Rebuilding the Shores, Increasing the Risks

This might be a good time to take a look at the most important environmental law that nobody has ever heard of.

The real estate industry fought that law bitterly in Congress, but lost, and it landed on Ronald Reagan’s desk in 1982. The president not only signed it, but did so with a rhetorical flourish, calling it a “triumph for natural resource conservation and federal fiscal responsibility.”

The law — the Coastal Barrier Resources Act — was intended to protect much of the American coastline, and it did so in a clever way that drew votes from the most conservative Republicans and the most liberal Democrats.

It is worth bringing up today because we are once again in an era when our coasts are at risk and our national coffers are strained. The $75 billion in damages from Hurricane Sandy, coming only seven years after the $80 billion from Hurricane Katrina, told us this much: We need a plan.

The climate is changing, the ocean is rising, more storms are coming, and millions of Americans are in harm’s way. The costs of making people whole after these storms are soaring. Without ideas that stand some chance of breaking the political gridlock in Washington, the situation will eventually become a national crisis.

The law that Reagan signed in 1982 might just offer a model of how to move forward. (...)

It should be obvious that the more people we move out of harm’s way in the reasonably near future, the better off we will ultimately be.

But we are doing the opposite, offering huge subsidies for coastal development. We proffer federally backed flood insurance at rates bearing no resemblance to the risks. Even more important, we go in after storms and write big checks so towns can put the roads, sewers and beach sand right back where they were.

We are, in other words, using the federal Treasury to shield people from the true risks that they are taking by building on the coasts. Coastal development has soared as a direct consequence, and this rush toward the sea is the biggest factor in the rising costs of storm bailouts.

So what was so clever about that 1982 law, and how can we learn from it?

Development pressure on the nation’s coasts was intense back then, but hundreds of miles of barrier islands and beaches were as yet unspoiled. Environmental groups would have loved a national ban on further coastal development, but conservatives would never have gone along with that.

Two Republicans, Senator John H. Chafee of Rhode Island and Representative Thomas B. Evans Jr. of Delaware, found the magic formula. Their bill simply declared that on sensitive coastlines that were then undeveloped, any future development would have to occur without federal subsidies.

In other words, no flood insurance and no fat checks after storms.

by Justin Gillis, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mario Tama/Getty Images

A North American's Guide to the Use and Abuse of the Modern PhD

You applied to the program, and you got in. Then you spent the next four, six, eight or more years stroking the capricious egos of professors, jockeying for position within your peer group and marking bad undergraduate essays for the minimum wage. You completed the research, the grant applications, the writing, the comprehensive exams, and finally the defence.

You got through it all, somehow – and now it's yours. You walked across the stage at a graduation ceremony, and an Important Person in a robe gave you the paper scroll that made it official. You are no longer a Mr. or a Ms. Now, you are a Doctor. You have a PhD.

A PhD isn't just something you've acquired, it's something you've become. It's part of who you are – and you're proud that you've transformed yourself in a way that's meaningful to you. Now that you can hold it in your hands, you feel you are someone special, and you want to tell the whole world.

But can you – or should you? And if so, how?

This is where it gets tricky. Indeed, knowing when it is professionally and socially acceptable to "use" your PhD – to call yourself Doctor, and to hope to be addressed as such in return – is a minefield where values, conventions and contexts intersect in fluid and intricate ways. And nowhere has the question ever been more perplexing than in North America today.

Ironically, this issue is often less troublesome in parts of Europe, Asia and Latin America. In many societies, scholarship and professional rank are highly respected things – and terms of address are an art form, requiring subtlety and precision. It would be tantamount to an insult to fail to address any kind of a doctor as Doctor.

But in North America – where traditions are discarded, hierarchies are flouted, and everything is supposed to be so much easier as a result – the rules surrounding the PhD designation are as clear as mud. Today's freshly minted scholars stand on shifting sands, and often have no idea when or where – or even if – it is acceptable to casually slip the initials Dr. in front of their name.

Google "PhD etiquette" and you'll find a clutch of anxious academics who have turned to the internet for advice. Timidly yet earnestly they raise the issue in chat rooms and on bulletin boards, begging an opinion about the use of Doctor from anyone who cares to offer one. However, the responses are an unhelpful mishmash – ranging from you're fully entitled to it at all times to what kind of jerk would even ask such a question?

by Colin Eatock, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Happy Mother's Day

I had coffee with awesome lady Nia Vardalos, writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. We talked about adoption and her new book, which she didn’t want to write: Instant Mom. I wrote about it here.
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Claire Malhoney
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source: unknown

Zuckerberg's FWD: Making Sure They Get It Right

[ed. See also: Why Zuckerberg’s Lobby Is Collapsing Like A House Of Cards Outside Of DC]

Mark Zuckerberg built himself a political action committee called FWD.us, and they're diving headfirst into trying to change immigration policy as their first priority. They seem to have good goals, and they've already adopted some extremely polarizing tactics, so I've tried to collect my thoughts here, as informed by a roundtable conversation yesterday which included FWD.us President and co-founder Joe Green. Spoilers: I don't have a simple, easy "It sucks!" or "It's great!" conclusion about FWD.us, but hopefully I've put together enough perspective here to help inform the discussion, provide some specific areas of improvement for the PAC, and offer a useful starting point for the discussion within the tech community of how we'd like to be effective in driving policy, whether specifically about immigration or on any broader issue.

It's already clear that with FWD.us, the tech industry is going to have to reckon with exactly how real the realpolitik is going to get. If we're finally moving past our innocent, naive and idealistic lack of engagement with the actual dirty dealings of legislation, then let's try to figure out how to do it without losing our souls.

The Fundamentals

Mark Zuckerberg wrote an editorial in the Washington Post a few weeks ago announcing the launch of FWD.us, in concert with a list of prominent Silicon Valley supporters. (Post CEO/Chairman Donald Graham is on Facebook's board, hence the choice of platform.) Zuck started by listing top-tier tech execs like Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt and Marissa Mayer, went through listing VCs and investors who are well known within the industry, and concludes with former Facebookers Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, who aren't big names in the industry but are actual immigrants, in contrast to most of the other backers. Shortly after launch, names like Bill Gates, Reed Hastings and Fred Wilson were added as they apparently became financial backers as well.

All those dollars are being spent to support an organization that's pretty small — half a dozen people in Silicon Valley and four people on the ground in DC. ADrian Chen's excellent look at FWD.us offers lots of good perspective on the functioning and funding of FWD.us, but this is an organization that seems to be built with a long-term mission in mind.

I've long wanted the tech industry to engage in a serious and effective way with the policy world. At the peak of the protests against SOPA and PIPA, my dream was that we might black out our sites in protest of torture as state policy rather than simply focusing on self-serving goals. And while we've thus far had limited avenues for participation such as the White House's innovative petition platform, we obviously haven't played in the serious realm of policy before, either with our attention and interest or with the greasing of palms that actually makes legislation happen in DC.

So if we've got a practical organization working on meaningful problems and that's what I've wanted the tech industry to do, why am I so concerned? Let's take a look.

by Anil Dash, Making Culture |  Read more:

Image: FWD.us

Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters

[ed. One of my all-time favorite acoustic guitar performances.]

Shaun O'Dell, We Do Not Advance Through Fixed Gradations, 2010
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Norman Rockwell: The Dugout (cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, September 4, 1948).
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Brian Berman
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Depression Part Two

[ed. Simple, straightforward depiction of what depression feels like. Excellent.]

I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler.

I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was.

But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same.

I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Horse's Big Space Adventure transformed into holding a plastic horse in the air, hoping it would somehow be enjoyable for me. Prehistoric Crazy-Bus Death Ride was just smashing a toy bus full of dinosaurs into the wall while feeling sort of bored and unfulfilled. I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience.

Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything.

by Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half |  Read more:

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Gatsby le Magnifique, Paul Rogers
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Not Safe for Funding: The N.S.F. and the Economics of Science

Last month, Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, introduced a divisive new bill, the High Quality Research Act, that would change the criteria by which the National Science Foundation evaluates research projects and awards funding. (The N.S.F., with a budget of seven billion dollars, funds roughly twenty per cent of federally supported basic research in American universities.) Currently, proposals are evaluated through a traditional peer-review process, in which scientists and experts with knowledge of the relevant fields evaluate the projects’ “intellectual merits” and “broader impacts.” Peer review is a central tenet of modern academic science, and, according to critics, the new bill threatens to supersede it with politics.

John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said last week that “adding Congress as reviewers is a mistake.” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson warned more forcefully that Representative Smith was “sending a chilling message to the entire scientific community that peer review may always be trumped by political review.” But in a statement, Representative Smith said the draft bill “improves on [the peer-review process] by adding a layer of accountability.” The bill’s new three-point criteria for funding require that a project be “in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense”; solve “problems that are of the utmost importance to society at large”; and not be “duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.”

Implicit in the proposal’s language is a desire for oversight built into the process of determining which areas of study are significant. (Representative Smith cited five N.S.F.-funded social science projects, with concerns as to whether they “adhere to NSF’s ‘intellectual merit’ guideline.”) To Smith’s point, despite sizable public investment in research and development (nearly $150 billion this year), relatively scant attention is devoted to investigating whether the process of science, in its current form, is well-designed for generating knowledge.

As it turns out, the N.S.F. recently awarded a grant to Kevin Zollman, an assistant professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, to investigate what drives researchers to pursue particular projects, and how they secure funding for them. In an ideal world, all science would proceed from the simple and lofty social goal of expanding human knowledge, but researchers are of course subject to the constraints of economic reality. To disentangle these knotted incentives, Zollman is applying a branch of game theory known as “mechanism design,” which uses simple models to understand how individual players within a system balance competing motivations to arrive at different ends. (...)

As researchers scramble to carve out intellectual real estate, however, overly aggressive competition and singular focus on originality can elicit a host of negative behaviors: bias toward reporting positive or rushed results, withholding or fabricating data, and counterproductive levels of output. Of fifty million scholarly articles published since 1665, more than half of themappeared in the last twenty-five years. While a number of factors contribute to this glut, one of them is the pressure to publish results even when they’re not immediately relevant. “Much of the recent scientific literature is repetitive, unimportant, poorly conceived or executed, and oversold; perhaps deservingly, much of it is ignored,” wrote the microbiologist Ferric Fang in a 2012 editorial. The problem is becoming particularly acute as a growing pool of scientists face a shrinking pot of money, both from drying stimulus funds scheduled to disappear this September and 2.9-percent budget cuts forced on the N.S.F. through sequestration. The currently overcharged pull of priority, by spurring unnecessary questions and hairs to be split, can thus dilute or stifle the advancement of science.

In light of these problems, Representative Smith proposed his bill. Yet the economic straits in science already encourage research that targets specific, funder-driven priorities over riskier, more open-ended questions. As the Nobel laureate Roger Kornberg lamented in 2007, “If the work that you propose to do isn’t virtually certain of success, then it won’t be funded.” Elevated political scrutiny would likely only reduce the willingness of agencies like the N.S.F. to fund projects without clearly defined, or even expected, outcomes. In tension with this reality is the fact that revolution in science is often indebted to prolonged exploration of basic research projects, which may at their outset fail to meet Representative Smith’s criteria. Forecasting how well research will “advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare,” or predetermining the degree to which a project is or is not “groundbreaking,” demands an unlikely prescience. Further embedding specific requirements in grant allocation could make improvements at the margins by defunding egregiously conspicuous research. But it also threatens to close off a large landscape of research questions with unforeseen potential.

by Dylan Walsh, New Yorker |  Read more:.

Photograph, of Representative Lamar Smith, by Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty

Rachel Rickert
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The Genius of Tesla

Tech writers love to compare Tesla to Apple. As Steven Johnson pointed out earlier this year—and as many other writers have as well—Elon Musk’s electric-car company seems to be following the master plan Steve Jobs drew up when he brought Apple back from the brink in the late 1990s.

Both companies sell high-end products that inspire evangelical fervor in their supporters and incredulous, irrational hatred in their opponents. Both are adored by critics. Consumer Reports just gave Tesla’s Model S sedan a near-perfect score, one of the best in the magazine’s history. (On the other hand, a New York Times reviewer did (controversially) have to call a tow truck.) Both Apple and Tesla strive for excellent customer service. When your Tesla breaks down, the firm will deliver a loaner vehicle to your location and pick up your old one for free, which is even better than when the guy at the Genius Bar gives you a new phone to replace the one you dropped in the toilet. And Musk, like Steve Jobs, is a fascinating figure—charismatic, pugilistic, unpredictable.

The most important comparison involves the two firms’ business models. When he came back to Apple, Jobs set out to do something unheard of in tech: sell luxury products at mainstream prices. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad weren’t just the most desirable gadgets in their categories. They were also very competitive on price: The first iPad was the cheapest tablet you could buy, the iPhone sells at the same price as other top-tier phones (when you include a service contract), and the iPod was available at every price point. But even though its prices were competitive, Apple was able to keep its profits high, thanks to amazing manufacturing efficiencies.

Now Tesla seems to be following the same path. At $70,000 the Model S, its family sedan, is still a very expensive car, but it’s far cheaper than the $109,000 Roadster that Tesla launched in 2009. This week, the company announced that in the first quarter of 2013, it earned its first-ever corporate profit. It sold 5,000 cars in Q1, and its list of orders is growing by 20,000 per year. Part of the reason Tesla has turned profitable, Musk explained in a shareholder letter, is by making its production processes more efficient. Among other things, the company reduced the amount of time it takes to build a car by 40 percent. Over the long run, Musk aims to keep lowering the price of its cars—he’s hoping to release a $30,000 car in the next three or four years—while keeping the company’s gross profit margin at 25 percent, which is very high for the car industry.

So, there you go: Tesla wants to be just like Apple. That’s not a bad goal—Apple has done quite well for itself. But what few in the tech press have noticed is that Musk seems to have another tech titan in mind: Google. Musk knows that there’s a single, towering problem in the electric car business: a lack of infrastructure. Batteries aren’t good enough, charging stations are too far apart, and there aren’t enough mechanics and dealers. Tesla is trying to create this infrastructure by itself, which means everything’s moving more slowly than it could. If the entire car business worked together to improve this stuff, batteries and charging infrastructure would improve at a faster pace.

So how can Tesla persuade General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, and other car giants—not to mention other car startups that are similar in size to Tesla—to all work together to improve the world’s electric vehicle infrastructure? By licensing its tech to its competitors, in the same way that Google gives Android away to every phone-maker in the world.

by Farhad Manjoo, Slate |  Read more:

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

After Catastrophe

Resilience, as it is now defined, has roots in various fields but perhaps most notably in ecology. In 1973, C.S. (Buzz) Holling, then a professor of ecology at the University of British Columbia, published an article titled "Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems." Holling argued that traditional studies of systems, using methods inherited from fields like physics, assumed that ecosystems existed in an equilibrium—to which they would return after a disturbance.

"What Holling was trying to introduce in this idea was that ecosystems could exist in qualitatively different forms," says Lance H. Gunderson, a professor of environmental studies at Emory University who worked extensively with Holling on resilience research.

Essentially, "resilience" refers to a system's ability to absorb shocks. Over time, various fields have adopted the term and the ideas behind it, and it has become value laden. When national-security experts and risk managers talk about resilience, they're often thinking about "recovery"—protecting "normal" life, and how quickly we can rebound to "normal" after a disaster. Others think of "resilience" and "sustainability" as synonyms. (...)

Most approaches to resilience, Fiksel complains, resemble traditional risk management: Identify a set of risks, calculate the probabilities, and do what you can to mitigate those risks. Those techniques, says Fiksel, don't account for the unexpected—the so-called black swans—and they don't acknowledge the rolling, compounding effects that disruptions can have in a hyperfast, hyperconnected world.

"We tend to get locked into economic and technological patterns that constrain us in terms of our ability to evolve and cope with new challenges," he says. "What we really need is to operate with variability as the norm."

Consider what has hit us hardest in recent years, how some of these disruptions came from or led to other woes: September 11, 2001; the 2003 Northeast blackout; the oil shock of 2008; the mortgage crisis and the Great Recession; Deepwater Horizon; the intense droughts; Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, and Sandy.

There are surely more disruptions to come. Stephen E. Flynn, a security expert and former military officer who is co-director of the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at Northeastern University, ticks off the most likely threats: a breakdown in the power grid; interruption of global supply chains, including those that provide our food; an accident at one of the many chemical factories in urban areas; or damage to the dams, locks, and waterways that shuttle agricultural products and other goods out to sea. The No. 1 threat, he says, is a terrorist attack that prompts lawmakers and a frightened public to shred the Bill of Rights or overreact in another way.

The tendency in government has been to focus intensely on these threats—or other problems, considering the wars on cancer, poverty, drugs, crime, and so on—and to try to eliminate them.

"If you look at the post-World War II area," Flynn says, "there is almost an overarching focus on reducing risk and bringing risk down to zero," the idea that this could be done "if you brought enough science and enough resources and you applied enough muscle." Since 9/11, that policy has meant spending vast sums to go after terrorists out there, but perhaps we aren't safer.

"Why do we have all this money to go after man-made terrorist attacks, and then we let our bridges fall down?" Flynn wonders.

He advocates a different approach. We should make American society more robust so that it can absorb shocks and carry on. Part of that shift includes reorienting people's attitudes so that they are more willing to deal with these uncertainties. The generation before World War II accepted risk as a matter of life, he says. "They had less ambition or hubris to believe that you would contain all of these things," he says, "and a measure of character was how you would deal with adversity, how you overcame it."

by Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education |  Read more:
Image: Michael S. Yamashita, National Geographic Stock

Yelp and the Wisdom of the "Lonely Crowd"

David Riesman spent the first half of his career writing one of the most important books of the twentieth century. He spent the second half correcting its pervasive misprision. “The Lonely Crowd,” an analysis of the varieties of social character that examined the new American middle class, appeared in 1950 to what Riesman, a lawyer who ended up teaching sociology, once called “quite astringent criticism” in the relevant academic prints. He was surprised, and of course pleased, that the book went on to find a wide general audience, but spent decades reckoning with the cost of its popularity: namely, the “profound misinterpretation” of the book as a simplistic critique of epidemic American postwar conformity via its description of the contours of the “other-directed character,” whose identity and behavior is shaped by its relationships. Riesman did his best, in prefaces to two subsequent editions of the book (at great length in 1961, and, with some brittleness about having to do it once more, in 1969), to correct this reading—to insist that he never meant to suggest that Americans now were any more conformist than they ever had been, or that there’s even such a thing as social structure without conformist consensus.

With the rise of the Internet, Riesman’s book—which is, at its root, a discussion of the emotional life of information—has become even more relevant now than it was in the nineteen-fifties. But it won’t be of much use if it continues to be read as a book about all the miserable conformists. (It has probably not helped that the publisher, Yale University Press, put a flock of jammed sheep on the book’s cover.) Critics like Lee Siegel continue to press a distorted Riesman into the service of any given day’s anti-Internet jeremiad. In this past weekend’s Styles section of the New York Times, Siegel uses “The Lonely Crowd” to analyze the putative “Yelpification” of contemporary life: according to Siegel, Riesman’s view was that “people went from being ‘inner-directed’ to ‘outer-directed,’ from heeding their own instincts and judgment to depending on the judgments and opinions of tastemakers and trendsetters.” The “conformist power of the crowd” and its delighted ability to write online reviews led Siegel down a sad path to a lackluster expensive dinner. Unhappy with his monkfish and the names of the desserts, Siegel writes that “gone are the days when ‘conformist’ was a slur on someone’s character. Now the idea is that if you are not following the crowd of five-star dispensers, you’re a tasteless, undiscriminating shlub.”

What Riesman actually suggested was that we think of social organization in terms of a series of “ideal types” along a spectrum of increasingly loose authority. On one end of the spectrum is a “tradition-directed” community, where we all understand that what we’re supposed to do is what we’re supposed to do because it’s just the thing that one does; authority is unequivocal, and there’s neither the room nor the desire for autonomous action. In the middle of the spectrum, as one moves toward a freer distribution of, and response to, authority, is “inner-direction.” The inner-directed character is concerned not with “what one does” but with “what people like us do.” Which is to say that she looks to her own internalizations of past authorities to get a sense for how to conduct her affairs. Contemporary society, Riesman thought, was best understood as chiefly “other-directed,” where the inculcated authority of the vertical (one’s lineage) gives way to the muddled authority of the horizontal (one’s peers). The inner-directed person orients herself by an internal “gyroscope,” while the other-directed person orients herself by “radar.”

It’s not that the inner-directed person consults some deep, subjective, romantically sui generis oracle. It’s that the inner-directed person consults the internalized voices of a mostly dead lineage, while her other-directed counterpart heeds the external voices of her living contemporaries. As Riesman put it, “the gyroscopic mechanism allows the inner-directed person to appear far more independent than he really is: he is no less a conformist to others than the other-directed person, but the voices to which he listens are more distant, of an older generation, their cues internalized in his childhood.” The inner-directed person is, simply, “somewhat less concerned than the other-directed person with continuously obtaining from contemporaries (or their stand-ins: the mass media) a flow of guidance, expectation, and approbation.” You can imagine how the Internet intensifies things.  (...)

The problem with Yelp is not the role it plays, for Siegel, in the proliferation of monoculture; most people of my generation have learned to ignore Yelp entirely. It’s the fact that, after about a year of usefulness, Yelp very quickly became a terrible source of information. There are several reasons for this. The first is the nature of an algorithmic response to the world. As Jaron Lanier points out in “Who Owns the Future?,” the hubris behind each new algorithm is the idea that its predictive and evaluatory structure is game-proof; but the minute any given algorithm gains real currency, all the smart and devious people devote themselves to gaming it. On Yelp, the obvious case would be garnering positive reviews by any means necessary. A second problem with Yelp’s algorithmic ranking is in the very idea of using online reviews; as anybody with a book on Amazon knows, they tend to draw more contributions from people who feel very strongly about something, positively or negatively. This undermines the statistical relevance of their recommendations. (This phenomenon has been dramatized to hilarious effect in the series of YouTube videos that feature actors performing melodramatic readings of Yelp reviews.)

by Gideon Lewis-Krause, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by D. Krán.

Portrait of a young woman (detail) 1869, Pierre Auguste Cot.
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