Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Rat Park and the Causes of Addiction
It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned -- and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.
If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves. (...)
If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.
One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.
The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."
But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexandernoticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?
In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.
But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more.
Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.
After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days -- if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is -- again -- striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)
When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense -- unless you take account of this new approach.
Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.
But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.
If you still believe -- as I used to -- that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.
This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. (...)
There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world -- and so leave behind their addictions.
This isn't theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them -- to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.
One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other's care.
The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I'll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass -- and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.
If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves. (...)
If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.
The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."
But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexandernoticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?
In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.
But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more.
Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.
After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days -- if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is -- again -- striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)
When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense -- unless you take account of this new approach.
Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.
But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.
If you still believe -- as I used to -- that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.
This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. (...)
There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world -- and so leave behind their addictions.
This isn't theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them -- to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.
One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other's care.
The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I'll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass -- and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.
by Johann Hari, Huffington Post | Read more:
Image via: i09
Soy Sauce Makes 'Miracle' Comeback
When the tsunami warning sounded, workers at the two-centuries-old soy sauce maker in northeastern Japan ran up a nearby hill to a shrine for safety, and watched in disbelief as towering waters swallowed their factory.
They all believed the business, started in 1807, and its precious fungal cultures that give soy sauce its unique taste were lost forever. Everyone except for Michihiro Kono, the ninth-generation son of the founding family.
Four years later, Yagisawa Shoten Co. has been saved through Kono's conviction, crowd-funding and the unexpected survival of its vital ingredient.
"If you don't give up, no matter how painful it gets, there will always be a way," said Kono, 41.
The March 11, 2011, tsunami killed nearly 19,000 people and set off meltdowns at a nuclear plant in the prefecture of Fukushima. In Rikuzentakata, Iwate prefecture, where Yagisawa is based, nearly 1,800 people were killed as sweeping waters reached as high as 17 meters (55 feet). Four years later, some 4,000 people still live in temporary housing in Rikuzentakata, mostly makeshift garage-like buildings.
Taking over as president from his father shortly after the disaster, Kono kept the company going even when it didn't have a single product to sell. The tsunami wiped out not only the factory but also the entire inventory. The damage was estimated at 220 million yen ($2 million).
As word of historic Yagisawa's plight spread, it got a lifeline from crowd-funding site Music Securities Inc. in Tokyo, which raised 150 million yen ($1.5 million) from sympathizers across the nation. Each supporter gave 10,000 yen ($100), half of it as investment and half as a straight donation. The company also got some government aid.
"We are a company in the boondocks and so we didn't know that much about crowd-funding. We did not have a very good image. We thought of takeovers like vulture funds," said Kono. "But it turned out to be a great system for a company like us."
From the start, Kono kept paying the salaries of his 38 workers, more than half of them women, and initially asked them to do volunteer work, distributing emergency food and clothing to tsunami victims. He believed a person without work would lose the mental energy to keep going.
Kiyoko Araki, 55, who lost her sister to the tsunami and still lives in temporary housing, recalled how grateful she was she could keep busy. These days, she is happily packing boxes with bottles of soy sauce for shipment.
A pungent scent wafts from the nearby six-ton vats filled with the dark sauce. What's wonderful about soy sauce-making is that it takes so long to make each product, each process requiring handcraft-quality care, Araki said.
"And soy sauce is seasoning every home needs," she said proudly.
Six other Yagisawa employees lost a family member to the tsunami. One employee died while doing his work as a volunteer fireman.
By May 2011, Yagisawa was selling soy sauce again, but products made by other manufacturers. Kono turned an old inn in Rikuzentakata into his office and then built a new factory in a nearby town on land vacated by a school. It began soy production in early 2013.
But resurrecting Yagisawa's soy sauce flavor would not have been possible if the original cultures had not been found, mainly by sheer luck.
The cultures were in storage at a university medical research laboratory where Kono had donated them for possible cancer-fighting research. The lab was destroyed by the tsunami, but the containers with the cultures were found nearby by its researchers, intact.
The sauce, made from soy beans and wheat, must sit for two years before it can be sold. That's why the sauce, given the name "Miracle," went on sale for the first time only in November.
They all believed the business, started in 1807, and its precious fungal cultures that give soy sauce its unique taste were lost forever. Everyone except for Michihiro Kono, the ninth-generation son of the founding family.
Four years later, Yagisawa Shoten Co. has been saved through Kono's conviction, crowd-funding and the unexpected survival of its vital ingredient."If you don't give up, no matter how painful it gets, there will always be a way," said Kono, 41.
The March 11, 2011, tsunami killed nearly 19,000 people and set off meltdowns at a nuclear plant in the prefecture of Fukushima. In Rikuzentakata, Iwate prefecture, where Yagisawa is based, nearly 1,800 people were killed as sweeping waters reached as high as 17 meters (55 feet). Four years later, some 4,000 people still live in temporary housing in Rikuzentakata, mostly makeshift garage-like buildings.
Taking over as president from his father shortly after the disaster, Kono kept the company going even when it didn't have a single product to sell. The tsunami wiped out not only the factory but also the entire inventory. The damage was estimated at 220 million yen ($2 million).
As word of historic Yagisawa's plight spread, it got a lifeline from crowd-funding site Music Securities Inc. in Tokyo, which raised 150 million yen ($1.5 million) from sympathizers across the nation. Each supporter gave 10,000 yen ($100), half of it as investment and half as a straight donation. The company also got some government aid.
"We are a company in the boondocks and so we didn't know that much about crowd-funding. We did not have a very good image. We thought of takeovers like vulture funds," said Kono. "But it turned out to be a great system for a company like us."
From the start, Kono kept paying the salaries of his 38 workers, more than half of them women, and initially asked them to do volunteer work, distributing emergency food and clothing to tsunami victims. He believed a person without work would lose the mental energy to keep going.
Kiyoko Araki, 55, who lost her sister to the tsunami and still lives in temporary housing, recalled how grateful she was she could keep busy. These days, she is happily packing boxes with bottles of soy sauce for shipment.
A pungent scent wafts from the nearby six-ton vats filled with the dark sauce. What's wonderful about soy sauce-making is that it takes so long to make each product, each process requiring handcraft-quality care, Araki said.
"And soy sauce is seasoning every home needs," she said proudly.
Six other Yagisawa employees lost a family member to the tsunami. One employee died while doing his work as a volunteer fireman.
By May 2011, Yagisawa was selling soy sauce again, but products made by other manufacturers. Kono turned an old inn in Rikuzentakata into his office and then built a new factory in a nearby town on land vacated by a school. It began soy production in early 2013.
But resurrecting Yagisawa's soy sauce flavor would not have been possible if the original cultures had not been found, mainly by sheer luck.
The cultures were in storage at a university medical research laboratory where Kono had donated them for possible cancer-fighting research. The lab was destroyed by the tsunami, but the containers with the cultures were found nearby by its researchers, intact.
The sauce, made from soy beans and wheat, must sit for two years before it can be sold. That's why the sauce, given the name "Miracle," went on sale for the first time only in November.
by Yuri Kageyama, AP | Read more:
Image: Eugene Hoshiko
Monday, March 9, 2015
Kino
The man always sat in the same seat, the stool farthest down the counter. When it wasn’t occupied, that is, but it was nearly always free. The bar was seldom crowded, and that particular seat was the most inconspicuous and the least comfortable. A staircase in the back made the ceiling slanted and low, so it was hard to stand up there without bumping your head. The man was tall, yet, for some reason, preferred that cramped, narrow spot.
Kino remembered the first time the man had come to his bar. His appearance had immediately caught Kino’s eye—the bluish shaved head, the thin build yet broad shoulders, the keen glint in his eye, the prominent cheekbones and wide forehead. He looked to be in his early thirties, and he wore a long gray raincoat, though it wasn’t raining. At first, Kino tagged him as a yakuza, and was on his guard around him. It was seven-thirty, on a chilly mid-April evening, and the bar was empty. The man chose the seat at the end of the counter, took off his coat, and in a quiet voice ordered a beer, then silently read a thick book. After half an hour, finished with the beer, he raised his hand an inch or two to motion Kino over, and ordered a whiskey. “Which brand?” Kino asked, but the man said he had no preference.
“Just an ordinary sort of Scotch. A double. Add an equal amount of water and a little bit of ice, if you would.”
Kino poured some White Label into a glass, added the same amount of water and two small, nicely formed ice cubes. The man took a sip, scrutinized the glass, and narrowed his eyes. “This will do fine.”
He read for another half hour, then stood up and paid his bill in cash. He counted out exact change so that he wouldn’t get any coins back. Kino breathed a small sigh of relief as soon as he was out the door. But after the man had left his presence remained. As Kino stood behind the counter, he glanced up occasionally at the seat the man had occupied, half expecting him still to be there, raising his hand a couple of inches to order something.
The man began coming regularly to Kino’s bar. Once, at most twice, a week. He would invariably have a beer first, then a whiskey. Sometimes he would study the day’s menu on the blackboard and order a light meal.
The man hardly ever said a word. He always came fairly early in the evening, a book tucked under his arm, which he would place on the counter. Whenever he got tired of reading (at least, Kino guessed that he was tired), he looked up from the page and studied the bottles of liquor lined up on the shelves in front of him, as if examining a series of unusual taxidermied animals from faraway lands.
Once Kino got used to the man, though, he never felt uncomfortable around him, even when it was just the two of them. Kino never spoke much himself, and didn’t find it hard to remain silent around others. While the man read, Kino did what he would do if he were alone—wash dishes, prepare sauces, choose records to play, or page through the newspaper.
Kino didn’t know the man’s name. He was just a regular customer who came to the bar, enjoyed a beer and a whiskey, read silently, paid in cash, then left. He never bothered anybody else. What more did Kino need to know about him?
Back in college, Kino had been a standout middle-distance runner, but in his junior year he’d torn his Achilles tendon and had to give up on the idea of joining a corporate track team. After graduation, on his coach’s recommendation, he got a job at a sports-equipment company, and he stayed there for seventeen years. At work, he was in charge of persuading sports stores to stock his brand of running shoes and leading athletes to try them out. The company, a mid-level firm headquartered in Okayama, was far from well known, and lacked the financial power of a Nike or an Adidas to draw up exclusive contracts with the world’s best runners. Still, it made carefully handcrafted shoes for top athletes, and quite a few swore by its products. “Do an honest job and it will pay off” was the slogan of the company’s founder, and that low-key, somewhat anachronistic approach suited Kino’s personality. Even a taciturn, unsociable man like him was able to make a go of sales. Actually, it was because of his personality that coaches trusted him and athletes took a liking to him. He listened carefully to each runner’s needs, and made sure that the head of manufacturing got all the details. The pay wasn’t much to speak of, but he found the job engaging and satisfying. Although he couldn’t run anymore himself, he loved seeing the runners race around the track, their form textbook perfect.
When Kino quit his job, it wasn’t because he was dissatisfied with his work but because he discovered that his wife was having an affair with his best friend at the company. Kino spent more time out on the road than at home in Tokyo. He’d stuff a large gym bag full of shoe samples and make the rounds of sporting-goods stores all over Japan, also visiting local colleges and companies that sponsored track teams. His wife and his colleague started sleeping together while he was away. Kino wasn’t the type who easily picked up on clues. He thought everything was fine with his marriage, and nothing his wife said or did tipped him off to the contrary. If he hadn’t happened to come home from a business trip a day early, he might never have discovered what was going on.
When he got back to Tokyo that day, he went straight to his condo in Kasai, only to find his wife and his friend naked and entwined in his bedroom, in the bed where he and his wife slept. His wife was on top, and when Kino opened the door he came face to face with her and her lovely breasts bouncing up and down. He was thirty-nine then, his wife thirty-five. They had no children. Kino lowered his head, shut the bedroom door, left the apartment, and never went back. The next day, he quit his job.
Kino remembered the first time the man had come to his bar. His appearance had immediately caught Kino’s eye—the bluish shaved head, the thin build yet broad shoulders, the keen glint in his eye, the prominent cheekbones and wide forehead. He looked to be in his early thirties, and he wore a long gray raincoat, though it wasn’t raining. At first, Kino tagged him as a yakuza, and was on his guard around him. It was seven-thirty, on a chilly mid-April evening, and the bar was empty. The man chose the seat at the end of the counter, took off his coat, and in a quiet voice ordered a beer, then silently read a thick book. After half an hour, finished with the beer, he raised his hand an inch or two to motion Kino over, and ordered a whiskey. “Which brand?” Kino asked, but the man said he had no preference.
“Just an ordinary sort of Scotch. A double. Add an equal amount of water and a little bit of ice, if you would.”Kino poured some White Label into a glass, added the same amount of water and two small, nicely formed ice cubes. The man took a sip, scrutinized the glass, and narrowed his eyes. “This will do fine.”
He read for another half hour, then stood up and paid his bill in cash. He counted out exact change so that he wouldn’t get any coins back. Kino breathed a small sigh of relief as soon as he was out the door. But after the man had left his presence remained. As Kino stood behind the counter, he glanced up occasionally at the seat the man had occupied, half expecting him still to be there, raising his hand a couple of inches to order something.
The man began coming regularly to Kino’s bar. Once, at most twice, a week. He would invariably have a beer first, then a whiskey. Sometimes he would study the day’s menu on the blackboard and order a light meal.
The man hardly ever said a word. He always came fairly early in the evening, a book tucked under his arm, which he would place on the counter. Whenever he got tired of reading (at least, Kino guessed that he was tired), he looked up from the page and studied the bottles of liquor lined up on the shelves in front of him, as if examining a series of unusual taxidermied animals from faraway lands.
Once Kino got used to the man, though, he never felt uncomfortable around him, even when it was just the two of them. Kino never spoke much himself, and didn’t find it hard to remain silent around others. While the man read, Kino did what he would do if he were alone—wash dishes, prepare sauces, choose records to play, or page through the newspaper.
Kino didn’t know the man’s name. He was just a regular customer who came to the bar, enjoyed a beer and a whiskey, read silently, paid in cash, then left. He never bothered anybody else. What more did Kino need to know about him?
Back in college, Kino had been a standout middle-distance runner, but in his junior year he’d torn his Achilles tendon and had to give up on the idea of joining a corporate track team. After graduation, on his coach’s recommendation, he got a job at a sports-equipment company, and he stayed there for seventeen years. At work, he was in charge of persuading sports stores to stock his brand of running shoes and leading athletes to try them out. The company, a mid-level firm headquartered in Okayama, was far from well known, and lacked the financial power of a Nike or an Adidas to draw up exclusive contracts with the world’s best runners. Still, it made carefully handcrafted shoes for top athletes, and quite a few swore by its products. “Do an honest job and it will pay off” was the slogan of the company’s founder, and that low-key, somewhat anachronistic approach suited Kino’s personality. Even a taciturn, unsociable man like him was able to make a go of sales. Actually, it was because of his personality that coaches trusted him and athletes took a liking to him. He listened carefully to each runner’s needs, and made sure that the head of manufacturing got all the details. The pay wasn’t much to speak of, but he found the job engaging and satisfying. Although he couldn’t run anymore himself, he loved seeing the runners race around the track, their form textbook perfect.
When Kino quit his job, it wasn’t because he was dissatisfied with his work but because he discovered that his wife was having an affair with his best friend at the company. Kino spent more time out on the road than at home in Tokyo. He’d stuff a large gym bag full of shoe samples and make the rounds of sporting-goods stores all over Japan, also visiting local colleges and companies that sponsored track teams. His wife and his colleague started sleeping together while he was away. Kino wasn’t the type who easily picked up on clues. He thought everything was fine with his marriage, and nothing his wife said or did tipped him off to the contrary. If he hadn’t happened to come home from a business trip a day early, he might never have discovered what was going on.
When he got back to Tokyo that day, he went straight to his condo in Kasai, only to find his wife and his friend naked and entwined in his bedroom, in the bed where he and his wife slept. His wife was on top, and when Kino opened the door he came face to face with her and her lovely breasts bouncing up and down. He was thirty-nine then, his wife thirty-five. They had no children. Kino lowered his head, shut the bedroom door, left the apartment, and never went back. The next day, he quit his job.
by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Michael Marcelle
President, What President?
[ed. Those crazy Republicans, what will they think of next? See also: this.]
Is that a bit hyperbolic? Maybe. But this news is nothing short of stunning:
A group of 47 Republican senators has written an open letter to Iran’s leaders warning them that any nuclear deal they sign with President Barack Obama’s administration won’t last after Obama leaves office.
Organized by freshman Senator Tom Cotton and signed by the chamber’s entire party leadership as well as potential 2016 presidential contenders Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the letter is meant not just to discourage the Iranian regime from signing a deal but also to pressure the White House into giving Congress some authority over the process.
“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system … Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement,” the senators wrote. “The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”It’s one thing to criticize the administration’s actions, or try to impede them through the legislative process. But to directly communicate with a foreign power in order to undermine ongoing negotiations? That is appalling. And just imagine what those same Republicans would have said if Democratic senators had tried such a thing when George W. Bush was president.
The only direct precedent I can think of for this occurred in 1968, when as a presidential candidate Richard Nixon secretly communicated with the government of South Vietnam in an attempt to scuttle peace negotiations the Johnson administration was engaged in. It worked: those negotiations failed, and the war dragged on for another seven years. Many people are convinced that what Nixon did was an act of treason; at the very least it was a clear violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits American citizens from communicating with foreign governments to conduct their own foreign policy.
This move by Republicans is not quite at that level. As Dan Drezner wrote, “I don’t think an open letter from members of the legislative branch quite rises to Logan Act violations, but if there’s ever a trolling amendment to the Logan Act, this would qualify,” and at least it’s out in the open. But it makes clear that they believe that when they disagree with an administration policy, they can act as though Barack Obama isn’t even the president of the United States.
And it isn’t just in foreign affairs. In an op-ed last week in the Lexington Herald-Leader, Mitch McConnell urged states to refuse to comply with proposed rules on greenhouse gas emissions from the Environmental Protection Agency. Never mind that agency regulations like these have the force of law, and the Supreme Court has upheld the EPA’s responsibility under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions — if you don’t like the law, just act as though it doesn’t apply to you. “I can’t recall a majority leader calling on states to disobey the law,” said Barbara Boxer, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, “and I’ve been here almost 24 years.”
by Paul Waldman, WP | Read more:
Image: via:
The Economics of Social Status
In economics, a good is anything that “satisfies human wants and provides utility.” This includes not just tangible goods like gold, grain, and real estate, but also services (housecleaning, dentistry, etc.) as well as abstract goods like love, health, and social status.
As an economic good, social status is a lot like health. They’re both intangible and highly personal. In proper economic terms, they are private goods — rivalrous and mostly excludable. And the fact that they’re hard to measure doesn’t make them any less valuable — in fact we spend trillions of dollars a year in their pursuit (though they often elude us).
But status differs from health in one very important respect: It can be transacted — spent as well as earned. It’s not a terminal good, but rather an intermediate good that helps us acquire other things of value. For example, I can trade some of my status for money, favors, sex, or information — and vice versa.
Health, if it’s possible to spend at all (e.g. in pursuit of career success), is extremely illiquid. But as I will argue today, status is so liquid — so easy to transact, and in real time — that it plays a fundamental economic role in our day-to-day lives. (...)
Let’s start with transactions, since they form the basis of an economy. Status is part of our system for competing over scarce resources, so it should be no surprise that it participates in so many of our daily transactions. Some examples:
In addition to participating in direct, X-for-Y trades like the above, status also functions as collateral or “table stakes.” (We often call this type of status “reputation.”) In many ways, a favor is like a loan (of time, energy, or some other resource) collateralized by the status of the borrower. It’s a weird kind of collateral, since it can’t be transfered to the creditor if the borrower defaults. But the borrower’s status can be destroyed or ruined, which provides incentive enough for most purposes. The bigger the favor, of course, the more status needs to be put up as collateral. This explains why it’s hard for a low-status person to ask a high-status person for a favor, but easy for a high-status person to make the request.
“Bidding for status” is another activity with economic characteristics. The nature of a bid is that it sets a particular ‘price’ that can be accepted or rejected. Robin Hanson suspects that speaking in public is a way of bidding for status. The very act of standing in front of a group and speaking authoritatively represents a claim to relatively high status. If you speak on behalf of the group — i.e., making statements that summarize the group’s position or commit the group to a course of action — then you’re claiming even higher status. These bids can either be accepted by the group (if they show approval or rapt attention, and let you continue to speak) or rejected (if they show disapproval, interrupt you, ignore you, or boo you off stage).
Similarly, every request for a favor is a complex bidding process (i.e. negotiation) framed largely — and often implicitly — in terms of status. When a manager, for example, gives a task to a subordinate, many nuances are involved in negotiating the ‘price’ of the favor in terms of the subordinate’s status:
As an economic good, social status is a lot like health. They’re both intangible and highly personal. In proper economic terms, they are private goods — rivalrous and mostly excludable. And the fact that they’re hard to measure doesn’t make them any less valuable — in fact we spend trillions of dollars a year in their pursuit (though they often elude us).
But status differs from health in one very important respect: It can be transacted — spent as well as earned. It’s not a terminal good, but rather an intermediate good that helps us acquire other things of value. For example, I can trade some of my status for money, favors, sex, or information — and vice versa.
Health, if it’s possible to spend at all (e.g. in pursuit of career success), is extremely illiquid. But as I will argue today, status is so liquid — so easy to transact, and in real time — that it plays a fundamental economic role in our day-to-day lives. (...)
Let’s start with transactions, since they form the basis of an economy. Status is part of our system for competing over scarce resources, so it should be no surprise that it participates in so many of our daily transactions. Some examples:
- We trade status for favors (and vice versa). This is so common you might not even realize it, but even the simple act of saying “please” and “thank you” accords a nominal amount of status to the person doing the favor. The fact that status is at stake in these transactions becomes clear when the pleasantries are withheld, which we often interpret as an insult (i.e., a threat to our status).
- An apology is a ritual lowering of one’s status to compensate for a (real or perceived) affront. As with gratitude, withholding an apology is perceived as an insult.
- We trade status for information (and vice versa). This is one component of “powertalk,” as illustrated in the Gervais Principle series.
- We trade status for sex (and vice versa), which often goes by the name “seduction.” Sometimes even the institution of marriage functions as a sex-for-status transaction. Dowries illustrate this principle by working against it — they reinforce class/caste systems by making it harder for high-status men to marry low-status women.
- We reward employees in the form of institutionalized status (titles, promotions, parking spots), which trade off against salary as a form of compensation.
- We can turn money into status by means of conspicuous consumption, or status into money by means of endorsement (i.e., being paid to lend status to an endeavor).
In addition to participating in direct, X-for-Y trades like the above, status also functions as collateral or “table stakes.” (We often call this type of status “reputation.”) In many ways, a favor is like a loan (of time, energy, or some other resource) collateralized by the status of the borrower. It’s a weird kind of collateral, since it can’t be transfered to the creditor if the borrower defaults. But the borrower’s status can be destroyed or ruined, which provides incentive enough for most purposes. The bigger the favor, of course, the more status needs to be put up as collateral. This explains why it’s hard for a low-status person to ask a high-status person for a favor, but easy for a high-status person to make the request.
“Bidding for status” is another activity with economic characteristics. The nature of a bid is that it sets a particular ‘price’ that can be accepted or rejected. Robin Hanson suspects that speaking in public is a way of bidding for status. The very act of standing in front of a group and speaking authoritatively represents a claim to relatively high status. If you speak on behalf of the group — i.e., making statements that summarize the group’s position or commit the group to a course of action — then you’re claiming even higher status. These bids can either be accepted by the group (if they show approval or rapt attention, and let you continue to speak) or rejected (if they show disapproval, interrupt you, ignore you, or boo you off stage).
Similarly, every request for a favor is a complex bidding process (i.e. negotiation) framed largely — and often implicitly — in terms of status. When a manager, for example, gives a task to a subordinate, many nuances are involved in negotiating the ‘price’ of the favor in terms of the subordinate’s status:
by Kevin Simler, Ribbonfarm | Read more:
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Boko Haram Bid To Join IS
Boko Haram's bid to forge an alliance with the Islamic State group in sub-Saharan Africa will provide only a propaganda boost for now, but in the long term it could internationalize a conflict restricted to Nigeria for nearly six years, analysts say.
The effort comes as both Islamic extremist groups have lost ground in recent weeks and as Nigeria's neighbors are forming a multinational army to confront Boko Haram.
By pledging allegiance to IS, Nigeria's home-grown militants have severed ties to al-Qaida, which is more powerful in the region, said Charlie Winter, a researcher at the London-based Quilliam Foundation.
Boko Haram has never been an affiliate of al-Qaida, but its militants fought alongside al-Qaida-linked groups during northern Mali's Islamic uprising two years ago, and some of its fighters have been trained in Somalia by al-Shabab, another group with ties to al-Qaida, according to the group's propaganda.
Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar Shekau, reportedly pledged allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in an audio posted Saturday on Twitter. It could take three or four weeks for IS to formally respond, as has been the case with affiliates in Egypt, Yemen and Libya.
An alliance "would lend a more imposing quality to Islamic State with its expansionist model," Winter said. The move was symbolically "a striking development," but he doubted it would "change things on the ground in either Nigeria or Iraq and Syria."
But "over time this pledge of allegiance might lead to the internationalization" of a threat that until now has been mostly confined to a single region of Nigeria with occasional spillover into neighboring countries, warned J. Peter Pham, director of the Washington-based Atlantic Council's Africa Center.
Boko Haram was little known until its April 2014 abduction of nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls from a school in the remote town of Chibok drew international outrage. At the time, al-Baghdadi praised the Nigerian insurgents and said the mass kidnapping was justification for the IS abduction of Yazidi women and girls in northern Iraq.
A partnership with IS could also be a recruiting tool. Fighters from IS franchises in North Africa who find it harder to migrate to the Middle East may choose to move to a Boko Haram emirate instead, Pham said.
The international support pouring into anti-Boko Haram forces from the United States, France, the United Kingdom and others "may render the Nigerian militants' fight all the more attractive to these foreign jihadists," Pham said.
The core of Boko Haram's estimated 4,000 to 6,000 militants is from the Kanuri tribe, which spreads across colonial-era borders in a region where people show stronger allegiance to tribes than states.
In August, Boko Haram declared it was reviving an ancient Islamic caliphate in northeastern Nigeria that spilled over those borders, in a move copying the Islamic State group. But Boko Haram's brutality, including beheadings and enslavement, predates and in some cases arguably exceeds that of IS, according to Pham.
Pham expects Boko Haram to engage in even more gruesome tactics if it wins the support of IS.
"The upcoming Nigerian elections and potential postelection upheaval provide too rich of a target environment for the jihadists to pass up," Pham said.
The effort comes as both Islamic extremist groups have lost ground in recent weeks and as Nigeria's neighbors are forming a multinational army to confront Boko Haram.
By pledging allegiance to IS, Nigeria's home-grown militants have severed ties to al-Qaida, which is more powerful in the region, said Charlie Winter, a researcher at the London-based Quilliam Foundation.
Boko Haram has never been an affiliate of al-Qaida, but its militants fought alongside al-Qaida-linked groups during northern Mali's Islamic uprising two years ago, and some of its fighters have been trained in Somalia by al-Shabab, another group with ties to al-Qaida, according to the group's propaganda.Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar Shekau, reportedly pledged allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in an audio posted Saturday on Twitter. It could take three or four weeks for IS to formally respond, as has been the case with affiliates in Egypt, Yemen and Libya.
An alliance "would lend a more imposing quality to Islamic State with its expansionist model," Winter said. The move was symbolically "a striking development," but he doubted it would "change things on the ground in either Nigeria or Iraq and Syria."
But "over time this pledge of allegiance might lead to the internationalization" of a threat that until now has been mostly confined to a single region of Nigeria with occasional spillover into neighboring countries, warned J. Peter Pham, director of the Washington-based Atlantic Council's Africa Center.
Boko Haram was little known until its April 2014 abduction of nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls from a school in the remote town of Chibok drew international outrage. At the time, al-Baghdadi praised the Nigerian insurgents and said the mass kidnapping was justification for the IS abduction of Yazidi women and girls in northern Iraq.
A partnership with IS could also be a recruiting tool. Fighters from IS franchises in North Africa who find it harder to migrate to the Middle East may choose to move to a Boko Haram emirate instead, Pham said.
The international support pouring into anti-Boko Haram forces from the United States, France, the United Kingdom and others "may render the Nigerian militants' fight all the more attractive to these foreign jihadists," Pham said.
The core of Boko Haram's estimated 4,000 to 6,000 militants is from the Kanuri tribe, which spreads across colonial-era borders in a region where people show stronger allegiance to tribes than states.
In August, Boko Haram declared it was reviving an ancient Islamic caliphate in northeastern Nigeria that spilled over those borders, in a move copying the Islamic State group. But Boko Haram's brutality, including beheadings and enslavement, predates and in some cases arguably exceeds that of IS, according to Pham.
Pham expects Boko Haram to engage in even more gruesome tactics if it wins the support of IS.
"The upcoming Nigerian elections and potential postelection upheaval provide too rich of a target environment for the jihadists to pass up," Pham said.
by Michelle Faul, AP | Read more:
Image: AP
Will You Need a New License to Operate a Self-Driving Car?
How do you train a driver not to drive? That’s a question officials in California are wrestling with. The U.S. state furthest along the road to self-driving vehicles is drawing up regulations for the operation of autonomous vehicles by the general public—and it may require motorists to undergo additional instruction or evaluation before they can be chauffeured by robots.
Self-driving cars promise a future where you can watch television, sip cocktails, or snooze all the way home. But what happens when something goes wrong? Today’s drivers have not been taught how to cope with runaway acceleration, unexpected braking, or a car that wants to steer into a wall. (...)
One problem is that regulators do not know whether self-driving technologies will arrive in production vehicles as optional features in luxury cars or as the master control of fully autonomous robo-taxis. Ryan Calo, who teaches a robotics law and policy class at the University of Washington, believes the distinction is crucial. “For an autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel, I’m not sure you need any more training than you’d get for a dishwasher,” he says. “But for a vehicle primarily meant to be driven by a human driver and that has an autonomous mode, I could imagine some additional degree of certification.”
Today’s experimental autonomous cars occasionally need to hand control back to their human operators, either because of a bug in the system or for something as innocuous as the car leaving a well-mapped area. These “disengagements” may require the driver to take action quickly. California takes disengagements so seriously that it requires manufacturers testing self-driving cars to log each one. “Today, drivers are not trained or tested for that change in control,” says Patrick Lin, director of the ethics and emerging sciences group at California Polytechnic State University. “Humans aren’t hardwired to sit and monitor a system for long periods of time and then quickly react properly when an emergency happens.”
Self-driving cars promise a future where you can watch television, sip cocktails, or snooze all the way home. But what happens when something goes wrong? Today’s drivers have not been taught how to cope with runaway acceleration, unexpected braking, or a car that wants to steer into a wall. (...)One problem is that regulators do not know whether self-driving technologies will arrive in production vehicles as optional features in luxury cars or as the master control of fully autonomous robo-taxis. Ryan Calo, who teaches a robotics law and policy class at the University of Washington, believes the distinction is crucial. “For an autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel, I’m not sure you need any more training than you’d get for a dishwasher,” he says. “But for a vehicle primarily meant to be driven by a human driver and that has an autonomous mode, I could imagine some additional degree of certification.”
Today’s experimental autonomous cars occasionally need to hand control back to their human operators, either because of a bug in the system or for something as innocuous as the car leaving a well-mapped area. These “disengagements” may require the driver to take action quickly. California takes disengagements so seriously that it requires manufacturers testing self-driving cars to log each one. “Today, drivers are not trained or tested for that change in control,” says Patrick Lin, director of the ethics and emerging sciences group at California Polytechnic State University. “Humans aren’t hardwired to sit and monitor a system for long periods of time and then quickly react properly when an emergency happens.”
by Mark Harris, IEEE | Read more:
Image: Randi Klett
Parenting School
How do you entertain a grumpy three-year-old? My strategy is generally: (a) panic; (b) rustle about in my bag for some breadsticks or – if she’s lucky – a colouring book; (c) hand over my iPhone and let her watch some cartoons – all the while worrying I’m stunting her brain development.
My friend, however, has a different strategy. One morning we were enjoying a coffee when, to distract her three-year-old daughter, she serenely reached into her bag and handed her a sheet of paper with six or seven three-letter words on it and a red pen. She then proceeded to read the words out at random, while her daughter correctly circled each one. It was impressive. I was horrified.
I’d never considered doing similar activities with my own daughter, just four months younger. Although we read to her before bed each night, I’d always assumed formal reading and writing was just something she’d pick up when she went to school. Perhaps I’d got it terribly wrong.
About a week later, when dropping my daughter off at nursery, I was handed a leaflet about parenting classes. Like many mums, no one taught me how to raise my children – I’ve simply muddled by on instinct and the odd book. But perhaps there’s a more evidence-based way to raise happy and successful kids. Maybe I needed to enrol at Parent School.
Trends in parenting have waxed and waned over the years. Although once upon a time, new parents simply fell back on the wisdom and experience of their extended families, doctors started getting involved from the late 19th century onwards. Today there’s no shortage of Supernannys, paediatricians and psychiatrists serving up often conflicting parenting advice. New parents can choose any number of approaches: attachment parenting, minimalist parenting, Tiger Mom parenting. (...)
All of this begs the question: which approach is best? Whereas many parenting trends reflect the opinions of a single psychoanalyst, paediatrician or nanny, CANparent’s providers claim to draw upon the latest scientific research about how children develop and say their strategies are “proven” to make a real, positive difference to families. Others, meanwhile, claim that such evidence-based parenting policies are based on distorted science and undermine parents’ confidence in their ability to raise their children.
“It transforms the meaning of family life,” says Jan Macvarish, who studies the impact of neuroscience on family policy at the University of Kent. “It says ‘we will be able to measure the quality of your family life by the intelligence or emotional intelligence of your child’.” (...)
One solution proposed by the current UK administration is parenting classes from birth – not just for poor families, but for everyone. “We know that the single most important factor in a child’s development is the quality of parenting, yet babies don’t come with instructions included,” says Vera Azuike of CANparent. “Everybody could use a little extra advice or support, but it has to be the right advice.”
Predominant among the classes offered by CANParent are those provided by an Australian company called Triple P (the Ps stand for ‘Positive Parenting Program’). Founded by clinical psychologist Matt Sanders, its original focus was helping children with aggression problems through a series of home visits and interventions drawn from social learning theory – the idea that children develop their model of values and behaviour from what they see and experience around them.
Triple P claims to be one of the few parenting programmes that’s scientifically proven to work, having helped hundreds of thousands of families in 25 different countries to deal with issues ranging from temper tantrums and disobedience to bedtime dramas and teenage rebellion in the 30 years since it was conceived. Today it’s a private company, managed by the University of Queensland’s technology transfer arm, although Sanders – who directs the University’s parenting and family support centre – remains actively involved.
“There are some key principles that we think are very important to children’s development,” he says. “The first is that kids grow up in an interesting and engaging environment with age-appropriate things to keep them busy. The second is that children will do better in a world of encouragement and positivity rather than criticism and putdowns. The third principle is really about boundaries and limits setting; parents should have clear ideas about what they expect of their children, and there should be consistent and predictable consequences if they break those boundaries.”
My friend, however, has a different strategy. One morning we were enjoying a coffee when, to distract her three-year-old daughter, she serenely reached into her bag and handed her a sheet of paper with six or seven three-letter words on it and a red pen. She then proceeded to read the words out at random, while her daughter correctly circled each one. It was impressive. I was horrified.
I’d never considered doing similar activities with my own daughter, just four months younger. Although we read to her before bed each night, I’d always assumed formal reading and writing was just something she’d pick up when she went to school. Perhaps I’d got it terribly wrong.About a week later, when dropping my daughter off at nursery, I was handed a leaflet about parenting classes. Like many mums, no one taught me how to raise my children – I’ve simply muddled by on instinct and the odd book. But perhaps there’s a more evidence-based way to raise happy and successful kids. Maybe I needed to enrol at Parent School.
Trends in parenting have waxed and waned over the years. Although once upon a time, new parents simply fell back on the wisdom and experience of their extended families, doctors started getting involved from the late 19th century onwards. Today there’s no shortage of Supernannys, paediatricians and psychiatrists serving up often conflicting parenting advice. New parents can choose any number of approaches: attachment parenting, minimalist parenting, Tiger Mom parenting. (...)
All of this begs the question: which approach is best? Whereas many parenting trends reflect the opinions of a single psychoanalyst, paediatrician or nanny, CANparent’s providers claim to draw upon the latest scientific research about how children develop and say their strategies are “proven” to make a real, positive difference to families. Others, meanwhile, claim that such evidence-based parenting policies are based on distorted science and undermine parents’ confidence in their ability to raise their children.
“It transforms the meaning of family life,” says Jan Macvarish, who studies the impact of neuroscience on family policy at the University of Kent. “It says ‘we will be able to measure the quality of your family life by the intelligence or emotional intelligence of your child’.” (...)
One solution proposed by the current UK administration is parenting classes from birth – not just for poor families, but for everyone. “We know that the single most important factor in a child’s development is the quality of parenting, yet babies don’t come with instructions included,” says Vera Azuike of CANparent. “Everybody could use a little extra advice or support, but it has to be the right advice.”
Predominant among the classes offered by CANParent are those provided by an Australian company called Triple P (the Ps stand for ‘Positive Parenting Program’). Founded by clinical psychologist Matt Sanders, its original focus was helping children with aggression problems through a series of home visits and interventions drawn from social learning theory – the idea that children develop their model of values and behaviour from what they see and experience around them.
Triple P claims to be one of the few parenting programmes that’s scientifically proven to work, having helped hundreds of thousands of families in 25 different countries to deal with issues ranging from temper tantrums and disobedience to bedtime dramas and teenage rebellion in the 30 years since it was conceived. Today it’s a private company, managed by the University of Queensland’s technology transfer arm, although Sanders – who directs the University’s parenting and family support centre – remains actively involved.
“There are some key principles that we think are very important to children’s development,” he says. “The first is that kids grow up in an interesting and engaging environment with age-appropriate things to keep them busy. The second is that children will do better in a world of encouragement and positivity rather than criticism and putdowns. The third principle is really about boundaries and limits setting; parents should have clear ideas about what they expect of their children, and there should be consistent and predictable consequences if they break those boundaries.”
by Linda Geddes, Mosaic | Read more:
Image: Thomas Slater
Saturday, March 7, 2015
The Death of Textbooks?
At a recent sit-down with executives representing one of the biggest players in the textbook industry, my colleague and I felt surprisingly out of touch.
The executives spent most of the meeting touting the evolving market, namely how their newfound allegiance to digital learning materials—rather than old-school physical textbooks—would place them at the forefront of the new wave of education technology. Rhetoric describing the company’s unmatched innovation pervaded the hour-long meeting; they raved about the company’s across-the-board shift to digital, how its new state-of-the-art materials comprise a "single roadmap" that is expected to make its generic, stodgy textbooks obsolete. They largely dismissed us as we—online journalists and Millennials in our mid-20s—reminisced about physical books that can be held, highlighted, and leafed through. And it quickly became evident that these men expected us to marvel at the company’s developments because, as soon as they noticed our eyes weren’t lighting up, they balked: "I don’t think you understand how groundbreaking this is," one of them said.
These executives certainly seem to have popular opinion on their side. Textbooks, which have long accounted for various subjects’ bulk of in-class learning materials, have garnered much vitriol in recent years. For some, the discontent starts as early as elementary school; heavy books can result in chronic back pain for children. But by the time those students are in college, textbooks are much more than a mere nuisance. What was once heavy burden on the back becomes an even heavier strain on the wallet. According to a recent College Board report, university students typically spend as much as $1,200 a year total on textbooks.
Nostalgia aside, it may come as a relief to many, then, that textbooks are becoming anachronistic. Digital in-class learning materials, like software that adapts to the ways in which individual students acquire information, and other forms of virtual education content are becoming more effective and intelligent. College-affordability advocates and others hope this growth could result in the normalization of less costly or even free materials down the road.
But as the executives failed to acknowledge in that meeting, the shortcomings of this trend—and its prospective impact on how humans learn—are worth keeping in mind. Many digital learning materials completely overhaul how classes, from pre-k to grad school, are conducted; how students are tested on knowledge; and how teachers fit into the picture. (...)
To find out what’s on the horizon for K-12 textbooks, I recently spoke with representatives (including the ones with whom I met at the sit-down) of two of the world’s largest textbook publishing: McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Both companies, as well as the industry’s other titans, are heavily focused on bolstering their digital arms in an apparent effort to dominate the booming virtual-content industry. Even Pearson, another behemoth in the textbook industry, now brands itself as a "digital learning and services company."
Houghton gave me a live demo of its language-arts program known as "Collections," an English course. The software essentially streamlines the process of analyzing and reviewing a text—think a teacher reading an excerpt, asking questions, and assigning an essay— on a simple interface. This interface allows kids to highlight material, take notes, and ask their classmates questions virtually. It even includes a "raise hand" button that a student can click to alert a teacher if he or she has a question. The program, moreover, pre-selects what it considers difficult or particularly wordy paragraphs, flagging them with a "Close Reading" tag; clicking this button opens up an brief explanatory video. Students can follow along with the audio version as they read the text—perhaps negating the need for the teacher to call on a student to recite the text out loud.
I also tried McGraw Hill’s math software: ALEKS, which stands for Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces, and is a web-based tool that assess students in mathematics, accounting, statistics, and chemistry. (The name alone—which, phonetically, sounds like a human—got me worrying about the prospect of a robot takeover, but I digress.) ALEKS launched in 1999 and operated for more than decade on its own before it McGraw Hill purchased it in 2013 and is predicated on "completely individualized learning"; the program adapts based on an individual’s knowledge and skill set. Behind the scenes, the software builds a database detailing the proficiency of each student, information that is then used to formulate questions tailored to kids based on what they find most challenging. Essentially, the program—which is based on 20 years of research by cognitive scientists, mathematicians and engineers—can instantly assess the individual abilities of an entire class of students at a rate that would be impossible for most teachers. (...)
Ultimately, these digitized materials are somewhat of a paradox. They are standardized at the top—the programs are aligned with the Common Core and rely on big data—but personalized underneath, customized around each student according to what the software gleans from assessments.
This shift also means that kids are spending more time than ever looking at screens, which could be physically and cognitively detrimental in the long run. The American Academy of Pediatrics, at least for now, recommends that kids spend no longer than two hours a day looking at digital devices. The shift is also taking a toll on the frequency that children engage in handwritten work, whichreports have shown is far more beneficial than taking notes on a laptop. And these changes could be disregarding how kids want to learn. Recent studies suggest that "digital natives" still prefer reading in print. One University of Washington pilot study of digital textbooks found that a quarter of students surveyed bought the print versions of e-textbooks that they were given for free, according to a recent Washington Post report.
Bill Buxton, the founder of the open-source publisher Textbook Equity, is skeptical of technology as a substitute for traditional learning materials. "I haven’t seen really strong evidence that people are doing a lot better with the online stuff than textbooks," he said. "Where’s the evidence? ... It’s coming from the biased companies; they want to make sure people buy it."
The executives spent most of the meeting touting the evolving market, namely how their newfound allegiance to digital learning materials—rather than old-school physical textbooks—would place them at the forefront of the new wave of education technology. Rhetoric describing the company’s unmatched innovation pervaded the hour-long meeting; they raved about the company’s across-the-board shift to digital, how its new state-of-the-art materials comprise a "single roadmap" that is expected to make its generic, stodgy textbooks obsolete. They largely dismissed us as we—online journalists and Millennials in our mid-20s—reminisced about physical books that can be held, highlighted, and leafed through. And it quickly became evident that these men expected us to marvel at the company’s developments because, as soon as they noticed our eyes weren’t lighting up, they balked: "I don’t think you understand how groundbreaking this is," one of them said.
These executives certainly seem to have popular opinion on their side. Textbooks, which have long accounted for various subjects’ bulk of in-class learning materials, have garnered much vitriol in recent years. For some, the discontent starts as early as elementary school; heavy books can result in chronic back pain for children. But by the time those students are in college, textbooks are much more than a mere nuisance. What was once heavy burden on the back becomes an even heavier strain on the wallet. According to a recent College Board report, university students typically spend as much as $1,200 a year total on textbooks.Nostalgia aside, it may come as a relief to many, then, that textbooks are becoming anachronistic. Digital in-class learning materials, like software that adapts to the ways in which individual students acquire information, and other forms of virtual education content are becoming more effective and intelligent. College-affordability advocates and others hope this growth could result in the normalization of less costly or even free materials down the road.
But as the executives failed to acknowledge in that meeting, the shortcomings of this trend—and its prospective impact on how humans learn—are worth keeping in mind. Many digital learning materials completely overhaul how classes, from pre-k to grad school, are conducted; how students are tested on knowledge; and how teachers fit into the picture. (...)
To find out what’s on the horizon for K-12 textbooks, I recently spoke with representatives (including the ones with whom I met at the sit-down) of two of the world’s largest textbook publishing: McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Both companies, as well as the industry’s other titans, are heavily focused on bolstering their digital arms in an apparent effort to dominate the booming virtual-content industry. Even Pearson, another behemoth in the textbook industry, now brands itself as a "digital learning and services company."
Houghton gave me a live demo of its language-arts program known as "Collections," an English course. The software essentially streamlines the process of analyzing and reviewing a text—think a teacher reading an excerpt, asking questions, and assigning an essay— on a simple interface. This interface allows kids to highlight material, take notes, and ask their classmates questions virtually. It even includes a "raise hand" button that a student can click to alert a teacher if he or she has a question. The program, moreover, pre-selects what it considers difficult or particularly wordy paragraphs, flagging them with a "Close Reading" tag; clicking this button opens up an brief explanatory video. Students can follow along with the audio version as they read the text—perhaps negating the need for the teacher to call on a student to recite the text out loud.
I also tried McGraw Hill’s math software: ALEKS, which stands for Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces, and is a web-based tool that assess students in mathematics, accounting, statistics, and chemistry. (The name alone—which, phonetically, sounds like a human—got me worrying about the prospect of a robot takeover, but I digress.) ALEKS launched in 1999 and operated for more than decade on its own before it McGraw Hill purchased it in 2013 and is predicated on "completely individualized learning"; the program adapts based on an individual’s knowledge and skill set. Behind the scenes, the software builds a database detailing the proficiency of each student, information that is then used to formulate questions tailored to kids based on what they find most challenging. Essentially, the program—which is based on 20 years of research by cognitive scientists, mathematicians and engineers—can instantly assess the individual abilities of an entire class of students at a rate that would be impossible for most teachers. (...)
Ultimately, these digitized materials are somewhat of a paradox. They are standardized at the top—the programs are aligned with the Common Core and rely on big data—but personalized underneath, customized around each student according to what the software gleans from assessments.
This shift also means that kids are spending more time than ever looking at screens, which could be physically and cognitively detrimental in the long run. The American Academy of Pediatrics, at least for now, recommends that kids spend no longer than two hours a day looking at digital devices. The shift is also taking a toll on the frequency that children engage in handwritten work, whichreports have shown is far more beneficial than taking notes on a laptop. And these changes could be disregarding how kids want to learn. Recent studies suggest that "digital natives" still prefer reading in print. One University of Washington pilot study of digital textbooks found that a quarter of students surveyed bought the print versions of e-textbooks that they were given for free, according to a recent Washington Post report.
Bill Buxton, the founder of the open-source publisher Textbook Equity, is skeptical of technology as a substitute for traditional learning materials. "I haven’t seen really strong evidence that people are doing a lot better with the online stuff than textbooks," he said. "Where’s the evidence? ... It’s coming from the biased companies; they want to make sure people buy it."
by Terrence F. Ross, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: McGraw Hill
Empire of the Pig
Pig number 5422 saunters into the pen, circles its few square metres and mounts a plastic stand. The farmer cleans the animal’s underside, feels around and draws out what appears to be a thin pink tube around 30cm long. He begins to massage. Pigs elsewhere snort, grunt or squeal, but the alpha pig is unmoved. Soon he has filled a thermal cup with more than 60 billion sperm. Around 150 pigs will owe their short, brutish lives to this emission.
A malty smell hangs in the air at the Fuxin Breeding Farm in Jiangxi province in central China, 10 hectares of low concrete barns and fields beside a small reservoir, which is home to around 2,000 pigs. The business was started four years ago by 31-year-old Ouyang Kuanxue. Mr Ouyang’s friends say he was destined to be a pig farmer—he was born in the Chinese zodiacal year of the pig—but his own explanation is more prosaic: when he came back to Pingxiang, his hometown, in 2003 after studying management at university in Beijing, he could not think what else to do. His grandfather was a coalminer who kept a few pigs. His father already had 100. He decided to expand.
Now the whole family is involved: together they have three farms with a total of around 5,000 swine. Mr Ouyang’s younger brother is in charge of production; his sister-in-law runs the office. The past year has been hard for them and other pig farmers, Mr Ouyang says, because pork prices have been low and feed expensive. But this lean year followed many fat ones. Mr Ouyang drives a Volkswagen SUV; his wife has a new Audi, wears a Cartier bracelet and runs two nail bars; they own an apartment in a new block in the local town. Mr Ouyang has a panoply of pig-related news feeds on his phone. Still, when he goes out for dinner with friends, he tends to avoid pork. (...)
The family’s good fortune is emblematic of China’s flying pig market over the past 35 years. Since the late 1970s, when the government liberalised agriculture, pork consumption has increased nearly sevenfold in China. It now produces and consumes almost 500m swine a year, half of all the pigs in the world. The tale of Chinese pigs is thus a parable of the country’s breakneck economic rise. But it is more than symbolic: China’s lust for pork has serious consequences for the country’s economy and environment—and for the world. (...)
For Mr Lei, as for many of his countrymen, the years of deprivation are well within living memory. Not surprising, then, that eating meat has become a symbol of triumph over hardship, as much a part of China’s transformation as the towering skyscrapers and glistening cities. Grandparents who once went hungry stuff their grandchildren with the treats they lacked—and top of the list is pork. The average Chinese now eats 39kg of pork a year (roughly a third of a pig), more even than Americans (who typically prefer beef), and five times more per person than they ate in 1979.
The most obvious impact has been on the pigs themselves. Until the 1980s farms as large as Mr Ouyang’s were unknown: 95% of Chinese pigs came from smallholdings with fewer than five animals. Today just 20% come from these backyard farms, says Mindi Schneider of the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Some industrial facilities, often owned by the state or by multinationals, produce as many as 100,000 swine a year. These are born and live for ever on slatted metal beds; most never see direct sunlight; very few ever get to breed. The pigs themselves have changed physically, too. Three foreign breeds now account for 95% of them; to preserve its own kinds, China has a national gene bank (basically a giant freezer of pig semen) and a network of indigenous-pig menageries. Nevertheless, scores of ancient variants may soon die out.
But China’s pigs are far from the only victims of their popularity. Demand for them worries the Communist Party, underpins what will soon be the world’s biggest economy and threatens Amazon rainforests. (...)
The Communist Party prizes self-sufficiency in food. Most of the pigs China eats are indeed home-grown. But each kilogram of pork requires 6kg of feed, usually processed soy or corn. Given the scarcity of water and land in China, it cannot feed its pigs as well as its people. The upshot is that Chinese swine, which previously ate household scraps, increasingly rely on imported feed.
Ms Schneider reckons that more than half of the world’s feed crops will soon be eaten by Chinese pigs. Already in 2010 China’s soy imports accounted for more than 50% of the total global soy market. From a low base, grain imports are rising fast as well: the US Grains Council, a trade body, predicts that by 2022 China will need to import 19m-32m tonnes of corn. That equates to between a fifth and a third of the world’s entire trade in corn today.
As a result, land use is changing drastically on the other side of the world. In Brazil, more than 25m hectares of land—parts of which were once Amazon rainforest—are being used to cultivate soy (Chinese companies have not signed up to the “soy roundtable”, a voluntary association, the members of which agree not to buy soyabeans from newly deforested land). Entire species of plants and trees are being sacrificed to fatten China’s pigs. Argentina has chopped down thousands of hectares of forest and shifted its traditional cattle-breeding to remote areas to make way for soyabeans. Since 1990 the Argentine acreage given over to that crop has quadrupled: the country exports almost all of its whole soyabeans—around 8m tonnes—to China. In some areas farmers harvest two or three crops a year, using herbicides that have been linked to birth defects and increased cancer rates.
A malty smell hangs in the air at the Fuxin Breeding Farm in Jiangxi province in central China, 10 hectares of low concrete barns and fields beside a small reservoir, which is home to around 2,000 pigs. The business was started four years ago by 31-year-old Ouyang Kuanxue. Mr Ouyang’s friends say he was destined to be a pig farmer—he was born in the Chinese zodiacal year of the pig—but his own explanation is more prosaic: when he came back to Pingxiang, his hometown, in 2003 after studying management at university in Beijing, he could not think what else to do. His grandfather was a coalminer who kept a few pigs. His father already had 100. He decided to expand.
Now the whole family is involved: together they have three farms with a total of around 5,000 swine. Mr Ouyang’s younger brother is in charge of production; his sister-in-law runs the office. The past year has been hard for them and other pig farmers, Mr Ouyang says, because pork prices have been low and feed expensive. But this lean year followed many fat ones. Mr Ouyang drives a Volkswagen SUV; his wife has a new Audi, wears a Cartier bracelet and runs two nail bars; they own an apartment in a new block in the local town. Mr Ouyang has a panoply of pig-related news feeds on his phone. Still, when he goes out for dinner with friends, he tends to avoid pork. (...)The family’s good fortune is emblematic of China’s flying pig market over the past 35 years. Since the late 1970s, when the government liberalised agriculture, pork consumption has increased nearly sevenfold in China. It now produces and consumes almost 500m swine a year, half of all the pigs in the world. The tale of Chinese pigs is thus a parable of the country’s breakneck economic rise. But it is more than symbolic: China’s lust for pork has serious consequences for the country’s economy and environment—and for the world. (...)
For Mr Lei, as for many of his countrymen, the years of deprivation are well within living memory. Not surprising, then, that eating meat has become a symbol of triumph over hardship, as much a part of China’s transformation as the towering skyscrapers and glistening cities. Grandparents who once went hungry stuff their grandchildren with the treats they lacked—and top of the list is pork. The average Chinese now eats 39kg of pork a year (roughly a third of a pig), more even than Americans (who typically prefer beef), and five times more per person than they ate in 1979.
The most obvious impact has been on the pigs themselves. Until the 1980s farms as large as Mr Ouyang’s were unknown: 95% of Chinese pigs came from smallholdings with fewer than five animals. Today just 20% come from these backyard farms, says Mindi Schneider of the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Some industrial facilities, often owned by the state or by multinationals, produce as many as 100,000 swine a year. These are born and live for ever on slatted metal beds; most never see direct sunlight; very few ever get to breed. The pigs themselves have changed physically, too. Three foreign breeds now account for 95% of them; to preserve its own kinds, China has a national gene bank (basically a giant freezer of pig semen) and a network of indigenous-pig menageries. Nevertheless, scores of ancient variants may soon die out.
But China’s pigs are far from the only victims of their popularity. Demand for them worries the Communist Party, underpins what will soon be the world’s biggest economy and threatens Amazon rainforests. (...)
The Communist Party prizes self-sufficiency in food. Most of the pigs China eats are indeed home-grown. But each kilogram of pork requires 6kg of feed, usually processed soy or corn. Given the scarcity of water and land in China, it cannot feed its pigs as well as its people. The upshot is that Chinese swine, which previously ate household scraps, increasingly rely on imported feed.
Ms Schneider reckons that more than half of the world’s feed crops will soon be eaten by Chinese pigs. Already in 2010 China’s soy imports accounted for more than 50% of the total global soy market. From a low base, grain imports are rising fast as well: the US Grains Council, a trade body, predicts that by 2022 China will need to import 19m-32m tonnes of corn. That equates to between a fifth and a third of the world’s entire trade in corn today.
As a result, land use is changing drastically on the other side of the world. In Brazil, more than 25m hectares of land—parts of which were once Amazon rainforest—are being used to cultivate soy (Chinese companies have not signed up to the “soy roundtable”, a voluntary association, the members of which agree not to buy soyabeans from newly deforested land). Entire species of plants and trees are being sacrificed to fatten China’s pigs. Argentina has chopped down thousands of hectares of forest and shifted its traditional cattle-breeding to remote areas to make way for soyabeans. Since 1990 the Argentine acreage given over to that crop has quadrupled: the country exports almost all of its whole soyabeans—around 8m tonnes—to China. In some areas farmers harvest two or three crops a year, using herbicides that have been linked to birth defects and increased cancer rates.
by The Economist | Read more:
Image: Getty
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