Happy Gut Bacteria

Here's the traditional understanding of metabolic syndrome: You ate too much refined food sopped in grease. Calories flooded your body. Usually, a hormone called insulin would help your cells absorb these calories for use. But the sheer overabundance of energy in this case overwhelms your cells. They stop responding to insulin. To compensate, your pancreas begins cranking out more insulin. When the pancreas finally collapses from exhaustion, you have diabetes. In addition, you develop resistance to another hormone called leptin, which signals satiety, or fullness. So you tend to overeat. Meanwhile, fat cells, which have become bloated and stressed as they try to store the excess calories, begin emitting a danger signal—low-grade inflammation.

But new research suggest another scenario: Inflammation might not be a symptom, it could be a cause. According to this theory, it is the immune activation caused by lousy food that prompts insulin and leptin resistance. Sugar builds up in your blood. Insulin increases. Your liver and pancreas strain to keep up. All because the loudly blaring danger signal—the inflammation—hampers your cells' ability to respond to hormonal signals. Maybe the most dramatic evidence in support of this idea comes from experiments where scientists quash inflammation in animals. If you simply increase the number of white blood cells that alleviate inflammation—called regulatory T-cells—in obese mice with metabolic syndrome, the whole syndrome fades away. Deal with the inflammation, it seems, and you halt the dysfunction.

Now, on the face of it, it seems odd that a little inflammation should have such a great impact on energy regulation. But consider: This is about apportioning a limited resource exactly where it's needed, when it's needed. When not under threat, the body uses energy for housekeeping and maintenance—and, if you're lucky, procreation, an optimistic, future-oriented activity. But when a threat arrives—a measles virus, say—you reprioritize. All that hormone-regulated activity declines to a bare minimum. Your body institutes a version of World War II rationing: troops (white blood cells) and resources (calories) are redirected toward the threat. Nonessential tasks, including the production of testosterone, shut down. Forget tomorrow. The priority is to preserve the self today.

This, some think, is the evolutionary reason for insulin resistance. Cells in the body stop absorbing sugar because the fuel is required—requisitioned, really—by armies of white blood cells. The problems arise when that emergency response, crucial to repelling pillagers in the short term, drags on indefinitely. Imagine it this way. Your dinner is cooking on the stove. You're paying bills. You smell smoke. You jump up, leaving those tasks half-done, and search for the fire before it burns down your house. Normally, once you put the fire out, you'd return to your tasks and then eat dinner.

But now imagine that you never find the fire, and you never stop smelling the smoke. You remain in a perpetual state of alarm. Your bills never get paid. You never eat your dinner. Your house smolders. Your life falls into disarray.

That's metabolic syndrome. Normal function ceases. Aging accelerates. Diabetes develops. Heart attacks strike. The brain degenerates. Life ends early. And it's all driven, in this understanding, by chronic, low-grade inflammation.

Where does the perceived threat come from—all that inflammation? Some ingested fats are directly inflammatory. And dumping a huge amount of calories into the bloodstream from any source, be it fat or sugar, may overwhelm and inflame cells. But another source of inflammation is hidden in plain sight, the 100 trillion microbes inhabiting your gut. Junk food, it turns out, may not kill us entirely directly, but rather by prompting the collapse of an ancient and mutually beneficial symbiosis, and turning a once cooperative relationship adversarial.

by Moises Valasquez-Manoff, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: Eye of Science / Science Source

Brownie McGhee

[ed. How you play the blues. And, with long-time partner Sonny Terry....]

Immortal Soldiers from the Darius the Great palace, Susa, Iran
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Me, Myself and I

The bluest period I ever spent was in Manhattan’s East Village, not so long back. I lived on East 2nd Street, in an unreconstructed tenement building, and each morning I walked across Tompkins Square Park to get my coffee. When I arrived the trees were bare, and I dedicated those walks to checking the progress of the blossoms. There are many community gardens in that part of town, and so I could examine irises and tulips, forsythia, cherry trees and a great weeping willow that seemed to drop its streamers overnight, like a ship about to lift anchor and sail away.

I wasn’t supposed to be in New York, or not like this, anyway. I’d met someone in America and then lost them almost instantly, but the future we’d dreamed up together retained its magnetism, and so I moved alone to the city I’d expected to become my home. I had friends there, but none of the ordinary duties and habits that comprise a life. I’d severed all those small, sustaining cords, and, as such, it wasn’t surprising that I experienced a loneliness more paralysing than anything I’d encountered in more than a decade of living alone.

What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full. It felt, at least sometimes, difficult and embarrassing and important to conceal. Being foreign didn’t help. I kept botching the ballgame of language: fumbling my catches, bungling my throws. Most days, I went for coffee in the same place, a glass-fronted café full of tiny tables, populated almost exclusively by people gazing into the glowing clamshells of their laptops. Each time, the same thing happened. I ordered the nearest thing to filter on the menu: a medium urn brew, which was written in large chalk letters on the board. Each time, without fail, the barista looked blankly up and asked me to repeat myself. I might have found it funny in England, or irritating, or I might not have noticed it all, but that spring it worked under my skin, depositing little grains of anxiety and shame.

Something funny happens to people who are lonely. The lonelier they get, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself. Once it becomes impacted, it isn’t easy to dislodge. When I think of its advance, an anchoress’s cell comes to mind, as does the exoskeleton of a gastropod.

This sounds like paranoia, but in fact loneliness’s odd mode of increase has been mapped by medical researchers. It seems that the initial sensation triggers what psychologists call hypervigilance for social threat. In this state, which is entered into unknowingly, one tends to experience the world in negative terms, and to both expect and remember negative encounters — instances of rudeness, rejection or abrasion, like my urn brew episodes in the café. This creates, of course, a vicious circle, in which the lonely person grows increasingly more isolated, suspicious and withdrawn.

by Olivia Laing, Aeon |  Read more:

Detail from The Hotel Room (1931) by Edward Hopper. Photo by Francis G. Mayer/Corbis

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You Are Not an Artisan

The future of work looks bleaker than it needs to for one simple reason: we bring consumption sensibilities to production behavior choices. Even our language reflects this: we “shop around” for careers. We look for prestigious brands to work for. We look for “fulfillment” at work. Sometimes we even accept pay cuts to be associated with famous names. This is work as fashion accessory and conversation fodder.

We can think of this as conspicuous production, by analogy to conspicuous consumption. First-world artisan tendencies take this to a logical extreme.

When you subconsciously think of work as something you consume for pleasure, you end up with a possibly irrational (economically speaking) attraction to artisan work. Even those who don’t actually end up as artisans choose work the way they choose cars, jewelry or handbags, over-valuing things like resume-value and exposure-value. (...)

Sexy work, such as being a bard, is work that:

1. humans find easy to enjoy
2. easily catalyzes mindful absorption while learning (flow)
3. is easy to value as a status currency
4. is good raw material for social identity formation

People who seek sexy work are often members of what I called the Jeffersonian middle class in an earlier post — motivated by creative self-expression and a sense of personal dignity rather than economic survival.

The first three attributes are self-explanatory. By social identity, I mean the part of your self-perception that is derived from what you think others think of you. Sexy work is attractive to those who like their social identity to be harmoniously integrated within itself (what your mom thinks of you and what your boss thinks of you are not in conflict) and with your private identity (you don’t feel misunderstood). There is consensual external validation of your internal sense of self-worth. You feel authentic.

Sexy work is easy to enjoy, learn, value and integrate into your identity, primarily because it is downhill psychological work: it is the cognitive equivalent of muscular atrophy. You have to choose to make it hard for yourself. You can cash out some status and attention even if you’re not making any money. It does not test your sense of self-worth significantly.

Schlep work has the opposite characteristics along all four vectors. It is harder to enjoy, learn, value and integrate into your identity, primarily because it is uphill psychological work for a social species. It is hard whether or not you want it to be. It is hard to cash out status and attention even if you’re making good money. It tests your sense of self-worth every day.

Somehow, over the past decade, we’ve gone from a useful heuristic (“focus on your strengths” and “find flow”) down a slippery slope of use-with-caution ideas (“work smart, not hard” and “follow your passion”) to the idea of work as a kind of consumption that should be chosen based on the pleasure one can derive from it. (...)

This is because when you actually poke at what people think of as creative — the broader universe around prototypical categories like fine art, rock music or programming — you realize they don’t really mean creative. They mean sexy. The “creative” attribute (whatever its subtle definition might be) is actually an optional extra. Push comes to shove, that’s an attribute people are pretty willing to give up, so long as the four key attributes are preserved (easy to enjoy, easy to learn, easy to value in a status economy, and easy to integrate into an “authentic” social identity).

In other words, we’re more afraid of machines taking away our social status than our jobs. This might seem like an obvious point. After all, most status-conscious people have strong feelings about what work is “beneath” them, but with machines in the picture, the point gets considerably more subtle.

People substitute creative for sexy in describing their aspirations (to themselves and others) because it sounds less narcissistic. If you seek sexy work, you could be viewed as self-absorbed, entitled and attention/status seeking.

If you pretend it is creative work, you’re suddenly God’s gift to the world, basking in the gratitude, admiration and adoration of all simply for existing.

This is one reason vanity startups, garage bands, indie coffee shops and boutique handbag design businesses proliferate.

by Venkat, Ribbonfarm |  Read more:

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Douglas Portway, Seven Green Apples 1991
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Climbing
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Test Match Special and Technological Agency

When Aleem Dar, one of two umpires at Trent Bridge last Sunday, raised his finger to dismiss Australia’s Brad Haddin and give the first Test to England, he was playing a crucial role not only in the 131 year history of the Ashes contest, but in a far older, and contemporarily relevant debate: that of human versus technological agency. It’s a strange thing when you realise that the most prominent discussion about the future of humanity in a technological age is happening during the lunch break on Radio Four Long Wave – but it is.

For those not familiar with international cricket’s Umpire Decision Review System (DRS), it is the process by which certain matters are decided on the field, not just by the umpires, but by a series of advanced technologies observing the game: watching, analysing, and even listening to it. Haddin was initially given not out when he appeared to be caught behind, presumably because the umpire didn’t believe he had hit the ball. But after England appealed the decision, the decision was referred to the third umpire, and DRS. A slow-motion infra-red camera known as Hot Spot, trained on the batsman from the far side of the field, showed a momentary but incontrovertibly bright dot of friction heat on Haddin’s bat as he just nicked the ball into the England wicket-keeper’s hands. Another system, not officially part of DRS but widely used by broadcasters, confirmed the decision. The Snickometer, a combination of slow-motion camera and high-quality microphone, detected an almost imperceptible but audible “snick” as the ball struck the bat’s edge. The game was England’s.

Hot Spot’s technology was adapted by an Australian broadcasting company for sporting use, but is based on pioneering military work by French scientist Nicholas Bion for tank and jet fighter tracking. The twin SLX-Hawk thermal imaging cameras at Trent Bridge were built by a British engineering company, Selex ES, which also designs laser rangefinders, radars and other sensors for planes, warships and satellites. The Snickometer was invented in the mid-90s by British Computer Scientist Alan Plaskett, who has also worked on Hot Spot. The final piece of DRS, and the best known one due to its use in Tennis and other sports, is Hawk-Eye, another product of British engineering – Roke Manor Research, based in Romsey, which also produces signal intercept systems and altimeters for drone aircraft.

Hawk-Eye uses a network of high-performance cameras to track a ball in motion, combining the footage from each one in order to create a three-dimensional representation of the ball’s trajectory. In tennis, this yields the footprints which decide whether a line call is given in or out in contested calls, and in cricket it is used to predict whether a ball deflecting by the batsman’s pad would have hit the wicket, or not. But of course, this is only a prediction, more accurate than a human eye and capable of greater accuracy than human judges, but not, in any strict sense, infallible. The complexity of the calculations used to determe Hawk-Eye’s accuracy rival those of the more famous, and equally misunderstood, Duckworth-Lewis method. (...)

And this is where sports technology begins to illuminate larger issues around human and technological agency. An unlikely champion of humanity has emerged in the person of Sepp Blatter, President of FIFA. Soccer players and fans have long called for the introduction of goal-line technology, which would be able to tell more accurately than referees if a ball had indeed crossed the line. A number of different approaches, one based on Hawk-Eye, another using chips implanted in footballs, are currently under trial. However, Blatter has long opposed these, based partly on their accuracy, but also going on the record to say that “Other sports regularly change the laws of the game to react to the new technology. … We don’t do it and this makes the fascination and the popularity of football”. What underlies this statement is a fundamental belief that sport is a human undertaking, with all the confusion, fallibility and debate that that involves. One reading is that officials are themselves part of the game, a fact of endless frustration to almost everyone involved; another that sport is inherently chance-based, and while we resist optimising participants through drugs and physical augmentations, the laws and outcomes of sport should remain human too.

by James Bridle, booktwo.org |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Chaotic Storage

How can something be random on purpose? Well, Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, stores its goods in a chaotic disorder. But only at first glance, because there’s order behind the apparent disarray. It’s called chaotic storage.

How does chaotic storage work?

A warehouse for chaotic storage – sometimes also known as random storage – is basically a shelving system holding the products. So far, it doesn’t differ from a warehouse with fix storage positions. What makes a chaotic storage system so special is the flow of material.

This starts at the goods-in section: the warehouse staff takes incoming goods to the shelving system, where they are placed in unoccupied shelf positions. Each shelf space has a unique barcode and every product as well. The staff uses handheld scanners to record the shelf space and the corresponding product, thus telling the computer, where the goods are located.

When an incoming order requires these goods to be picked, the computer compiles a picking list. It then sends order pickers to exactly those shelf spaces where the requested products can be found, according to the database. In order to keep this database current, each article that is removed from the shelf needs to be scanned again.

By the way, chaotic storage does not imply automatic storage. Although it is possible to operate a chaotic storage system automatically, it is not always the best alternative. Amazon for instance, still needs quite a lot of manpower, because a simulation of the storage processes showed that hiring warehouse staff was more economical than automation.

What are the advantages of chaotic storage?

Chaotic warehouses are much more flexible than conventional ones and can respond to changes in the product range much easier. This reduces the amount of planning, because neither the range of products as a whole nor the sales volume of particular goods need to be known or planned in advance.

In addition, chaotic storage allows to use the available storage space more efficiently, because freed-up space may be refilled immediately. In a storage system with fixed positions on the other hand, some shelf space is always reserved for certain articles, even if their actual stocks are considerably lower.

Chaotic storage is a time saver, not just when stocking up on goods but also during order picking. Incoming goods are simply placed in free spaces on the shelves. The computer will then create picking lists with optimised routes whenever someone orders products. This way, the distance the warehouse staff needs to cover is shortened. Furthermore, picking lists at Amazon are not sorted by order, which means that the picked products have to be combined to shipments in an additional step.

The amount of training required by new employees is also remarkably lower when using chaotic storage. It is not necessary for them to memorise the entire warehouse layout or even single storage locations. This will allow you to replace staff more easily or hire seasonal workers during peak times.

What are the requirements for chaotic storage?

Intuitively, most people would store similar goods together, virtually sorting them according to predefined characteristics. This would place all books in one section of the warehouse and all toys in another section.

But that’s not necessary in a chaotic storage system. The products only need to share the most basic requirements with regard to storage (i.e. temperature, humidity). Further characteristics don’t have to be considered. In a chaotic warehouse, all kinds of different articles may lie directly next to each other, such as books, toys, sport equipment, electronics, DVDs, jewellery and digital cameras.

by Torsten Reichardt, SSI Schaefer Intralogistics |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

FBI Taps Hacker Tactics to Spy on Suspects

[ed. Competing with the NSA to shred your privacy protection every day, so, you know, we can all be safer.]

Law-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.

Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.

People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with suspects who use new communications technology, including some types of online chat and encryption tools. The use of such communications, which can't be wiretapped like a phone, is called "going dark" among law enforcement.

A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.

The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.'s Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment.

by Jennifer Valentino-Devries and Danny Yadron, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Agence France-Presse/Getty

[ed. See also: Apple Patent Could Remotely Disable Protestors' Phone Cameras; The Reycling Bin is Stalking You; and Are Universities Collecting Too Much Information on Staff and Students.]

Genny Darko, Escape
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Sad day
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Steely Dan

[ed. Guitars: Denny Dias, Walter Becker, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter.]

Microsatellites: What Big Eyes They Have

People already worried about the candid cameras on Google Glass and low-flying drones can add a new potential snooper to the list: cameras on inexpensive, low-orbiting microsatellites that will soon be sending back frequent, low-cost snapshots of most of Earth’s populated regions from space.

They won’t be the first cameras out there, of course. Earth-imaging satellites the size of vans have long circled the globe, but those cost millions of dollars each to build and launch, in part because of their weight and specialized hardware. The new satellites, with some of the same off-the-shelf miniaturized technology that has made smartphones and laptops so powerful, will be far less expensive.

The view from high up is rich in untapped data, said Paul Saffo, a forecaster and essayist. He expects the new satellite services to find many customers.

Insurance companies, for example, could use the satellites’ “before” and “after” views to monitor insured property and validate claims after a disaster. Businesses that update online maps for geologists, city planners or disaster relief officials could be customers, too. The images could also be used to monitor problems like deforestation, melting icecaps and overfishing.

And food companies and commodities traders could use the images to keep track of crops and agricultural yields all over the planet, Mr. Saffo predicted.

But the images are also likely to be viewed as the latest mixed blessing by people already apprehensive of Big Brother-like surveillance in their lives.

First into space in the microsatellite business will be the San Francisco company Planet Labs, which plans to launch a fleet of 28 small satellites at the end of the year that will photograph the planet around the clock, with frequent updates. The company has already sent up two trial satellites for test runs, and will dispatch the entire set, called Flock-1, in December, said Will Marshall, a co-founder of the company and a former NASA scientist.

The Planet Labs’ satellites won’t be able to distinguish your face or read your license plate — the cameras don’t have that level of resolution. But the frequency with which images can be updated could raise privacy questions, said Timothy Edgar, a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and a former director of privacy and civil liberties in the Obama administration.

Mr. Edgar contrasted the satellite images with those provided by Google Earth — the ones that people zoom in on to see, for example, an aerial view of their homes.”That’s just an image of your house that was probably taken a few years ago,” he said. “It may feel like you are being watched, but you aren’t. It’s just a static picture that’s most likely several years old.”

But a satellite that regularly passes over your cabin deep in the woods and photographs a car that is sometimes parked there — and sometimes not — has different ramifications. “It can show a pattern, for example, when you appear to be at home and when you’re away,” he said.

by Anne Eisenberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Matt McDonald

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One-Way Ticket

[ed. Interesting dialog in the comments section.]

If you’re a state with the highest rate of homelessness in the country, you’ve got a number of options. You could build more shelters. You could enact new tax credits for the working poor. Maybe provide more counseling and other services.

Or you could take the route lawmakers in Hawaii did: offer homeless residents a one-way ticket out of the state.

State legislators passed funding this year for a new program to offer one-way flights to any of the state’s estimated 17,000 homeless persons. Lawmakers appropriated $100,000 over the next two years for the “return-to-home” program, but that funding could increase if the initiative is viewed as a success.

There are many reasons why homelessness is so pervasive in Hawaii. It’s an expensive state to live in. It’s not easy to leave. There isn’t much affordable housing.

Viewed in the most charitable light, one-way flights allow homeless people who currently live in Hawaii but have a family or better job opportunities on the mainland to be able to move. Viewed more cynically, officials in Hawaii will use this initiative to coerce homeless persons into leaving, freeing the state from any further obligations to help them.

The state Department of Human Services will administer the program, but officials there worry that the program could wind up being abused by those not currently living in Hawaii. “We remain concerned this program is an invitation to purchase a one-way ticket to Hawaii with a guaranteed return flight home,” said Kayla Rosenfeld, the department’s spokeswoman.

by Scott Keyes, Think Progress |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

GitHub: The Software That Builds Software

Complex, specialized tools are often made from simpler ones. Machines are built with power drills; software is built with code editors. And so the future of computing depends partly on coding platforms in much the same way that the future of the movie industry depends on camera technology.

Over the past five years, a rapidly growing San Francisco company called GitHub has become a dominant player in software development, largely because it has fine-tuned the tools used for “version control,” which is the process of logging all the changes made to a set of documents. Programs are fragile enough that even a small change—a single misplaced semicolon, for example—might cause it to crash. GitHub keeps track of those semicolons, and who put them where.

Last year, GitHub’s financial projections and cultural influence were enough to secure a hundred-million-dollar investment from Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that previously invested in Twitter, Facebook, and Skype. (It is Andreessen Horowitz’s single biggest investment to date, valuing GitHub at roughly seven hundred and fifty million dollars.) Today, GitHub has three and a half million users working on close to seven million projects, and it grows by ten thousand users on a typical weekday. You can find projects written in almost any programming language in existence, from common Web development languages like P.H.P. and JavaScript to the ancient low-level language Fortran, and even LOLCODE, an absurdist programming syntax jokingly assembled from LOLcat captions.

The GitHub Web site is built around an independent piece of version-control software called Git, which was created by the developer Linus Torvalds. Even before Git, Torvalds was a nerd hero. He created Linux, which is one of the most important operating systems in the world. It runs on more kinds of hardware than any other computer operating system, and it is a dominant platform for Web servers and supercomputers; it is also widely deployed on common devices like wireless routers, cell phones, and even TiVos. It is the crown jewel of the open-source-software movement, a school of thought in which even the most valuable code in a program is freely shared so it can be collaboratively improved by many developers at once.

With so many programmers working on it, building Linux is incredibly complicated, and by 2005, Torvalds and his team had decided that the existing version-control systems were inadequate. They decided to write their own. The result, which was named Git after the insult in British slang, was much more powerful than the other available options.

In other development systems, there is often a hierarchy of gatekeepers who delegate access to chunks of code. In Git, every developer working on a project can have full access to every part of the code and its history. The best ideas and the strongest code for any aspect of the project can bubble up to the surface and be approved, no matter where they originate, dramatically flattening and democratizing the development workflow. “In order to avoid all those stupid political issues, you have to basically allow anybody to make changes, and then accept them based on technical merit after the fact, rather than on some pre-approval process,” Torvalds told me via e-mail. (...)

Thinking about GitHub as a social product rather than simply a software-development platform is perhaps the best way to consider its future: the big problem GitHub solves is about collaboration, not software. “For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” Preston-Werner, the site’s founder, told the New York Times last year. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”

Those seem like lofty aspirations, but in early May, the start-up RapGenius, which originally crowdsourced explanations of lyrics from hip-hop songs, announced its expansion into breaking news, using the same text-annotation platform it had been refining for years. RapGenius could prove useful for parsing complicated legal documents, for example, and if rap enthusiasts can build a useful platform for legal analysis, why can’t coders?

by Vijith Assar, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Tom Preston-Werner, the C.E.O. and co-founder of GitHub. Photograph by Jin Lee/Bloomberg/Getty.