The Psychiatric Drug Crisis

It’s been just over twenty-five years since Prozac came to market, and more than twenty per cent of Americans now regularly take mind-altering drugs prescribed by their doctors. Almost as familiar as brands like Zoloft and Lexapro is the worry about what it means that the daily routine in many households, for parents and children alike, includes a dose of medications that are poorly understood and whose long-term effects on the body are unknown. Despite our ambivalence, sales of psychiatric drugs amounted to more than seventy billion dollars in 2010. They have become yet another commodity that consumers have learned to live with or even enjoy, like S.U.V.s or Cheetos.

Yet the psychiatric-drug industry is in trouble. “We are facing a crisis,” the Cornell psychiatrist and New York Times contributor Richard Friedman warned last week. In the past few years, one pharmaceutical giant after another—GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi—has shrunk or shuttered its neuroscience research facilities. Clinical trials have been halted, lines of research abandoned, and the new drug pipeline has been allowed to run dry.

Why would an industry beat a hasty retreat from a market that continues to boom? (Recent surveys indicate that mental illness is the leading cause of impairment and disability worldwide.) The answer lies in the history of psychopharmacology, which is more deeply indebted to serendipity than most branches of medicine—in particular, to a remarkable series of accidental discoveries made in the fifteen or so years following the end of the Second World War.

by Gary Greenberg, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Paul Skelcher/Science Faction/Corbis

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The Bechdel Test

In her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf observed about the literature of her time what the Bechdel test would later highlight in more recent fiction:

All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. [...] And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. [...] They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that [...]

What is now known as the Bechdel test was introduced in Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. In a 1985 strip titled "The Rule", an unnamed female character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:

1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.

Bechdel credited the idea for the test to a friend and karate training partner, Liz Wallace.

The test has been described as "the standard by which feminist critics judge television, movies, books and other media", and moved into mainstream criticism in the 2010s. According to Neda Ulaby, the test still resonates because "it articulates something often missing in popular culture: not the number of women we see on screen, but the depth of their stories, and the range of their concerns." (...)

Application

Only a small proportion of films pass the Bechdel test, according to writer Charlie Stross and film director Jason Reitman. According to Mark Harris of Entertainment Weekly, if passing the test were mandatory, it would have jeopardized half of 2009's Academy Award for Best Picture nominees and would cut the length of the annual Comic-Con from five days to 45 minutes. Stross also noted that about half of the films that do pass the test only do so because the women talk about marriage or babies. Works that fail the test include some that are mainly about or aimed at women, or which do feature prominent female characters. The television series Sex and the City highlights its own failure to pass the test by having one of the four female main characters ask: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends? It's like seventh grade with bank accounts!"

Explanations that have been offered to explain why relatively few films pass the Bechdel test include the relative lack of diversity among scriptwriters, or their assumptions about the audience's preferences: A scriptwriting student at UCLA wrote in 2008 that she was told by professors that the audience "only wanted white, straight, male leads" and not, as she quoted a male industry professional as saying, "a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about".

The website bechdeltest.com is a user-edited database of some 3,300 films classified by whether or not they pass the test, with the added requirement that the women must be named characters. As of July 2012, it listed 53% of these films as passing all three of the test's requirements, 11% as failing one (the women's conversations are about men), 25% as failing two (the women don't talk to each other) and 11% as failing all three (there are not two named female characters).

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Never Let Me Go via:

Diary: San Francisco

The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course wifi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.

Other days I think of them as the company buses by which the coal miners get deposited at the minehead, and the work schedule involved would make a pit owner feel at home. Silicon Valley has long been famous for its endless work hours, for sucking in the young for decades of sixty or seventy-hour weeks, and the much celebrated perks on many jobsites – nap rooms, chefs, gyms, laundry – are meant to make spending most of your life at work less hideous. The biotech industry is following the same game plan. There are hundreds of luxury buses serving mega-corporations down the peninsula, but we refer to them in the singular, as the Google Bus, and we – by which I mean people I know, people who’ve lived here a while, and mostly people who don’t work in the industry – talk about them a lot. Parisians probably talked about the Prussian army a lot too, in the day.

My brother says that the first time he saw one unload its riders he thought they were German tourists – neatly dressed, uncool, a little out of place, blinking in the light as they emerged from their pod. The tech workers, many of them new to the region, are mostly white or Asian male nerds in their twenties and thirties; you often hear that to be over fifty in that world is to be a fossil, and the two founders of Google (currently tied for 13th richest person on earth) are not yet forty. (...)

The Google Bus means so many things. It means that the minions of the non-petroleum company most bent on world domination can live in San Francisco but work in Silicon Valley without going through a hair-raising commute by car – I overheard someone note recently that the buses shortened her daily commute to 3.5 hours from 4.5. It means that unlike gigantic employers in other times and places, the corporations of Silicon Valley aren’t much interested in improving public transport, and in fact the many corporations providing private transport are undermining the financial basis for the commuter train. It means that San Francisco, capital of the west from the Gold Rush to some point in the 20th century when Los Angeles overshadowed it, is now a bedroom community for the tech capital of the world at the other end of the peninsula.

There are advantages to being an edge, as California long was, but Silicon Valley has made us the centre. Five of the six most-visited websites in the world are here, in ranked order: Facebook, Google, YouTube (which Google owns), Yahoo! and Wikipedia. (Number five is a Chinese-language site.) If corporations founded by Stanford alumni were to form an independent nation, it would be the tenth largest economy in the world, with an annual revenue of $2.7 trillion, as some professors at that university recently calculated. Another new report says: ‘If the internet was a country, its gross domestic product would eclipse all others but four within four years.’ (...)

I weathered the dot-com boom of the late 1990s as an observer, but I sold my apartment to a Google engineer last year and ventured out into both the rental market (for the short term) and home buying market (for the long term) with confidence that my long standing in this city and respectable finances would open a path. That confidence got crushed fast. It turned out that the competition for any apartment in San Francisco was so intense that you had to respond to the listings – all on San Francisco-based Craigslist of course, the classifieds website that whittled away newspaper ad revenue nationally – within a few hours of their posting to receive a reply from the landlord or agency. The listings for both rentals and homes for sale often mentioned their proximity to the Google or Apple bus stops.

At the actual open houses, dozens of people who looked like students would show up with chequebooks and sheaves of resumés and other documents and pack the house, literally: it was like a cross between being at a rock concert without a band and the Hotel Rwanda. There were rumours that these young people were starting bidding wars, offering a year’s rent in advance, offering far more than was being asked. These rumours were confirmed. Evictions went back up the way they did during the dot-com bubble. Most renters have considerable protection from both rent hikes and evictions in San Francisco, but there are ways around the latter, ways that often lead to pitched legal battles, and sometimes illegal ones. Owners have the right to evict a tenant to occupy the apartment itself (a right often abused; an evicted friend of mine found a new home next door to his former landlord and is watching with an eagle eye to see if the guy really dwells there for the requisite three years). Statewide, the Ellis Act allows landlords to evict all tenants and remove the property from the rental market, a manoeuvre often deployed to convert a property to flats for sale. As for rent control, it makes many landlords restless with stable tenants, since you can charge anything you like on a vacant apartment – and they do.

by Rebecca Solnit, LRB |  Read more:

Image: San Francisco Wikimedia Commons

Ignacio Iturria, Pileta Con Chica Rubia
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California Poised to Implement First Electronic License Plates

[ed. What's not to like? Moving wiretaps AND a new source of advertising revenue. Who says America has lost its innovative spark?]

This week, the California State Senate approved a bill that would create the nation’s first electronic license plate. Having already passed the state’s assembly, the bill now goes to Gov. Jerry Brown (D) for his signature.

The idea is that rather than have a static piece of printed metal adorned with stickers to display proper registration, the plate would be a screen that could wirelessly (likely over a mobile data network) receive updates from a central server to display that same information. In an example shown by a South Carolina vendor, messages such as “STOLEN,” “EXPIRED,” or something similar could also be displayed on a license plate. (...)

State isn’t getting location data directly, for now

Not surprisingly, though, privacy concerns abound. After all, if the state’s authorities can send and receive data to your digital license plate, then they have to know where you are. That would make the use of the increasingly ubiquitous license plate readers completely irrelevant—law enforcement likely would be able to either directly access location data in real-time and/or get historical travel data.

The state senator who introduced the bill, Sen. Ben Hueso, a Democrat who represents San Diego, did not respond to Ars’ multiple requests for an interview or comment. It still remains unclear as to exactly why this bill was proposed and what its objectives are. The precise technical details of the program are similarly unclear, as is how long plate information would be retained and who would have access to it.

“We've been talking to Sen. Hueso on the bill, and it's gotten some amendments that address some of the location privacy issues—within the pilot, the DMV would not be receiving any location information,” Lee Tien, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars. “But the company that operates the plates would [have access, and] they are going to be controlling what's on the plates.”

The privacy advocate likened the proposed system to a moving wiretap that reveals an individual’s vehicle location constantly. (...)

But the state senate’s five-page analysis (PDF) notes that one San Francisco-based company would stand to gain from this test, particularly if it gets the green light:

A supporter of this bill is Smart Plate Mobile, a company that holds a patent on a digital electronic license plate, which is essentially a computer screen that can take on the size and appearance of a standard California license plate (i.e., a 12” by 6” white, reflectorized rectangle with blue characters and “California” in red across the top). This product also allows that screen, once a vehicle comes to a stop for four seconds or longer, to display a different image on the plate such as an advertisement.

by Cyrus Farivar, ARS Technica |  Read more:
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Drone Skies: The Unmanned Aircraft Revolution Is Coming

It's a quiet morning in San Francisco, with soft sunlight illuminating patches of thick fog billowing over the Golden Gate Bridge. A solitary unmanned aircraft—a 4-pound, battery-powered wedge of impact-resistant foam with a 54-inch wingspan, a single pusher-propeller in the rear, and a GoPro video camera attached to its body—quietly approaches the landmark.

Raphael "Trappy" Pirker controls the aircraft from a nearby hill. The bridge is within sight, but the 29-year-old enjoys the scenery through virtual-reality goggles strapped to his head. The drone's-eye view is broadcast to the goggles, giving Pirker a streaming image of the bridge that grows larger as he guides the radio-controlled aircraft closer.

Pirker, a multilingual Austrian and a master's student at the University of Zurich, is a cofounder of a group of radio-control-aircraft enthusiasts and parts salesmen called Team BlackSheep. This California flight is the last stop of the international group's U.S. tour. Highlights included flights over the Hoover Dam, in Monument Valley, down the Las Vegas Strip, and through the Grand Canyon. The team has also flown above Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Berlin, London, and Istanbul. (...)

Team BlackSheep is willfully—gleefully, really—flying through loopholes in the regulation of American airspace. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allows unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to fly as long as their operators keep them in sight, fly below 400 feet, and avoid populated areas and airports.

The FAA also forbids any drone to be flown for business purposes. "In the U.S. right now, it's completely open, so long as you do it for noncommercial purposes," Pirker says. "The cool thing is that this is still relatively new. None of the laws are specifically written against or for what we do." (...)

Federal, state, and local agencies can apply for FAA waivers to be able to put drones to work. Although the process is cumbersome and time-consuming, there has been a sharp rise in requests (see "Rising Drone Demand," page 81). For example, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) operates a fleet of 21 T-Hawks, ducted-fan UAS that can be readied for takeoff in 10 minutes and can ascend to altitudes of 8000 feet. The USGS has obtained permission to use these craft to view hard-to-reach cliff art, track wildlife, inspect dams, and fight forest fires. Others are not so lucky. Last year the FAA grounded a $75,000 drone that the state of Hawaii bought to conduct aerial surveillance over Honolulu Harbor. The agency would not waive the rules because the flights were too close to Honolulu International Airport.

In a bid to force a reassessment of the regulations, Congress in 2012 ordered the FAA to open the National Airspace System (NAS) to unmanned aircraft. The law sets a deadline of 2015 for the FAA to create regulations and technical requirements that will integrate drones into the NAS. "Once the rules of the air are established, you're going to see this market really take off," predicts Ben Gielow, a lobbyist for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

The FAA predicts that, because of the law's passage, 30,000 public and private flying robots will be soaring in the national airspace by 2030. For a sense of scale, 350,000 aircraft are currently registered with the FAA, and 50,000 fly over America every day.

Some experts express alarm at the prospect of tens of thousands of extra aircraft flying in the already cramped U.S. airspace. "To most of us air traffic controllers, it's unimaginable. But we're also smart enough to know it's coming," says Chris Stephenson, an operations coordinator with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. "I refer to UAS as the tsunami that's headed for the front porch."

by Richard Whittle, Popular Mechanics |  Read more:

Image: Craig Cutler

Meet the Flexians

One Sunday last May, anthropologist Janine Wedel was standing in the security line at Washington’s Reagan National Airport, about to embark on a few days of field research among members of an enigmatic modern tribe. She was, to be precise, on her way to a hedge fund industry conference in Miami Beach. A petite woman in her early 50s with large, hazel eyes, Wedel wore a pink dress, heels, elaborately coiffed hair, and conservatively thick makeup. She was a picture of non-threatening propriety, costumed to move among the financial elite just as an old-time anthropologist might have worn a sarong to study inhabitants in the South Pacific.

A professor at George Mason University, Wedel has spent nearly two decades combining the tools of anthropology—old-fashioned ethnographic field research and social-network analysis—with computational social science to study one of Americans’ favorite fears: corruption. A 2012 Gallup poll found that 87 percent of Americans thought it was extremely or very important to fight corruption in the federal government, second on their list of priorities behind “creating good jobs.”

But what exactly is corruption? In an inverse of the way the Inuits of Nunavik supposedly have 53 words for snow, Americans use the word corruption to collapse dozens of distinct types of badness, ranging from bribery to fraud, extortion, vote fixing, drug trafficking, embezzlement, favoritism, prostitution scandals, money laundering, poorly monitored campaign contributions, and tax evasion. Corruption is such a vague category that its best definition is circular: Corruption is the stuff that crooks do.

Judging from public opinion, you might think that America is crawling with corruption. Survey after survey finds a precipitous falloff of trust in big institutions: Congress, the banking industry, religious institutions, the media. And yet going by some of the narrower definitions of corruption, the United States doesn’t have much of it. The World Bank basically equates corruption with bribes, and estimates that the world loses a trillion dollars to them every year. But the U.S. doesn’t have a big problem with bribery. According to a 2013 report by Transparency International, only seven percent of Americans surveyed reported paying a bribe in the last year—well under the global average of 27 percent. So what is wrong with us?

Across the political spectrum, there is a sense that something has taken control of the institutions that we used to trust. According to Wedel, that something is a new class of power brokers with a new set of cultural norms. Wedel calls these power brokers “flexians.”

A flexian, as Wedel defines the term, is a creature peculiar to our moment in history: a mover and shaker who serves multiple, overlapping roles with smiling finesse—business consultant, think tank fellow, government adviser. He is someone who “glides in and around the organizations that enlist his services,” she writes in her book Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. “It is not just his time that is divided. His loyalties, too, are often flexible. Even the short-term consultant doing one project at a time cannot afford to owe too much allegiance to the company or government agency. Such individuals are in these organizations (some of the time anyway), but they are seldom of them.”

Flexians aren’t people furtively violating the law by stuffing cash into a freezer or promoting their cousins. They are a professional class obeying a new, elite social code that practically requires bending old rules.

For an example, look no further than that TSA line. See the full body scanners? Thank a flexian. While Michael Chertoff was serving as the head of Homeland Security in 2005, the department purchased five Rapiscan body scanners. When he left government he formed the Chertoff Group, and Rapiscan became a client. After a Nigerian man with explosives in his underwear attempted an airplane bombing on Christmas Day 2009, Chertoff appeared on CNN and elsewhere, advocating strongly for more scanners. TSA put in an order for 300.

In Wedel’s analysis, Chertoff is a classic flexian, using his former role as a government official to enable his work as corporate champion, without always being upfront about his interests during his TV appearances. Were scanners what we needed to make flying safe? Was Rapiscan the best choice? Was it the best price? Who knows? All we know is that Chertoff was there, ready to position himself as a kind of fixer, spinning the interlocking gears of public fear, private interests, and Congressional appropriations.

Flexians are everywhere, once you start looking. As it happened, Rapiscan’s lock on U.S. scanner contracts was broken by L-3 Communications, maker of a competing body scanner, whose lobbyists included former FAA official Linda Daschle. By late 2010, the government had spent $39.7 million on L-3’s units. Daschle, of course, is married to Tom Daschle, a former senator who helped convince President Obama to set aside stimulus dollars for digitizing medical records—then advised private clients who were poised to profit from that money. He wasn’t registered as a lobbyist, but he did have a perch as an expert with the Center for American Progress.

Wedel, knowing the story behind the scanners and feeling they weren’t adequately vetted for safety, had no intention of walking through one. The TSA agents told Wedel she’d have to wait for a pat down. As the minutes ticked by, she started worrying about missing her flight. She didn’t think the old methods of insisting on her rights would work. So the demure-looking, pink-clad anthropologist, dressed to blend in among the financial elite, did something bizarre, conspicuous, and calculating: She began singing The Star-Spangled Banner at the top of her lungs. She figured the last thing the TSA wanted to read was the headline “Woman Arrested for Singing National Anthem.” In less than a minute, the agents sheepishly patted her down. And just like that, she blended back into her surroundings and went on her way.

by Lisa Margonelli, Pacific Standard |  Read more:

Images: Tom Nick Cocotos and Cade Martin

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Logo, Bullshit & Co., Inc.

[ed. For a variety of reasons a lot of people seem pretty exercised about the new Yahoo logo.]

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Anybody can make a logo. No doubt. It’s not complicated. Just try a couple of fonts and colors, choose the one you like, then change the font a little so it becomes special. Make it look nice. Blog about it, showing those magic construction lines. You can do it. All it needs is a little time, a computer, someone that knows how to use Illustrator, and taste, maybe. Everybody has taste, right? So let’s do it!

So thought Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer, and she went and did it. How did it turn out?

The Weekend

For the last month Yahoo has showcased its logo in a different font each day. The motivation was unclear. Did they want feedback in the decision process, or was Yahoo just trying to get attention from the design community? The new logo Yahoo unveiled at the end of this was not better or worse than the previous variations, and it appears it had already been chosen before this began. After unveiling that empty secret, Marissa Mayer wrote a blog post about the process:

We hadn’t updated our logo in 18 years. Our brand, as represented by the logo, has been valued at as much as ~$10 billion dollars. So, while it was time for a change, it’s not something we could do lightly.

Whether Yahoo needs a change in brand identity is hardly something we can decide from outside, not knowing exactly what the overall brand strategy is. It seems legit, because currently the Yahoo brand feels dead. Yahoo is still a massive online property, but it is as boring as it is big. Changing brand identity when you change strategy makes sense. So, even though it’s misleading to claim that the Yahoo logo hasn’t changed in 18 years, the time for a change is up to the CEO.

On a personal level, I love brands, logos, color, design, and, most of all, Adobe Illustrator. I think it’s one of the most incredible software packages ever made. I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous :)

There is nothing wrong with loving brands or branding as such (I do), logos in general (some do), colors (who doesn’t?) or a particular software program (okay, that’s a little weird). And it’s okay if you are not a pro at everything. But if, as the CEO, you work on a $10 Billion Dollar core brand identity, and you hack it out in a weekend, you are not being professional.

So, one weekend this summer, I rolled up my sleeves and dove into the trenches with our logo design team: Bob Stohrer, Marc DeBartolomeis, Russ Khaydarov, and our intern Max Ma. We spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday designing the logo from start to finish, and we had a ton of fun weighing every minute detail.

Let us assume that at Yahoo the logo design team (including the intern) is comprised of the best designers in the field. It is conceivable that, with some luck, this dream team can design a logo “from start to finish” over a weekend. It sure is fun “weighing every minute detail” with a team of outstanding professionals. And what is more efficient than working directly with the CEO on the brand identity? A dream setup. Also, it’s cheap. A weekend for a logo, instead of paying a branding agency millions and waiting months for something that can be done in a couple of days? That’s smart business!

Is it?

by Oliver Reichenstein, iA |  Read more:

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We Post Nothing About Our Daughter Online

[ed. Not sure what's most remarkable here: the paranoia, the OCD or the "helicoptering". In any case, it's a good example of the degree to which some people think they can control their digital lives and technology (...want to make some headway? Start by getting off Facebook!) Anyway, read the comments for a good laugh.]

I vividly remember the Facebook post. It was my friend’s 5-year-old daughter “Kate,” (a pseudonym) standing outside of her house in a bright yellow bikini, the street address clearly visible behind her on the front door. A caption read “Leaving for our annual Labor Day weekend at the beach,” and beneath it were more than 50 likes and comments from friends—including many “friends” that Kate’s mom barely knew.

The picture had been uploaded to a Facebook album, and there were 114 shots just of Kate: freshly cleaned and swaddled on the day of her birth … giving her Labradoodle a kiss … playing on a swing set. But there were also photos of her in a bathtub and an awkward moment posing in her mother’s lacy pink bra.

I completely understood her parents’ desire to capture Kate’s everyday moments, because early childhood is so ephemeral. I also knew how those posts would affect Kate as an adult, and the broader impact of creating a generation of kids born into original digital sin.

Last week, Facebook updated its privacy policy again. It reads in part: “We are able to suggest that your friend tag you in a picture by scanning and comparing your friend’s pictures to information we’ve put together from your profile pictures and the other photos in which you’ve been tagged.” Essentially, this means that with each photo upload, Kate’s parents are, unwittingly, helping Facebook to merge her digital and real worlds. Algorithms will analyze the people around Kate, the references made to them in posts, and over time will determine Kate’s most likely inner circle. (...)

There’s a more insidious problem, though, which will haunt Kate well into the adulthood. Myriad applications, websites, and wearable technologies are relying on face recognition today, and ubiquitous bio-identification is only just getting started. In 2011, a group of hackers built an app that let you scan faces and immediately display their names and basic biographical details, right there on your mobile phone. Already developers have made a working facial recognition API for Google Glass. While Google has forbidden official facial recognition apps, it can’t prevent unofficial apps from launching. There’s huge value in gaining real-time access to view detailed information the people with whom we interact.

The easiest way to opt-out is to not create that digital content in the first place, especially for kids. Kate’s parents haven’t just uploaded one or two photos of her: They’ve created a trove of data that will enable algorithms to learn about her over time. Any hopes Kate may have had for true anonymity ended with that ballet class YouTube channel.

Knowing what we do about how digital content and data are being cataloged, my husband and I made an important choice before our daughter was born. We decided that we would never post any photos or other personally identifying information about her online. Instead, we created a digital trust fund.

The process started in earnest as we were selecting her name. We’d narrowed the list down to a few alternatives and ran each (and their variants) through domain and keyword searches to see what was available. Next, we crawled through Google to see what content had been posted with those name combinations, and we also looked to see if a Gmail address was open.

We turned to KnowEm.com, a website I often rely on to search for usernames, even though the site is primarily intended as a brand registration service. We certainly had a front-runner for her name, but we would have chosen something different if the KnowEm results produced limited availability or if we found negative content associated with our selection.

With her name decided, we spent several hours registering her URL and a vast array of social media sites. All of that tied back to a single email account, which would act as a primary access key. We listed my permanent email address as a secondary—just as you’d fill out financial paperwork for a minor at a bank. We built a password management system for her to store all of her login information.

On the day of her birth, our daughter already had accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Github. And to this day, we’ve never posted any content.

by Amy Webb, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Hemera/Thinkstock

Eggplants in a Basket, Japanese (woodblock print) late Edo Period; Ukiyo-e; surimono
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They’re Taking Over!

It’s become fashionable to keep jellyfish in aquariums. Behind glass they can be hypnotically beautiful and immensely relaxing to watch. Unless we are enjoying them in this way, we usually give little thought to the creatures until we are stung by one. Jellyfish stings are often not much more than a painful interlude in a seaside holiday—unless you happen to live in northern Australia. There, you might be stung by the most venomous creature on Earth: the box jellyfish, Chironex fleckeri.

Box jellyfish have bells (the disc-shaped “head”) around a foot across, behind which trail up to 550 feet of tentacles. It’s the tentacles that contain the stinging cells, and if just six yards of tentacle contact your skin, you have, on average, four minutes to live—though you might die in just two. Seventy-six fatalities have been recorded in Australia since 1884, and many more may have gone misdiagnosed or unreported.

In 2000 a somewhat less venomous species of box jellyfish, which lives further south, threatened the Sydney Olympics. It began swarming at the exact location scheduled for the aquatic leg of the triathlon events. The Olympic Committee considered many options, including literally sweeping the course free of the menace, but all were deemed impractical. Then, around a week before the opening ceremony, the jellyfish vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared.

Most jellyfish are little more than gelatinous bags containing digestive organs and gonads, drifting at the whim of the current. But box jellyfish are different. They are active hunters of medium-sized fish and crustaceans, and can move at up to twenty-one feet per minute. They are also the only jellyfish with eyes that are quite sophisticated, containing retinas, corneas, and lenses. And they have brains, which are capable of learning, memory, and guiding complex behaviors. (...)

The box jellies and Irukandjis are merely the most exotic of a group of organisms that have existed for as long as complex life itself. In Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, biologist Lisa-ann Gershwin argues that after half a billion years of quiescence, they’re on the move:

If I offered evidence that jellyfish are displacing penguins in Antarctica—not someday, but now, today—what would you think? If I suggested that jellyfish could crash the world’s fisheries, outcompete the tuna and swordfish, and starve the whales to extinction, would you believe me?

Jellyfish are among the oldest animal fossils ever found. Prior to around 550 million years ago, when a great diversity of marine life sprang into existence, jellyfish may have had the open oceans pretty much to themselves. Today they must share the briny deep with myriad creatures, and with machines. It’s not just the wildlife they’re worrying. In November 2009 a net full of gigantic jellyfish, the largest of which weighed over 450 pounds, capsized a Japanese trawler, throwing the three-man crew into the ocean. But even mightier vessels have been vanquished by jellyfish. (...)

From the Arctic to the equator and on to the Antarctic, jellyfish plagues (or blooms, as they’re technically known) are on the increase. Even sober scientists are now talking of the jellification of the oceans. And the term is more than a mere turn of phrase. Off southern Africa, jellyfish have become so abundant that they have formed a sort of curtain of death, “a stingy-slimy killing field,” as Gershwin puts it, that covers over 30,000 square miles. The curtain is formed of jelly extruded by the creatures, and it includes stinging cells. The region once supported a fabulously rich fishery yielding a million tons annually of fish, mainly anchovies. In 2006 the total fish biomass was estimated at just 3.9 million tons, while the jellyfish biomass was 13 million tons. So great is their density that jellyfish are now blocking vacuum pumps used by local diamond miners to suck up sediments from the sea floor.

by Tim Flannery, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: David Hall