The Dangers of Going Gluten-Free

The first time Margaret Dron organized the Gluten Free Expo early last year, it was inside the gymnasium of a small community centre in east Vancouver. She had recruited one volunteer, two speakers, 38 vendors and expected 500 attendees. There was no entrance fee—instead, people were to bring gluten-free goods for the local food bank; three boxes were set aside for the collection. Six hours later, more than 3,000 people had turned out, and the volunteer had to call a one-tonne truck to pick up the donations. In one Sunday afternoon, Dron realized, “there is some serious potential here. So I quit everything I had, got an extension on my mortgage, and just dove in.” Since then, “it has blown up.”

That is to say, the Gluten Free Expo is now an annual affair in Toronto and Calgary, besides Vancouver. Next year, Edmonton and Ottawa will join the roster. About 10,000 people attend each weekend-long event, which is usually held inside a 60,000-sq.-foot convention centre. “And that’s getting tight,” says Dron. More than 200 vendors sell their offerings, mostly food items but also skin-care products and nutritional supplements—all made without gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye, and blamed for many digestive problems. Food donations are still accepted, but a $12 to $15 entrance fee has been implemented. “It’s gone from me begging [for] volunteer speakers to chefs and authors from all over North America requesting to come out,” says Dron. “It’s amazing.”

“Amazing” meaning lucrative, of course. Gluten-free products are a $90-million enterprise in Canada alone, and the sector is expected to grow at least 10 per cent each year through to 2018—an astounding feat for what is primarily a food-based category. In the United States, the market is valued at $4.2 billion and climbing. A landmark study by researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax, published in the Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research in 2008, revealed that gluten-free foods were, on average, 242 per cent more expensive than their “regular” counterparts, and up to 455 per cent pricier in some cases. “If I was to manufacture a product,” says Dron, “there is no way that I would not have a gluten-free option in today’s day and age.”

Manufacturers are getting the message—and not just small fringe businesses, but behemoth multinational corporations, too. Kellogg’s revamped its Rice Krispies recipe, first concocted in 1927, by removing barley malt (the source of gluten in the original) from its gluten-free version so it could advertise as a cereal “that’s easy for kids to digest.” Campbell Company of Canada claims to be the “first mainstream brand” to feature a gluten-free symbol on its soups and chilies. Tim Hortons hailed the introduction of a gluten-free menu item in mid-July—a chewy coconut macaroon drizzled with milk chocolate—as nothing short of a “defining moment in our Canadian dining history.” Wal-Mart Canada started selling gluten-free goods online this summer and offers free shipping no matter the order size. “They want to be the Amazon.com of gluten-free,” says communications specialist Tricia Ryan, who founded the Gluten-Free Agency in Toronto last August to help companies market their new products.

Business is booming for her, too, as the variety of products expands far beyond the oxymoronic “gluten-free pasta” and “gluten-free bread” lines. Items that consumers might never even think of as containing gluten are being tweaked, or at least rebranded, to meet the demand: soy sauce, salad dressings, potato chips, hot dogs, veggie burgers, licorice, pickles, spices, beer, vodka, toothpaste, makeup, protein powders, medicine, even playdough. Indeed, nothing is so sacred it can’t be reworked. Canadian churches can now purchase gluten-free or low-gluten Eucharistic wafers: $22.95 for 100 pieces. (...)

In the midst of this frenzy, it’s easy to forget the fact that only a tiny segment of the Canadian population is strictly prohibited from eating wheat by medical professionals—the roughly 35,000 people diagnosed with celiac disease. Another 300,000 are believed to be afflicted but undiagnosed. Their plight is severe: Just one bite of a glutenous food damages their small intestine and can cause a range of symptoms including abdominal pain, gas, bloating, diarrhea and constipation. The disease can lead to problems including “osteoporosis, anemia, sterility, even carcinoma,” says Peter Taylor, executive director of the Canadian Celiac Association. For them, “every day, every meal, every mouthful” is a matter of sickness or health.

But they are a small lot, certainly “not enough to make a business,” says Ryan. Rather, it appears that the gluten-free craze is being fuelled by the dietary choices of a much larger group of individuals known as “gluten avoiders”—seven million strong in Canada alone, the majority of whom do not have celiac disease or any other medically prescribed reason for eliminating gluten from their diet. Many say they experience gut problems, but their doctors can’t explain why or what to do about it. Some of these individuals turn to blogs and books for guidance on how to go gluten-free. In the process, they may learn of other rumoured benefits: weight loss, chief among them. They share their story with family, friends and co-workers, who in turn try going gluten-free, too. It’s for this crowd that the market grows. The gluten avoider group “is the driver for the gluten-free category,” says Ryan. “It’s the one that substantiates businesses making [these products].”

It’s also the segment of the population that has an increasing number of doctors across Canada confused and worried about the possible dangers of patients going gluten-free without talking to a health professional first. Gluten avoiders may spend money on foods that they don’t really need to eat, that may actually be lacking nutrition and causing them other problems. They may also miss out on important diagnoses, especially if they do have celiac disease and aren’t tested. All this has led doctors to debate in the pages of scientific journals and even out loud: Is Canada facing a new medical emergency about which little is yet understood or is this just the latest health fad gone wild? And most importantly, are gluten avoiders doing themselves more harm than good?

by Cathy Gulli, MacLeans | Read more:

Image: Liam Mogan

Swearing - the Language of Life and Death

Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly once said, ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’ The same could be said for swearing and taboo language, as this article explains. Swearing is a relatively new focus for psychology research but an apt one. From swearing in pain to swearing in foreign tongues, and several points in between, a number of investigators have begun to rise to the challenge of striving to understand the emotional power undoubtedly contained within some of the shortest of utterances in the lexicon. Here, then, is a brief introduction.

In 2004 my second daughter was born and, aspiring to be a modern dad, I stayed with and supported my wife through the labour. After a while it became clear that things were not going according to plan. This was mainly because our daughter was trying, unsuccessfully, to come out feet first. What followed was a very long and difficult labour for my wife, and towards the end her pain was such that she swore out loud. Indeed, she produced a rather impressive selection of expletives during each wave of agonising contractions. But as the contractions passed and the pain subsided, she became embarrassed and apologetic over having let fly in front of the nurses, midwives and doctors, only to redouble her efforts when the next wave of contractions struck. The staff, however, had clearly seen all of this before.

A midwife explained to us that swearing, four-letter words, cursing, profanity, bad language – whatever you care to call it – is a completely normal and routine part of the process of giving birth. Amid the joy at the arrival of our healthy daughter and the mental disorientation of a very difficult and emotional day, I found this fascinating.

When I eventually returned to my desk at Keele University School of Psychology I wondered why it was that people swear in response to pain. Was it a coping mechanism, an outlet for frustration, or what? I did some literature searching to find out what psychologists thought of the link between swearing and pain. To my surprise I could not find anything written on this topic, although there were some papers on the psychology of swearing more generally. Professor Timothy Jay of Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the States, whom I have since had the pleasure of meeting, has forged a career investigating why people swear and has written several books on the topic. His main thesis is that swearing is not, as is often argued, a sign of low intelligence and inarticulateness, but rather that swearing is emotional language. In his words: ‘Curse words do things to sentences that noncurse words cannot do’ (Jay, 1999, p.137). Indeed, Professor Jay is rather scathing at psycholinguists’ tendency to have largely ignored swearing. He says: ‘Linguistic definitions of language [that omit cursing] are ultimately invalid, although polite’ (Jay, 1999, p.11).

I spoke with colleagues. Two psychological explanations of why people might swear when in pain were put forward. The ‘disinhibition’ explanation was the idea that in the momentary stress of acute pain we enter a state of social disinhibition (a diminished concern for social propriety) and reduced self-control so that words and ideas that we would usually suppress are expressed. The other explanation was that swearing in response to pain represents ‘pain catastrophising’ behaviour. Pain catastrophising is an exaggerated negative ‘mental-set’ brought to bear during pain experience (Sullivan et al., 2001). Catastrophic thinking exaggerates the level of threat posed by a painful event and heightens the pain intensity experienced. While there was some plausibility to the idea of swearing being an expression of pain catastrophising, it also seemed illogical. Swearing as catastrophising would serve to increase feelings of hurt and discomfort, whereas most people seek to reduce the pain they are feeling.

by Richard Stephens, The Psychologist |  Read more:

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David Byrne

[ed. See also: Men I Might Regret Sleeping With Were It Not for the Music They Introduced Me To (Parts 1-3) and ( Part 4).

Mark Lague, San Francisco White
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[ed. Julie Andrews can no longer sing. A sad fact I didn't know about until today.]
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Google's Covert Role In Foaming Uprisings

[ed. Dang, missed this a couple weeks ago. Pretty interesting.] 

So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website.

The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. (...)

Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors.

Two months after my meeting with Eric Schmidt, WikiLeaks had a legal reason to call Hilary Clinton and to document that we were calling her. It’s interesting that if you call the front desk of the State Department and ask for Hillary Clinton, you can actually get pretty close, and we’ve become quite good at this. Anyone who has seen Doctor Strangelove may remember the fantastic scene when Peter Sellers calls the White House from a payphone on the army base and is put on hold as his call gradually moves through the levels. Well WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, pretending to be my PA, put through our call to the State Department, and like Peter Sellers we started moving through the levels, and eventually we got up to Hillary Clinton’s senior legal advisor, who said that we would be called back.

Shortly afterwards another one of our people, WikiLeaks’ ambassador Joseph Farrell, received a call back, not from the State Department, but from Lisa Shields, the then girlfriend of Eric Schmidt, who does not formally work for the US State Department. So let’s reprise this situation: The Chairman of Google’s girlfriend was being used as a back channel for Hillary Clinton. This is illustrative. It shows that at this level of US society, as in other corporate states, it is all musical chairs. (...)

Jared Cohen was the co-writer of Eric Schmidt’s book, and his role as the bridge between Google and the State Department speaks volumes about how the US securitocracy works. Cohen used to work directly for the State Department and was a close advisor to both Condolezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. But since 2010 he has been Director of Google Ideas, its in-house ‘think/do’ tank.

Documents published last year by WikiLeaks obtained from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, show that in 2011 Jared Cohen, then (as he is now) Director of Google Ideas, was off running secret missions to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan. In these internal emails, Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President for Intelligence and a former senior State Department official, describes Google as follows:

“Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do…[Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag”

In further internal communication, Burton subsequently clarifies his sources on Cohen’s activities as Marty Lev, Google’s director of security and safety and.. Eric Schmidt.

WikiLeaks cables also reveal that previously Cohen, when working for the State Department, was in Afghanistan trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto US military bases. In Lebanon he covertly worked to establish, on behalf of the State Department, an anti-Hezbollah Shia think tank. And in London? He was offering Bollywood film executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into Bollywood films and promising to connect them to related networks in Hollywood. That is the Director of Google Ideas. Cohen is effectively Google’s director of regime change. He is the State Department channeling Silicon Valley.

by Julian Assange, Zero Hedge |  Read more:

Image: Eric Schmidt via:

National Parks Try to Appeal to Minorities

[ed. See also: White People Love Hiking. Minorities Don't. Here's Why.]

Thrusting out into the Pacific Ocean, Olympic National Park can feel like a lost world, with its ferny rain forests, violent surf and cloud-shrouded peaks.

But to the four women who hiked down to the sand one recent afternoon, there was an added element of strangeness: race.

“We’ve been here for two days, walking around, and I can’t think of any brown person that I’ve seen,” said Carol Cain, 42, a New Jersey resident of Dominican and Puerto Rican roots, who was zipped up tight in her hooded, dripping rain jacket.

The National Park Service knows all too well what Ms. Cain is talking about. In a soul-searching, head-scratching journey of its own, the agency that manages some of the most awe-inspiring public places is scrambling to rethink and redefine itself to the growing number of Americans who do not use the parks in the way that previous — mostly white — generations did.

Only about one in five visitors to a national park site is nonwhite, according to a 2011 University of Wyoming report commissioned by the Park Service, and only about 1 in 10 is Hispanic — a particularly lackluster embrace by the nation’s fastest-growing demographic group.

One way the service has been fighting to break through is with a program called American Latino Expeditions, which invited Ms. Cain and her three colleagues. Groups like theirs went to three parks and recreation areas this summer — participants competed for the spots, with expenses paid for mostly through corporate donations — part of a multipronged effort to turn the Park Service’s demographic battleship around.

“We know that if we get them there, it can be transformative,” Jonathan B. Jarvis, the Park Service’s director, said in a telephone interview. A single positive park visit, he said, can create a lifelong pattern.

Easy to say, harder to achieve, Mr. Jarvis admitted. But the agency, in looking for a path forward, has also stumbled onto an unlikely team of allies — from outdoor outfitters to health and fitness advocates — all focused on the same thing: encouraging, supplying or simply understanding the young minority market. (...)

“The future is diverse,” said Scott Welch, a spokesman for Columbia Sportswear, which provided clothing to expedition groups this summer and has been working with GirlTrek. “If you want to be a brand for the future, you’ve got to embrace that.”

But the effort to diversify also touches some deep cultural grooves in American life that may not be as quick to change as a moisture-wicking outdoor shirt.

by Kirk Johnson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Matthew Ryan Williams

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:

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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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