Black Milk Reflects on His Success in 'What It's Worth Video

Producer Black Milk has come a long way from working under the late and great studio maestro J Dilla. The Detroit native reflects on his grind in the minimalist video for ‘What It’s Worth.’

Shot by King David, the video is simplistic but drives home the point that Black Milk is always thinking about his next move. We see the hitmaker sitting alone in a dimly-lit room pondering his career choices and future endeavors.

In an e-mail to Complex, the 31-year-old producer explains his thought process behind the clip.

“Everyone asks themselves this question at one point or another about life in general: What does it all mean? Some people have the answers, some don’t,” writes Milk. “This song represents me figuring out the value of everything I’ve accomplished and the things I still want to accomplish in this lifetime.”

Check out his video and nod your head to the soulful production and introspective rhymes of Black Milk.

Black Milk, 'If There's a Hell Below' -- Album Review:

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Bits Blog: Measuring the Success of Online Education

One of the dirty secrets about MOOCs — massive open online courses — is that they are not very effective, at least if you measure effectiveness in terms of completion rates.

If as few as 20 percent of students finishing an online course is considered a wild success and 10 percent and lower is standard, then it would appear that MOOCs are still more of a hobby than a viable alternative to traditional classroom education.

Backers reason that the law of large numbers argues in favor of the online courses that have rapidly come to be seen as the vehicle for the Internet’s next big disruption — colleges. If 100,000 students take a free online course and only 5,000 complete it, that is still a significant number.

However, MOOCs are a moving target. Because they are computerized and networked they offer an ideal medium for quantifying what works and what doesn’t. Earlier this week, when San Jose State University in California announced that it was contracting with MOOC-developer Udacity to create three pilot classes, they noted that the National Science Foundation had agreed to fund research to study the impact of the classes.

Udacity, along with other MOOC designers, is moving rapidly away from the video lecture model of teaching toward an approach that is highly interactive and based on frequent quizzes and human “mentors” to provide active online support for students.

Moreover, there are early indications that the high interactivity and personalized feedback of online education might ultimately offer a learning structure that can’t be matched by the traditional classroom.

Duolingo, a free Web-based language learning system that grew out of a Carnegie Mellon University research project, is not an example of a traditional MOOC. However, the system, which now teaches German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and English, has roughly one million users and about 100,000 people spend time on the site daily. The firm’s business is based on the possibility of using students to translate documents in a crowd-sourced fashion.

Seventy-five percent of the students are outside of United States, and Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Luis von Ahn notes that the foreign students are significantly more motivated and have a higher completion rate than their American counterparts.

The firm, which was founded by Dr. von Ahn and his students, commissioned a study of the effectiveness of the language training system that indicates that students may learn languages more quickly online. Conducted this fall by Roumen Vesselinov, a visiting assistant professor of economics at Queens College, City University of New York, and John Grego, chairman of the statistics department at the University of South Carolina, the study compared Duolingo to offline learners and found that on average a person with no knowledge of Spanish would need an average of 34 hours to cover the material for the equivalent of a first college semester. Although, the number of class hours for a college language class vary for a semester, Dr. von Ahn said that a course at Carnegie Mellon might require roughly 135 hours of course time.

The researchers reported: “The main factor for higher effectiveness was the motivation of the participants with people studying for travel gaining the most and people studying for personal interest gaining the least. Another factor for higher effectiveness was the initial level of knowledge of Spanish with beginners gaining the most and more advanced learners gaining the least.”

The researchers have previously conducted studies of the effectiveness of other commercial learning programs such as Rosetta Stone, Auralog and Berlitz, and in this case they began with a sample of 556 students who were using the Duolingo service.

Dr. von Ahn acknowledged that the results are preliminary, and the researchers noted that it was not possible to generalize beyond the study of Spanish based on their sample. However, he noted that with other researchers he has started a longer, more general study. In the meantime, Duolingo has continued to grow at a MOOC pace — the service is picking up between 15,000 and 20,000 new users daily and Dr. von Ahn said that it might expand by as much as five times in the coming year.

The company is now working to add Chinese to its list of languages, with a particular focus on teaching English to Chinese speakers. “It turns out that there are 1.2 billion people in the world who want to learn a foreign language, and 400 million of them are in China,” he said.

Bits Blog: Facebook Poke and the Tedium of Success Theater

There’s a big problem in social media right now.

Poke, a Facebook app, lets people send messages that self-destruct after a few seconds.

It’s boring.

A crucial and indispensable source of news and information, absolutely. But more often than not, it’s also tedious and predictable. One woman’s look at technology and life.

Don’t get me wrong: My use of Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook has never been greater. But I’m growing tired of seeing everyone’s perfectly framed, glittering nightscapes of the Manhattan skyline, their impeccably prepared meals, those beautifully blurred views of the world from an airplane window seat. I’m getting tired of carefully crafting and sharing them myself.

As these media have matured and more of our colleagues, former flings, in-laws and friends have migrated to them, our use of them has changed. We’ve become better at choreographing ourselves and showing our best sides to the screen, capturing the most flattering angle of our faces, our homes, our evenings out, our loved ones and our trips.

It’s success theater, and we’ve mastered it. We’ve gotten better at it because it matters more. You never know who is looking or how it might affect your relationships and career down the road, and as a result, we have become more cautious about the version of ourselves that we present to each other and the world. Even Twitter, a service steeped in real-time and right-nowness, has added filters to its photo uploads, letting its users add a washed-out effect to their posts. It makes me miss the raw and unfiltered glimpses those services used to provide of the lives of my friends and the people I follow.

But the ubiquity of success theater is why I’ve become so fascinated with Snapchat and, more recently, Facebook Poke, services that let you send photos, messages and videos with a built-in shelf life, that self-destruct after a time interval that you choose. The beauty of these applications, perhaps their main redemptive quality, is that you can only send photos, messages and videos that you have created within the application. You cannot access your phone’s photo library for a more attractive self-portrait or an exotic locale to mask that you’re really sitting on the couch on Friday night in pajamas, wearing a face mask.

These applications are the opposite of groomed; they practically require imperfection, a sloppiness and a grittiness that conveys a sense of realness, something I’ve been craving in my communication. They transform the screen of your phone into a window into the life of your friend, wherever they are at that exact moment.

All of this is not to say that Snapchat or Facebook Poke have any permanent home in our daily routines. The applications, in their current iterations, have yet to gain significant traction in any of my social circles. Part of the fun is the novelty, as with any new service. And both have specific uses that are not as mainstream as services like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or even Tumblr. After all, it’s much harder to find your comfort level within them. It’s startling, at first, to see the poorly lit, grainy pictures of your friends’ unfiltered faces, to adjust to the intimacy of realizing that the video of your friend that just landed in your in-box is meant for your eyes only, and that you are expected to send something of equal or greater intimacy in return. It is also possible that over time, Snapchat, VidBurn and Facebook Poke will become warped by their own versions of success theater, or lose steam if they gain seedier reputations.

But they capture a behavior my closest friends and I had already begun to adopt: The practice of showing each other where we are at any given moment in time, either through a short video or photo of our workstations, our faces as we lie half-asleep in bed on rainy Sunday afternoons, a look into our lives that is reserved for only those closest to each other. It is an acknowledgement that the version of ourselves we share through other social media is not the truest one, and has not been for a long time.

This is a variation of the same impulse that made Chatroulette a viral hit, and something that Apple has tried to capture with FaceTime, Google with its Hangouts, even Color’s ill-fated last and final iteration. It’s enough to make me think that the real real-time social Web is coming, in one form or another.

Israeli Success in Downing Hamas Rockets Has World’s Attention

But even ardent supporters of a continent-size missile shield to guard the United States and other NATO members acknowledge the limitations of Iron Dome, which is a tactical system designed to shoot down unsophisticated rockets — basically flying pipe bombs — with a range of less than 50 miles.

Some American technical experts also say they want hard evidence before judging whether Iron Dome knocked out as many rockets as Israel has claimed. Iron Dome’s most salient feature, according to American experts now examining after-action reports from Gaza, may well be its software: The system rapidly discriminates between incoming rockets that are hurtling toward a populated area and others not worth expending a far costlier Iron Dome interceptor to knock down.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas focused global attention on missile defenses, and came as the United States and its Arab allies have undertaken a costly effort to knit together a regional shield in the Persian Gulf to protect cities, oil refineries, pipelines and military bases from a potential Iranian attack.

“This will ratify the common-sense notion that these systems can play a role in defending you,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former under secretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration. “It will be especially relevant as we move into an era in which there will be more countries with small inventories of rockets and missiles — and more countries that will want to defend against them in a reasonable way.”

The effort in the gulf is envisioned to include advanced radar as well as sets of two antimissile systems with accompanying radar: Patriot Advanced Capability interceptors and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. Those weapons would be linked with the radars and missiles carried aboard American Aegis warships in nearby waters.

There is a similar effort in the Pacific centered on radars in Japan, Aegis warships at sea and land-based interceptors in Alaska and California.

The Obama administration’s more recent focus has been the system to protect NATO allies in Europe with advanced radars based in Turkey and long-range interceptors to be based first in Romania and subsequently in Poland. American officials have emphasized that the limited number of interceptors in Europe are all about Iran, and would be inadequate to blunt Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal; but the system remains an irritant in relations with Moscow.

During the conflict with Hamas, Israeli officials report that Iron Dome knocked down more than 400 rockets on flight paths to populated areas, with a kill rate of 85 percent. Hamas is said to have fired off more than 1,400 rockets in all, but Israel was able to limit Hamas’s ability to launch more of its arsenal of 12,000 rockets with pre-emptive attacks on the storehouses where they were kept.

But some antimissile experts have expressed doubt about Israeli claims for Iron Dome, which is built by Israeli defense firms but has received about $275 million in financial support from the United States. Bright flashes can create a visual impression of overwhelming interceptor success, when in fact they may represent nothing more than the interceptor warhead blowing up, these skeptics warn.

“I’ve met the guys in Israel, and they’re smart,” said Richard M. Lloyd, an antimissile expert with more than a dozen patents and two major textbooks on warhead design to his credit. “But I’m not seeing the things I want to see” to prove that Iron Dome actually succeeded to the extent described by Israel.

Mr. Lloyd, who works for Tesla Laboratories Inc., a defense contractor in Arlington, Va., said he had studied dozens of publicly available photographs of spent rockets that landed on Israel. Few of them, he said, showed signs of damage from Iron Dome’s exploding warhead and the specific mechanism by which the interceptor is designed to make its kill — a dense spray of speeding metal fragments.

Success of Crowdfunding Puts Pressure on Entrepreneurs

But last week Apple announced a redesigned iPhone that is not compatible with the dock — and because of manufacturing delays, some of the project’s original backers were still waiting to receive theirs. The designers are now scrambling to make an adapter and update the product.

“I’m just hoping to get mine before the iPhone 6 ships at this point,” one backer wrote on Kickstarter.

Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are letting designers and other creative people connect with audiences who want to finance their dreams, and they are becoming increasingly popular. Nearly three million people have helped a total of 30,000 projects meet their fund-raising goals on Kickstarter, the largest such site, to the tune of $300 million in pledges.

But for the creators of these projects, getting the money is sometimes the easy part. They then have to turn their dreams into reality, with a crowd keeping an eye on their progress.

This new model comes with a host of potential pitfalls that are often difficult for project creators to anticipate, and hard for the armchair philanthropists who back them to grasp. Backers are essentially putting their trust in the project creators, giving them cash in return for the promise of a future reward.

Those who give a few dollars to a moviemaking project may get their names in the credits, while someone who puts up $100 to support development of a smart wristwatch might be promised one of the finished items.

Much of the time this works out. But some projects, including several prominent and in-demand ones, have run into missteps and lengthy delays. The permits for a new food truck might not come through. Or a gadget like the Elevation Dock might be harder than expected to manufacture and ship.

The rise of crowdfunding came up often over the weekend here at the debut of the XOXO Festival, a conference that focused on new models and outlets for creativity on the Internet. The conference was co-founded by an early Kickstarter employee, Andy Baio, who sold $400 tickets on Kickstarter itself to gauge interest in the event and raise money for it.

The relationship between creators and backers on crowdfunding sites is still being worked out. The backers play the role of philanthropists, investors, customers — or all of the above. And when promised rewards are slow to materialize, eager backers can get cranky.

“It’s definitely a lot of pressure,” said Eric Migicovsky, whose Kickstarter project to create a line of “Pebble” wristwatches with innovative displays raised more than $10 million — more than 10 times what he had hoped to get. “There are 65,000 people who have preordered a watch that doesn’t yet exist.”

Mr. Migicovsky hired someone to help manage his in-box — nearly 9,000 people have e-mailed him about the project — and to post updates. He originally hoped to start shipping the watches in September, a date that he has had to push back, although he declined to say by how much.

A study by Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found that 75 percent of design- and technology-related projects on Kickstarter, most of which involve physical products, failed to meet their promised deadlines. In general, project backers seem to be understanding of hiccups and willing to wait as long as they are kept informed.

“The honeymoon period that we are experiencing around crowdfunding is beginning to come to a close,” said Wil Schroter, co-founder and chief executive of Fundable, a company that is applying crowdfunding to the venture capital process. “People realize there is real risk involved in investing in anything early-stage, whether it’s an idea, a charity or a product, and they’re starting to understand they aren’t buying off of Amazon.”

Kickstarter says it is not responsible for making sure a project is completed on time, or at all. It says project creators are legally obligated to fulfill their promises, but if they do not, Kickstarter has no mechanism for refunding the money that was pledged. The project creators can refund the money if they choose.

Sometimes project creators can be overwhelmed by the success of a crowdfunding campaign.

The four college students behind Diaspora, a project that aimed to build an open alternative to Facebook, began with the modest goal of $10,000. They raised $200,000 from around 6,500 people. But after three years, they decided to start on another venture and turned the code over to anyone who might want to keep working on it. (One member of the team committed suicide last year.)

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 19, 2012

An article on Tuesday about the challenges of entrepreneurs who finance their enterprises through crowdfunding misspelled the surname of the co-founder and chief executive of Fundable, which is using crowdfunding for start-up companies. He is Wil Schroter, not Schroeter.

Success of Crowdfunding Puts Pressure on Entrepreneurs

But last week Apple announced a redesigned iPhone that is not compatible with the dock — and because of manufacturing delays, some of the project’s original backers were still waiting to receive theirs. The designers are now scrambling to make an adapter and update the product.

“I’m just hoping to get mine before the iPhone 6 ships at this point,” one backer wrote on Kickstarter.

Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGogo are letting designers and other creative people connect with audiences who want to finance their dreams, and they are becoming increasingly popular. Nearly three million people have helped a total of 30,000 projects meet their fund-raising goals on Kickstarter, the largest such site, to the tune of $300 million in pledges.

But for the creators of these projects, getting the money is sometimes the easy part. They then have to turn their dreams into reality, with a crowd keeping an eye on their progress.

This new model comes with a host of potential pitfalls that are often difficult for project creators to anticipate, and hard for the armchair philanthropists who back them to grasp. Backers are essentially putting their trust in the project creators, giving them cash in return for the promise of a future reward.

Those who give a few dollars to a moviemaking project may get their names in the credits, while someone who puts up $100 to support development of a smart wristwatch might be promised one of the finished items.

Much of the time this works out. But some projects, including several prominent and in-demand ones, have run into missteps and lengthy delays. The permits for a new food truck might not come through. Or a gadget like the Elevation Dock might be harder than expected to manufacture and ship.

The rise of crowdfunding came up often over the weekend here at the debut of the XOXO Festival, a conference that focused on new models and outlets for creativity on the Internet. The conference was co-founded by an early Kickstarter employee, Andy Baio, who sold $400 tickets on Kickstarter itself to gauge interest in the event and raise money for it.

The relationship between creators and backers on crowdfunding sites is still being worked out. The backers play the role of philanthropists, investors, customers — or all of the above. And when promised rewards are slow to materialize, eager backers can get cranky.

“It’s definitely a lot of pressure,” said Eric Migicovsky, whose Kickstarter project to create a line of “Pebble” wristwatches with innovative displays raised more than $10 million — more than 10 times what he had hoped to get. “There are 65,000 people who have preordered a watch that doesn’t yet exist.”

Mr. Migicovsky hired someone to help manage his in-box — nearly 9,000 people have e-mailed him about the project — and to post updates. He originally hoped to start shipping the watches in September, a date that he has had to push back, although he declined to say by how much.

A study by Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found that 75 percent of design- and technology-related projects on Kickstarter, most of which involve physical products, failed to meet their promised deadlines. In general, project backers seem to be understanding of hiccups and willing to wait as long as they are kept informed.

“The honeymoon period that we are experiencing around crowdfunding is beginning to come to a close,” said Wil Schroter, co-founder and chief executive of Fundable, a company that is applying crowdfunding to the venture capital process. “People realize there is real risk involved in investing in anything early-stage, whether it’s an idea, a charity or a product, and they’re starting to understand they aren’t buying off of Amazon.”

Kickstarter says it is not responsible for making sure a project is completed on time, or at all. It says project creators are legally obligated to fulfill their promises, but if they do not, Kickstarter has no mechanism for refunding the money that was pledged. The project creators can refund the money if they choose.

Sometimes project creators can be overwhelmed by the success of a crowdfunding campaign.

The four college students behind Diaspora, a project that aimed to build an open alternative to Facebook, began with the modest goal of $10,000. They raised $200,000 from around 6,500 people. But after three years, they decided to start on another venture and turned the code over to anyone who might want to keep working on it. (One member of the team committed suicide last year.)

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 18, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the co-founder and chief executive of Fundable. He is Wil Schroter, not Schroeter.