Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook today announced that it is improving the functionality of its search feature, making it more powerful than before. Now the search tool can be used not only for finding people, but also for finding specific posts. This feature has been added following the feedback that Facebook has received from users on the Graph Search beta and one of the things users said was most important was the ability to find specific posts.

That doesn’t mean users won’t be able to do with search what they previously could. It’s still possible to make queries like “my friends who live in New York” to bring up the appropriate people. Facebook does point out that search results are personalized and unique to each user, and each user can see specific posts only shared with them.

Facebook also heard from users that they wanted a better search experience on mobile, so today’s updates have been designed for mobile. The new search functionality will be available on Facebook for iPhone to start off, as well as the desktop. Other mobile platforms will have to wait a while for their turn.

The world’s largest social network says that these updates are rolling out this week in U.S. English on the iPhone and desktop. It hasn’t confirmed when other mobile platforms will receive the same update.

Facebook Search Now Allows Users To Find Posts

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A scene on Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom recently struck me, at first, as simply an astute and amusing commentary on global warming… until the real world chimed in with one of those life-imitating-art occasions suggesting that R.E.M.’s apocalyptic song is destined to be the soundtrack of our future.

First, the HBO moment: Anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) interviews an EPA administrator (Paul Lieberstein, who will always be Toby Flenderson from The Office no matter what role he’s playing) about a report that carbon dioxide levels have hit extremely dangerous new highs.

McAvoy begins in the usual mode for this sort of story, poised to emphasize the urgent threat of climate change while reinforcing the conventional platitudes that people need to take this seriously and work hard to remediate the problem.

His conversation, though, quickly goes off the rails.

“If you were the doctor and we were the patient,” the anchor asks, “what’s your prognosis? A thousand years, two thousand years?” The scientist’s response takes him aback: “A person has already been born who will die due to catastrophic failure of the planet.”

McAvoy: You’re saying the situation is dire?

EPA guy: Not exactly. Your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire. Your house has already burned to the ground, the situation is over.

McAvoy: So what can we do to reverse this?

EPA: Well there’s a lot we could do…

McAvoy (interrupts): Good…

EPA: …20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. But now, no.

McAvoy (becoming increasingly uncomfortable): Can you make an analogy that might help us understand?

EPA: Sure. It’s as if you’re sitting in your car, in your garage, with the engine running and the door closed, and you’ve slipped into unconsciousness. And that’s it.

McAvoy: What if someone comes and opens the door?

EPA: You’re already dead.

McAvoy: What if the person got there in time?

EPA: Then you’d be saved.

McAvoy: OK. So now what’s the CO2 equivalent of the getting there on time?

EPA: Shutting off the car 20 years ago.

McAvoy: You sound like you’re saying it’s hopeless.

EPA: Yeah.

McAvoy: Is that the administration’s position or yours?

EPA: There isn’t a position on this any more than there’s a position on the temperature at which water boils.

Then last week, an actual piece of journalism, the lead story in Monday’s New York Times, confirms that things are indeed pretty much as desperate as Sorkin depicted on his pretend newscast. As the latest UN summit on greenhouse gases convenes in Peru, climate scientists report that a 3.6 degree rise seems inevitable, which they believe is “the tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels and widespread flooding.”

Flipping back to one last bit of patter from The Newsroom: The EPA administrator tells McAvoy, “The last time there was this much CO2 in the air the oceans were 80 feet higher than they are now. Two things you should know: Half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of an ocean.” “And the other?” “Humans can’t breathe under water.”

I propose that it is time for us to accept as a premise in whatever environmental discussions we have — or indeed, in any deliberations on anything taking place in the future — the fact that the world is coming to an end.

Well, not the world itself: The planet is actually pretty resilient, and will likely continue on its orbit unbothered by the warm spell; it’s just people, along with most other life forms, that will disappear. Geologically, there’s not so much to worry about; biologically, on the other hand, we have a situation.

Over the past decade — since Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth brought global warming into the mainstream consciousness — the rhetoric has been dire, but at least minimally hopeful: If we start doing this and stop doing that now, we can perhaps just barely salvage what is left of our ecosystem.

For a while it made sense, as Will McAvoy was trying to do on his newscast, to cling to a thread of hope in order to motivate reform and prevent people from descending into a paralyzing sense of helplessness.

But now it’s time to accept our impending demise. Those are profoundly difficult words to write, but they are necessary: Our times demand a new rhetorical honesty. It is deceitful and irrelevant to sustain the charade that things may improve. Instead, it’s time to start talking about how we will die.

(Maxine Kumin has a poem called “Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief.” It was.)

As depressing as this is, it has at least the virtue of being true, unlike the kick-the-can-down-the-road policies that pretend the solution for global warming lies in producing (someday!) cars that get 150 mpg and cities powered by wind farms. And expecting Westerners (the 12 percent of the world’s population who consume 60 percent of its resources) to use less stuff.

If there’s a silver lining, it is not a very satisfying one, but for what it’s worth: I think it may prove refreshing, even exhilarating, to develop a new trope, a new truth, that lets go of the pretense that things will turn out ok.

“The progress narrative” that has undergirded Western culture for millennia was nice while it lasted, but it’s also responsible for getting us where we are today, as it stoked the fantasy that we were invincibly moving ever forward, and that our rampantly voracious overdevelopment (exploration, imperialism, conquest, growth, “civilizing” nature) had no costs, no limits, no consequences.

As an English professor, I find it exciting to consider the possibilities for a new voice, a new style, a new writerly consciousness that may accompany and chronicle the winding down of our sound and fury.

Other cultures at similar points in their trajectory — past the zenith, clearly waning yet close enough to the glories of the past — have often produced keenly insightful literature and art. Being on the cusp of decline provokes incisive self-reflection — as the Greeks called it, anagnorisis: recognition.

Cervantes achieved this in Don Quixote toward the end of Spain’s Golden Age, as did T. S. Eliot in “The Waste Land,” his report from the front lines of the cultural disintegration that accompanied the collapse of European imperialism and the War to End All Wars: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

On a personal level, we have lately begun to do a better job of dying, and of accepting death — writing “death plans,” forsaking heroic measures of resuscitation. So too as a species we may learn to accept the inescapability of our impending ecological fate. We can celebrate the bright spots from our past human heritage, acknowledge our follies, and finally, deal with it: It is what it is.

There will be a limited future audience for this brave new art, since we’re hovering on the verge of extinction, but it will leave an interesting time capsule for whoever might come to recolonize the planet after we’re gone.

“Anthropocene,” a recently coined term for our present epoch, reflects the unique phenomenon of human impact that has changed (disrupted, ruined) the earth. Complementing this scientific assessment, a parallel aesthetic movement must acknowledge, better late than never, that we have irreparably fouled our nest.

We might demarcate our cultural expressions of this period as “epitaphal”: our last words, as on a gravestone, inscribed with a solidity that will outlast our mortal frames and will announce for eternity (even in its conscribed scope) what kind of people we wanted to be and how we hoped we might be remembered.

Randy Malamud is Regents’ Professor of English and chair of the department at Georgia State University.

Echoing the sentiment of her “Top Five” co-star Chris Rock, Gabrielle Union sees a glaring lack of parts for black women in film. But she also recognizes a force to be celebrated behind today’s more diverse television landscape, and that force’s name is Shonda Rhimes.

In a HuffPost Live interview on Thursday, Dec. 4 the actress praised the queen of ABC’s Thursday night programming and her commitment to featuring all types of women in prominent roles.

“Success breeds more opportunity,” she said, “so with the success of ‘Scandal,’ with the success of ‘How To Get Away With Murder,’ — basically Shonda has taken over the most important night of television with a very diverse cast of characters.”

Rhimes has featured “black women, [women of] all different sexual orientations, religions, [and] sizes,” Union described, a rare offering of diversity onscreen.

Both of the leads in Rhimes’ wildly popular Thursday night series are African-American women. Additionally, Rhimes writes for women of all ages: Viola Davis, the star of “How To Get Away With Murder,” captivates viewers weekly even as she approaches age 50.

But while this is undoubtedly progress, Union hopes for more diverse representations of women of color in the industry on a broader scale.

“It’s very limited, period,” the “Bring It On” star said, referring to exposure for black women on the whole. “And when you add in women of color or women of color over a size 4, women of color with darker skin tones, women of color who want to rock natural hair, it becomes more and more limited. I have not seen that change.”

Watch more from Gabrielle Union’s conversation with HuffPost Live here.

Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live’s new morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!

Pure incremental and breakthrough innovation is unsustainable so how does one balance managements’ risk-attitude with users’ taste preferences when designing innovative offerings?

In the 1930’s, Raymond Lowell, the father of American design, advocated MAYA – Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable, as a canon for industrial design. The bell-shaped model for customer acceptance showed that if design expressions / styling / aesthetics exceeded beyond a certain point on the curve, customers would become alienated causing sales and profit to plummet.

A paradigm shift is only profitable if the lead-time for acceptance is reasonable since, for management and users alike, embracing new ideas takes time. As an example, abstract art has been with us for over a century, yet only twenty percent of people in the UK appreciate this art form today. So one is still better off painting bright colored landscapes, flowers, nudes and marine pictures than exploring new expressions.

Geoffrey Moore proposed that an offering’s Life Cycle Adoption curve might include a chasm between the Early Adopters and the Early Majority. Sixteen percent of a population, Innovators and Early Adopters, are on the “wrong side” of the chasm, while eighty-four percent constituting the Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards are on the “right side”. When crossing the chasm, the challenge is to identify and leverage specific members of the Early Majority’s trust in a group of Early Adopters, in combination with addressing their need for a flawless offering.

A study at Stanford Center for Design Research in 2005 revealed a one to two year adoption delay for highly innovative consumer products. The urban legend, at that time, was that winning an IDEA (Industrial Design Excellence Award) Bronze was a sign of success, while receiving the IDEA Gold Award was the kiss of death.

By observing Gold, Silver and bronze winners the years following the announcement, however, a different story appeared. IDEA Bronze winners were found to have success right away, while IDEA Gold winners, on average enjoyed success a couple of years further down the road.

There are always exceptions. The BMW Mini won IDEA Gold in 2003 and enjoyed success right away, while the Chevrolet Super Sport Roadster that won IDEA Gold in 2004, started as a miserable failure and was eventually discontinued.

Both the BMW Mini and the Chevrolet Super Sport Roadster happened to be “retro” designs, the popular style of that period. When one has a new unique product, it is probably best to play it safe when it comes to exterior styling and what is safe may differ between cultures.

Analyzing European, North American and Asians response to IDEA winners from the previous year showed that Europeans, North Americans as well as Asians were attracted to geometric and easily identifiable products, however Asians were also drawn to more sculptural products.

As the adage goes, if one develops a product that does not work, there may be a second chance offered but if one develop a product for which there is no market, one will be looking for a new job. With such an incentives in place, is it any wonder that business and design managers continue to play it safe?

Clues To Her Future Foreign Policy, and How She Will Govern

Hillary Clinton could not have known (could she?) when writing Hard Choices that in the summer and fall of 2014 the world would be in virtual meltdown, with extremists of various stripes on the rise seemingly everywhere. Internationally, there is the dangerous nationalism and ambition for empire-rebuilding being carried out by Vladimir Putin, in ways both coherent and otherwise. Even more frightening — because we understand it less well — are religious zealots and their state sponsors running amok across the Middle East. Meanwhile on the domestic front, extreme elements of one of our two principal national parties have caused dysfunction and the near-breakdown of our polity at a time of unique and pressing challenges: health care, immigration and the nation’s basic infrastructure, to name just three. On top of all this, the emergence of Ebola was a pile-on that, while hardly man-made, appeared as a metaphor for a world gone mad.

Against this backdrop stands the former secretary’s book and, with the arrival of the Holiday Season (and, if we are lucky, a quieter time of introspection and actual book reading), the chance to assess the strengths of extreme competence and steady-as-she goes perseverance that the author brings to once, and perhaps future, national challenges.

Here’s what you need to know about Hard Choices, including some tips on how to address this worthy tome.

First of all, this reviewer discovered that the book is very engaging and, indeed, revealing — more so than might be expected from this particular Memoir. While there is plenty here for policy wonks, there are also gripping tales that have the quality of a page-turner. The lead-up to Osama Bin Laden’s death in Pakistan, the rescue of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng in Beijing, that famous first flight from Malta into Tripoli, Libya (immortalized by a Hillary-as-commando meme that went viral), the president and secretary literally crashing a private meeting of dissenting world leaders at the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen — these are all here.

Even beyond these events, this is a genuinely accessible book. Clinton’s prose is simple and matter-of-fact, with complex issues explained in (mostly) plain language. While many Beltway-insiders may roll their eyes at facts and policy arguments they already know by heart, Clinton didn’t write this book only for them; rather it was written for Jane Q. Citizen, who reads to learn of recent history, and to gain insights into a future that may yet be. What Jane Q. will also find in Hard Choices are lesser known, but no less fascinating, foreign policy efforts and events that make equally riveting reading — like the secret U.S. effort to negotiate peace with the Taliban, the secretary’s heart-rending visit with women and children in Eastern Congo, and the extraordinary tale told to her by President Putin about how he came to be born(!)

On the “wonk” side there are real serious, cogent explanations of things you may not have quite understood before. This is an evidence-based book, so facts and statistics often come fast: like the fact that the United States spends less than 1 percent of its annual budget on foreign assistance (rather than the “28 percent” that resides in the popular imagination) or that “Secretary of State” is the addressee on each and every one of the millions of cables that come in to Washington from over 270 U.S. embassies and consulates around the world every year — and that only a tiny, tiny fraction of these ever reach the secretary’s own desk (therefore debunking the misinformation spread by political opponents that the secretary was directly apprised of the Libyan security situation, pre-Benghazi). Among many other subjects, Clinton explains the pragmatism that lay behind the Russian “reset” and, in detail, why the reset did not mean capitulation — far from it.

While it’s notable that Clinton abstains from using this book to settle old scores, she includes careful explanations of events and decisions that may have caused confusion at the time they occurred. For example, instead of squarely laying at least some responsibility for Benghazi’s inadequate security at Congress’ doorstep, Clinton merely alludes rather softly to her “four years making the case to Congress that adequately funding our diplomats and development experts was a national security priority” at a time of shrinking Congressional appropriations. That a heartier Congressional embrace of Clinton’s signature smart power doctrine, including more security funding to better enable our development and diplomacy professionals to do their difficult work on many levels, might also have helped avoid Benghazi and other security incidents is implied, if not directly stated.

Clinton also acknowledges her mistake — in the plainest language possible — on the subject of her 2002 vote authorizing President Bush to wage war in Iraq, yet also lets us fully understand the context of that vote: one in which a strong majority of then-sitting senators voted “yes” with Clinton on a bill that, by its terms, instructed the president (not yet known, in 2002, for waging preemptive wars) to ‘use diplomacy before using force’ and ‘not to wage war unless U.S. national security is at stake.’

Of course, in light of the rise of ISIS and America’s recent re-entry into Iraq, the Secretary’s 2002 vote — considered in the proper context — doesn’t now appear quite the error it was long considered to be.

Perhaps most importantly for this book, there is heart, soul and emotion. Clinton saves some of the most expansive, lofty language for her worldwide, and life-spanning, efforts on behalf of women and girls, and this reviewer was especially heartened by all the space she devotes to perhaps the final frontier of international human rights: the plight of LGBT people in the developing world, starting with her description of the first time she uttered the words, at a State Department Pride event, “human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights, once and for all.”

A couple of parting tips on how to read Hard Choices, especially if you find its telephone book size to be daunting: you don’t have to read it cover to cover. The book is organized like a marvelous worldwide travelogue, so while you should begin by reading “Part One: A Fresh Start” (which contains its own share of riveting stories of the Obama-Clinton 2008 rapprochement that are new or newly told), proceed from there by dipping into the parts of the world — or towards the end, the international challenges — that tickle your fancy, and come back to the rest later on.

And, oh yes, about those last questions you have for Hillary Clinton: when will she announce her run for the presidency, and how will she run? Many have quoted the following language from the book’s last chapter as a sign: “Never rest on your laurels. Never quit. Never stop working to make the world a better place. That’s our unfinished business.”

This reviewer prefers the following, from the epilogue:

In the coming years, Americans will have to decide whether we are prepared to learn from and call on the lessons of history and rise once more to defend our values and interests. This is not a summons to confrontation or to a new Cold War — we’ve learned painfully that force should be our last resort, never our first. Instead, it’s an appeal to stand firmly and united in pursuit of a more just, free and peaceful world. Only Americans can decide this.

Clinton then goes on to devote a long paragraph to America’s domestic challenges, addressing rising income inequality, deepening poverty in many quarters and Washington’s increasing dysfunction — and thereby offers important clues to how she will run in the primaries and beyond. And finally this: “In the end, our strength abroad depends on our resolve and resilience at home.”

The past six months since publication of Clinton’s book have been a time when a commercial airliner was shot out of the sky over Ukraine (the deadliest such incident in human history), at least four separate wars raged across the Middle East and South Asia, and heinous, barbaric executions of Americans took place for all the world to see. Unfortunately, we can expect to look forward to more rather than fewer such periods. To battle feckless extremism wherever it arises, we need feral competence and discipline and perseverance at our helm. Whether by accident or by design, Hard Choices doggedly makes the case for the person to lead us who is best placed to deliver more democracy, more freedom and more peacefulness the world over — and it doesn’t hurt that she has the biggest, most diverse rolodex on the planet.