The Letter, Christopher Thompson
via:
It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too.
— Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
— Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Shadow Banking
[ed. It's not just Wall Street, it's the world; no wonder financial regulation is so difficult. Think about it: $67 trillion. I wonder how much of that is real money, in actual circulation? More on Shadow Banking here:]
The system of so-called "shadow banking," blamed by some for aggravating the global financial crisis, grew to a new high of $67 trillion globally last year, a top regulatory group said, calling for tighter control of the sector.A report by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) on Sunday appeared to confirm fears among policymakers that shadow banking is set to thrive, beyond the reach of a regulatory net tightening around traditional banks and banking activities.
The FSB, a task force from the world's top 20 economies, also called for greater regulatory control of shadow banking.
"The FSB is of the view that the authorities' approach to shadow banking has to be a targeted one," the group wrote in a report, noting the current lax regulation of the sector.
"The objective is to ensure that shadow banking is subject to appropriate oversight and regulation to address bank-like risks to financial stability," it said.
Officials at the European Commission in Brussels also see closer oversight of the sector as important in preventing a repeat of the financial crisis that has toppled banks over the past five years and rocked the euro zone.
The study by the FSB said shadow banking around the world more than doubled to $62 trillion in the five years to 2007 before the crisis struck.
But the size of the total system had grown to $67 trillion in 2011 - more than the total economic output of all the countries in the study.
The multitrillion-dollar activities of hedge funds and private equity companies are often cited as examples of shadow banking.
But the term also covers investment funds, money market funds and even cash-rich firms that lend government bonds to banks, which in turn use them as security when taking credit from the European Central Bank.
Even the man credited with coining the term, former investment executive Paul McCulley, gave a catch-all definition, saying he understood shadow banking to mean "the whole alphabet soup of levered up non-bank investment conduits, vehicles and structures," such as the special investment vehicles that many blamed for the financial crisis.
Learning from Psychopaths
It’s too simplistic to think of psychopaths as being murderers or law-breakers, says Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton.
In his new book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, Dutton examines what we can learn from those who lack conscience but are also bold and highly resilient to stress.
What exactly is a psychopath?
No sooner is the word out of someone’s mouth than images of [serial killers] like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer come to mind. It doesn’t automatically mean that you’re a criminal or serial killer. When psychologists talk about psychopaths, what we refer to are people with a distinct set of personality characteristics including ruthlessness, fearlessness, mental toughness, a charismatic personality and lack of conscience and empathy.
You write that you think your father was a psychopath…
It sounds like a crazy thing to say, but there’s no doubt at all about it. He was a nailed down psychopath. He wasn’t violent. He was a market trader [in the U.K., a person who sells things at an open-air street market]. One of the central messages of the book is that you don’t need to be violent to be a psychopath. My dad was ruthless, fearless and also extremely charming. He could have sold shaving cream to the Taliban.
So what would be an example of his psychopathic behavior?
When I was a kid, probably about 9 or 10 [years old], we went to an Indian restaurant for dinner. Just as my dad was about to pay, he suddenly tinked his spoon against his glass and stood up. The whole restaurant went silent. My dad said, “I’d just like to thank you all for coming; some from just round the corner, some from much further afield. You’re all most welcome to join us for a little drinks reception across the road.’
And so an entire restaurant of strangers who had never seen us before were all applauding wildly because they didn’t want to be seen as gatecrashers. We just took off. He [told me] we’re not going to the pub really and [explained that his] old friend Malcolm had [just opened a new pub across the street].
If you think about the front you need to do that: it’s a whole different kind of personality. On a personal level, I guess I wrote the book to figure out my old man.
Were you afraid you might have gotten some of those genes?
I have some psychopathic characteristics. I’m not so ruthless. I’m pretty fearless. Not much phases me. I’ve got mental toughness; people say I’m quite persistent. But what lets me down in the psychopath stakes is that I do have a heck of a conscience and am rather empathetic. I’m high on some characteristics and low on others.
Psychopaths don’t have the caring part of empathy, but they are better than average at the “mind reading” part where they can predict other people’s behavior in order to manipulate it.
It’s a real paradox. Some years ago, I interviewed a psychopath — and I can’t work out for the life of me whether he being manipulative or telling the truth — it was probably a bit of both, but he said, ‘If you had a deaf guy standing watching a building burn down and had a child in the building screaming in pain and the deaf guy didn’t go in, you wouldn’t hold him to blame. Imagine if you’re emotionally deaf. You can hear the sound, but it doesn’t do anything for you. You don’t feel that emotional kick in the backside to go in and do something.’
That means psychopaths must miss out on some of life’s greatest pleasures, too. If the happiest moments of our lives tend to involve sharing joy with others—falling in love, having fun with people we care about— they don’t have any of that.
In a sense, they never had that so they’re not going to miss it. We think, because we have empathy, ‘Gosh how terrible it must be to not have it.’ But if you never had it to start with, you don’t miss it. I agree as an empathetic person, I find it horrendous to imagine [living a life] where you couldn’t take pleasure from others and didn’t feel love and compassion.
What do you think makes one psychopath a serial killer while the other winds up on Wall Street?
Let’s say you are a psychopath and you get a poor start in life. You’re low in intelligence and also dispositionally violent. Just due to natural biology, some people are more aggressive than others from the word go. Your prospects, to be perfectly honest, are not great. You’re going to end up as a low level thug or enforcer in a criminal gang and either way, you will wind up in prison.
Now, remove violence from the equation. You are a psychopath who is nonviolent but you don’t get a good start. Your prospects are a little better, you end up as a small time con artist or drug dealer. You’re also going to wind up in prison very quickly.
Then [consider] a psychopath who is not dispositionally violent. You get a good start in life and are intelligent. Now, it’s a different story. Now, you’re more likely to kill in the market than anywhere else. If you’re an intelligent psychopath and violent [and get a good start], there are any number of exciting occupations, anything from special forces operative to head of a criminal syndicate.
by By Maia Szalavitz, Time | Read more:
In his new book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, Dutton examines what we can learn from those who lack conscience but are also bold and highly resilient to stress.
What exactly is a psychopath?No sooner is the word out of someone’s mouth than images of [serial killers] like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer come to mind. It doesn’t automatically mean that you’re a criminal or serial killer. When psychologists talk about psychopaths, what we refer to are people with a distinct set of personality characteristics including ruthlessness, fearlessness, mental toughness, a charismatic personality and lack of conscience and empathy.
You write that you think your father was a psychopath…
It sounds like a crazy thing to say, but there’s no doubt at all about it. He was a nailed down psychopath. He wasn’t violent. He was a market trader [in the U.K., a person who sells things at an open-air street market]. One of the central messages of the book is that you don’t need to be violent to be a psychopath. My dad was ruthless, fearless and also extremely charming. He could have sold shaving cream to the Taliban.
So what would be an example of his psychopathic behavior?
When I was a kid, probably about 9 or 10 [years old], we went to an Indian restaurant for dinner. Just as my dad was about to pay, he suddenly tinked his spoon against his glass and stood up. The whole restaurant went silent. My dad said, “I’d just like to thank you all for coming; some from just round the corner, some from much further afield. You’re all most welcome to join us for a little drinks reception across the road.’
And so an entire restaurant of strangers who had never seen us before were all applauding wildly because they didn’t want to be seen as gatecrashers. We just took off. He [told me] we’re not going to the pub really and [explained that his] old friend Malcolm had [just opened a new pub across the street].
If you think about the front you need to do that: it’s a whole different kind of personality. On a personal level, I guess I wrote the book to figure out my old man.
Were you afraid you might have gotten some of those genes?
I have some psychopathic characteristics. I’m not so ruthless. I’m pretty fearless. Not much phases me. I’ve got mental toughness; people say I’m quite persistent. But what lets me down in the psychopath stakes is that I do have a heck of a conscience and am rather empathetic. I’m high on some characteristics and low on others.
Psychopaths don’t have the caring part of empathy, but they are better than average at the “mind reading” part where they can predict other people’s behavior in order to manipulate it.
It’s a real paradox. Some years ago, I interviewed a psychopath — and I can’t work out for the life of me whether he being manipulative or telling the truth — it was probably a bit of both, but he said, ‘If you had a deaf guy standing watching a building burn down and had a child in the building screaming in pain and the deaf guy didn’t go in, you wouldn’t hold him to blame. Imagine if you’re emotionally deaf. You can hear the sound, but it doesn’t do anything for you. You don’t feel that emotional kick in the backside to go in and do something.’
That means psychopaths must miss out on some of life’s greatest pleasures, too. If the happiest moments of our lives tend to involve sharing joy with others—falling in love, having fun with people we care about— they don’t have any of that.
In a sense, they never had that so they’re not going to miss it. We think, because we have empathy, ‘Gosh how terrible it must be to not have it.’ But if you never had it to start with, you don’t miss it. I agree as an empathetic person, I find it horrendous to imagine [living a life] where you couldn’t take pleasure from others and didn’t feel love and compassion.
What do you think makes one psychopath a serial killer while the other winds up on Wall Street?
Let’s say you are a psychopath and you get a poor start in life. You’re low in intelligence and also dispositionally violent. Just due to natural biology, some people are more aggressive than others from the word go. Your prospects, to be perfectly honest, are not great. You’re going to end up as a low level thug or enforcer in a criminal gang and either way, you will wind up in prison.
Now, remove violence from the equation. You are a psychopath who is nonviolent but you don’t get a good start. Your prospects are a little better, you end up as a small time con artist or drug dealer. You’re also going to wind up in prison very quickly.
Then [consider] a psychopath who is not dispositionally violent. You get a good start in life and are intelligent. Now, it’s a different story. Now, you’re more likely to kill in the market than anywhere else. If you’re an intelligent psychopath and violent [and get a good start], there are any number of exciting occupations, anything from special forces operative to head of a criminal syndicate.
by By Maia Szalavitz, Time | Read more:
Early Arrival
Today it has become common for girls to enter puberty before discovering Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Over the second half of the 20th century, the average age for girls to begin breast development has dropped by a year or more in the industrialized world. And the age of first menstruation, generally around 12, has advanced by a matter of months. Hispanic and black girls may be experiencing an age shift much more pronounced.
The idea of an entire generation maturing faster once had a strong cadre of doubters. In fact, after one of the first studies to warn of earlier puberty in American girls was published in 1997, skeptics complained in the journalPediatrics that “many of us in the field of pediatric endocrinology believe that it is premature to conclude that the normal age of puberty is occurring earlier.” Today, more than 15 years later, a majority of doctors appear to have come around to the idea. Have a conversation with a pediatric endocrinologist, and it isn’t long before you hear the phrase “new normal.”
“If you basically say that the onset of puberty has a bell-shaped distribution, it seems to many of us the whole curve is shifting to the left,” says Paul Kaplowitz, chief of the division of endocrinology and diabetes at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. More girls, he says, are starting puberty before age 8, putting them at “the lower end of the new normal range.”
Researchers are now turning their attention to what could be driving the trend. Many scientists suspect that younger puberty is a consequence of an epidemic of childhood obesity, citing studies that find development closely tied to the accumulation of body fat. But there are other possibilities, including the presence of environmental chemicals that can mimic the biological properties of estrogen, and psychological and social stressors that might alter the hormonal makeup of a young body.
These possibilities could also be occurring simultaneously in ways that are not understood. A study published in September in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that children with high levels of a common environmental pollutant were more likely to be obese. “Although I’m convinced that obesity is part of the story, I’m no longer convinced it’s the whole story,” Kaplowitz says.
Scientists hope more research will help explain why the puberty trend for boys isn’t as clear as it is for girls, though a recent study in Pediatrics does suggest that boys, too, may be maturing earlier. The concern is not parental squeamishness but the potential for future health consequences. Children reaching puberty too young, some data suggest, face a higher risk of cancer, bone fractures and other problems in adulthood. Doctors also fear a body that belies true age, especially in girls, could put children at risk for sexual abuse and other problems.
“The early maturing girl has greater vulnerabilities and is more likely to be involved in risky behaviors,” says Frank Biro, director of adolescent medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. When a 9-year-old looks 12, “her peers and adults take the cues from what she looks like. But she’s still a 9-year-old.”
by Laura Bell, Science News | Read more:
Nancy Honey/Getty Images
Proposed Ban on Anchored Putting
[ed. The issue currently roiling the golf world. For more reactions see The Long and Short of It]
Golf's ruling bodies are ready to put an end to the style of putting that has been used by the winners of three of the last five major championships.
Less than a year after announcing they were going to take a fresh look at the topic, the U.S. Golf Association and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews announced a proposed rule change today that in 2016 would prohibit the anchored style of putting, the same style that was used by the winners of both the U.S. and British Open this year. The proposed rule would not ban belly or long putters, but it would ban any stroke where the grip or hand is anchored "directly" to any "anchor point" on the body.
The ruling bodies are seeking comment from golfers and the golf industry over the next three months before making a final decision. Assuming the timeline remains unchanged, the rule will be approved by both the USGA and the R&A this spring, and the anchored stroke ban would go into effect with the next official revision of the rules in January 2016.
"It's been a polarizing issue, and for many years you've had people who genuinely care about the game sit on both sides of it," USGA Executive Director Mike Davis told GolfDigest.com. "It's been fairly divisive and it's only gotten more so in the last year, but this decision gets back to the USGA and R&A feeling that fundamentally golf for 600 years has been about picking up the club, gripping it with two hands and making a free swing away from the body.
"We don't write rules to make the game easier, but we don't write rules to make the game harder, either. We write them to define the game, clarify the game, and in this case, the game has always been about swinging the club freely, and the anchored stroke is really a diversion from that." (...)
Although a ban on anchored putting has been decried as unfair by some current belly and long putter users, including Bradley and Tim Clark, both of whom have suggested they might pursue legal avenues, others, including ESPN legal expert Lester Munson, believe precedent is in the favor of the ruling bodies. Tiger Woods, who in the past has made clear his opposition to the belly and long putter, indicated in his press conference at the World Challenge that his opinion was still firm.
"We swing all other 13 clubs. I think the putter should be the same. It should be a swinging motion throughout the entire bag.," he said Tuesday, indicating he was especially concerned that youngsters were copying the pros' anchored putting style. "That's something that I think for the greater good of the game needs to be adjusted."
Golf's ruling bodies are ready to put an end to the style of putting that has been used by the winners of three of the last five major championships.
Less than a year after announcing they were going to take a fresh look at the topic, the U.S. Golf Association and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews announced a proposed rule change today that in 2016 would prohibit the anchored style of putting, the same style that was used by the winners of both the U.S. and British Open this year. The proposed rule would not ban belly or long putters, but it would ban any stroke where the grip or hand is anchored "directly" to any "anchor point" on the body. The ruling bodies are seeking comment from golfers and the golf industry over the next three months before making a final decision. Assuming the timeline remains unchanged, the rule will be approved by both the USGA and the R&A this spring, and the anchored stroke ban would go into effect with the next official revision of the rules in January 2016.
"It's been a polarizing issue, and for many years you've had people who genuinely care about the game sit on both sides of it," USGA Executive Director Mike Davis told GolfDigest.com. "It's been fairly divisive and it's only gotten more so in the last year, but this decision gets back to the USGA and R&A feeling that fundamentally golf for 600 years has been about picking up the club, gripping it with two hands and making a free swing away from the body.
"We don't write rules to make the game easier, but we don't write rules to make the game harder, either. We write them to define the game, clarify the game, and in this case, the game has always been about swinging the club freely, and the anchored stroke is really a diversion from that." (...)
Although a ban on anchored putting has been decried as unfair by some current belly and long putter users, including Bradley and Tim Clark, both of whom have suggested they might pursue legal avenues, others, including ESPN legal expert Lester Munson, believe precedent is in the favor of the ruling bodies. Tiger Woods, who in the past has made clear his opposition to the belly and long putter, indicated in his press conference at the World Challenge that his opinion was still firm.
"We swing all other 13 clubs. I think the putter should be the same. It should be a swinging motion throughout the entire bag.," he said Tuesday, indicating he was especially concerned that youngsters were copying the pros' anchored putting style. "That's something that I think for the greater good of the game needs to be adjusted."
by Mike Stachura, Golf Digest | Read more:
Photo: Lucas Dawson, Warren Little / Getty Images via:
How to Find True Friends (and Love) in 45 minutes
Can you make someone become intimately close to you -- even fall in love with you -- in less than an hour? Just ask Arthur Aron.Dr Aron -- known to friends as Art -- runs the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University in upstate New York, and he has love on his mind. Passionate love, unreciprocated love, romantic attraction, unexpected arousal, pure lust -- all aspects of human intimacy that fascinate this much-published psychology professor specialising in what causes people to fall in and out of love and form other deep relationships ("the self-expansion model of motivation and cognition in personal relationships", as his CV puts it). He has built his reputation on papers with titles such as "The neural basis of long-term romantic love", "Motivations for unreciprocated love" and "A prototype of relationship boredom". But such dry academic language belies the shockingly powerful nature of some of his team's lab work.
Back in 1997, Aron and colleagues published a paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin on "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness". They wanted to know if they could create lab conditions that would make strangers quickly bond and form close friendships, even romantic engagements, after just a few minutes.
They arranged volunteers in pairs, and gave them a list of 36 questions that, one by one, they were both asked to answer openly over an hour "in a kind of sharing game". Even before the hour was up, respondents typically said they felt unusually close to the person they had shared questions with.
But would the "fast friends" experiment also work with more worldly senior executives and entrepreneurs? Ever since I discovered the experiment three years ago, I have been looking for an opportunity to put it into practice among a group of curious and open-minded strangers.
I found my opportunity at WPP's recent Stream conference in Athens (...)
"Take part in a psychological experiment, and make friends fast," I scribbled on the whiteboard where session hosts competed for delegates' attention. The brave 18 people curious enough to show up discovered that this was no false advertising: the experiment really did promote incredibly fast bonding.
Like Aron, I paired the high-achieving entrepreneurs, investors, editors and executives to answer 36 questions. And like Dr Aron's participants, mine were told that their task, which sounded fun, was "simply to get close to your partner" over an hour. They were given the questions, printed out in order, and told that both partners should answer each of them in turn.
The questions began simply enough:
- Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
- Would you like to be famous? In what way?
- Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
- What would constitute a "perfect" day for you?
- When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
by David Rowan, Wired | Read more:
Photo: J.D. Hancock
How To Go Viral On YouTube
As an entrepreneur, one of the most sought after marketing anomalies is the creation of the viral video.With over 4 billion views on YouTube each day, the opportunity for exposure is tremendous. But don’t be fooled. Just because your video is on Youtube and YOU think it’s great doesn’t mean it’ll capture the kind of attention you are hoping for.
So what does it take to achieve the coveted status of viral video? Is this a phenomenon of chance, or can it be intentionally engineered?
One creative California agency believes they’ve not only cracked the viral code, but can also inject a message within the entertainment.
Introducing Mekanism
I recently had the pleasure of meeting Brendan Gahan, Director of Social Media for Mekanism, an award winning creative agency.
Mekanism has created viral campaigns for clients such as Pepsi, Virgin Mobile, Axe and 20th Century Fox.
Most recently added to their collection of viral hits is the creation of Hovercat which launched on June 9th, 2012 to promote animal adoption through the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). (...)
The Candy With The Medicine
In order to generate massive views, Mekanism uses something they call “Candy with the Medicine,” a philosophy that recognizes a message is best received within entertainment.
Therefore, the first item on the agenda is to ENTERTAIN – that’s the “candy.”
The second step is to inject the MESSAGE – that’s the “medicine.”
David Horowitz, Mekanism Creative Director explains how this was executed.
The challenge was making something that promoted the ASPCA and made people smile. Ultimately, pets are fun. Look on YouTube and you’ll see thousands of animal videos with huge view counts for that very reason – pets do funny things, and people like watching pets do funny things. We wanted to use that truth as the selling point. But unlike a video a kid makes at home, we couldn’t just find a cat and wait for it to fall into a box or jump on a ceiling fan. If we wanted to have our own cat viral hit, we needed to create something that would have a hook – a concept that could be described in the title itself. Thus, Hovercat was born.”by Lewis Howes, Forbes | Read more:
The Myth of American Meritocracy
But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.
During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America’s richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent.2 This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners’ circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges.3 On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas are handed out.4
The Battle for Elite College Admissions
As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America’s test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League.5 Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program, seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard.6 Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.7
But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even while our national economy has stagnated.
Just a few years ago Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden published The Price of Admission, a devastating account of the corrupt admissions practices at so many of our leading universities, in which every sort of non-academic or financial factor plays a role in privileging the privileged and thereby squeezing out those high-ability, hard-working students who lack any special hook. In one particularly egregious case, a wealthy New Jersey real estate developer, later sent to Federal prison on political corruption charges, paid Harvard $2.5 million to help ensure admission of his completely under-qualified son.8 When we consider that Harvard’s existing endowment was then at $15 billion and earning almost $7 million each day in investment earnings, we see that a culture of financial corruption has developed an absurd illogic of its own, in which senior Harvard administrators sell their university’s honor for just a few hours worth of its regular annual income, the equivalent of a Harvard instructor raising a grade for a hundred dollars in cash.
An admissions system based on non-academic factors often amounting to institutionalized venality would seem strange or even unthinkable among the top universities of most other advanced nations in Europe or Asia, though such practices are widespread in much of the corrupt Third World. The notion of a wealthy family buying their son his entrance into the Grandes Ecoles of France or the top Japanese universities would be an absurdity, and the academic rectitude of Europe’s Nordic or Germanic nations is even more severe, with those far more egalitarian societies anyway tending to deemphasize university rankings.
The Battle for Elite College Admissions
As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America’s test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League.5 Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program, seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard.6 Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.7
But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even while our national economy has stagnated.
Just a few years ago Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden published The Price of Admission, a devastating account of the corrupt admissions practices at so many of our leading universities, in which every sort of non-academic or financial factor plays a role in privileging the privileged and thereby squeezing out those high-ability, hard-working students who lack any special hook. In one particularly egregious case, a wealthy New Jersey real estate developer, later sent to Federal prison on political corruption charges, paid Harvard $2.5 million to help ensure admission of his completely under-qualified son.8 When we consider that Harvard’s existing endowment was then at $15 billion and earning almost $7 million each day in investment earnings, we see that a culture of financial corruption has developed an absurd illogic of its own, in which senior Harvard administrators sell their university’s honor for just a few hours worth of its regular annual income, the equivalent of a Harvard instructor raising a grade for a hundred dollars in cash.
An admissions system based on non-academic factors often amounting to institutionalized venality would seem strange or even unthinkable among the top universities of most other advanced nations in Europe or Asia, though such practices are widespread in much of the corrupt Third World. The notion of a wealthy family buying their son his entrance into the Grandes Ecoles of France or the top Japanese universities would be an absurdity, and the academic rectitude of Europe’s Nordic or Germanic nations is even more severe, with those far more egalitarian societies anyway tending to deemphasize university rankings.
by Ron Unz, The American Conservative | Read more:
Illustration: Michael Hogue
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Moral Machines
That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems. Your car is speeding along a bridge at fifty miles per hour when errant school bus carrying forty innocent children crosses its path. Should your car swerve, possibly risking the life of its owner (you), in order to save the children, or keep going, putting all forty kids at risk? If the decision must be made in milliseconds, the computer will have to make the call. (...)
With or without robotic soldiers, what we really need is a sound way to teach our machines to be ethical. The trouble is that we have almost no idea how to do that. Many discussions start with three famous laws from Isaac Asimov:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.The trouble with these seemingly sound laws is threefold. The first is technical: at least for now, we couldn’t program a machine with Asimov’s laws if we tried. As yet, we haven’t figured out how to build a machine that fully comprehends the concept of “dinner”, much less something as abstract as “harm” or “protection.” Likewise, we are a long way from constructing a robot that can fully anticipate the consequences of any of its actions (or inactions). For now, a robot is lucky if it can predict would happen if it dropped a glass of water. A.I. has a long way to go before laws as abstract as Asimov’s could realistically be encoded in software.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws.
Second, even if we could figure out how to do the programming, the rules might be too restrictive. The first and second laws, for example, preclude robots from ever harming other humans, but most people would make exceptions for robots that could eliminate potential human targets that were a clear and present danger to others. Only a true ideologue would want to stop a robotic sniper from taking down a hostage-taker or Columbine killer.
Meanwhile, Asimov’s laws themselves might not be fair—to robots. As the computer scientist Kevin Korb has pointed out, Asimov’s laws effectively treat robots like slaves. Perhaps that is acceptable for now, but it could become morally questionable (and more difficult to enforce) as machines become smarter and possibly more self-aware.
The laws of Asimov are hardly the only approach to machine ethics, but many others are equally fraught. An all-powerful computer that was programmed to maximize human pleasure, for example, might consign us all to an intravenous dopamine drip; an automated car that aimed to minimize harm would never leave the driveway. Almost any easy solution that one might imagine leads to some variation or another on the Sorceror’s Apprentice, a genie that’s given us what we’ve asked for, rather than what we truly desire. A tiny cadre of brave-hearted souls at Oxford, Yale, and the Berkeley California Singularity Institute are working on these problems, but the annual amount of money being spent on developing machine morality is tiny
.
by Gary Marcus, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty.
How Does Nitroglycerin Stop Heart Attacks?
Dear Cecil:
Recently a friend of the family had a heart attack. While he was in the hospital, they gave him nitroglycerin pills to stop the attack and ease his chest pains! I consider myself as having a rational mind, but the ingestion of explosives (no matter how small the amount) does not on the surface seem to be a great way to promote cardiovascular health! In fact, it would seem that nitro might have caused a few heart attacks (especially around the Fourth of July). How does nitroglycerin stop heart attacks?
— Steve S., Salt Lake City
People nowadays are such wimps. If you're looking for strong medicine, how can you do better than a high explosive? The nitroglycerin in the pills, patches, and sprays that heart patients use for angina (chest pain) is in fact the same stuff you find in dynamite--the residue the drug leaves on patients' skin and clothing is often enough to set off airport bomb-sniffing machines. The medicinal dose is tiny and diluted with inert material, so it's completely nonexplosive; even so, nitroglycerin is one medicine I'd hesitate to shake before use.
I'm kidding, of course. Still, straight nitroglycerin (an oily yellow liquid) isn't something you'd want to take a swig of--even if we ignore the fact that it's poisonous, the merest jolt will detonate it. The man who discovered it in 1846, Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, had his face scarred by a laboratory explosion. The Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, made his pile after figuring out in the 1860s that mixing nitro with diatomaceous earth would produce a relatively stable explosive paste that was much safer to use.
Laborers in Nobel's factories were the first to feel nitroglycerin's therapeutic effects. When they arrived at work each morning, those with heart problems found that their chest pains subsided (though almost everybody on the job noticed that sometimes their heads hurt like hell). Turned out the nitroglycerin vapor in the factory air was acting as a vasodilator, increasing blood flow both to the heart (which needed it, at least in the case of the angina sufferers) and to the head (which didn't).
Nitroglycerin pills have been a standard treatment for angina and heart attack symptoms since 1879--doctors prescribed them for Nobel himself not long before his death in 1896 (he refused to take them--couldn't brook the headaches). But more than a century passed before scientists understood how they worked. In the 1970s, researchers established that the body converts nitroglycerin into nitric oxide, and in the '80s they demonstrated that nitric oxide is a messenger molecule that tells the smooth muscles surrounding blood vessels to relax. (A heart attack basically means that not enough blood is reaching your cardiac muscles.) In 1998 three scientists who'd been instrumental in unlocking the mystery of nitroglycerin were collectively awarded--I'm telling you, this story has irony out the wazoo--the Nobel Prize in medicine.
Recently a friend of the family had a heart attack. While he was in the hospital, they gave him nitroglycerin pills to stop the attack and ease his chest pains! I consider myself as having a rational mind, but the ingestion of explosives (no matter how small the amount) does not on the surface seem to be a great way to promote cardiovascular health! In fact, it would seem that nitro might have caused a few heart attacks (especially around the Fourth of July). How does nitroglycerin stop heart attacks?
— Steve S., Salt Lake City
People nowadays are such wimps. If you're looking for strong medicine, how can you do better than a high explosive? The nitroglycerin in the pills, patches, and sprays that heart patients use for angina (chest pain) is in fact the same stuff you find in dynamite--the residue the drug leaves on patients' skin and clothing is often enough to set off airport bomb-sniffing machines. The medicinal dose is tiny and diluted with inert material, so it's completely nonexplosive; even so, nitroglycerin is one medicine I'd hesitate to shake before use.I'm kidding, of course. Still, straight nitroglycerin (an oily yellow liquid) isn't something you'd want to take a swig of--even if we ignore the fact that it's poisonous, the merest jolt will detonate it. The man who discovered it in 1846, Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, had his face scarred by a laboratory explosion. The Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, made his pile after figuring out in the 1860s that mixing nitro with diatomaceous earth would produce a relatively stable explosive paste that was much safer to use.
Laborers in Nobel's factories were the first to feel nitroglycerin's therapeutic effects. When they arrived at work each morning, those with heart problems found that their chest pains subsided (though almost everybody on the job noticed that sometimes their heads hurt like hell). Turned out the nitroglycerin vapor in the factory air was acting as a vasodilator, increasing blood flow both to the heart (which needed it, at least in the case of the angina sufferers) and to the head (which didn't).
Nitroglycerin pills have been a standard treatment for angina and heart attack symptoms since 1879--doctors prescribed them for Nobel himself not long before his death in 1896 (he refused to take them--couldn't brook the headaches). But more than a century passed before scientists understood how they worked. In the 1970s, researchers established that the body converts nitroglycerin into nitric oxide, and in the '80s they demonstrated that nitric oxide is a messenger molecule that tells the smooth muscles surrounding blood vessels to relax. (A heart attack basically means that not enough blood is reaching your cardiac muscles.) In 1998 three scientists who'd been instrumental in unlocking the mystery of nitroglycerin were collectively awarded--I'm telling you, this story has irony out the wazoo--the Nobel Prize in medicine.
End the Charade: Let Athletes Major in Sports
Countless published articles, letters to the editor, and essays have railed against those ethical violations for decades in well-intentioned efforts to provide solutions. A recent investigationby The Chronicle's Brad Wolverton revealed a host of quick, cheap, and easy academic credits available to athletes in danger of losing their eligibility to play.
What bothers me as a retired academic with decades of service—and as an avid college-sports fan to boot—is an issue that may be integral to a good portion of such travesties.
Why do we impose upon young, talented, and serious-minded high-school seniors the imperative of selecting an academic major that is, more often than not, completely irrelevant to, or at least inconsistent with, their heartfelt desires and true career objectives: to be professional athletes?
Acquisition of athletic skills is what significant numbers of NCAA Division I student athletes want to pursue. And this is undeniably why they've gone to their campus of choice. Their confessions about their primary interest are readily proclaimed and by no means denied or repressed. These athletes are as honest in recognizing and divulging their aspiration as is the student who declares a goal of performing some day at the Metropolitan Opera or on the Broadway stage. Student athletes wish to be professional entertainers. This is their heart's desire.
Their family members, friends, and high-school coaches acknowledge and support that goal, so why not let them step out of the closet and declare their true aspiration—to study football, basketball, or baseball? Why not legitimize such an academic specialty in the same manner that other professional performance careers, such as dance, voice, theater, and music, are recognized and supported? Why treat preparation for professional sports careers differently? Why not establish a well-planned, defensible, educationally sound curriculum that correlates with a career at the elite level of sports?
by David Pargman, Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Illustration: Tim Foley
Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?
Sommer was conducting research on hydrozoans, small invertebrates that, depending on their stage in the life cycle, resemble either a jellyfish or a soft coral. Every morning, Sommer went snorkeling in the turquoise water off the cliffs of Portofino. He scanned the ocean floor for hydrozoans, gathering them with plankton nets. Among the hundreds of organisms he collected was a tiny, relatively obscure species known to biologists as Turritopsis dohrnii. Today it is more commonly known as the immortal jellyfish.
Sommer kept his hydrozoans in petri dishes and observed their reproduction habits. After several days he noticed that his Turritopsis dohrnii was behaving in a very peculiar manner, for which he could hypothesize no earthly explanation. Plainly speaking, it refused to die. It appeared to age in reverse, growing younger and younger until it reached its earliest stage of development, at which point it began its life cycle anew.
Sommer was baffled by this development but didn’t immediately grasp its significance. (It was nearly a decade before the word “immortal” was first used to describe the species.) But several biologists in Genoa, fascinated by Sommer’s finding, continued to study the species, and in 1996 they published a paper called “Reversing the Life Cycle.” The scientists described how the species — at any stage of its development — could transform itself back to a polyp, the organism’s earliest stage of life, “thus escaping death and achieving potential immortality.” This finding appeared to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die. (...)
Yet the publication of “Reversing the Life Cycle” barely registered outside the academic world. You might expect that, having learned of the existence of immortal life, man would dedicate colossal resources to learning how the immortal jellyfish performs its trick. You might expect that biotech multinationals would vie to copyright its genome; that a vast coalition of research scientists would seek to determine the mechanisms by which its cells aged in reverse; that pharmaceutical firms would try to appropriate its lessons for the purposes of human medicine; that governments would broker international accords to govern the future use of rejuvenating technology. But none of this happened. (...)
In fact there is just one scientist who has been culturing Turritopsis polyps in his lab consistently. He works alone, without major financing or a staff, in a cramped office in Shirahama, a sleepy beach town in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, four hours south of Kyoto. The scientist’s name is Shin Kubota, and he is, for the time being, our best chance for understanding this unique strand of biological immortality.
Many marine biologists are reluctant to make such grand claims about Turritopsis’ promise for human medicine. “That’s a question for journalists,” Boero said (to a journalist) in 2009. “I prefer to focus on a slightly more rational form of science.”
Kubota, however, has no such compunction. “Turritopsis application for human beings is the most wonderful dream of mankind,” he told me the first time I called him. “Once we determine how the jellyfish rejuvenates itself, we should achieve very great things. My opinion is that we will evolve and become immortal ourselves.”
I decided I better book a ticket to Japan.
by Nathaniel Rich, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Takashi Murai for The New York Times
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
End of the Line in the ICU
She wasn’t kidding, and after a couple months of work, I understood why. I also understood the nurses who voice their advocacy of natural death—and their fear of ending up like some of our patients—in regular discussions of plans for DNRtattoos. For example: “I am going to tattoo DO NOT RESUSCITATE across my chest. No, across my face, because they won’t take my gown off. I am going to tattoo DO NOT INTUBATE above my lip.”
Another nurse says that instead of DNR, she’s going to be DNA, Do Not Admit.
We know that such plainly stated wishes would never be honored. Medical personnel are bound by legal documents and orders, and the DNR tattoo is mostly a very dark joke. But the oldest nurse on my unit has instructed her children never to call 911 for her, and readily discusses her suicide pact with her husband.
You will not find a group less in favor of automatically aggressive, invasive medical care than intensive care nurses, because we see the pointless suffering it often causes in patients and families. Intensive care is at best a temporary detour during which a patient’s instability is monitored, analyzed, and corrected, but it is at worst a high tech torture chamber, a taste of hell during a person’s last days on earth.
I cared for a woman in her 90s whose family had considered making her a DNR,but decided against it. After a relatively minor stroke that left her awake but not lucid, Helen* went into kidney failure and started on continuous hemodialysis. Because she kept pulling out her IV lines and the feeding tube we had dropped into her nose and down to her stomach, we put boxing glove-like pillow mitts on her hands. When I approached with her medicine, Helen batted at me with her boxing gloves, saying, “NO. STOP.” She frowned, shook her head and then her fist at me. Her wishes were pretty clear, but technically she was “confused,” because when asked her name, the date, and her location, she failed to answer.
During the next shift, Helen’s heart stopped beating. But despite talking with the doctors about her advanced age and the poor state of her health, her family had nonetheless decided that we should “do everything we can” for her, and so Helen died in a frenzy of nurses pumping her with vasopressors and doing chest compressions, probably cracking several ribs.
That was a situation in which a patient’s family made a decision that probably caused Helen to suffer and did not help her. But there are circumstances where it is the healthcare team that chooses to push on with intensive interventions. And there are circumstances where bureaucracy, miscommunication, and the relatively low priority, among very busy physicians, of making decisions about how far to pursue medical care cause patients to linger in the ICU weeks past the point when any medical professional thought meaningful recovery was possible.
by Kristen McConnell, The Health Care Blog | Read more:
Land of the Seven Moles
When it comes to eating, I’m not wildly adventurous. Sometimes I think that I’m too cautious. Looking back at those moments when I wasn’t setting the sort of example a parent should set, I can hear Abigail saying, while the two of us were perusing the menu at a restaurant in Cuzco, Peru, “I guess you’re going to wimp out on the guinea pig.” I haven’t felt inspired by those who talk about having downed a great variety of gruesome foodstuffs. Eating, say, iguana spleen strikes me as sort of like bungee jumping: the point is not to do it but to have done it. When I’m asked about my willingness to eat the ostensibly inedible, I usually tell the story of finding on the menu of a restaurant in Hong Kong an item listed as double-boiled deer penis. “I thought about ordering it,” I always say, “but I was afraid when they brought it to the table I’d take one look at it and say, ‘Maybe you could take it back and have him boil it one more time.’ ”
On the other hand, I usually like to try the local specialty. In Ecuador, I eventually did eat guinea pig. Given my experience with nutria in Louisiana some years before, in fact, I suppose that, if I hadn’t been raised to prize modesty, I could describe myself as a man with relatively broad experience in rodent consumption. As I studied the mounds of various sizes of grasshoppers in the markets, though, I found myself with a question similar to the one that goes through my mind when I see someone in Chinatown reach into a barrel of live frogs and pull one out for inspection: What, exactly, does one look for in a grasshopper? I thought I might ease into grasshopper-eating, following the general rule that anything is edible if it’s chopped up finely enough. That’s apparently the route my granddaughters had taken. Both of the girls had sampled grasshopper, although neither of them seemed keen on making a habit of it. Given Rebecca’s reputation as someone with an almost limitless appetite for corn tortillas—a woman across the road from the house Abigail and Brian had rented makes three hundred a day on a traditional earthenware griddle called a comal, and it’s clear that, left unchecked, Rebecca could put a considerable dent in a day’s inventory—Isabelle, who’s ten, had a simple explanation for how her little sister, who’s only seven, happened to consume grasshoppers, mixed with some other things: “Rebecca will eat anything that’s wrapped in a tortilla.”
by Calvin Trillin, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by TrujilloPaumier
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