Every Dog Will Have His Day

Fashion is such a far-reaching thing. It isn’t content with all that goes on a woman; it extends to all that goes around, under, and over her. It is responsible for her figure, her complexion, and her state of mind. It won’t even stop at inanimate things—it extends to her very dog. Fancy carrying a short full dog when Paris insists on long straight lines, or trying to combine a Louis XVI–style dog with a Moyen Âge gown—well, it simply isn’t done, that’s all.

But one need not despair. So many dogs are smart this season that a woman could really have a different dog for every gown in her wardrobe. There are chows, for instance. They are becoming to almost every woman. One may have a Titian-haired chow or a decided brunette, according to which is the better foil, and he is just the thing to put in the front seat of one’s motor, to fill in that awkward space left by any chance departure of the footman. Chows are most decorative, and they wear a puzzled expression that keeps one interested. One wonders what on earth they are trying to find out. Then, too, they are a shining example to the woman of flirtatious tendencies—the chow is a one-man dog.

If it’s the little things that count in one’s life, one might acquire a Brussels griffon. They are scarcely visible to the naked eye, but they are exceedingly smart this season. A griffon bears a startling resemblance to a small mop that has seen hard service; it is difficult to ascertain, at a cursory glance, which end is going to bark and which to wag.

But fashion isn’t content with a mere chow or two and a handful of griffons. All sorts and conditions of terriers are being done, this season—they are so smart, worn with tailored costumes. Airedales are so popular that they are almost overdone. One can not stroll down Fifth Avenue without encountering an affable Airedale every six feet or so. In color and texture, an Airedale is very like a shredded wheat biscuit. There is such a wistfully angelic expression in his amber-colored eyes that, at first, one fears that he will be snatched up to heaven at any minute; after one has known him for a while, one ceases to worry. He is far from graceful, his manner is absolutely unpolished, he has no savoir faire, and he just can’t make his paws behave. But he has a way with him—and scepters have been tossed aside for that.

Fifth Avenue is also densely populated with assorted Scottish terriers—all sorts and conditions of these uncanny Scots. They plod busily along on their utterly inadequate paws, with their overgenerous allowances of tail streaming proudly in the breeze. Their general air is that of those who are burdened with affairs of international importance, and who cannot be annoyed with merely local matters. On those rare occasions when they can be persuaded to sit, they do it with extreme care, neatly arranging their forepaws in the first dancing position. There is something about them that irresistibly reminds one of a fussy little old gentleman—the sort of old gentleman who writes to the newspapers about those disgraceful skirts the women are wearing.

by Dorothy Parker, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

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A House Divided

[ed. Lemmings with suicide vests!]

On July 28th, Mark Meadows, a Republican representative from North Carolina, walked to the well of the House and filed a motion to vacate the chair. It’s an obscure parliamentary tool that allows any member of the House to trigger a vote to oust the Speaker. The only other time it had been used was in 1910, during a rebellion by forty-two Progressive Republicans, the Party radicals of the day, against their Speaker, Joseph Gurney Cannon, who was accused of running the House like a tyrant.

Meadows is one of the more active members of the House Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only group of about forty right-wing conservatives that formed at the beginning of this year. Since 2010, when the Party won back the chamber, the House has been engaged in a series of clashes over taxes and spending. Two years ago, House Republicans brought about a government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act and nearly caused the United States to default on its debt. This week, as Congress raced to meet a December 11th deadline to pass the annual legislation that funds the government, the members of the Freedom Caucus had new demands: they wanted to cut funding for Planned Parenthood and restrict Syrian refugees from entering the United States, policies that, if attached to the spending bills, could face a veto from Obama and, potentially, lead to another government shutdown.

To the general public, these fights have played out as a battle between President Obama and Republicans in Congress. But the more critical divide is within the Republican Party, as House Speaker John Boehner discovered. Boehner, who is from Ohio, was elected to Congress in 1990 and rose to the Speakership in 2010. His tenure was marked by an increasingly futile effort to control a group of conservatives that Devin Nunes, a Republican from California and an ally of Boehner’s, once described as “lemmings with suicide vests.” In 2013, to the bafflement of some colleagues, Boehner supported the shutdown, in the hope that the public backlash would expose the group as hopelessly radical. It didn’t work. The group continued to defy Boehner. He tried to regain control as Speaker by marginalizing its members, and they decided that he must be forced out.

Meadows, who was elected in 2012, spent months weighing whether to launch the attack. “It was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done,” he told me recently. “It was a lonely period of time here on Capitol Hill. Even my closest friends didn’t necessarily think it was the right move.”

The decisive moment came on June 4th, when Meadows and his wife were being given a private tour of the Library of Congress. In the South Exhibition Gallery of the Thomas Jefferson Building, below stained-glass ceilings etched with the names of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, the guide showed them one of the first printed copies of the Declaration. Meadows was surprised to see, at the bottom of the document, only the name of John Hancock, in large block type. The guide explained that about two hundred copies of that version, known as the Dunlap Broadside, were printed on July 4, 1776, and one of them was sent off to King George. It was only several weeks later, in early August, that Hancock’s fellow-revolutionaries convened to sign the document.

“He was committing treason,” Meadows said. “When I heard that, it hit me profoundly that this motion to vacate could have only one signature. I wrestled with it for weeks.”

Meadows was feeling pressure from his constituents, who were angry that the G.O.P. leadership kept losing to Obama. “I got an e-mail from a gentleman back home,” Meadows told me. “He said, ‘I’ve worked hard and I’ve given money and yet nothing is happening.’ And this was from a country-club Republican, not a Tea Party activist. That had a real impact.”

On the morning of July 28th, Meadows’s fifty-sixth birthday, he got a voice mail from his son, Blake, encouraging him to go forward with the anti-Boehner plot. Blake read some lines from a famous Teddy Roosevelt speech. “It is not the critic who counts,” Roosevelt said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,” and who, “at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” Listening to the message brought tears to Meadows’s eyes. “I still keep it on my phone,” he told me.

Because there had been only one previous motion to vacate the chair, Meadows had to consult with a parliamentarian. His motion echoed the style and language of the Declaration’s “long train of abuses.” At about 5 P.M., during a series of votes on unrelated legislation, he waded through the crowded House floor, handed a copy of the resolution to the House clerk, and signed his name.

The resolution declared that Boehner “endeavored to consolidate power and centralize decision-making, bypassing the majority of the 435 Members of Congress and the people they represent.” Boehner had “caused the power of Congress to atrophy, thereby making Congress subservient to the Executive and Judicial branches,” and he “uses the power of the office to punish Members.” It provided details about several rules and parliamentary maneuvers that Boehner had allegedly used to control the chamber, and it ended, “Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant.”

by Ryan Lizza, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Matt Chase

Ad Blockers Will Change How Ads Are Sold

[ed. See also: X Marks the Spot That Makes Online Ads So Maddening]

Last week, I was in Berlin for a presentation of the Digital News Initiative created by Google and a group of publishers (see a previous story on the Accelerated Mobile Pages program). Needless to say, ad blockers was the talk of the town.

In a detailed lecture, Dr. Thomas Schreiber, who works with European publishers, exposed the first step of Google’s approach. Unsurprisingly, the search giant will first collect facts. In a wide study to be conducted globally in the coming months, Google will try to ascertain what exactly motivates a web user to install an ad blocker. A (large) unspecified number of people will go through what is called a Cognitive Load Test in which users are compensated for reading as many articles as possible. Different series of stories will carry various ads formats, ranging from the most invasive to the lightest. Applied on a large sample, the study will provide valuable information on ad intolerance. The Google survey will also yield reliable numbers for people using ad blockers, especially in Asia where mobile web browsing runs high.

As often, averages don’t provide the whole picture. Stating that 25% or 30% of users have installed an ad blocker is close to meaningless. We know the oldest segment of the internet doesn’t block ads very much. By contrast, the rate will skyrocket for a younger, more tech-savvy crowd. I recently took a quick show of hands while giving a couple of lectures to young audiences: more than eight out of ten admitted using an ad blocker. A few months ago, the operator of a large gaming site told me that 90% of its users were blocking ads.

Clearly, entire categories of digital properties are being wrecked.

The study should also confirm that people who are ideologically opposed to advertising are a minority compared to the ones who have installed an ad blocker simply because digital promotions and tracking have become unbearable. Richard Gingras, who oversees news products at Google, said on stage that the invasion of ad blockers “…is the reaction to a user experience gone bad”.

All conversations I had with conference attendees confirmed a growing resentment from publishers who denounce the ad community’s “let’s milk the cow until it dies” approach. The whole food chain is seen as way too tolerant of invasive ads. More important, some publishers begin to question the ability of their own sales force to adapt quickly enough. The future of advertising revenue rests on adopting a “less is more” attitude: less annoying formats will eventually generate more revenue.

This implies two major shifts.

by Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Can’t Put Down Your Device? That’s by Design

Greg Hochmuth was one of the first software engineers hired at Instagram.He worked on a team in 2012 that developed the first Android app for the slick photo-sharing service. In its first 24 hours, the app was downloaded more than one million times.

But Mr. Hochmuth eventually came to realize that the platform’s pleasing features — the interface that made it easy for people to upload and share beautiful images, the personalized suggestions of accounts to follow — also had potential downsides.

The same design qualities that make an app enthralling, he said, may also make it difficult for people to put down. And the more popular such services become, the more appeal they hold for users — a phenomenon known as the network effect.

“Once people come in, then the network effect kicks in and there’s an overload of content. People click around. There’s always another hashtag to click on,” Mr. Hochmuth, who left Instagram last year and started his own data consulting firm in Manhattan, told me recently. “Then it takes on its own life, like an organism, and people can become obsessive.”

Now Mr. Hochmuth and Jonathan Harris, an artist and computer scientist, have collaborated on a project that explores the implications of such compelling digital platforms for the human psyche. Titled “Network Effect,”the site invites users to click through a video and audio smorgasbord of human behavior. It includes 10,000 clips of people primping, eating, kissing, blinking and so on.

Unlike delectable cooking apps or engrossing music streaming apps that may elicit pleasure responses in the brain, however, the voyeuristic site is deliberately disjointed and discomfiting. To challenge the idea that people entirely exercise free will during their online sessions, the site also automatically turns itself off after a few minutes, shutting out users for 24 hours.

“The endpoint makes you reflect,” Mr. Hochmuth said. “Do I want to keep browsing and clicking and being obsessed? Or do I want to do something else?”

As the site underscores, digital life keeps us hooked with an infinite entertainment stream as its default setting. Tech companies often set it up that way.

There’s Facebook beckoning with its bottomless news feed. There’s Netflix autoplaying the next episode in a TV series 10 seconds after the previous one ends. There’s Tinder encouraging us to keep swiping in search of the next potential paramour.

And then there are the constant notices and reminders — a friend liked your photo or tweet; a colleague wants to connect with you on LinkedIn; an Evite awaits your response — which automatically induce feelings of social obligation. You damn yourself to distraction if you respond, and to fear of missing out if you don’t.

Tech companies tend to present these feedback loops as consumer conveniences. A new Intel TV ad, for instance, shows a young girl in the back of a car growing sad because the laptop on which she was watching a singalong video suddenly runs out of power. The company’s new battery-preserving processor, though, ultimately saves the day, “so you never have to stop watching.” T-Mobile has just introduced BingeOn, a feature that offers subscribers on certain plans unlimited high-speed access to popular streaming video channels.

There’s even an industry term for the experts who continually test and tweak apps and sites to better hook consumers, keep them coming back and persuade them to stay longer: growth hackers.

“How do you drive habitual use of a product?” said Sean Ellis, the chief executive of GrowthHackers.com, a software company specializing in online growth techniques. “It’s not just about getting new people. It’s about retaining the people you already have and, ultimately, getting them to bring in more people.”

by Natasha Singer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: The Network Effect

The Myth Of The Perfect 36

[ed. I've never thought much to how the "cocktail generation" might have been a precursor to the drug-drenched, free-love hippie ethic of the 60s, but it makes sense. The comments on this essay also brought up an old memory: The Glades in Honolulu. The women there (transvestites, or mahu's as they're called in Hawaii) were so beautiful, at least the ones we'd banter with and whistle to outside at 2 am (always the last thing to do before heading home after a fun night of partying). Life was grittier and more dangerous back then, but also more interesting.]

Carol Doda’s death came to me via the same mechanism as so much news comes to me these days – Social Media. It was Veteran’s Day when I saw the article on SF Gate. I had enjoyed a much-needed day off work though I spent much of it working on things for myself and my kid – artwork, writing, laundry, dishes.

In the evening, I logged onto Facebook and found myself glutted with streams of posts about the passing of Doda at age 78. I read the SF Gate story on Doda’s death which opens with the preposterous statement that “Carol Doda . . . helped take stripping out of the shadowy margins of American society.” My first response was fury and outrage. Really? That is a rather grand and sweeping statement. On what facts are writers Kevin Faggan and Sam Whiting making this assumption? Clearly they haven’t spent a lot of time (or any time) working in strip clubs in America, or more specifically, North Beach. I can’t really blame them. They are writing about their perceptions, what has been fed to them from media and what they have experienced as onlookers.

The SF Gate article was just the tip of the iceberg (or of the nipples in Doda’s case). These writers represent a very small fraction of the hundreds of people who I read voicing their opinion on Doda. It seems like everyone, especially those living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60s and 70s, had a story or opinion to share. Her tits were mythic! She revolutionized stripping! She was an icon for female sexual freedom! She changed the landscape of San Francisco’s North Beach from sleaze-ball sex alley to neon lit tourist destination! She put the S in Silicone and pioneered bending sexuality as an act of sexual liberation! She was hilarious! She was a riot! She was iconic! Bigger than her big neon tits glowing over Broadway and Columbus!

People recounted their encounters with Doda, which in the end mostly weren’t encounters at all, but restatements of myths of Doda which were perpetuated by the image of her plastered in the media as a representation of San Francisco’s ribald history and its reputation as a leader in sexual freedom. But these stories weren’t “real.” They were recreations of urban myths that took a real person – Carol Doda – and turned her into a phantom legend. People writing about Doda mostly experienced her from the point of view of spectator and tourist. Few of them had ever really met her, and none that I read had actually worked for her.

People fondly remembered seeing Doda descend to the stage of the Condor while standing on a pristine white grand piano. Doda donned in slinky glitter and high heels belted out songs and jokes to a riotous audience while she made her tits pump up and down and sideways. Or they remembered driving past the large red neon sign outside the Condor and gaping in awe at Doda’s neon-lit larger-than-life-size-tits and blinking incandescent nipples pointed to the San Francisco skyline. Others recounted stories of the barkers standing outside the Condor inciting tourists to step inside and checkout Carol’s show. Real live Carol Doda tits! Woo hoo!

As I read through these stories, my insides churned. I flashed back to a time nearly 40 years ago when I was a fifteen-year-old runaway girl living on the streets of San Francisco, and I happened to land a job in the Condor Club working for Carol Doda. My story is a different story then the ones I have read in the news this past week. Sure, when I walked through the doors of the Condor, I was as aware of the legend of Doda as anyone else growing up in San Francisco at that time. She was, after all, a television icon. Her slinky voice – “This is Carol Doda, and you are watching the Perfect 36”—was the soundtrack to late night TV, her voice accompanied by the ever present snap of the tab on my dad’s beer cans as we watched movies together and he drank down six packs of Budweiser or Olympia.

So yeah, I thought I knew damn well who Carol Doda was when I walked into the Condor in April 1977 looking for a job, but actually, I didn’t know her at all.

I grew up in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s, and Carol Doda was a regular household name. My parents and uncles and aunts were part of the Cocktail Generation, the generation that thought getting drunk and wagging your tits was revolutionary. Sure Doda’s face was a staple on the TV in my house, but she and her tits were also emblems of a whole culture that centered on getting wasted and humping each other as some sign of being sexually revolutionary. My parents played Herb Albert albums, the covers featuring naked women covered in whipped cream. Playboy magazine arrived in the mail regularly, and my mom used Mod Podge to decoupage all variety of household items with the images of naked women and their large Hugh Hefner-endorsed tits. My parents, uncles, aunts and their friends frequently headed to North Beach to play the scene.

During the day, my mom was a bookkeeper and my dad was an ironworker. On the weekends, they were transformed into out-of-control hyper sexual drunks, and Carol Doda incited them to push boundaries while North Beach gave them a place to push them. My parents came home with black eyes, hangovers and tales of public displays of debauchery. They came home saying they saw Carol Doda’s tits.

On my 12th birthday, my Uncle Jerry gave me a dog-eared copy of Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker (1971) as a present. It was the copy that he already read, and I really don’t want to think about what that meant. I think Uncle Jerry thought he was passing along some kind of baton of liberation, but really it was just another way in which the Cocktail Generation fucked up their kids. I was supposed to look to a hooker as a hero? I read the book front to back cover, mesmerized by the story. That book, along with every other piece of sex and booze propaganda thrust on my young self, probably helped pave the way for me to walk into the Condor and ask for a job when I was a fifteen year old girl who barely had lost her virginity.

In my mind, Doda was wrapped into the entire stinking cocktail that soaked through my parents’ generation. They were part of the Rat Pack generation and its taste for excess – booze, sex, and cigarettes – for no other reason than they could do it without any perceivable repercussions and that they felt momentary escape from the confines of their ordinary lives. To them, it was like flipping the finger to the Establishment they worked for but were also part of. Regardless of the myth of San Francisco as some kind of sex-crazed free for all, during the time of Doda’s reign, much of the city was still populated by working class families, like my own, who would head to North Beach as if they were going to Disneyland for the weekend.

This was well and fine for the adults who were exercising their new sense of liberty, especially for the cocktail generation who coopted the ideals of the hippy free love movement into a nightmarish bastardization that included believing it was okay to have orgies in front of their kids, engage in wife-swapping, and feed their children booze because “it was safer in the home than outside.” In this skewed world, these drunken sex-addled adults thought they were doing their kids a favor by removing taboos, when really for a lot of kids like me, growing up at that time was like living inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

That was my San Francisco. The era when kids were oversexed before they could crawl. The era that sent a lot of young girls, including myself, fleeing home and landing on the streets with nowhere to go and no way of knowing how to get there. And in the background, Carol Doda reminded us all that we were not only watching but living the world of the Perfect 36.

Of course the first myth to bust (pun intended ) is that Carol Doda’s tits were 36s. They were 44DDs the last time I checked. And I saw Carol Doda’s tits, many nights, as she pumped them up and down and sideways on the stage of the Condor. Those taut globes were the size of bowling balls. Ludicrous orbs ready to burst from their overinflated seams. As a kid looking at those things, I felt like I was watching what happened to Barbie when she took a wrong turn. Holy shit! So much for Disneyland. I was in the seventh circle of Plasticine Hell.

Perhaps my uncle knew something about my future that I didn’t when he handed me The Happy Hooker on my 12th birthday, or perhaps he was writing my future. In any case, my future led me to Carol Doda, and my memories of The Condor and the North Beach strip club scene (where I spent much of my fifteenth year on the planet ) are nothing like the mythic nostalgic recollections I read about Doda when she died last week.

The road that took me to The Condor Club is a long and winding one, to quote a song from the background of my childhood. But through many events in my early life – from alcohol-drenched parents to a strung out brother and a lot of Very Bad Shit – I ended up alone in San Francisco, a fifteen year old girl without a home and nowhere to go. Perhaps it was the fallout of the Cocktail Generation that shook my foundation so hard it threw me onto the streets when I was just a kid. I landed hard, and it was a tough fall, but somehow I learned how to survive, which is certainly obvious by the fact that I am sitting here writing my Carol Doda memories at age 53.

by Kim Nicolini, Anderson Valley Advertiser |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Dan Wynn
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Apple Lisa
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[ed. You really don't want to know.]

Big Cable’s Sledgehammer Is Coming Down

I want to talk about the sledgehammer of usage-based billing.

I take no pride in saying that I’ve been talking about it for years. The sledgehammer is not something I welcome, and I would have been happy if my fears about it never materialized. After all, the sledgehammer could cost internet users billions of dollars, enrich monopolists, and defeat the spirit — if not the law — of net neutrality. In a big way, the sledgehammer will also beat down our economic growth. This is one evil sledgehammer.

And it sounds so innocent! Usage-based billing. Kind of like paying for what you use, right? Don’t be fooled. The usage-based billing playbook was developed by the mobile wireless industry, which itself is nothing more than a duopoly (Verizon Wireless and AT&T) with a fringe of a few other firms with similar business models. I’ve been predicting for years that usage-based billing will be used as a sledgehammer by other internet access providers like Comcast. Unfortunately, it looks like I’ve been proven right.

The sledgehammer (as employed by the mobile carriers) is a part of a complex scheme designed to hijack the development of a fast, cheap, competitive, unlimited-capacity data communications systems — like the one our country should have.

It begins by announcing a data cap that’s set high enough to affect only a small percentage of current users who routinely hit it. Justify it by saying you’re only targeting the “hogs” who gobble up everybody else’s bandwidth. Say you’ll charge for data usage that exceeds that cap. Then sit back and wait. Eventually, increased usage by more Americans will bring millions into the fold. And presto: without lifting a finger, dominant players can charge more people more per month — on every side of every transaction, content sources as well as consumers — without expanding their facilities, much less upgrading to the communications capacity we need.

Why did this happen on the mobile wireless side? Because no one stood up and complained early enough in the game. And there’s no real competition to prompt better behavior.

That’s bad enough. But the sledgehammer’s use does not stop there. Now the country’s local cable monopolies feel emboldened to open up the mobile carriers’ playbook and set this scheme in motion. They are brash, unapologetic, and fearless — they are feeling their power. Usage-based billing is the sledgehammer they’ve been patiently weighing in their hands for a long time. Forget that they have lots more bandwidth than the mobile carriers —they will employ the caps not because they need to, but because they can get away with it.

What a great deal — for them. The scheme as a whole allows them to make the use of services that compete with their own businesses feel expensive to consumers. Today, these include streaming TV; tomorrow, the squeeze will come in home security, telemedicine, distance education, or anything else that requires modern-day levels of data capacity. It allows these giants to pick and choose among the providers of new businesses that will be allowed to reach consumers effectively. It allows them to charge differently for uses of their network that feel identical to consumers. And it’s unclear whether the FCC has retained the power to do anything about any of this.

The bottom line is that employing the sledgehammer of usage-based billing allows a cascade of practices that will make a mockery of net neutrality — allowing cable to pick the winners and losers among apps and services in the future. And it’s happening now.

Earlier this month, Comcast announced that it would be launching a $15 per month streaming pay TV service — cleverly named Stream TV — that wouldn’t count against the 300GB data plans (that number is the cap) it had already introduced in several states.

To understand why this matters, it’s important to realize that Comcast has intentionally architected the last-mile connections within its network pipe to allow for two different “lanes.” Traffic is either in one lane or the other. A rough way to describe it would be one lane for digital services that Comcast controls or has a relationship with, and the other for high-speed internet access.

by Susan Crawford, Backchannel |  Read more:

Image: Backchannel

It's Not About the Nail

Shocking New Way to Get the Salt Out

As the availability of clean, potable water becomes an increasingly urgent issue in many parts of the world, researchers are searching for new ways to treat salty, brackish or contaminated water to make it usable. Now a team at MIT has come up with an innovative approach that, unlike most traditional desalination systems, does not separate ions or water molecules with filters, which can become clogged, or boiling, which consumes great amounts of energy.

Instead, the system uses an electrically driven shockwave within a stream of flowing water, which pushes salty water to one side of the flow and fresh water to the other, allowing easy separation of the two streams. The new approach is described in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, in a paper by professor of chemical engineering and mathematics Martin Bazant, graduate student Sven Schlumpberger, undergraduate Nancy Lu, and former postdoc Matthew Suss.

This approach is “a fundamentally new and different separation system,” Bazant says. And unlike most other approaches to desalination or water purification, he adds, this one performs a “membraneless separation” of ions and particles.

Membranes in traditional desalination systems, such as those that use reverse osmosis or electrodialysis, are “selective barriers,” Bazant explains: They allow molecules of water to pass through, but block the larger sodium and chlorine atoms of salt. Compared to conventional electrodialysis, “This process looks similar, but it’s fundamentally different,” he says.

In the new process, called shock electrodialysis, water flows through a porous material —in this case, made of tiny glass particles, called a frit — with membranes or electrodes sandwiching the porous material on each side. When an electric current flows through the system, the salty water divides into regions where the salt concentration is either depleted or enriched. When that current is increased to a certain point, it generates a shockwave between these two zones, sharply dividing the streams and allowing the fresh and salty regions to be separated by a simple physical barrier at the center of the flow.

“It generates a very strong gradient,” Bazant says.

Even though the system can use membranes on each side of the porous material, Bazant explains, the water flows across those membranes, not through them. That means they are not as vulnerable to fouling — a buildup of filtered material — or to degradation due to water pressure, as happens with conventional membrane-based desalination, including conventional electrodialysis. “The salt doesn’t have to push through something,” Bazant says. The charged salt particles, or ions, “just move to one side,” he says.

The underlying phenomenon of generating a shockwave of salt concentration was discovered a few years ago by the group of Juan Santiago at Stanford University. But that finding, which involved experiments with a tiny microfluidic device and no flowing water, was not used to remove salt from the water, says Bazant, who is currently on sabbatical at Stanford.

The new system, by contrast, is a continuous process, using water flowing through cheap porous media, that should be relatively easy to scale up for desalination or water purification. “The breakthrough here is the engineering [of a practical system],” Bazant says.

by David L. Chandler, MIT News |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Stevie Wonder

Helen Macdonald’s ‘H Is for Hawk’

If birds are made of air, as the nature writer Sy Montgomery says, then writing a great bird book is a little like dusting for the fingerprints of a ghost. It calls for poetry and science, conjuring and evidence. In her breathtaking new book, “H Is for Hawk,” winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence — and her own — with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering.

The premise of her memoir is simple: Macdonald loses her bearings after her beloved father’s sudden death. She retreats from the human world. She’s a poet, historian and longtime falconer, and for complicated reasons, she seizes upon a strange yet sublime prescription for what ails her: She will raise and train a young goshawk, a cur of a bird to some, notoriously difficult to tame. Bigger, “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier,” she says, than other hawks they are sometimes confused with.

Although “animal as emotional healer” is a familiar motif, Macdonald’s journey clears its own path — messy, muddy and raw. Early on, she drives to Scotland from her home in Cambridge to pick up a captive-bred, 10-week-old, Czech-Finnish-German goshawk she’s seen online. At the first glimpse of her bird, Macdonald’s “heart jumps sideways.” And so does the reader’s, for here is a creature worth writing about: “A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.”

Back home, the bird fills “the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.” Fatherless mourner and baby hawk become acquainted. Macdonald grew up obsessed with birds of prey and later trained them, so she knows what to do and has all the necessary equipment: the tiny leather hood, as beautifully made, an observer says, as a Prada shoe; the jesses, or tethering straps; bells; and transmitters. The freezer is a morgue for dead chicks used to train and feed the hawk. Except for using devices that require a power source, Macdonald handles her bird much as a 15th-century falconer would.

The bird becomes Mabel, derived “from amabilis, meaning lovable, or dear,” and she learns to fly to Macdonald’s fist at the sound of a whistle: “There is a scratch of talons on wood, a flowering of feathers, one deep downstroke, the brief, heavy swing of talons brought up and into play and the dull thud as she hits my glove.”

There are tearful misunderstandings and glorious steps forward. But Macdonald’s progress is not as steady as her hawk’s. Training proceeds, but not without an existential hitch. “While the steps were familiar,” Macdonald writes, “the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life.”

Looking back at her mad mourning, she realizes a painful transformation is taking place: “What the mind does after losing one’s father isn’t just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.”

Macdonald feels safe in the dark house, barricaded from the outside world, but knows she must go out for Mabel’s sake — to the woods, where the goshawk’s “long, barred tail feathers and short, broad wings” are perfectly suited for the speed and hairpin-turning ability necessary for aerial slalom in dense forest.

We get to know Mabel as her trainer does. Macdonald stays so close, and the house is so quiet when they are together that she can hear the bird blinking. The hawk’s breath is like “pepper and musk and burned stone.” Her preening sounds like a deck of cards being shuffled. Every mood can be read: Feathers held in tight is fear; when Mabel fluffs herself and shakes her feathers into place, she is content. We come to love the bird’s “shaggy trousers and waggy tail,” her “café au lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-colored teardrops,” and even her formidable weapons — the “curved black beak” and the black talons.

Soon enough, Macdonald doesn’t even consciously inventory the body language of her bird; instead she seems to just feel what Mabel feels. On a hunch, Macdonald even discovers a little bit of whimsy in this ultra-serious predator. She rolls up paper into a ball and hands it to Mabel. The hawk plays with it like a toy, eyes narrowed in “bird laughter.”

That’s not our image of hawks at all. And it’s an important point to Macdonald, who worries, rightly, that generations of preconceived notions rob us of truly seeing some creatures as they really are. “Wild things are made from human histories,” she writes.

by Vicki Constantine Croke, NY Times | Read more:
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What Passing a Key CO2 Mark Means to Climate Scientists

This is written for anyone who is climate-concerned, but specifically for our DC readers in the policy-making community. This is the issue at which cautious incrementalism collides with urgency. If a meteor were headed for earth and due to crash in a year between 2020 and 2040, I doubt our policymakers would be talking about how long to delay before acting.

The climate emergency is that meteor. 2020 is five years away. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not feeling lucky. Neither are these folks. [via:]

This week is a big one for our world. Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels climbed above the 400 parts per million (ppm) at the Mauna Loa Observatory and it’s distinctly possible they won’t be back below that level again in our lifetimes.

Humans have burned enough fossil fuels to drive atmospheric CO2 to levels that world hasn’t seen in at least 400,000 years. That’s driven up temperatures, melted ice and caused oceans to acidify. Some extreme weather events around the world have become more likely and stronger because of it, and some will likely only get worse as the planet continues to warm.

Because CO2 sits in the atmosphere long after it’s burned, that means we’ve likely lived our last week in a sub-400 ppm world. It also means that the reshaping of our planet will continue for decades and centuries to come, even if climate talks in Paris in two weeks are successful.

To get some perspective on what this means for the world, we asked leading climate scientists for their insight on passing this milestone as well as what it means for their particular areas of research. Below are their answers, some edited lightly for clarity or length.

by Andrea Thompson and Brian Kahn, Climate Central | Read more:
Image: Climate Central

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How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself

[ed. See also: How to look at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative]

Mark Zuckerberg did not donate $45 billion to charity. You may have heard that, but that was wrong.

Here’s what happened instead: Mr. Zuckerberg created an investment vehicle.

Sorry for the slightly less sexy headline.

Mr. Zuckerberg is a co-founder of Facebook and a youthful megabillionaire. In announcing the birth of his daughter, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, declared they would donate 99 percent of their worth, the vast majority of which is tied up in Facebook stock valued at $45 billion today.

In doing so, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan did not set up a charitable foundation, which has nonprofit status. He created a limited liability company, one that has already reaped enormous benefits as public relations coup for himself. His P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock. Mr. Zuckerberg was depicted in breathless, glowing terms for having, in essence, moved money from one pocket to the other.

An L.L.C. can invest in for-profit companies (perhaps these will be characterized as societally responsible companies, but lots of companies claim the mantle of societal responsibility). An L.L.C. can make political donations. It can lobby for changes in the law. He remains completely free to do as he wishes with his money. That’s what America is all about. But as a society, we don’t generally call these types of activities “charity.”

In covering the event, many commentators praised the size and percentage of the gift and pointed out that Mr. Zuckerberg is relatively young to be planning to give his wealth away. “Mark Zuckerberg Philanthropy Pledge Sets New Giving Standard,” Bloomberg glowed. The New York Times ran an article on the front page. Few news outlets initially considered the tax implications of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan. A Wall Street Journal article didn’t mention taxes at all.

Nor did they grapple with the societal implications of the would-be donations.

So what are the tax implications? They are quite generous to Mr. Zuckerberg. I asked Victor Fleischer, a law professor and tax specialist at the University of San Diego School of Law, as well as a contributor to DealBook. He explained that if the L.L.C. sold stock, Mr. Zuckerberg would pay a hefty capital gains tax, particularly if Facebook stock kept climbing.

If the L.L.C. donated to a charity, he would get a deduction just like anyone else. That’s a nice little bonus. But the L.L.C. probably won’t do that because it can do better. The savvier move, Professor Fleischer explained, would be to have the L.L.C. donate the appreciated shares to charity, which would generate a deduction at fair market value of the stock without triggering any tax.

Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t create these tax laws and cannot be criticized for minimizing his tax bills. If he had created a foundation, he would have accrued similar tax benefits. But what this means is that he amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the world — and is likely never to pay any taxes on it. Anytime a superwealthy plutocrat makes a charitable donation, the public ought to be reminded that this is how our tax system works. The superwealthy buy great public relations and adulation for donations that minimize their taxes.

by Jesse Eisinger, Dealbook/NY Times | Read more:
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Martin Johnson Heade, Two Fighting Hummingbirds with Two Orchids (1875)
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The Bonds of Catastrophe

It is perhaps not widely understood (outside the specialized domains of risk modeling and property insurance) that the last twenty years have seen the relatively rapid growth of a new kind of financial instrument: the catastrophe bond. I aim in what follows to offer the reader a brief introduction to these innovative money-things, which sit at the precarious nexus of mathematical modeling, environmental instability, and vast sums of capital. Techno-legal creations of considerable complexity (and some genuine elegance), “cat bonds“ circulate in the Olympian air of global high finance, where they afford investors an opportunity to place large bets on the occurrence (and non-occurrence) of various mass disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, plagues, suitcase nukes. The lengthy, turgid, and highly confidential specifications that make up the prospectuses of these investments might be said to represent a special and entirely overlooked subgenre of science fiction: what we discover, turning the pages of such deals, are fanatically extensive metrical descriptions of countless doomsday scenarios, each story told in lovingly legalistic and scientific detail. Unlike most dystopian fantasizing, however, the worst-case scenarios played out in the appendices of cat bond issues come with very real-world prospective paydays, precisely priced and proper to the consideration of an imaginative portfolio manager looking to diversify her investments. 


Put your paranoia aside (at least temporarily). It is quite possible that cat bonds are basically a good thing, creating mechanisms as they do for hedging against the tremendously disruptive costs of low-probability, high-negative-impact natural and/or social events. It is also possible, of course, that they are simply another sophisticated exercise in plutocratic self-dealing. We will bracket that thorny problem for now, and focus here on conveying (1) a general understanding of how these instruments work, and (2) a specific appreciation of the way that they constitute perhaps the most elaborate and powerful social technology currently available for articulating just what we mean when we say “catastrophe.”


* * *

So what’s a cat bond? A cat bond is, first of all, a bond—meaning a kind of debt arrangement. The holder of any bond has conveyed a sum of money to the bond issuer for a fixed term (say, a year or two) in return for the promise of some sort of interest payment: You hold my hundred thousand dollars this year, but you promise that at the end of the year you are going to give me back, not a hundred thousand dollars, but a hundred and ten thousand dollars—netting me a 10% return on my investment. With an ordinary high-quality corporate or municipal bond, my odds of getting my principal back are pretty close to 100%, and my rate of return (given the near-negligible risk of loss) is generally pretty low. US Treasury bonds are about as minimal-risk an investment as the earth seems to afford at present (since they are backed by the American government, which, despite its problems, looks unlikely to evaporate anytime soon), and so whatever they are paying in a given year basically sets the baseline for investors everywhere: it’s a small rate of return but, for all intents and purposes, it’s guaranteed. By contrast, if I am buying a “junk” bond—issued by some business guys with wild eyes and big ideas—I am promised considerably bigger interest payments than I would get on a “T-bill” (a short-term US Treasury bond), but I have to weigh the non-zero probability of a default on the part of my debtors, who may in fact not only not pay me my nice premium, but could even lose some or all of my principal (though this is pretty rare in normal financial climates). That, in a nutshell, is the bond market: lend money to different folks, who have to promise to pay you more or less for the privilege of the loan, depending on how shady they look.


Catastrophe bonds have this basic structure. The holder of such a bond has indeed conveyed a sum of money to the bond issuer for a fixed term, in return for the promise of a downstream percentage premium. What makes a cat bond a cat bond, however, is that—unlike most ordinary bonds, which are issued by people/governments/institutions needing ready-to-hand money to build a building or a bridge or expand a business—a cat bond has been issued by somebody who is worried about some kind of possible disaster, somebody who is looking for protection from the financial effects of a catastrophe.


Think like a gigantic insurance corporation for a moment. If you’ve been writing property insurance for a large number of homeowners in southern Florida, you get pretty nervous every hurricane season. Yes, you’ve socked away everybody’s premiums for years and years, so you are sitting on a mountain of cash, but you still have to reckon with the fear that, in your competitive drive to underbid the other insurance companies writing policies in the Sunshine State, you may have left yourself inadequately capitalized in the event that a massive storm flattens the region. You would do well to hedge against that whopper, by basically buying some insurance yourself. And indeed, the “reinsurance” market—insurance for insurers—has been around for a long time, and amounts to a circa $500 billion business, whereby the financial risks of different large-scale insurable events are carved up and spread out among a sizable (but relatively cozy) community of mutually re-insuring insurers. This is all good old-fashioned insurance. Meaning, basically, contracts with the following form: “If you lose this under these conditions, I will pay you back for it.” It’s a big deal to take on that sort of obligation. You had better be sure you can do what you say you are going to do—or else you go bankrupt (and your clients get screwed). 


by D. Graham Burnett, Cabinet |  Read more:

Image: MultiCat Mexico Ltd

Banks Are About to Have an 'Uber Moment'

Antony Jenkins, the former CEO of Barclays, has a nightmare vision for the future of big banks.

In a speech in London this week he said: "The incumbents risk becoming merely capital-providing utilities that operate in a highly regulated, less profitable environment, a situation unlikely to be tolerated by shareholders."

Jenkins says a series of Uber-style disruptions in the industry could shrink headcount at traditional big banks by as much as 50%, while profitability in some areas could collapse by over 60% — huge predictions from a man who, until recently, ran one of Britain's biggest banks.

He adds: "In my view only a few [incumbent banks] will have the courage and decisiveness to win in this new field."

The problem? Financial technology, better known as fintech.

Jenkins, who was ousted as Barclays CEO in July, says a new wave of tech-savvy startups that can do things better, faster, and cheaper than the big banks will disrupt their traditional businesses like lending, payments, and wealth management.

He isn't alone in thinking this. A survey by software firm Temenos released on Thursday found 27% of senior bankers named tech companies as the biggest threats to their businesses.

In fact, we're already seeing it happen with startups like Lending Club and Funding Circle(lending), Square (payments), Nutmeg (wealth management), and TransferWise(international payments) — all of whom Jenkins name checks in his speech at Chatham House.

Jenkins recently visited Silicon Valley to hobnob with fintech types out there and it's convinced him that financial services are about to be disrupted in the same way publishing, telecoms, and the music industry have been.

He says:

We will see massive pressure on incumbent banks, which will struggle to implement new technologies at the same pace as their new rivals. That will make it increasingly challenging for them to deliver the returns and profitability that their shareholders demand. 

Ultimately, those forces will compel large banks to significantly automate their business. I predict that the number of branches and people employed in the financial services sector may decline by as much as 50% over the next 10 years, and even in a less harsh scenario I expect a decline of at least 20%.

A halving of headcount and branches over 10 years! That is a huge decline. The prediction coincides with reports that Lloyds is poised to axe 1,000 jobs as part of branch closures and increased automation.

Jenkins also quoted research from consultancy McKinsey that technology will wipe out two-thirds of profits from things like retail lending, car loans, and credit cards.

So why are banks suddenly facing a swarm of new tech businesses eating away at their businesses? There are two big factors.

by Oscar Williams-Grut, Business Insider |  Read more:

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