Over the last few weeks I’ve been in some classic New York buildings, including 30 Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building and the Port Authority building. What I found interesting about these three buildings, beyond their massive size, was that subways open directly into their lobbies (Update 5/24/11: As one commenter notes, the Empire State Building doesn’t actually have a subway that opens into it — not sure where I came up with that). Curious, I emailed my friend and self-styled NYC transit expert Ian Westcott to see if he’d ever seen a full list. Reprinted with permission, here’s his reply:
Oh man, good question! There are a bunch of them I think. I don’t believe there is a list anywhere though.
A few off the top of my head:
- Canal St A/C/E has an exit into the AT&T building
- Jay St-Metrotech A/C/F/R has an exit into 370 Jay, which used to be an MTA building but is currently abandoned
- 34th St N/Q/R/B/D/F/V exits into Manhattan Mall (there is a closed passageway underground, owned by the mall, that once connected to Penn Station)
- South Ferry 1/Whitehall R exits into the Staten Island Ferry terminal
- 28th St 6 exits into the New York Life building
- Penn Station & Grand Central subways have numerous connecting exits, obvs
- Wall St 4/5 exits into a couple buildings
- There’s an exit into a Duane Reade at 42nd and 8th (A/C/E, PABT)
- Astor Place (6) exits to Kmart
- Clark St 2/3 – the elevators exit into a strip mall in the ground floor of the Hotel St. George. That’s one of my favorites actually, it’s really weird.
I think they’re more common in older buildings where developers saw subway access as a thing of value and not a source of riffraff. Nowadays if a building encompasses a subway exit it usually shunts it off to the sidewalk (see Union Sq, Broadway/Lafayette, etc). Also there are numerous cases of entrances that were bricked over by the property owner and are now flat walls or utility closets.
Up at 50th there’s even a library branch in the subway.
May 19, 2011
Frequently I don’t realize how interesting an idea is until I find myself repeating it six months later. That’s the case with this post by Mike Monteiro about calendar design. In it he argues that the whole idea of scheduling meetings for people based on the availability in their calendar drives a very bad behavior, mainly assuming that just because something isn’t scheduled that the person is free. As he puts it, “‘I’m adding a meeting’ should really be ‘I’m subtracting an hour from your life.’”
What if your calendar worked the opposite way? All time was filled by default and people had to extract from your day when scheduling things. This would move the onus to make a case for the meeting to the scheduler rather than the schedulee. I can even imagine taking it a step further and adding a set of prompts as the person schedules asking if this meeting is really important and whether it really needs to be an hour. In general it highlights a real problem we all face, though: We let software dictate the way we behave rather than vice-versa. If you use iCal you probably have lots of one hour meetings, not because they need to be an hour, but because that’s the default amount of time a new event has and people’s tendency is to no adjust that.
May 19, 2011
Eli Pariser, who started MoveOn.org has a new book out that I keep running into called The Fitler Bubble. As I understand it (and this is most likely a very surface reading, since I haven’t actually read it), Pariser tries to educate the world on the dangers (or at least impacts) of all the algorithms that filter our digital lives for us.
In an interview over at Brain Pickings he digs in a little bit on some of the stuff the book discusses. His points seem to center around two things: First, the false notion that the internet is killing serendipity and the true notion that there are privacy implications to all the data being collected to power all these filters (which we all knew).
What’s more interesting to me than questions about whether the web is killing serendipity (it’s not) is why algorithms are written in the way they are (which very few seem to ask). Pariser brings up an interesting example with Netflix:
Netflix uses an algorithm called Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE, to geeks), which basically calculates the “distance” between different movies. The problem with RMSE is that while it’s very good at predicting what movies you’ll like — generally it’s under one star off — it’s conservative. It would rather be right and show you a movie that you’ll rate a four, than show you a movie that has a 50% chance of being a five and a 50% chance of being a one. Human curators are often more likely to take these kinds of risks.
My question is, “why?” Why has Netflix (and many others) decided that conservative is the only direction for an algorithm. Why do recommendation systems tend to recommend closest neighbors when often you already know and have actively chosen not to pay attention to them? Is it that the people writing these things are worried that people won’t be able to accept the sort of risk taking that Pariser sees in human curators from a machine? I mean, I think I agree with that but has anyone tested it? (It could turn out the answers to all these questions are in the book which I haven’t read, in which case I apologize.)
Algorithms are nothing more than a whole bunch of people’s opinions transferred into a mathematical equation. Understanding that is incredibly important and I suspect is a major reason Pariser is bringing up the topic. There is a hidden politics in the algorithms that drive our world. Those politics are not necessarily right or left, but that doesn’t matter. Google for years has been driving home this (false) idea that the black box is truth and only recently did they publicly come clean, admitting that it was just their opinions on what’s good and bad driving their algorithmic decisions. And maybe that’s not a bad thing, maybe they do represent the best interests of all of us internet citizens. But then again, maybe they don’t, and at the very least it seems like people should know what’s driving their results.
May 15, 2011
Of all the things I read about Osama bin Laden in the days after his death, I think this piece by Steve Coll at the New Yorker was the most interesting (it’s only available in full online to subscribers, sorry). Coll tries to understand bin Laden’s legacy (beyond, of course, the many lives he is responsible for ending in the United States and around the world) and paints him as a bit of a peculiar revolutionary who left behind little in the way of ideas. Coll writes that, “Other leaders claiming to be vanguards of revolution, such as Lenin and Castro, remade their homelands and altered global affairs. Al Qaeda never acquired a state, and its territorial influence has been limited to ungoverned backwaters such as Somalia and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.”
Coll argues that bin Laden’s most revolutionary trait was his understanding of media:
The standard caricature of bin Laden places him in a cave, stroking his untrimmed beard, plotting to drag the world backward in time. But a better way to understand his significance might be as a singular and peculiar talent in asymmetric communication and marketing strategies. His career as a terrorist signalled changes in the structure of dissent, violent and otherwise, in the Arab and Muslim worlds, particularly involving the role of transnational media. He grasped the disruptive potential of border-hopping technologies even before many Western media executives and Arab dictators did. … Bin Laden was to Arab violence and dissent in the digital age what Adam Osborne was to laptop computers or Excite was to the search-engine business. He lacked the unifying ideas and insights required to build a sustainable community of followers, but, in some ways, he was ahead of his time.
May 12, 2011
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