, would simply not have corresponded to our expectations of what blood looks like.

Within reason, I'm not overly concerned about changes to saturation or lighting since our perception of that and the device's recording of that are all relative anyhow. Ansel Adams did a ton of dodging and burning for his black and white nature photographs, he just did it chemically rather than digitally. I edit most my photos before putting them online, and almost always my efforts are towards capturing the emotion from a moment.

Changing a color completely, however, or removing items from a photo, or changing the shape of a person for a fashion cover, those are edits that move from the realm of your basic digital darkroom processing into something more akin to fiction writing.

Returning to the Hansen photo, it does appear that the faces of the five to seven men closest to the camera are unusually well lit given no apparent light source coming from behind the camera (note that the bodies of the children appear to be in shadow that doesn't seem to affect the men's faces). So it does feel a bit unnatural as a photo. Without looking at the RAW photo, it's hard to say how much those faces might have been brightened in post, but perhaps in the future the before and after will always be available so people can judge for themselves the degree of manipulation.

It's also important to realize that digital cameras that have a wide latitude often shoot a very flat RAW image or "negative" that looks really dull and washed out and that post-processing is almost always necessary to achieve a higher contrast image for final presentation. The flat negative is often a good sign, indicating that there is room for such manipulation, and so I expect a certain amount of post processing work on almost all digital images.

Face facts

I still remember the first time I encountered the teachings of Paul Ekman, through a Malcolm Gladwell article titled The Naked Face in The New Yorker.  The idea was compelling: the human face, through a series of involuntary micro-expressions, revealed underlying emotions in a universal manner, across people of all races and backgrounds.

I briefly considered sending away for a Facial Action Coding System training kit which, at the time, was hundreds of dollars (training tools are available for much cheaper now). I thought it would turn me into some human lie detector, a monster at the poker table. Ekman's system even inspired a TV show, and he has consulted with a whole slew of government agencies, from the CIA and FBI to the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA.

But now, decades after the theory rose to prominence, it has come under fire. Lisa Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern, has challenged Ekman's findings and theory.

She returned to those famous cross-cultural studies that had launched Ekman’s career—and found that they were less than watertight. The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think.

Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”

More importantly... 

That, Barrett told me, is what the mind does with emotions. Just as that first picture of the bee actually wasn’t a picture of a bee for me until I taught myself that it was, my emotions aren’t actually emotions until I’ve taught myself to think of them that way. Without that, I have only a meaningless mishmash of information about what I’m feeling. In other words, as Barrett put it to me, emotion isn’t a simple reflex or a bodily state that’s hard-wired into our DNA, and it’s certainly not universally expressed. It’s a contingent act of perception that makes sense of the information coming in from the world around you, how your body is feeling in the moment, and everything you’ve ever been taught to understand as emotion. Culture to culture, person to person even, it’s never quite the same. What’s felt as sadness in one person might as easily be felt as weariness in another, or frustration in someone else.

So there’s no such thing as a basic emotion? It sounds crazy. But this is where all sorts of brain science is headed. Researchers once assumed that the brain stored specific memories, but now they’ve realized that there is no such stash to be found. Memories, the new science suggests, are actually reconstructed anew every time we access them, and appear to us a little differently each time, depending on what’s happened since. Vision works in a similar way. The brain, it turns out, doesn’t consciously process every single piece of information that comes its way. Think of how impossibly distracting the regular act of blinking would be if it did. Instead, it pays attention to what you need to pay attention to, then raids your memory stores to fill in the blanks.

The idea that emotion is a human construction, if true, is hugely important. It opens the possibility that people can teach themselves to react differently to different situations by teaching yourself to process your bodily feelings in specific ways. If emotion comes in the interpretation and not directly from physical reaction, there is a gap between the two in which you can choose the emotional outcome.  

This may be why some people react differently to different situations like adversity. Perhaps their bodies feel it the same way, but one person chooses a different emotional manifestation or outcome than the other.

Of course, even before I read the article on Barrett, I had heard of a theory that indirectly challenged Ekman's theories in a more populist manner. Yes, I'm referring to the phenomenon forever to be known as Bitchy Resting Face.  What you read as bitchiness might merely be the default facial expression when a person is feeling no emotion in particular.