Social Robots: Our Charismatic Friends in an Automated Future

Reclining on a lounger around a pool while sipping cocktails in the Caribbean is nice, but it's not what humans want to do all the time: we like working, we like being creative, we like challenging ourselves. These motivations mean that the next robot revolution is not about automation -- it's about our continuing on a path to becoming superhuman. By partnering with machines, we ascend from being cavemen.

Life is not necessarily easier with machines -- technology can be high maintenance -- but it can be more rewarding. We are already cyborgs, conjoined with our mobile phones, social-media identities, apps and automotive exoskeletons. An augmented self doesn't forget birthdays, always knows the best curry joint in town (as long as there's Wi-Fi), and can win Olympic medals after losing legs from a childhood disease.

As a robot designer, I'm not excited by the paradigm of a robot that will -- painstakingly -- imitate each of my capabilities so that I don't have to do anything for myself. I can already do the things I can do. Humans and machines have different capabilities, which is the reason why we can achieve more together.

Sending a robot to Mars makes sense, because they are better suited for the rigours of the trip. However, humans must manage the mission objectives and deal with unexpected situations. Human flexibility and creativity have no parallel in machines, but if we can rely on the capabilities of robots, extensions of mankind can touch the far ends of our solar system.

Social robotics takes this concept one step further. Humans are social creatures. As soon as we encounter a machine capable of motion, sensing and some modicum of volition, we place that machine into the social hierarchy of human relations. I have mourned the loss of a stolen laptop as if it were a loved one, and I bought my Nao robot Data, rather than return it to Aldebaran Robotics, the company I was working for at the time, because I had bonded with it in the way I might with a puppy. I'm now a doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, and the robot splurge is the reason that I don't own a car.

In the way that sending machines to Mars makes sense, one of the reasons automation has been so effective is that the distribution of labour is entirely severed. By partnering with machines, we gain capabilities beyond our own limitations. We can already fly, talk to someone on the other side of the planet and cure disease, so what super-human capacities might we invent when we come up with ways for robots to integrate seamlessly into our homes, offices, schools, hospitals or entertainment centres?

For the last decade, I have been a researcher of social robotics. Rather than asking humans to learn a programming language to communicate with our creations, my team and I seek to create robots that grasp enough about human sociability and convention so that they are able to meet us in the middle. And designing robots for people means understanding ourselves. Our brain structure affects whether we interpret motion as aggressive or friendly, alive or inanimate. Our psychology influences our snap judgments of intent. I would not hire a gardener I did not get along with or trust. Similarly, a successful robot must connect with us at a visceral level.

by Heather Knight, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Spencer Lowell

The Fight Against Small Apartments

Seattle - In May of 2009, a rumor was floating around City Hall. Homeowners on Capitol Hill were furious about a construction project. So one sunny afternoon, while workers hammered nails into a few unfinished buildings near 23rd Avenue and East John Street, I went knocking on doors to find out what the problem was.

One neighbor was Alan Gossett. Gossett was trying to sell his blue Craftsman house, which shared an alley with the new development. Standing on the corner of his rear deck, Gossett pointed through the trees to the half-built structure and said, "I think this is going to be a magnet for very sketchy people."

Why sketchy?

According to permitting paperwork, the building was a commonplace cluster of six town houses—the sort that would typically attract well-to-do buyers. But inside each town house, the developer was building up to eight tiny units (about 150 to 250 square feet each, roughly the size of a carport) to be rented out separately. The tenants would each have a private bathroom and kitchenette, with a sink and microwave, but they would share one full kitchen for every eight residents. The rent would be cheap—starting at $500 a month, including all utilities and Wi-Fi—making this essentially affordable housing in the heart of the city. And, remarkably, for affordable housing, it was built without any subsidies from the city's housing levy. But Gossett was bracing for 46 low-income renters in the space where he'd been expecting six new homeowners instead.

Gossett and other neighbors felt hoodwinked, they told me.

There was no public notification and no review process that allowed neighbors to pose objections. This was due to a loophole in the permits: The city and developers classified the building as six units (with up to eight bedrooms each), instead of as an apartment building with dozens of units, which would have required a more public process. Neighbors said they feared that the area wasn't ready for so many new residents and that the influx of newcomers would usurp on-street parking. But Gossett also seemed concerned by who his new neighbors might be.

"Anyone who can scrape up enough money to live month-to-month can live there," he said, worried that low-income interlopers would jeopardize his chances to sell his own house. "I don't think most people want to live next to a boarding house with itinerant people living in it."

This style of development is called microhousing, or in the case of this particular project, the developer, Calhoun Properties, has trademarked the name aPodments. Gossett and other neighbors said they should be banned.  (...)

Seattle is a leader on the nation's bell curve of prosperity, ranking in the top five local economies since 2010, according to a Policom Corporation report. Unemployment is less than 6 percent, construction cranes swing across the skyline, and vacancy rates for apartments are at a scarce 3 percent in some central neighborhoods. Affordable housing is virtually nonexistent. In the past five years, the monthly rental rates for studios have increased 15 percent and one-bedroom apartments have increased 21 percent, according to real-estate economist Matthew Gardner. The price of an average studio apartment in Seattle last month hit $991, and one-bedrooms soared to $1,230, according to the real-estate tracking firm Dupre + Scott.

In this environment, microhousing is in high demand. "Kids are coming out of college, and in not much smaller numbers than the baby boom generation—and are they wanting to live in Issaquah?" Gardner asks. "No, they are not. They are going to want to live downtown. But when you start looking at average unit size, it will be increasingly unaffordable. But they are willing to live in a smaller space if the absolute dollars they pay are less." Since I visited that aPodment in 2009—the first of its kind built for that purpose—several developers have applied for permits to construct 44 more microhousing projects, according to the city's Department of Planning and Development. Seven are complete, and 37 others are getting permits or being built. In all, the city forecasts that 2,371 microhousing units are slated to enter the rental market.

Many community groups have made it their mission to halt this trend. They see this wave of microhousing as an invasive species. In their eyes, developers stand to get rich by transforming beautiful residential areas—defined by lawns and plentiful parking—into crowded, dilapidated slums of inhumanely small homes with shared kitchens and undesirable tenants.

by Dominic Holden, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Kelly O

Japanese Movie Poster: Rikyu. Koichi Sato. 1989.
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William Hodges, Tomb and Distant View of the Rajmahal Hills, c.1781
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Good People

[ed. From a compilation of Russian dash cams. A nice antidote to the daily mayhem we usually see on the 24-hour news cycle.]
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Elizabeth Warren Q&A: Students “Deserve the Same Break that Big Banks Get”

“The U.S. government invests in big banks by giving them a great deal on their interest rates,” freshman Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in an interview with Salon on Wednesday afternoon (the transcript of which is below). “We should make at least the same investment in our students.”

Warren was discussing the first bill she has introduced in the Senate, a plan released on Wednesday to address the crisis of outstanding student debt – which topped $1 trillion this year, with over 37 million Americans owing thousands of dollars in higher education costs that could take decades to pay back.

Student debt is now the second-highest form of debt in America – behind only mortgage debt – with the number of borrowers and the average balance increasing 70 percent since 2004. Research from the New York Federal Reserve Board indicates that this has begun to have an impact on the broader economy, with young people burdened by student debt more reluctant to take out auto or home loans. And without congressional action, this will get worse: on July 1, interest rates on federally subsidized Stafford student loans will double, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. This will effectively raise costs for 8 million student borrowers by $1,000.

President Obama’s budget proposal would set subsidized student loan rates at 1 percent above the interest rate it costs the Treasury Department to borrow money for the U.S. government. But a variable rate without a cap would come back to haunt students when interest rates rise again. Another proposal would simply freeze the current rate of 3.4 percent, and would institute a plan limiting payment to 10 percent of income over a 10-year period.

Warren’s plan takes it a step further. For the next year, she would reduce the subsidized student loan interest rate to the same rate that America’s largest banks pay to borrow money from the Federal Reserve at the “discount window.” Currently, banks pay a minimal 0.75 percent to borrow from the Fed, one-ninth the rate that students would pay if Congress fails to act by July 1. Under the plan, the Federal Reserve would give the Department of Education the funds necessary to equalize those rates.

Warren introduced the legislation in a Senate floor speech Wednesday morning.

This one-year stopgap, while Congress works on a permanent solution, would solve several problems. In the near term, it would save money for students, perhaps relieving some of the burden that has led them to scale back their purchases and threaten overall economic growth. In addition, the Federal Reserve has a stated policy of lowering interest rates to spur economic activity, known as quantitative easing, but they have had difficulty extending the benefits of QE beyond Wall Street and the wealthy. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted as much last February, noting in a speech that while QE has helped housing and stock markets, difficulty in obtaining mortgage credit has meant that “the strong actions taken by the Federal Reserve … have had less effect on the housing sector and overall economic activity than they otherwise would have had.” If the Fed is looking for ways for Main Street to benefit from cheaper borrowing rates, they could hardly endorse a more appropriate policy than lowering student loan interest rates in the short term to what they give out to big banks.

by David Dayden, Salon |  Read more:

Image: AP/Cliff Owen

If You Use the Web, You Are a 'Curator'

A curator ingests, analyzes and contextualizes web content and information of a particular nature onto a platform or into a format we can understand. In other words, a curator is like that person at the beach with the metal detector, surfacing items and relics of perceived value. Only, a web curator shares those gems of content with their online audiences.

And since people create 571 new websites every minute, tweet175 million times per day and upload 48 hours of new video each minute, a curator's work is never done.

It seems everywhere you look on the web, a different kind of curation is cropping up. Do you use Pinterest or Tumblr? Believe it or not, you're a social curator — or you're following users who are. These social platforms are as much about repinning and reblogging content from other people (curation) as they are sharing your own ideas (creation).

Take a look at your Facebook profile, at the types of articles you save on Pocket, at the list of subreddits to which you subscribe. Notice any patterns? Maybe you tend to share cat GIFs or Pocket news about the oil crisis. Sharing those interests makes you a curator.

Some believe "curator" to be a reappropriated, throwaway term, one that simply elevates marginally focused web users.

"Guess what? Assembling a group of tangentially related things and publishing them online does not make you a curator," writes Mel Buchanan, the Hermitage Museum's assistant curator in a blog post titled "An Open Letter to Everyone Using the Word ‘Curate’ Incorrectly on the Internet." [The link to the original post has since been disabled.] "So what does it make you? A blogger? A list-maker? An arbiter of taste? Sure, I’ll take any one of those. Just stop calling yourself a curator," writes Buchanan.

by Stephanie Buck, Mashable | Read more:
Image via iStockphoto, laziesVisa

War on Prairie Dogs

More than most people, perhaps, Stapleton resident Patricia Olson feels a strong connection to animals. A veterinarian and former CEO of the world's largest nonprofit dedicated to animal health sciences, she's helped fund research studies on everything from housecats to sea lions to gorillas.

But even though she lives in a place that was once a vast grassland, Olson had never paid much attention to prairie dogs. Not until a contractor hired by Forest City, the developer in charge of transforming Stapleton from a decommissioned airport into a mixed-use, amenity-stuffed community of tomorrow, began gassing them right around the corner from her home.

A yipping, thriving colony of black-tailed prairie dogs had taken over a vacant stretch of land on the south side of East 26th Avenue, the dividing line between Aurora and Denver on the east side of Stapleton. Like many neighbors, Olson had become so accustomed to the colony that she drove slowly on 26th to avoid mashing the occasional stray darting in and out of the street. But one day, close to Thanksgiving 2011, she came home to find the land being prepped for construction and men sealing up the burrows.

The men explained to Olson that the area was slated to become a children's playground and "natural park." But first they had to exterminate the prairie dogs.

"I tried to find out why they were doing it and what poison they were using," Olson recalls. "And that's when I got really upset."

Over the next few months, Olson read up on prairie dogs — their behavior and their role as a keystone species in the shortgrass prairie ecosystem, providing food and habitat for a wide range of animals, insects and plants. She learned more than she wanted to know about the poison the men were using: aluminum phosphide, a rodenticide that, when ingested, produces highly toxic phosphine gas, internal bleeding — and, in some cases, an agonizingly slow death. (...)

Choice of lethal compounds aside, Olson thought the entire procedure smacked of bad policy. A recent study in Science suggests that prairie dogs that lose close kin disperse further, possibly in search of their lost relatives; sure enough, in recent months new burrows have appeared on 26th, flanking either side of the playground under construction. And what's the point, Olson wondered, of creating a "natural" park in which one of the most essential natural components has been removed?

"If you poison them, they go looking for Aunt Mildred and disperse," Olson says. "That's exactly what happened. It's not effective. It's not humane. So what are they doing?"

Despite the outcry, developers and park managers are doing what they've always done with Colorado's prairie dogs: waging war on them as if dealing with mosquitoes or noxious weeds. Ranchers have long regarded the lowly rodent as a flea-bitten, grass-stripping, plague-infested nuisance, and that distorted characterization has strongly shaped how urban as well as rural colonies are treated. For a keystone species, prairie dogs have virtually no protection from annihilation, particularly on private land; with little fuss, they can be shot, poisoned or even buried alive with bulldozers. State law makes it extremely difficult to relocate them across county lines, and surveys indicate that their habitat along the Front Range is becoming increasingly fragmented.

by Alan Prendergast, Denver Westworld | Read more:
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Some 370 blue-coloured carp streamers fly at the tsunami-devastated city of Higashimatsushima, Miyagi prefecture on May 3, 2013. People hoist the blue-coloured carp streamers to mourn children who died in the March 11, 2011 tsunami disaster in the city. [Credit : Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images]

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clok_moitie on Flickr and on Twitter
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He Conceived the Mathematics of Roughness

Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The key to it is a simple yet elusive idea, that of self-similarity.

To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower. Take a head of this vegetable and observe its form—the way it is composed of florets. Pull off one of those florets. What does it look like? It looks like a little head of cauliflower, with its own subflorets. Now pull off one of those subflorets. What does that look like? A still tinier cauliflower. If you continue this process—and you may soon need a magnifying glass—you’ll find that the smaller and smaller pieces all resemble the head you started with. The cauliflower is thus said to be self-similar. Each of its parts echoes the whole.

Other self-similar phenomena, each with its distinctive form, include clouds, coastlines, bolts of lightning, clusters of galaxies, the network of blood vessels in our bodies, and, quite possibly, the pattern of ups and downs in financial markets. The closer you look at a coastline, the more you find it is jagged, not smooth, and each jagged segment contains smaller, similarly jagged segments that can be described by Mandelbrot’s methods. Because of the essential roughness of self-similar forms, classical mathematics is ill-equipped to deal with them. Its methods, from the Greeks on down to the last century, have been better suited to smooth forms, like circles. (Note that a circle is not self-similar: if you cut it up into smaller and smaller segments, those segments become nearly straight.)

Only in the last few decades has a mathematics of roughness emerged, one that can get a grip on self-similarity and kindred matters like turbulence, noise, clustering, and chaos. And Mandelbrot was the prime mover behind it. He had a peripatetic career, but he spent much of it as a researcher for IBM in upstate New York. In the late 1970s he became famous for popularizing the idea of self-similarity, and for coining the word “fractal” (from the Latin fractus, meaning broken) to designate self-similar forms. In 1980 he discovered the “Mandelbrot set,” whose shape—it looks a bit like a warty snowman or beetle—came to represent the newly fashionable science of chaos. What is perhaps less well known about Mandelbrot is the subversive work he did in economics. The financial models he created, based on his fractal ideas, implied that stock and currency markets were far riskier than the reigning consensus in business schools and investment banks supposed, and that wild gyrations—like the 777-point plunge in the Dow on September 29, 2008—were inevitable. (...)

It was in casting about for a thesis topic that he had his first Keplerian glimmer. One day Uncle Szolem—who by now had written off Mandelbrot as a loss to mathematics—disdainfully pulled from a wastebasket and handed to him a reprint about something called Zipf’s law. The brainchild of an eccentric Harvard linguist named George Kingsley Zipf, this law concerns the frequency with which different words occur in written texts—newspaper articles, books, and so on. The most frequently occurring word in written English is “the,” followed by “of” and then “and.” Zipf ranked all the words in this way, and then plotted their frequency of usage. The resulting curve had an odd shape. Instead of falling gradually from the most common word to the least common, as one might expect, it plunged sharply at first and then leveled off into a long and gently sloping tail—rather like the path of a ski jumper. This shape indicates extreme inequality: a few hundred top-ranked words do almost all the work, while the large majority languish in desuetude. (If anything, Zipf underestimated this linguistic inequality: he was using James Joyce’s Ulysses, rich in esoteric words, as one of his main data sources.) The “law” Zipf came up with was a simple yet precise numerical relation between a word’s rank and its frequency of usage.

Zipf’s law, which has been shown to hold for all languages, may seem a trifle. But the same basic principle turns out to be valid for a great variety of phenomena, including the size of islands, the populations of cities, the amount of time a book spends on the best-seller list, the number of links to a given website, and—as the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto had discovered in the 1890s—a country’s distribution of income and wealth. All of these are examples of “power law” distributions.* Power laws apply, in nature or society, where there is extreme inequality or unevenness: where a high peak (corresponding to a handful of huge cities, or frequently used words, or very rich people) is followed by a low “long tail” (corresponding to a multitude of small towns, or rare words, or wage slaves). In such cases, the notion of “average” is meaningless.

by Jim Holt, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Hank Morgan/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Raccoon on spring flowering tree, by Coy.
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Live in Infamy

To some, the Facebook timeline reads as an explicit chronology of illicit behavior. For most, these personality museums are masterfully curated, conveying an exuberance tamed by professionalism, edginess blunted by responsibility. While we are generally aware of the risks involved in divulging personal information, the popular conception is that our norms of exposure will change. Through mass-unveiling, salacious behavior will become bland.

Our society will learn to forgive youth-frozen-in-documentation. We will be more affirming of eccentric conduct and peculiar passions. Whereas candidate Clinton said that he didn’t inhale and he didn’t like it, Obama could say he inhaled often because that was the point. As our social mores relax to accommodate the radical honesty of blogs and the overshare impulse of Instagram, our aspiring candidates will be resilient to ad feminam attacks. This would be so precisely because we’d all be vulnerable to them, or at least familiar with them. (Few background checks are as rigorous as those for public servants, but the population at large will grow accustomed to informal and undisclosed reputation screenings in their personal and professional life.) (...)

Individuals whose life stories buck standard social scripts—immigrants, LGBT youth and ethnic minorities—are more aware of this than most. Members of these groups often navigate several social realms, swapping different speech patterns and modes of behavior depending on the context. As the much-missed Dave Chappelle once said, all black Americans are bilingual, equipped with one language for the street and another for the job interview. This ability to develop and express one’s dynamism, and to control one’s appearance based on a particular audience, is stifled by pervasive exposure.

In 2010, 28-year-old Krystal Ball ran for a seat in Congress to represent Virginia’s conservative 1st district. Pictures surfaced in early October of a younger Ball at a costume party with her then-husband. She was dressed in a Santa hat. Her ex’s makeshift costume consisted of fuzzy reindeer antlers and a red dildo for a nose (think: naughty Santa and Rudolph). Even though observers of Virginia politics identify Ball’s political inexperience as the campaign’s burden, as well as her running as a Democrat in a heavily Republican district, the photographs dominated the news. Ball responded swiftly:

The tactic of painting female politicians as whores and as sluts is nothing new, and painting successful women in general in this way in order to delegitimize them and to denigrate them is nothing new. It’s a new twist on it though because obviously now as I’m one of the first of my generation in the Facebook age to step up and run for office I’m sort of the first one to have this particular thing happen to me but I certainly don’t think I’ll be the last.

Where many of us can see ourselves in those pictures of playful twentysomethings posing at a costume party, Ball’s political enemies attempted to rip her likeness from its context. They wanted Virginians in the 1st district to see her as an immoral and unserious ditz.

That many of this country’s lingering stereotypes play out on the political stage was not lost on Ball. In her responses during and since the campaign, she urges young women not to let this incident dissuade them from public service. But for every girl inspired by Ball’s pleas, how many more were discouraged by the whole episode? To argue that normalized exposure will endow our politics with greater forgiveness is to overlook how the identities of our society’s most vulnerable are mischaracterized, simplified and denied richness.

Witnessed in the abundance of cruel and negative advertisement during campaigns, and recounted to us in obnoxious detail in tell-alls like Confessions of a Political Hitman, opposition researchers and political adversaries will use any information they can find to convince voters to shun candidates. As Ball found out, the prevalence of social networks just means there is a larger ammunition cache.

Consider also this bizarre declaration from Facebook boy-king Mark Zuckerberg: “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Or ponder this nugget from Google Executive Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

In Schmidt and Zuckerberg’s vision, it would be inappropriate to account for Ball’s setting and circumstance. Last year, when two Texas undergraduates were outed to their unsympathetic parents through a Facebook privacy loophole, was that merely stark justice for their lack of integrity? The damage exacted by unwilling exposure will be unfair and uneven.

For young people interested in public service, it could be seen as best practice to simply stay off social networks. Keeping a low profile might shield their reputations from disrepute, against criticisms of the maximalist “let-it-all-hang-out” stance. But this too misses the point.

Not only does this mindset fail to acknowledge the entanglement of networked social platforms with face-to-face communication—as well as the ways ubiquitous surveillance captures information without one’s knowledge or consent—it also represents a perverse kind of incentivizing. Blogs, like older forms of publishing, encourage ideological experimentation. Subject-oriented networks, in the spirit of Twitter, traffic in the magnetism of shared interest. To discourage the use of these technologies could foster a political class that is calculating in character and predictable in policy. Hiding healthy duplicities or repressing radical dissent may encourage politically minded young people to be more like politicians.

by Hamza Shaban, TNI |  Read more:

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Kyoto's Restaurant by Giora on Flickr.
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The Slopes of Davos

During the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, in a school auditorium outside the ski resort’s secure perimeter, there’s a smaller Open Forum – no invitation required for anyone who can make it up to the Swiss Alps. It’s TEDx to Davos’s TED, a neat package of webstream-ready inspiration. One of this year’s presentations was Life Lessons from Jazz: Improvisation as a Way of Life, in which Columbia ethnomusicology professor Chris Washburne and his band taught the audience how to survive neoliberal uncertainty with the “spontaneous creativity that we have inherited from the African-American culture.”

Quoting the early soloist Sidney Bechet, Washburne calls jazz the sound of freedom. “It’s the sounds that emulate [sic] from the emancipated slaves. The newfound freedom that they found in the South of the United States, and they had to make sense of that freedom. They had to turn ugliness into beauty, and to rebuild their lives.” So, too, do we have to grasp the new freedoms of the neoliberal world to improvise a way of life that celebrates uncertainty and precarity.

A favored metaphor in Davos, jazz offers these life lessons to the precariat and the elites alike, while negating the responsibility of the latter to do anything about the vulnerabilities of the former. We’re all in the music together, and risk sets the rhythm. Jazz musicians “have one of the riskiest jobs in the world, because failure is just around the corner at every single turn,” Washburne assures us between sets of Azure and Caravan. “As a matter of fact, you can think about jazz as just a series of failures.”

The World Economic Forum belongs to those who drape themselves in risk and find opportunity in each reversal of fortune. They are used to improv – only improv promises mostly to enrich them, rather than allowing them to scrape by. In a way, the economic elite see this meeting as their own Montreux Jazz, a place for free-market thought leaders to fearlessly riff on the future as it comes.

Their setlist comes in an annual Global Risks report prepared at the start of the year. This document, with its clean graphics in five colors – Google plus purple – lays bare the terrors of the moment and sorely tests the macho boardroom definition of risk. In the corporate world, risk always carries a harmonic of opportunity; always exists to be snatched up by someone with big enough balls and a good enough hedge. It is a kind of commodity. Any disaster just needs to be quantified in two variables – likelihood of occurring, and potential impact – and it’s ready for the market.

The first Global Risk reports emerged seven years ago from a network of experts and roundtable consultations bringing together risk advisors, academics and executives. Insurance corporations – Swiss Re, Zurich Insurance, Marsh & McLennan – played, and continue to play, a nonspecific role as “collaborators,” providing guidance in the selection of risks. In 2011, the process switched to a larger email survey of leaders and thinkers from business, government, international organizations and the academies. Respondents were asked to rate a list of risks by likelihood of occurrence in the next ten years, by potential cost in billions of dollars, and by connection with other risks.

In 2012 the survey pool grew to include NGOs, and the unit of potential impact changed from billions of dollars to a value-neutral five point scale. Like the Open Forum, this was Davos in its inclusive, multi-stakeholder guise. The sample nevertheless remains heavily skewed toward the business world, which accounts for over 42 percent of respondents this year; all other groups are dwarfed, with governments coming in at 8.1 percent.

The list of risks also reached its current size and shape in 2012, and the authors decided to fix it in place for the sake of year-to-year analysis. These fifty possible disasters would thenceforth serve as the basic scale on which to jam – the definitive threats to business and, by extension, humanity. Until the next overhaul, we’re stuck with the sound of 2012 – but if it’s catastrophic imagination that we need, 2012 was a creative year.

Global Risks 2013 explores catastrophes that are too big and unknown to hedge, even if many of them are already coming to pass. Its portfolio is fifty risk factors thick, with water shortages, liquidity crises and orbital debris, each precisely weighted by likelihood and potential impact and charted like commodities. Backlash against globalization is up. Extreme weather is up. Nothing is down. It’s never been clear exactly whose nightmares these risks are, and the lack of attribution is part of the point. They are supposed to rise up out of the data, objective and urgent, the voice of the planet demanding to be heard.

by T. Paul Cox, TNI |  Read more:

Image: Imp Kerr

The Kentucky Derby...On Acid

This is my good friend Caitlin (whose name isn’t really Caitlin). That is a hit of acid on her tongue. She did acid once, four years ago, and she’s doing it again now, just before we head out to the Kentucky Derby, because the only way to attend the most famous horse race in the world—an event that features thousands of drunken gamblers, straight-up drunks, and a roiling, seersuckered mess of Southern gentry—is to trip your head off for the whole thing.

by Amira Asad, Vice |  Read more:

Photo: uncredited

Six Flags in New Orleans (Abandoned - post Katrina)
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A Dream of Glowing Trees

Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.

The project, which will use a sophisticated form of genetic engineering called synthetic biology, is attracting attention not only for its audacious goal, but for how it is being carried out.

Rather than being the work of a corporation or an academic laboratory, it will be done by a small group of hobbyist scientists in one of the growing number of communal laboratories springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap enough to give rise to a do-it-yourself movement.

The project is also being financed in a D.I.Y. sort of way: It has attracted more than $250,000 in pledges from about 4,500 donors in about two weeks on the Web site Kickstarter.

The effort is not the first of its kind. A university group created a glowing tobacco plant a few years ago by implanting genes from a marine bacterium that emits light. But the light was so dim that it could be perceived only if one observed the plant for at least five minutes in a dark room.

The new project’s goals, at least initially, are similarly modest. “We hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like glow-in-the-dark paint), but don’t expect to replace your light bulbs with version 1.0,” the project’s Kickstarter page says.

But part of the goal is more controversial: to publicize do-it-yourself synthetic biology and to “inspire others to create new living things.” As promising as that might seem to some, critics are alarmed at the idea of tinkerers creating living things in their garages. They fear that malicious organisms may be created, either intentionally or by accident.

Two environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, have written to Kickstarter and to the Agriculture Department, which regulates genetically modified crops, in an effort to shut down the glowing plant effort.

The project “will likely result in widespread, random and uncontrolled release of bioengineered seeds and plants produced through the controversial and risky techniques of synthetic biology,” the two groups said in their letter demanding that Kickstarter remove the project from its Web site.

They note that the project has pledged to deliver seeds to many of its 4,000 contributors, making it perhaps the “first-ever intentional environmental release of an avowedly ‘synthetic biology’ organism anywhere in the world.” Kickstarter told the critics to take up their concerns with the project’s organizers. The Agriculture Department has not yet replied.  (...)

Synthetic biology is a nebulous term and it is difficult to say how, if at all, it differs from genetic engineering.

In its simplest form, genetic engineering involves snipping a gene out of one organism and pasting it into the DNA of another. Synthetic biology typically involves synthesizing the DNA to be inserted, providing the flexibility to go beyond the genes found in nature.

by Andrew Pollack, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?

The Hawaiian monk seal has wiry whiskers and the deep, round eyes of an apologetic child. The animals will eat a variety of fish and shellfish, or turn over rocks for eel and octopus, then haul out on the beach and lie there most of the day, digesting. On the south side of Kauai one afternoon, I saw one sneeze in its sleep: its convex body shuddered, then spilled again over the sand the way a raw, boneless chicken breast will settle on a cutting board. The seals can grow to seven feet long and weigh 450 pounds. They are adorable, but also a little gross: the Zach Galifianakises of marine mammals.

Monk seals are easy targets. After the Polynesians landed in Hawaii, about 1,500 years ago, the animals mostly vanished, slaughtered for meat or oil or scared off by the settlers’ dogs. But the species quietly survived in the Leeward Islands, northwest of the main Hawaiian chain — a remote archipelago, including Laysan Island, Midway and French Frigate Shoals, which, for the most part, only Victorian guano barons and the military have seen fit to settle. There are now about 900 monk seals in the Leewards, and the population has been shrinking for 25 years, making the seal among the world’s most imperiled marine mammals. The monk seal was designated an endangered species in 1976. Around that time, however, a few monk seals began trekking back into the main Hawaiian Islands — “the mains” — and started having pups. These pioneers came on their own, oblivious to the sprawling federal project just getting under way to help them. Even now, recovering the species is projected to cost $378 million and take 54 years.

As monk seals spread through the mains and flourished there, they became tourist attractions and entourage-encircled celebrities. Now when a seal appears on a busy beach, volunteers with the federal government’s “Monk Seal Response Network” hustle out with stakes and fluorescent tape to erect an exclusionary “S.P.Z.” around the snoozing animal — a “seal protection zone.” Then they stand watch in the heat for hours to keep it from being disrupted while beachgoers gush and point.

But the seals’ appearance has not been universally appreciated. The animals have been met by many islanders with a convoluted mix of resentment and spite. This fury has led to what the government is calling a string of “suspicious deaths.” But spend a little time in Hawaii, and you come to recognize these deaths for what they are — something loaded and forbidding. A word that came to my mind was “assassination.”

by Jon Mooalem, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Peter Bohler for The New York Times

Ryan Adams