[ed. This little guy hung out here all night and would not move. Figured he was either intoxicated or trying to sell me insurance.]
photo: markk
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality
At the top of the prestige pyramid, in highly selective colleges like those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our society make up around 5 percent of the enrollments. This meager figure is often explained as the consequence of a regrettable reality: qualified students from disadvantaged backgrounds simply do not exist in significant numbers. But it’s not so. A recent study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard shows that the great majority of high-achieving low-income students (those scoring at or above the ninetieth percentile on standardized tests, and with high school grades of A- or higher) never apply to any selective college, much less to several, as their better-off peers typically do. Their numbers, which Hoxby and Avery estimate at between 25,000 and 35,000 of each year’s high school seniors, “are much greater than college admissions staff generally believe,” in part because most such students get little if any counseling in high school about the intricate process of applying to a selective college—so they rarely do.
As for the colleges themselves, searching for more qualified low-income students and providing financial aid for them as well as for middle-income students are likely to require compensatory reductions in budgets for competing priorities. Scholarships for needy students can be solicited from donors—but there are “opportunity costs” in the sense that asking alumni to give to the scholarship fund precludes or reduces their giving for other purposes such as faculty chairs or a new dorm or gym. At my own university, which has lately raised billions of dollars in large part to finance a campus expansion, the percentage of college students receiving financial aid has, inexcusably, declined.
Meanwhile, at public institutions, which enroll many more students than private colleges—some 14 million of the roughly 18 million undergraduates who attend nonprofit colleges—subsidies to keep college affordable have also been dropping. Mettler points out that between 1980 and 2010, average spending on higher education slipped from 8 percent to 4 percent of state budgets. Some states have seen a modest recovery since the Great Recession, but recently the governors of Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Illinois have proposed new cuts.
As a result, the cost of public higher education has shifted markedly from taxpayers to students and their families, in the form of rapidly rising tuition. Between 2000 and 2008, the proportion of family income required for families in the bottom income quintile to cover the average cost of attending a four-year public institution rose from 39 percent to 55 percent. For top-quintile families over that same period, the corresponding rise went from 7 percent to 9 percent.
The story these numbers tell is of a higher education system—public and private—that is reflecting the stratification of our society more than resisting it. Those students who do get to college are distributed, like airline passengers, into distinct classes of service, but with incomparably larger and lingering effects. In 2010, private nonprofit universities, whose students tend to be relatively affluent, spent on average nearly $50,000 per student—with the wealthiest colleges spending nearly double that amount. At public four-year institutions expenditure per student was $36,000, while community colleges, where minority and first-generation students are concentrated and which stress vocational training and offer associate rather than bachelor degrees, could spend just $12,000 per student. Moreover, while the number of Pell grants for needy students has jumped over the last forty years from half a million to more than ten million, a Pell grant in the 1970s covered four fifths of total cost at the average four-year public university. Today it covers less than one third.
These numerical disparities have stark human consequences. Getting through college can be a challenge even for confident students with families on whom they can count to cushion the shock if a parent falls ill or loses a job, or if unexpected expenses arise. For students without such a buffer, college can be a very hard road indeed. Yet in our current system the relation between vulnerability and support is an inverse one. One result is that graduation rates are the same for low-income students with high test scores as for high-income students with low scores. In the United States today, three of every five children from families in the top income quartile earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-four, while for those in the bottom quartile the rate is one in four (see Figure 1).
These are indefensible realities in a nation that claims to believe in equal opportunity. Yet some people look at this picture and say that the whole idea of mass higher education was misguided from the start—that the United States should have emulated instead the European model of test-based tracking by which a select few are chosen early in life for university training that leads to public service or the professions, while the rest are channeled into vocational schools or the trades.
by Andrew Delbanco, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
As for the colleges themselves, searching for more qualified low-income students and providing financial aid for them as well as for middle-income students are likely to require compensatory reductions in budgets for competing priorities. Scholarships for needy students can be solicited from donors—but there are “opportunity costs” in the sense that asking alumni to give to the scholarship fund precludes or reduces their giving for other purposes such as faculty chairs or a new dorm or gym. At my own university, which has lately raised billions of dollars in large part to finance a campus expansion, the percentage of college students receiving financial aid has, inexcusably, declined.Meanwhile, at public institutions, which enroll many more students than private colleges—some 14 million of the roughly 18 million undergraduates who attend nonprofit colleges—subsidies to keep college affordable have also been dropping. Mettler points out that between 1980 and 2010, average spending on higher education slipped from 8 percent to 4 percent of state budgets. Some states have seen a modest recovery since the Great Recession, but recently the governors of Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Illinois have proposed new cuts.
As a result, the cost of public higher education has shifted markedly from taxpayers to students and their families, in the form of rapidly rising tuition. Between 2000 and 2008, the proportion of family income required for families in the bottom income quintile to cover the average cost of attending a four-year public institution rose from 39 percent to 55 percent. For top-quintile families over that same period, the corresponding rise went from 7 percent to 9 percent.
The story these numbers tell is of a higher education system—public and private—that is reflecting the stratification of our society more than resisting it. Those students who do get to college are distributed, like airline passengers, into distinct classes of service, but with incomparably larger and lingering effects. In 2010, private nonprofit universities, whose students tend to be relatively affluent, spent on average nearly $50,000 per student—with the wealthiest colleges spending nearly double that amount. At public four-year institutions expenditure per student was $36,000, while community colleges, where minority and first-generation students are concentrated and which stress vocational training and offer associate rather than bachelor degrees, could spend just $12,000 per student. Moreover, while the number of Pell grants for needy students has jumped over the last forty years from half a million to more than ten million, a Pell grant in the 1970s covered four fifths of total cost at the average four-year public university. Today it covers less than one third.
These numerical disparities have stark human consequences. Getting through college can be a challenge even for confident students with families on whom they can count to cushion the shock if a parent falls ill or loses a job, or if unexpected expenses arise. For students without such a buffer, college can be a very hard road indeed. Yet in our current system the relation between vulnerability and support is an inverse one. One result is that graduation rates are the same for low-income students with high test scores as for high-income students with low scores. In the United States today, three of every five children from families in the top income quartile earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-four, while for those in the bottom quartile the rate is one in four (see Figure 1).
These are indefensible realities in a nation that claims to believe in equal opportunity. Yet some people look at this picture and say that the whole idea of mass higher education was misguided from the start—that the United States should have emulated instead the European model of test-based tracking by which a select few are chosen early in life for university training that leads to public service or the professions, while the rest are channeled into vocational schools or the trades.
by Andrew Delbanco, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
The Misanthropic Genius of Joy Williams
A few years ago, the writer Joy Williams’s favorite church needed to dispose of a few extra pews after a renovation. Williams attends the church only in April and October, when her frequent cross-country drives take her to Laramie, Wyo., but she wanted a pew anyway. She borrowed a trailer, got a friend to help her load the pew and drove a thousand miles, pulling it behind her enormous Bronco, her two German shepherds in the cab with her. Now the long, dark pew lives in her house in Tucson.
When Williams was a child, her father was a minister at a Congregational church in Portland, Me. ‘‘He gave a beautiful sermon,’’ she said as we hiked through Arizona’s Santa Catalina foothills on trails she walks every morning. I asked if she had ever considered being a preacher like her father: Her stories often reveal themselves as parables, and her writing on the environment is equal parts fire, brimstone and eulogy. ‘‘Oh, no, I’m too shy,’’ she said, before lapsing into a companionable silence, the only sound her Chuck Taylors’ crunch on the trailbed. ‘‘Maybe that’s what I need,’’ she cawed suddenly. ‘‘A pulpit that I take from reading to reading with me.’’
Williams is wiry and tanned, her hands and face biblically wrinkled. She is 71. Years ago, she lost her eyeglasses before a university appearance and had to wear prescription sunglasses at the lectern; appreciating, perhaps, the remoteness they facilitate, she has worn them ever since at all hours of the day and night. Not unlike that church pew in her living room, the sunglasses seem like an act of disregard for everyday comfort, an eccentricity that makes everyone else uneasy but Williams more secure.
It was just after dawn, but already the air was stifling. We reached a summit, and Williams drank from her dogs’ scratched and dented water bottle. Fat black ants swarmed into a crevice near our feet. Atop a nearby hill stood a trio of saguaros, the bottoms of their trunks black from some recent fire or decades-ago disease. Miles away, a single impossible thunderhead dropped rain in curtains over the Sonoran Desert. Nothing we could see cared about us.
To call her 50-year career that of a writer’s writer does not go far enough. Her three story collections and four darkly funny novels are mostly overlooked by readers but so beloved by generations of fiction masters that she might be the writer’s writer’s writer. ‘‘She did the important work of taking the tight, minimal Carveresque story and showing that you could retrofit it with comedy,’’ George Saunders told me, ‘‘that particularly American brand of funny that is made of pain.’’
The typical Williams protagonist is a wayward girl or young woman whose bad decisions, or bad attitude, or both, make her difficult to admire: She drives away while her husband is paying for gas, or ransacks a houseguest’s room to read her journal. In Williams’s precise, unsparing, surprising prose, her characters reach for the sublime but often fall miserably to earth: ‘‘Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness.’’ She has a gift for sentences whose unsettling turns — ‘‘While she was thinking of something perfectly balanced and amusing to say, the baby was born’’ — force readers to grapple, just as her characters grapple, with the way life will do what it wants with you. Other writers I spoke to about Williams’s work expressed a sense of awe at the grandeur underlying her stories of weirdos and misfits. ‘‘She’s a visionary,’’ Karen Russell told me, ‘‘and she resizes people against a cosmic backdrop.’’
This month, Knopf will publish ‘‘The Visiting Privilege,’’ a collection of 46 stories that cements Williams’s position not merely as one of the great writers of her generation, but as our pre-eminent bard of humanity’s insignificance. The collection’s epigraph is a verse from 1 Corinthians: ‘‘We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.’’ When Don DeLillo called to talk about Williams, he quoted that verse back to me. Then he said: ‘‘This is the definition of the classic American short story. And this is what Joy writes so beautifully.’’
When Williams was a child, her father was a minister at a Congregational church in Portland, Me. ‘‘He gave a beautiful sermon,’’ she said as we hiked through Arizona’s Santa Catalina foothills on trails she walks every morning. I asked if she had ever considered being a preacher like her father: Her stories often reveal themselves as parables, and her writing on the environment is equal parts fire, brimstone and eulogy. ‘‘Oh, no, I’m too shy,’’ she said, before lapsing into a companionable silence, the only sound her Chuck Taylors’ crunch on the trailbed. ‘‘Maybe that’s what I need,’’ she cawed suddenly. ‘‘A pulpit that I take from reading to reading with me.’’Williams is wiry and tanned, her hands and face biblically wrinkled. She is 71. Years ago, she lost her eyeglasses before a university appearance and had to wear prescription sunglasses at the lectern; appreciating, perhaps, the remoteness they facilitate, she has worn them ever since at all hours of the day and night. Not unlike that church pew in her living room, the sunglasses seem like an act of disregard for everyday comfort, an eccentricity that makes everyone else uneasy but Williams more secure.
It was just after dawn, but already the air was stifling. We reached a summit, and Williams drank from her dogs’ scratched and dented water bottle. Fat black ants swarmed into a crevice near our feet. Atop a nearby hill stood a trio of saguaros, the bottoms of their trunks black from some recent fire or decades-ago disease. Miles away, a single impossible thunderhead dropped rain in curtains over the Sonoran Desert. Nothing we could see cared about us.
To call her 50-year career that of a writer’s writer does not go far enough. Her three story collections and four darkly funny novels are mostly overlooked by readers but so beloved by generations of fiction masters that she might be the writer’s writer’s writer. ‘‘She did the important work of taking the tight, minimal Carveresque story and showing that you could retrofit it with comedy,’’ George Saunders told me, ‘‘that particularly American brand of funny that is made of pain.’’
The typical Williams protagonist is a wayward girl or young woman whose bad decisions, or bad attitude, or both, make her difficult to admire: She drives away while her husband is paying for gas, or ransacks a houseguest’s room to read her journal. In Williams’s precise, unsparing, surprising prose, her characters reach for the sublime but often fall miserably to earth: ‘‘Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness.’’ She has a gift for sentences whose unsettling turns — ‘‘While she was thinking of something perfectly balanced and amusing to say, the baby was born’’ — force readers to grapple, just as her characters grapple, with the way life will do what it wants with you. Other writers I spoke to about Williams’s work expressed a sense of awe at the grandeur underlying her stories of weirdos and misfits. ‘‘She’s a visionary,’’ Karen Russell told me, ‘‘and she resizes people against a cosmic backdrop.’’
This month, Knopf will publish ‘‘The Visiting Privilege,’’ a collection of 46 stories that cements Williams’s position not merely as one of the great writers of her generation, but as our pre-eminent bard of humanity’s insignificance. The collection’s epigraph is a verse from 1 Corinthians: ‘‘We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.’’ When Don DeLillo called to talk about Williams, he quoted that verse back to me. Then he said: ‘‘This is the definition of the classic American short story. And this is what Joy writes so beautifully.’’
by Dan Kois, NY Times Magazine | Read more:
Image: Raymond Meeks
Google’s Driverless Cars Run Into Problem: Cars With Drivers
Google, a leader in efforts to create driverless cars, has run into an odd safety conundrum: humans.
Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.
Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you are a stickler for the rules. One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.
It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world in which humans don’t behave by the book. “The real problem is that the car is too safe,” said Donald Norman, director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, who studies autonomous vehicles.
“They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”
Traffic wrecks and deaths could well plummet in a world without any drivers, as some researchers predict. But wide use of self-driving cars is still many years away, and testers are still sorting out hypothetical risks — like hackers — and real world challenges, like what happens when an autonomous car breaks down on the highway.
For now, there is the nearer-term problem of blending robots and humans. Already, cars from several automakers have technology that can warn or even take over for a driver, whether through advanced cruise control or brakes that apply themselves. Uber is working on the self-driving car technology, and Google expanded its tests in July to Austin, Tex.
Google cars regularly take quick, evasive maneuvers or exercise caution in ways that are at once the most cautious approach, but also out of step with the other vehicles on the road.
“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
Since 2009, Google cars have been in 16 crashes, mostly fender-benders, and in every single case, the company says, a human was at fault.
Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.
Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you are a stickler for the rules. One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world in which humans don’t behave by the book. “The real problem is that the car is too safe,” said Donald Norman, director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, who studies autonomous vehicles.
“They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”
Traffic wrecks and deaths could well plummet in a world without any drivers, as some researchers predict. But wide use of self-driving cars is still many years away, and testers are still sorting out hypothetical risks — like hackers — and real world challenges, like what happens when an autonomous car breaks down on the highway.
For now, there is the nearer-term problem of blending robots and humans. Already, cars from several automakers have technology that can warn or even take over for a driver, whether through advanced cruise control or brakes that apply themselves. Uber is working on the self-driving car technology, and Google expanded its tests in July to Austin, Tex.
Google cars regularly take quick, evasive maneuvers or exercise caution in ways that are at once the most cautious approach, but also out of step with the other vehicles on the road.
“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
Since 2009, Google cars have been in 16 crashes, mostly fender-benders, and in every single case, the company says, a human was at fault.
by Matt Richtel and Conor Dougherty, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Gordon De Los Santos/Google
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Thoughts on Trump
To save myself from answering this question repeatedly, these are the thoughts I have had about Trump since he became a presidential candidate, which were partly expressed in a Politico article over a month ago.
First of all, I think his support is firm and shows no sign of diminishing. He has already weathered storms such as his criticism of John McCain that would have doomed any other candidate. Anyone who thinks he is the current version of Cain, Bachmann, Santorum or other nutcase that briefly led the GOP field in 2012 is dead wrong.
Keep in mind also that in primary elections, one doesn’t need majority support to win in a field with multiple candidates. And intensity of support is often more important than the percentage. Support for the designated favorite of party insiders is often exaggerated in polls and I think Trump’s supporters are unusually motivated.
Second, Trump’s positions on the issues are largely irrelevant to his success. None of his supporters care whether a wall across Mexico is remotely feasible or that he regularly flip-flops on the issues. What he is selling is attitude and a certain fascistic form of leadership. He will get things done, his supporters believe. And it’s less important what he will do than that he will do something.
Ironically, Republicans brought this on themselves in two ways. To begin with, they grossly oversold what they could do just with control of Congress. The Republican base really seems to have simply forgotten about the presidential veto or the Senate filibuster. They seem to have thought all they had to do was pass bills with a simple majority and they would magically become law. How else to explain voting over and over and over again to repeal Obamacare. It makes no sense unless my assumption is correct.
Additionally, Republicans are suffering from the gridlock that they themselves caused. We all know that nature abhors a vacuum, but I think it abhors gridlock as well. That has always been the appeal of fascism and it would be very foolish to believe that Americans are immune from its attractive qualities of getting things done that need to get done. And let us not forget that Trump is talking about genuine problems even if his solutions are simplistic or even wrongheaded.
My third point in Trump’s favor is his willingness to fund his own campaign and ability to run such a campaign on the cheap. By the latter, I mean that he started his campaign with close to 100% name ID and he has the amazing ability to get massive free media exposure any time he wants it. The mainstream media seem powerless to ignore the newsworthiness of anything he says about anything at any time in any place. In lieu of a traditional campaign staff, all Trump needs are the PR people he has long employed, a scheduler and a pilot for his plane.
by Bruce Bartlett, The Big Picture | Read more:
Image: via:
First of all, I think his support is firm and shows no sign of diminishing. He has already weathered storms such as his criticism of John McCain that would have doomed any other candidate. Anyone who thinks he is the current version of Cain, Bachmann, Santorum or other nutcase that briefly led the GOP field in 2012 is dead wrong.
Keep in mind also that in primary elections, one doesn’t need majority support to win in a field with multiple candidates. And intensity of support is often more important than the percentage. Support for the designated favorite of party insiders is often exaggerated in polls and I think Trump’s supporters are unusually motivated.Second, Trump’s positions on the issues are largely irrelevant to his success. None of his supporters care whether a wall across Mexico is remotely feasible or that he regularly flip-flops on the issues. What he is selling is attitude and a certain fascistic form of leadership. He will get things done, his supporters believe. And it’s less important what he will do than that he will do something.
Ironically, Republicans brought this on themselves in two ways. To begin with, they grossly oversold what they could do just with control of Congress. The Republican base really seems to have simply forgotten about the presidential veto or the Senate filibuster. They seem to have thought all they had to do was pass bills with a simple majority and they would magically become law. How else to explain voting over and over and over again to repeal Obamacare. It makes no sense unless my assumption is correct.
Additionally, Republicans are suffering from the gridlock that they themselves caused. We all know that nature abhors a vacuum, but I think it abhors gridlock as well. That has always been the appeal of fascism and it would be very foolish to believe that Americans are immune from its attractive qualities of getting things done that need to get done. And let us not forget that Trump is talking about genuine problems even if his solutions are simplistic or even wrongheaded.
My third point in Trump’s favor is his willingness to fund his own campaign and ability to run such a campaign on the cheap. By the latter, I mean that he started his campaign with close to 100% name ID and he has the amazing ability to get massive free media exposure any time he wants it. The mainstream media seem powerless to ignore the newsworthiness of anything he says about anything at any time in any place. In lieu of a traditional campaign staff, all Trump needs are the PR people he has long employed, a scheduler and a pilot for his plane.
by Bruce Bartlett, The Big Picture | Read more:
Image: via:
Streets With No Game
Behavioural effects of city street design have been reported before. In 2006, the Danish urbanist Jan Gehl observed that people walk more quickly in front of blank façades; compared with an open, active façade, people are less likely to pause or even turn their heads in such locations. They simply bear down and try to get through the unpleasant monotony of the street until they emerge on the other side, hopefully to find something more interesting.
For planners concerned with making city streets more amenable and pedestrian-friendly, findings such as these have enormous implications: by simply changing the appearance and physical structure of a building’s bottom three metres, they can exert a dramatic impact on the manner in which a city is used. Not only are people more likely to walk around in cityscapes with open and lively façades, but the kinds of things that they do in such places actually change. They pause, look around and absorb their surroundings while in a pleasant state of positive affect and with a lively, attentive nervous system. Because of these kinds of influences, they actually want to be there. And because of such effects, many cities have carefully designed building codes for new construction that dictate some of the contributing factors to happy and lively façades: in cities such as Stockholm, Melbourne and Amsterdam, building codes specify that new construction cannot simply be parachuted into place. There is a hard lower limit on the number of doorways per unit of sidewalk length, and there are specifications for transparency between the building and street in the form of clear windows with two-way views.
In Gehl’s terms, a good city street should be designed so that the average walker, moving at a rate of about 5km per hour, sees an interesting new site about once every five seconds. This does not happen in front of Whole Foods in East Houston Street, nor outside any of the other large, monolithic structures such as banks, courthouses and business towers in cities throughout the world.
If city streets are designed with endless closed façades, such as those seen in supermarkets and bank headquarters, people might feel a little less happy and they might walk faster and pause less. But what is really at stake here? The real risks of bad design might lie less in unhappy streets filled with unmotivated pedestrians, and more in the amassing of a population of urban citizens with epidemic levels of boredom.
Boredom research has, on the whole, been conducted by individuals who were especially repulsed by the feeling. William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, wrote in 1890 that ‘stimulation is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience’. In more recent times, serious discussion and measurement of states of boredom and stimulation began with the work of the late University of Toronto psychologist Daniel Berlyne, who argued that much of our behaviour is motivated by curiosity alone: the need to slake our incessant thirst for the new.
To make his case for information-seeking as a prime motivator of human behaviour, Berlyne turned to a branch of applied mathematics known as information theory. This powerful set of ideas, born in the laboratories of the Bell Telephone Company in the 1940s, was designed to help understand the transmission of signals through wires. The unit of information was described as the bit, which could range in value from zero, containing no information, to one, being filled with information. One of the keys to the theory is that elements that don’t occur very often provide more information than those that occur commonly. Imagine you retrieve a garbled message from your voicemail, and can make out only certain words. If you heard the message: ‘. . . the . . . to . . . and . . . you . . .,’ you would learn very little; the bit value of the utterance would be close to zero. But if you heard: ‘I’m . . . way . . . dinner . . . call . . . later,’ you could do a good job of disentangling at least a part of the meaning. In terms of information theory, both utterances contain the same number of words. The difference is that the first contains only words that appear with high frequency in English, and carry few bits of information, while the second message contains words with lower frequencies (hence lower probabilities of occurrence), and more information.
Though it might seem like a stretch, there is in fact a connection between the technicalities of phone transmission and an understanding of urban psychology. According to Berlyne, it wasn’t just signals sent along wires that could be characterised in terms of their information content, but any kind of object that we can perceive, including visual displays such as pictures, three-dimensional objects, even streetscapes.
Now the reason for the dismal recordings of happiness and arousal in participants standing in front of blank façades should be clearer. At a psychological level, these constructions fail us because we are biologically disposed to favour locations defined by complexity, interest, and the passing of messages of one kind or another.
The opposite of this situation translates, essentially, to boredom. Though we might not all agree on a precise definition of boredom, some of the signs are well-known: an inflated sense of the inexorably slow passage of time; a kind of restlessness that can manifest as both an unpleasant and aversive inner mental state but also with overt bodily symptoms: fidgeting; postural adjustment; restless gaze; perhaps yawning.
Some researchers have suggested that boredom is characterised (perhaps even defined by) a state of low arousal. In some studies, it seems that when people are asked to sit quietly without doing anything in particular – presumably a trigger for boredom – physiological arousal appears to decrease. But Berlyne, and recently others, have suggested that boredom can sometimes be accompanied by high states of arousal and perhaps even stress. (...)
Boredom can also lead to risky behaviour. Surveys among people with addictions, including substance and gambling addictions, suggest that their levels of boredom are generally higher, and that episodes of boredom are one of the most common predictors of relapse or risky behaviour.
Merrifield and Danckert suggest that exposure to even a brief, boring experience is sufficient to change the brain and body’s chemistry in such a way as to generate stress. It might seem extreme to say that a brief encounter with a boring building could be seriously hazardous to one’s health, but what about the cumulative effects of immersion, day after day, in the same oppressively dull surroundings?
by Colin Ellard , Aeon | Read more:
Image: Getty
For planners concerned with making city streets more amenable and pedestrian-friendly, findings such as these have enormous implications: by simply changing the appearance and physical structure of a building’s bottom three metres, they can exert a dramatic impact on the manner in which a city is used. Not only are people more likely to walk around in cityscapes with open and lively façades, but the kinds of things that they do in such places actually change. They pause, look around and absorb their surroundings while in a pleasant state of positive affect and with a lively, attentive nervous system. Because of these kinds of influences, they actually want to be there. And because of such effects, many cities have carefully designed building codes for new construction that dictate some of the contributing factors to happy and lively façades: in cities such as Stockholm, Melbourne and Amsterdam, building codes specify that new construction cannot simply be parachuted into place. There is a hard lower limit on the number of doorways per unit of sidewalk length, and there are specifications for transparency between the building and street in the form of clear windows with two-way views.In Gehl’s terms, a good city street should be designed so that the average walker, moving at a rate of about 5km per hour, sees an interesting new site about once every five seconds. This does not happen in front of Whole Foods in East Houston Street, nor outside any of the other large, monolithic structures such as banks, courthouses and business towers in cities throughout the world.
If city streets are designed with endless closed façades, such as those seen in supermarkets and bank headquarters, people might feel a little less happy and they might walk faster and pause less. But what is really at stake here? The real risks of bad design might lie less in unhappy streets filled with unmotivated pedestrians, and more in the amassing of a population of urban citizens with epidemic levels of boredom.
Boredom research has, on the whole, been conducted by individuals who were especially repulsed by the feeling. William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, wrote in 1890 that ‘stimulation is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience’. In more recent times, serious discussion and measurement of states of boredom and stimulation began with the work of the late University of Toronto psychologist Daniel Berlyne, who argued that much of our behaviour is motivated by curiosity alone: the need to slake our incessant thirst for the new.
To make his case for information-seeking as a prime motivator of human behaviour, Berlyne turned to a branch of applied mathematics known as information theory. This powerful set of ideas, born in the laboratories of the Bell Telephone Company in the 1940s, was designed to help understand the transmission of signals through wires. The unit of information was described as the bit, which could range in value from zero, containing no information, to one, being filled with information. One of the keys to the theory is that elements that don’t occur very often provide more information than those that occur commonly. Imagine you retrieve a garbled message from your voicemail, and can make out only certain words. If you heard the message: ‘. . . the . . . to . . . and . . . you . . .,’ you would learn very little; the bit value of the utterance would be close to zero. But if you heard: ‘I’m . . . way . . . dinner . . . call . . . later,’ you could do a good job of disentangling at least a part of the meaning. In terms of information theory, both utterances contain the same number of words. The difference is that the first contains only words that appear with high frequency in English, and carry few bits of information, while the second message contains words with lower frequencies (hence lower probabilities of occurrence), and more information.
Though it might seem like a stretch, there is in fact a connection between the technicalities of phone transmission and an understanding of urban psychology. According to Berlyne, it wasn’t just signals sent along wires that could be characterised in terms of their information content, but any kind of object that we can perceive, including visual displays such as pictures, three-dimensional objects, even streetscapes.
Now the reason for the dismal recordings of happiness and arousal in participants standing in front of blank façades should be clearer. At a psychological level, these constructions fail us because we are biologically disposed to favour locations defined by complexity, interest, and the passing of messages of one kind or another.
The opposite of this situation translates, essentially, to boredom. Though we might not all agree on a precise definition of boredom, some of the signs are well-known: an inflated sense of the inexorably slow passage of time; a kind of restlessness that can manifest as both an unpleasant and aversive inner mental state but also with overt bodily symptoms: fidgeting; postural adjustment; restless gaze; perhaps yawning.
Some researchers have suggested that boredom is characterised (perhaps even defined by) a state of low arousal. In some studies, it seems that when people are asked to sit quietly without doing anything in particular – presumably a trigger for boredom – physiological arousal appears to decrease. But Berlyne, and recently others, have suggested that boredom can sometimes be accompanied by high states of arousal and perhaps even stress. (...)
Boredom can also lead to risky behaviour. Surveys among people with addictions, including substance and gambling addictions, suggest that their levels of boredom are generally higher, and that episodes of boredom are one of the most common predictors of relapse or risky behaviour.
Merrifield and Danckert suggest that exposure to even a brief, boring experience is sufficient to change the brain and body’s chemistry in such a way as to generate stress. It might seem extreme to say that a brief encounter with a boring building could be seriously hazardous to one’s health, but what about the cumulative effects of immersion, day after day, in the same oppressively dull surroundings?
by Colin Ellard , Aeon | Read more:
Image: Getty
Willie and the Weed Factory
Marijuana’s state-by-state march toward full legalization would never have happened without Willie Nelson. He’s 82 now, and he’s spent nearly half his life as America’s most famous stoner. But this fall he’ll be making the leap from aficionado to entrepreneur. What Paul Newman did for tomato sauce, what Francis Coppola did for Cabernet, Willie Nelson is hoping to do for weed
“I’ve bought a lot of pot in my life,” Willie Nelson tells me, “and now I’m selling it back.”
Willie Nelson has this kind of answer—stock, pithy—for all kinds of questions, and he’s been using them for decades. Bring up his brief abortive stint at college studying business administration? Invariably he’ll soon say, “I majored in dominoes.” Mention the massive sum he owed the IRS in the early ’90s—somewhere between $17 million and $32 million—and you’ll get the one about how it isn’t so much “if you say it real fast.”
As time passes, the world offers up new questions, and so sometimes new answers are required. Once he reached the age when people began asking about retirement, Nelson would reply that he doesn’t do anything but play music and golf: “I wouldn’t know what to quit.” And now that one of America’s stoner icons is going into the pot business and planning to launch his own proprietary brand called Willie’s Reserve, this bought-a-lot-of-pot-in-my-life line is already on instant replay and you can confidently expect to hear Nelson use it for the next few years, anytime the subject is raised in his vicinity. In fact when we first meet, on the tour bus where he likes to do interviews and live much of his life, less than ninety seconds pass before he
deploys it.
There’s a lot of shade and space behind answers like these. They leave people feeling like they’ve had a funny and intimate encounter with someone who, as Willie Nelson does, knows how to deliver them—with an amiable mischievous half-smile and a wizened wink in his eye, as though the words have just popped into his head. Answers that charm and entertain but also leave his real thoughts unbothered, his real life unruffled.
Willie Nelson has plenty of real thoughts, and he has lived a life as real and unreal as they come for eighty-two years and counting. Those stories are a little harder to shake loose, but he will share some of them, too. And when it comes to Willie Nelson, it’s worth holding out for the good stuff.
Maybe all of us are engaged in a lifelong fight to find our better natures. But some of us, perhaps the luckiest ones, find a reliable shortcut. For Willie Nelson, that shortcut has turned out to be pot. It works for him, and he needed it. His public image is a kind of Zen cowboy, a naturally chilled-out elder—Robin Williams used to have a bit in his act about how even Buddha was jealous of how mellow Willie Nelson was—but of course the truth is more complicated. “I can be a real asshole when I’m straight,” he tells me. “As Annie can probably adhere to.”
Annie is Nelson’s fourth wife—“my current wife,” as he has sometimes described her, though they have now been married for twenty-four years. She sits out of my sight, behind me, but periodically she contributes to the conversation. “He’s not an asshole sober,” she clarifies, coming to her husband’s defense. Briefly, at least. “Only when he’s drinking. Then he’s an asshole.” (...)
You’ve said that you’re naturally a little too revved up, and that pot brings you back closer to normal.
He nods. “I have compared myself to the motorboat where the fuel for the motorboat is a little too hot for the motor, where you have to add a little oil in it. I figure that’s my oil, you know. It’s what I have to do to, you know, to make it easier.”
And what happens to the motorboat without the oil?
“Burns out,” says Annie.
“Yeah. It wears out. And he does dumb and dumber things.”
“The motorboat stays a redhead,” says Annie.
Do you ever drink at all now?
“Very rarely. If you got a drink, I’ll take a drink. But no, I don’t like me drinking.”
Why do you think it had that effect on you?
“I don’t know, I’ve got a lot of Indian blood in me, and something true is that Indians can’t do alcohol. So I start out knowing that. My drummer, Paul, we’ve been together for a long time, and back in my drinking days whenever I’d get too drunk and out of order, he’d roll up a joint and hand it and I’d take a couple hits and pass out. So he knew how to handle me.”
He’s said that you always wanted to drive cars when you were drunk.
Nelson’s eyes light up. “Yeah. And see how fast they would go.”
That’s really not a good idea.
“Thank you.” He laughs. “No, you’re right.” (...)
Why do you think you had the impulse to do that?
“I don’t know. I was always a kind of go-fast guy, you know.”
And what are you now?
“I still am a go-fast guy, but I know that and I try to guard against my instincts a little better.” (...)
You’ve got an interesting sense of fun.
“Yeah. You see why I smoke a lot. I’ve got to calm that out.”
by Chris Heath, GQ | Read more:
Image: Getty
Monday, August 31, 2015
Sunday, August 30, 2015
The Life and Death of the American Lawn
The hashtag #droughtshaming—which primarily exists, as its name suggests, to publicly decry people who have failed to do their part to conserve water during California’s latest drought—has claimed many victims. Anonymous lawn-waterers. Anonymous sidewalk-washers. The city of Beverly Hills. The tag’s most high-profile shamee thus far, however, has been the actor Tom Selleck. Who was sued earlier this summer by Ventura County’s Calleguas Municipal Water District for the alleged theft of hydrant water, supposedly used to nourish his 60-acre ranch. Which includes, this being California, an avocado farm, and also an expansive lawn.
The case was settled out of court on terms that remain undisclosed, and everyone has since moved on with their lives. What’s remarkable about the whole thing, though—well, besides the fact that Magnum P.I. has apparently become, in his semi-retirement, a gentleman farmer—is how much of a shift all the Selleck-shaming represents, as a civic impulse. For much of American history, the healthy lawn—green, lush, neatly shorn—has been a symbol not just of prosperity, individual and communal, but of something deeper: shared ideals, collective responsibility, the assorted conveniences of conformity. Lawns, originally designed to connect homes even as they enforced the distance between them, are shared domestic spaces. They are also socially regulated spaces. “When smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country,” Andrew Jackson Downing, one of the nation’s first landscaper-philosophers, put it, “we know that order and culture are established.”
That idea remains, and it means that, even today, the failure to maintain a “smiling lawn” can have decidedly unhappy consequences. Section 119-3 of the county code of Fairfax County, Virginia—a section representative of similar ones on the books in jurisdictions across the country—stipulates that “it is unlawful for any owner of any occupied residential lot or parcel which is less than one-half acre (21,780 square feet) to permit the growth of any grass or lawn area to reach more than twelve (12) inches in height/length.” And while Fairfax County sensibly advises that matters of grass length are best adjudicated among neighbors, it adds, rather sternly, that if the property in question “is vacant or the resident doesn’t seem to care, you can report the property to the county.”
That kind of reporting can result in much more than fines. In 2008, Joe Prudente—a retiree in Florida whose lawn, despite several re-soddings and waterings and weedings, contained some unsightly brown patches—was jailed for “failing to properly maintain his lawn to community standards.” Earlier this year, Rick Yoes, a resident of Grand Prairie, Texas, also spent time behind bars—for the crime, in this case, of the ownership of an overgrown yard. Gerry Suttle, a woman in her mid-70s, recently had a warrant issued for her arrest—she had failed to mow the grass on a lot she owned across the street from her house—until four boys living in her Texas neighborhood heard of her plight in a news report, came over, and mowed the thing themselves.(...)
Which is all to say that lawns, long before Tom Selleck came along, have doubled as sweeping, sodded outgrowths of the Protestant ethic. The tapis vert, or “green carpet”—a concept Americans borrowed not just from French gardens and English estates, but also from the fantastical Italian paintings that imagined modern lawns into existence—became, as installed in the not-yet-united states, a signal that the American colonies aspired to match Europe in, among other things, elitism. (Lawns, in Europe, were an early form of conspicuous consumption, signs that their owners could afford to dedicate grounds to aesthetic, rather than agricultural, purposes—and signs, too, that their owners, in the days before lawnmowers lessened the burden of grass-shearing, could afford to pay scythe-wielding servants to do that labor.) Thomas Jefferson, being Thomas Jefferson, surrounded Monticello not just with neatly rowed crops, but with expanses of sheared grass that served no purpose but to send a message—about Jefferson himself, and about the ambitions of a newly formed nation.
As that country developed, its landscape architects would sharpen lawns’ symbolism: of collectivity, of interlocking destinies, of democracy itself. “It is unchristian,” the landscaper Frank J. Scott wrote in The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, “to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure.” He added, magnanimously, that “the beauty obtained by throwing front grounds open together, is of that excellent quality which enriches all who take part in the exchange, and makes no man poorer.” Lawns became aesthetic extensions of Manifest Destiny, symbols of American entitlement and triumph, of the soft and verdant rewards that result when man’s ongoing battles against nature are finally won. A well-maintained lawn—luxurious in its lushness, implying leisure even as its upkeep had a stubborn way of preventing it—came, too, to represent a triumph of another kind: the order of suburbia over the squalor of the city. A neat expanse of green, blades clipped to uniform length and flowing from home to home, became, as Roman Mars notes, the “anti-broken window.”
The case was settled out of court on terms that remain undisclosed, and everyone has since moved on with their lives. What’s remarkable about the whole thing, though—well, besides the fact that Magnum P.I. has apparently become, in his semi-retirement, a gentleman farmer—is how much of a shift all the Selleck-shaming represents, as a civic impulse. For much of American history, the healthy lawn—green, lush, neatly shorn—has been a symbol not just of prosperity, individual and communal, but of something deeper: shared ideals, collective responsibility, the assorted conveniences of conformity. Lawns, originally designed to connect homes even as they enforced the distance between them, are shared domestic spaces. They are also socially regulated spaces. “When smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country,” Andrew Jackson Downing, one of the nation’s first landscaper-philosophers, put it, “we know that order and culture are established.”That idea remains, and it means that, even today, the failure to maintain a “smiling lawn” can have decidedly unhappy consequences. Section 119-3 of the county code of Fairfax County, Virginia—a section representative of similar ones on the books in jurisdictions across the country—stipulates that “it is unlawful for any owner of any occupied residential lot or parcel which is less than one-half acre (21,780 square feet) to permit the growth of any grass or lawn area to reach more than twelve (12) inches in height/length.” And while Fairfax County sensibly advises that matters of grass length are best adjudicated among neighbors, it adds, rather sternly, that if the property in question “is vacant or the resident doesn’t seem to care, you can report the property to the county.”
That kind of reporting can result in much more than fines. In 2008, Joe Prudente—a retiree in Florida whose lawn, despite several re-soddings and waterings and weedings, contained some unsightly brown patches—was jailed for “failing to properly maintain his lawn to community standards.” Earlier this year, Rick Yoes, a resident of Grand Prairie, Texas, also spent time behind bars—for the crime, in this case, of the ownership of an overgrown yard. Gerry Suttle, a woman in her mid-70s, recently had a warrant issued for her arrest—she had failed to mow the grass on a lot she owned across the street from her house—until four boys living in her Texas neighborhood heard of her plight in a news report, came over, and mowed the thing themselves.(...)
Which is all to say that lawns, long before Tom Selleck came along, have doubled as sweeping, sodded outgrowths of the Protestant ethic. The tapis vert, or “green carpet”—a concept Americans borrowed not just from French gardens and English estates, but also from the fantastical Italian paintings that imagined modern lawns into existence—became, as installed in the not-yet-united states, a signal that the American colonies aspired to match Europe in, among other things, elitism. (Lawns, in Europe, were an early form of conspicuous consumption, signs that their owners could afford to dedicate grounds to aesthetic, rather than agricultural, purposes—and signs, too, that their owners, in the days before lawnmowers lessened the burden of grass-shearing, could afford to pay scythe-wielding servants to do that labor.) Thomas Jefferson, being Thomas Jefferson, surrounded Monticello not just with neatly rowed crops, but with expanses of sheared grass that served no purpose but to send a message—about Jefferson himself, and about the ambitions of a newly formed nation.
As that country developed, its landscape architects would sharpen lawns’ symbolism: of collectivity, of interlocking destinies, of democracy itself. “It is unchristian,” the landscaper Frank J. Scott wrote in The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, “to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure.” He added, magnanimously, that “the beauty obtained by throwing front grounds open together, is of that excellent quality which enriches all who take part in the exchange, and makes no man poorer.” Lawns became aesthetic extensions of Manifest Destiny, symbols of American entitlement and triumph, of the soft and verdant rewards that result when man’s ongoing battles against nature are finally won. A well-maintained lawn—luxurious in its lushness, implying leisure even as its upkeep had a stubborn way of preventing it—came, too, to represent a triumph of another kind: the order of suburbia over the squalor of the city. A neat expanse of green, blades clipped to uniform length and flowing from home to home, became, as Roman Mars notes, the “anti-broken window.”
by Megan Garber, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Robert Couse-Baker / Flickr
Denali. Finally.
[ed. About time. Actually, way past time.]
It’s official: Denali is now the mountain formerly known as Mount McKinley.
With the approval of President Barack Obama, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has signed a “secretarial order” to officially change the name, the White House and Interior Department announced Sunday. The announcement comes roughly 24 hours before Obama touches down in Anchorage for a whirlwind tour of Alaska.
Talk of the name change has swirled in Alaska this year since the National Park Service officially registered no objection in a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C.
The tallest mountain in North America has long been known to Alaskans as Denali, its Koyukon Athabascan name, but its official name was not changed with the creation of Denali National Park and Preserve in 1980, 6 million acres carved out for federal protection under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The state changed the name of the park’s tallest mountain to Denali at that time, but the federal government did not.
Jewell’s authority stems from a 1947 federal law that allows her to make changes to geographic names through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, according to the department.
“I think for people like myself that have known the mountain as Denali for years and certainly for Alaskans, it's something that's been a long time coming,” Jewell told Alaska Dispatch News Sunday.
Every year, the same story plays out in Washington, D.C.: Alaska legislators sometimes file bills to change the name from Mount McKinley to Denali, and every year, someone in the Ohio congressional delegation -- the home state of the 25th President William McKinley -- files legislation to block a name change. (...)
According to the order Jewell signed, there is a policy of deferring action while a matter is under consideration by Congress. So the Ohio delegation’s annual legislative efforts have stalled any federal movement. But the law does allow the interior secretary to take action when the board naming doesn’t act “within a reasonable amount of time,” the order said.
“It's something (former Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond) pushed for back in 1975, and because of an effort to stop it in legislation that has not actually gone anywhere in the last 40 years, the Board of Geographic Names did not take it up,” Jewell said.
As interior secretary, she has authority to make a unilateral decision after a “reasonable time has passed,” Jewell said.
“And I think any of us would think that 40 years is an unreasonable amount of time. So we're delighted to make the name change now, and frankly I'm delighted that President Obama has encouraged the name change consistent with his trip,” Jewell said.
Jewell said the “overwhelming support for many years from the citizens of Alaska is more robust than anything that we have heard from the citizens of Ohio,” and that filing the same legislation year after year has not been accompanied by any “grass roots support” in Ohio. (...)
“I think most of us have always called it Denali. I know that's true in the climbing community and I suspect it has been true in Alaska for a very long time. So it'll just be great to formalize that with our friends at the U.S. Geological Survey and the Board of Geographic Names,” Jewell said.
The name “Denali” is derived from the Koyukon name and is based on a verb theme meaning “high” or “tall,” according to linguist James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in the book “Shem Pete’s Alaska.” It doesn't mean "the great one," as is commonly believed, Kari wrote.
The mountain was named for McKinley before he became president, by gold prospector William A. Dickey, who had just received word of McKinley’s nomination as a candidate in 1897. McKinley died without ever setting foot in Alaska, assassinated at the start of his second term in office.
It’s official: Denali is now the mountain formerly known as Mount McKinley.
With the approval of President Barack Obama, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has signed a “secretarial order” to officially change the name, the White House and Interior Department announced Sunday. The announcement comes roughly 24 hours before Obama touches down in Anchorage for a whirlwind tour of Alaska.Talk of the name change has swirled in Alaska this year since the National Park Service officially registered no objection in a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C.
The tallest mountain in North America has long been known to Alaskans as Denali, its Koyukon Athabascan name, but its official name was not changed with the creation of Denali National Park and Preserve in 1980, 6 million acres carved out for federal protection under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The state changed the name of the park’s tallest mountain to Denali at that time, but the federal government did not.
Jewell’s authority stems from a 1947 federal law that allows her to make changes to geographic names through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, according to the department.
“I think for people like myself that have known the mountain as Denali for years and certainly for Alaskans, it's something that's been a long time coming,” Jewell told Alaska Dispatch News Sunday.
Every year, the same story plays out in Washington, D.C.: Alaska legislators sometimes file bills to change the name from Mount McKinley to Denali, and every year, someone in the Ohio congressional delegation -- the home state of the 25th President William McKinley -- files legislation to block a name change. (...)
According to the order Jewell signed, there is a policy of deferring action while a matter is under consideration by Congress. So the Ohio delegation’s annual legislative efforts have stalled any federal movement. But the law does allow the interior secretary to take action when the board naming doesn’t act “within a reasonable amount of time,” the order said.
“It's something (former Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond) pushed for back in 1975, and because of an effort to stop it in legislation that has not actually gone anywhere in the last 40 years, the Board of Geographic Names did not take it up,” Jewell said.
As interior secretary, she has authority to make a unilateral decision after a “reasonable time has passed,” Jewell said.
“And I think any of us would think that 40 years is an unreasonable amount of time. So we're delighted to make the name change now, and frankly I'm delighted that President Obama has encouraged the name change consistent with his trip,” Jewell said.
Jewell said the “overwhelming support for many years from the citizens of Alaska is more robust than anything that we have heard from the citizens of Ohio,” and that filing the same legislation year after year has not been accompanied by any “grass roots support” in Ohio. (...)
“I think most of us have always called it Denali. I know that's true in the climbing community and I suspect it has been true in Alaska for a very long time. So it'll just be great to formalize that with our friends at the U.S. Geological Survey and the Board of Geographic Names,” Jewell said.
The name “Denali” is derived from the Koyukon name and is based on a verb theme meaning “high” or “tall,” according to linguist James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in the book “Shem Pete’s Alaska.” It doesn't mean "the great one," as is commonly believed, Kari wrote.
The mountain was named for McKinley before he became president, by gold prospector William A. Dickey, who had just received word of McKinley’s nomination as a candidate in 1897. McKinley died without ever setting foot in Alaska, assassinated at the start of his second term in office.
The Perfect Poop
It’s the middle of the day for Eric, a 24-year-old research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and nature is calling.
Eric leaves his job and hops a train. Then a bus. Then he walks some more. He passes countless toilets, and he needs to use them, but he doesn’t.
Eventually, Eric arrives at a nondescript men’s room 30 minutes away from MIT. A partition separates two toilets. There’s a square-tiled floor like in any public restroom. It’s unremarkable in every way, with one exception: A pit stop here can save lives.
Eric hangs a plastic collection bucket down inside the toilet bowl and does his business. When he’s finished, he puts a lid on the container, bags it up and walks his stool a few doors down the hall to OpenBiome, a small laboratory northwest of Boston that has developed a way to turn poop from extremely healthy people into medicine for really sick patients.
A lab technician weighs Eric’s “sample.” Over the past 2½ months, Eric has generated 10.6 pounds of poop over 29 visits, enough feces to produce 133 treatments for patients suffering from Clostridium difficile, an infection that kills 15,000 Americans a year and sickens half a million.
To donate, Eric had to pass a 109-point clinical assessment. There is a laundry list of factors that would disqualify a donor: obesity, illicit drug use, antibiotic use, travel to regions with high risk of contracting diseases, even recent tattoos. His stools and blood also had to clear a battery of laboratory screenings to make sure he didn’t have any infections.
After all that screening, only 3% of prospective donors are healthy enough to give. “I had no idea,” he says about his poop. “It turns out that it’s fairly close to perfect.”
And that, unlike most people’s poop, makes Eric’s worth money. OpenBiome pays its 22 active donors $40 per sample. They’re encouraged to donate often, every day if they can. Eric has earned about $1,000.
“It takes us a lot of time and effort to find these donors,” says OpenBiome’s research director, Mark Smith. “When we do find them, we want to keep them as engaged as possible and really want to compensate them for their time.”
Why is Eric’s poop so valuable?
A hundred trillion bacteria live inside your gut, some good, some bad. When patients take antibiotics for infections, sometimes they fail to work; good bacteria gets killed off while bad bacteria — C. difficile — grows unchecked.
The life-saving bacteria from the guts of people like Eric can help. When their healthy microbes are placed inside the intestines of a sick person they can chase out harmful C. difficile bacteria. It’s called a fecal transplant. The treatments are administered bottom-up, through a colonoscopy, or top-down, through a tube in the nose.
OpenBiome’s poop donors have created about 5,000 treatments, and the organization says the results have been stunning. Stinky human waste is an astonishingly simple cure: 90% of the patients get better.
“They’ll actually have this really transformational experience where they’ll be going to the bathroom 20 times a day and then have normal bowel movements sort of immediately or the next day,” Smith says.
The organization’s fecal transplants cost $385 to purchase and are providing a treatment to more than 350 hospitals in 47 states.
Eric leaves his job and hops a train. Then a bus. Then he walks some more. He passes countless toilets, and he needs to use them, but he doesn’t.Eventually, Eric arrives at a nondescript men’s room 30 minutes away from MIT. A partition separates two toilets. There’s a square-tiled floor like in any public restroom. It’s unremarkable in every way, with one exception: A pit stop here can save lives.
Eric hangs a plastic collection bucket down inside the toilet bowl and does his business. When he’s finished, he puts a lid on the container, bags it up and walks his stool a few doors down the hall to OpenBiome, a small laboratory northwest of Boston that has developed a way to turn poop from extremely healthy people into medicine for really sick patients.
A lab technician weighs Eric’s “sample.” Over the past 2½ months, Eric has generated 10.6 pounds of poop over 29 visits, enough feces to produce 133 treatments for patients suffering from Clostridium difficile, an infection that kills 15,000 Americans a year and sickens half a million.
To donate, Eric had to pass a 109-point clinical assessment. There is a laundry list of factors that would disqualify a donor: obesity, illicit drug use, antibiotic use, travel to regions with high risk of contracting diseases, even recent tattoos. His stools and blood also had to clear a battery of laboratory screenings to make sure he didn’t have any infections.
After all that screening, only 3% of prospective donors are healthy enough to give. “I had no idea,” he says about his poop. “It turns out that it’s fairly close to perfect.”
And that, unlike most people’s poop, makes Eric’s worth money. OpenBiome pays its 22 active donors $40 per sample. They’re encouraged to donate often, every day if they can. Eric has earned about $1,000.
“It takes us a lot of time and effort to find these donors,” says OpenBiome’s research director, Mark Smith. “When we do find them, we want to keep them as engaged as possible and really want to compensate them for their time.”
Why is Eric’s poop so valuable?
A hundred trillion bacteria live inside your gut, some good, some bad. When patients take antibiotics for infections, sometimes they fail to work; good bacteria gets killed off while bad bacteria — C. difficile — grows unchecked.
The life-saving bacteria from the guts of people like Eric can help. When their healthy microbes are placed inside the intestines of a sick person they can chase out harmful C. difficile bacteria. It’s called a fecal transplant. The treatments are administered bottom-up, through a colonoscopy, or top-down, through a tube in the nose.
OpenBiome’s poop donors have created about 5,000 treatments, and the organization says the results have been stunning. Stinky human waste is an astonishingly simple cure: 90% of the patients get better.
“They’ll actually have this really transformational experience where they’ll be going to the bathroom 20 times a day and then have normal bowel movements sort of immediately or the next day,” Smith says.
The organization’s fecal transplants cost $385 to purchase and are providing a treatment to more than 350 hospitals in 47 states.
by CNN Wire | Read more:
Image: Andrea Levy, The Plain Dealer
Saturday, August 29, 2015
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