The Canada Experiment

As 2017 begins, Canada may be the last immigrant nation left standing. Our government believes in the value of immigration, as does the majority of the population. We took in an estimated 300,000 newcomers in 2016, including 48,000 refugees, and we want them to become citizens; around 85% of permanent residents eventually do. Recently there have been concerns about bringing in single Arab men, but otherwise Canada welcomes people from all faiths and corners. The greater Toronto area is now the most diverse city on the planet, with half its residents born outside the country; Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa and Montreal aren’t far behind. Annual immigration accounts for roughly 1% of the country’s current population of 36 million.

Canada has been over-praised lately for, in effect, going about our business as usual. In 2016 such luminaries as US President Barack Obama and Bono, no less, declared “the world needs more Canada”. In October, the Economist blared “Liberty Moves North: Canada’s Example to the World” on its cover, illustrated by the Statue of Liberty haloed in a maple leaf and wielding a hockey stick. Infamously, on the night of the US election Canada’s official immigration website crashed, apparently due to the volume of traffic.

Of course, 2016 was also the year – really the second running – when many western countries turned angrily against immigration, blaming it for a variety of ills in what journalist Doug Saunders calls the “global reflex appeal to fear”. Alongside the rise of nativism has emerged a new nationalism that can scarcely be bothered to deny its roots in racial identities and exclusionary narratives.

Compared to such hard stances, Canada’s almost cheerful commitment to inclusion might at first appear almost naive. It isn’t. There are practical reasons for keeping the doors open. Starting in the 1990s, low fertility and an aging population began slowing Canada’s natural growth rate. Ten years ago, two-thirds of population increase was courtesy of immigration. By 2030, it is projected to be 100%.

The economic benefits are also self-evident, especially if full citizenship is the agreed goal. All that “settlers” – ie, Canadians who are not indigenous to the land – need do is look in the mirror to recognize the generally happy ending of an immigrant saga. Our government repeats it, our statistics confirm it, our own eyes and ears register it: diversity fuels, not undermines, prosperity.

But as well as practical considerations for remaining an immigrant country, Canadians, by and large, are also philosophically predisposed to an openness that others find bewildering, even reckless. The prime minister, Justin Trudeau, articulated this when he told the New York Times Magazine that Canada could be the “first postnational state”. He added: “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”

The remark, made in October 2015, failed to cause a ripple – but when I mentioned it to Michael Bach, Germany’s minister for European affairs, who was touring Canada to learn more about integration, he was astounded. No European politician could say such a thing, he said. The thought was too radical.

For a European, of course, the nation-state model remains sacrosanct, never mind how ill-suited it may be to an era of dissolving borders and widespread exodus. The modern state – loosely defined by a more or less coherent racial and religious group, ruled by internal laws and guarded by a national army – took shape in Europe. Telling an Italian or French citizen they lack a “core identity” may not be the best vote-winning strategy.

To Canadians, in contrast, the remark was unexceptional. After all, one of the country’s greatest authors, Mavis Gallant, once defined a Canadian as “someone with a logical reason to think he may be one” – not exactly a ringing assertion of a national character type. Trudeau could, in fact, have been voicing a chronic anxiety among Canadians: the absence of a shared identity.

But he wasn’t. He was outlining, however obliquely, a governing principle about Canada in the 21st century. We don’t talk about ourselves in this manner often, and don’t yet have the vocabulary to make our case well enough. Even so, the principle feels right. Odd as it may seem, Canada may finally be owning our postnationalism.

There’s more than one story in all this. First and foremost, postnationalism is a frame to understand our ongoing experiment in filling a vast yet unified geographic space with the diversity of the world. It is also a half-century old intellectual project, born of the country’s awakening from colonial slumber. But postnationalism has also been in intermittent practise for centuries, since long before the nation-state of Canada was formalised in 1867. In some sense, we have always been thinking differently about this continent-wide landmass, using ideas borrowed from Indigenous societies. From the moment Europeans began arriving in North America they were made welcome by the locals, taught how to survive and thrive amid multiple identities and allegiances.

That welcome was often betrayed, in particular during the late 19th and 20th centuries, when settler Canada did profound harm to Indigenous people. But, if the imbalance remains, so too does the influence: the model of another way of belonging.

Can any nation truly behave “postnationally” – ie without falling back on the established mechanisms of state governance and control? The simple answer is no.

Canada has borders, where guards check passports, and an army. It asserts the occasional modest territorial claim. Trudeau is more aware than most of these mechanisms: he oversees them.

It can also be argued that Canada enjoys the luxury of thinking outside the nation-state box courtesy of its behemoth neighbour to the south. The state needn’t defend its borders too forcefully or make that army too large, and Canada’s economic prosperity may be as straightforward as continuing to do 75% of its trade with the US. Being liberated, the thinking goes, from the economic and military stresses that most other countries face gives Canada the breathing room, and the confidence, to experiment with more radical approaches to society. Lucky us.

Nor is there uniform agreement within Canada about being it post-anything. When the novelist Yann Martel casually described his homeland as “the greatest hotel on earth,” he meant it as a compliment – but some read it as an endorsement of newcomers deciding to view Canada as a convenient waystation: a security, business or real-estate opportunity, with no lasting responsibilities attached.

Likewise, plenty of Canadians believe we possess a set of normative values, and want newcomers to prove they abide by them. Kellie Leitch, who is running for the leadership of the Conservative party, suggested last autumn that we screen potential immigrants for “anti-Canadian values.” A minister in the previous Conservative government, Chris Alexander, pledged in 2015 to set up a tip-line for citizens to report “barbaric cultural practises”. And in the last election, the outgoing prime minster, Stephen Harper, tried in vain to hamstring Trudeau’s popularity by confecting a debate about the hijab.

To add to the mix, the French-speaking province of Quebec already constitutes one distinctive nation, as do the 50-plus First Nations spread across the country. All have their own perspectives and priorities, and may or may not be interested in a postnational frame. (That said, Trudeau is a bilingual Montrealer, and Quebec a vibrantly diverse society.)

In short, the nation-state of Canada, while wrapped in less bunting than other global versions, is still recognisable. But postnational thought is less about hand-holding in circles and shredding passports. It’s about the use of a different lens to examine the challenges and precepts of an entire politics, economy and society.

by Charles Foran, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Jacqui Oakley

Boris Rogozin, Cyberpunk
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Trump and the Case of Congressional Ethics

How much does Donald Trump care about congressional ethics? The principles at stake can’t bother him much, it’s reasonable to say, given the choices that he has made so far regarding his own conflicts, and in a hundred other areas. That is what congressional Republicans may have guessed when, late in the evening of Monday, a federal holiday, they made the dismantling of the Office of Congressional Ethics the first order of business for their new term. So much during the election year had pushed the limits of self-parody, so why shouldn’t they? For about eighteen hours, it looked like a triumph for legalized graft. Under the new measure, the ethics office would not be independent, would not be allowed to talk to the press, would not be able to do, really, anything. And the Republicans who had pushed their caucus to back it, led by Representative Robert Goodlatte, of Virginia, had done so in a closed meeting with no warning, as part of a package of rules changes. The G.O.P. representatives were absolutely correct in thinking that the Trump years are shaping up to be a bitter farce, in terms of good government, and a tragedy in other ways—bereft, for example, of real efforts to improve the lives of the most vulnerable Americans. What they were confused about was the part that they are expected to play. This became clear on Monday night, as critics from all sides pelted the congressmen with their own absurdity, and, the next morning, when Trump began to tweet. (...)

A couple of hours after Trump tweeted, the Republican conference met again, in what Politico described as an “emergency meeting” called by Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and, for now, abandoned the plan. Reportedly, the ethics-gutting embarrassed McCarthy and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House; supposedly, Ryan (who was reëlected as Speaker on Tuesday) had never liked the idea, at least behind closed doors, though on Tuesday morning he claimed that it would leave Congress as ethical as ever, for whatever that’s worth. So how did it get as far as it did? The partisanship in the House is such that what counts, generally, is simply who gets the majority when the Republicans meet as a caucus—the majority of the majority—which the Party is then expected to get behind. This meant that the ethics-rule change looked like a done deal because Republicans alone favored including it in that rules package by a margin of 119–74. (A number of Democrats, some of whom have their own ethical problems, might have favored the measure, too.) That is no reason to feel sorry for Ryan, who has lived by and fortified this culture. There were moments during the campaign when Ryan was critical of Trump. But in its last days he campaigned for Trump by name. Ryan seems to have his own gold-painted fantasies of what that means. He talks frequently about how much “Donald” likes his ideas. If, in his focus on getting Trump’s help in dismantling the safety net, he let himself be exposed to a day of humiliation, he can’t be surprised. Nor does he deserve much credit for his late effort, with the reversal of the rule change, to salvage his dignity. Indeed, by doing it so quickly after the Trump tweets he has made himself look all the more like the President-elect’s messenger, or maybe his intern.

One mystery of all this is how the Republicans could have been so foolish—so conspicuous—given the populist rhetoric they themselves benefitted from in the past election. But when politicians become too used to saying things that they don’t believe, it becomes easy for them to forget that members of the public might actually be dismayed. And if they thought that Trump would cover for them, and help make them look good, the picture is that much more pathetic. (Chris Christie, now slumping in his office in Trenton, seems to have believed that, too.) Maybe, looking at the way business is done in the Tower, the congressional Republicans imagined that they might have a role like that ascribed to Trump’s adult children, seeking out the projects they liked and then bringing them to him for a wave of the hand. They may have thought that, when they smiled at his speeches, they’d shimmer a little, like Ivanka. Or maybe they thought that they’d be like his foreign partners, paying a modest fee to license the Trump name, using it to bring the locals into the golf course and keeping the serious money for themselves. They appear to have been wrong. In this case, they were the low-level Atlantic City contractors, sending a bill to Manhattan for the electrical work, having eagerly helped to build something bankrupt, and not even getting paid.

by Amy Davidson, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: uncredited

One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die

Early in June, Sloan was readmitted to U.C.S.F., and Baldwin, his mother, returned to San Francisco to be with him. Miller saw both of them for an appointment that morning, and when he walked in, it hit him how quickly Sloan’s body was failing: In roughly six weeks, Sloan had gone from a functioning, happy 27-year-old, walking his dog up a hill, to very clearly dying. His decline was relentless, by any standard. At no point had any doctor been able to give him a single bit of good news. Even now, Sloan’s oncologist was reporting that after the first dose of chemotherapy, his heart was likely too frail to take more. (...)

Good palliative-care doctors recognize there’s an art to navigating clinical interactions like this, and Miller seems particularly sensitive to its subtleties. In this case, Miller realized, his job was to “disillusion” Sloan without devastating him. Hope is a tricky thing, Miller told me. Some terminal patients keep chasing hope through round after round of chemo. But it’s amazing how easily others “re-proportion,” or recalibrate, their expectations: how the hope of making it to a grandchild’s birthday or finishing “Game of Thrones” becomes sufficiently meaningful. “The question becomes,” Miller says, “how do you incorporate those hard facts into your moment-by-moment life instead of trying to run away from them?”

At an initial appointment with Sloan, two weeks earlier, Miller made the calculation not to steer Sloan toward any crushing realizations. He worried that if he pushed too hard, Sloan might feel alienated and shut down. (“I needed his allegiance,” Miller later explained; it was more important, in the long term, that Sloan see him as an advocate.) At the second meeting, Miller remembered, “I felt the need to be more brutal.” And, he imagined, by now Sloan would have started to suspect that the story he’d been telling himself didn’t fit the reality. “I just said, ‘Randy, this is not going like any of us want for you,’ ” and Miller began, calmly, to level with him.

Traveling was out of the question, Miller explained; best guess, Sloan had a few months to live. “You could just watch his world collapse,” Miller recalled. “With each sentence, you’re taking another possibility away.” Sloan started crying. And yet, Baldwin also knew that her son had been waiting for his doctors to say this out loud. Sloan couldn’t understand why, if he had Stage 4 of an incurable cancer, he was still taking 70 pills every day, with the doses laid out in a dizzying flowchart. And as Miller went on, he was stunned by how well Sloan seemed to be absorbing this new information, without buckling under its weight. “He was actually kind of keeping up with his grief, reconciling the facts of his life,” he says. “It was a moving target, and he kept hitting it.” Baldwin told me: “Randy was a simple guy. He would say to me, ‘Mom, all I want is one ordinary day.’ ” He was sick of being sick — just like he’d been saying. He wanted to go back to living, as best he could.

Quickly the conversation turned to what was next. A standard question in palliative care is “What’s important to you now?” But Sloan didn’t muster much of a response, so Miller retooled the question. He told Sloan that nothing about his life was going the way he expected, and his body was only going to keep breaking down. “So, what’s your favorite part of yourself? What character trait do we want to make sure to protect as everything else falls apart?” Sloan had an immediate answer for this one. “I love everybody I’ve ever met,” he said. (...)

Sloan got apprehensive when Miller started telling him about Zen Hospice’s residential facility, known as the Guest House; it sounded as if it was for old people. But Miller explained that it was probably the best chance he had for living the last act of his life the way he wanted. His other options were to tough it out at home with two weekly visits from a home hospice nurse or go to a nursing home. At Zen Hospice, Sloan’s friends would always be welcome, and Sloan could come and go as he pleased as long as someone went with him. He could eat what he wanted. He could step out for a cigarette. He could even walk up the street and smoke on his own stoop — the Guest House was just two blocks from Sloan’s apartment. Besides, Miller told him: “It’s where I work. I’ll be there.” (...)

I never met Randy Sloan. But as I heard these stories in the months after his death, it became impossible for me not to fixate on the unfathomability of his interior life, or anyone’s interior life, at the end — to wonder how well Sloan had come to terms with what was happening to him, how much agony he might have felt. Erin Singer, the kitchen manager, told me that Sloan seemed intent on keeping his distance from the Guest House. Usually, she said, he sat under a tree in the park next door, silently smoking a cigarette. And it struck Singer as significant that Sloan “didn’t sit looking at the street or the garden. He always sat looking at the house,” as if he was wrestling with what it would mean to go inside.

The question that was unsettling me was about regret: How sure was everyone that Sloan didn’t have desires he would have liked to express or anguish he would have liked to work through — and should someone have helped him express and work through them, instead of just letting him play video games with his friends? My real question, I guess, was: Is this all there is?

Later, when I admitted this to Miller, he told me he understood this kind of anxiety well, but was able, with practice, to resist it. “Learning to love not knowing,” he said, “that’s a key part of this story. Obviously, I don’t know the depths of Randy’s soul, either. Was Randy enlightened or did he just not have the right vocabulary for this, if any of us do? We’ll never know. And maybe the difference between those things is unimportant. I think of it as: Randy got to play himself out.”

This is a favorite phrase of Miller’s. It means that Randy’s ability to be Randy was never unnecessarily constrained. What Sloan chose to do with that freedom at the Guest House was up to him. Miller was suggesting that I’d misunderstood the mission of Zen Hospice. Yes, it’s about wresting death from the one-size-fits-all approach of hospitals, but it’s also about puncturing a competing impulse, the one I was scuffling with now: our need for death to be a hypertranscendent experience. “Most people aren’t having these transformative deathbed moments,” Miller said. “And if you hold that out as a goal, they’re just going to feel like they’re failing.” The truth was, Zen Hospice had done something almost miraculous: It had allowed Sloan and those who loved him to live a succession of relatively ordinary, relatively satisfying present moments together, until Sloan’s share of present moments ran out.

by Jon Mooallem, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Todd Hido for The New York Times

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The Swamp Gets Swampier

[ed. First order of business for the new Republican Congress: Kill the Congressional Ethics Committee. Brilliant! Update: GOP backtracks... for now.]

President-elect Donald Trump criticized House Republicans Tuesday for making one of their first acts a vote to gut the independent Office of Congressional Ethics, arguing that tax reform and health care should be higher priorities.

"With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it may be, their number one act and priority," Trump asked over Twitter the morning after the surprise and secretive move by the House GOP.

"Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance!" he added.

Trump's comments came after GOP House members voted behind closed doors Monday to give lawmakers themselves ultimate control over the Office of Congressional Ethics, the independent body created in 2008 to investigate allegations of misconduct by lawmakers. The office was created after several bribery and corruption scandals sent members to prison.

The ethics change, which prompted a furious outcry from Democrats and government watchdog groups, is part of a rules package that the full House will vote on Tuesday.

Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who had argued against the unilateral rules change Monday night, issued a statement Tuesday down playing the change and insisting that the OCE will operate independently though under the oversight of the member-only House Ethics Committee.

"All members of Congress are required to earn the public's trust every single day, and this House will hold members accountable to the people," Ryan said.

Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., had pressed for a bipartisan approach at a later date, but rank-and-file Republicans defied their leadership.

The 119-74 vote reflected the frustration of many lawmakers who have felt unfairly targeted by the OCE, but it was a setback for leadership caught off guard by the swift action.

Under the ethics change pushed by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., the non-partisan Office of Congressional Ethics would fall under the control of the House Ethics Committee, which is run by lawmakers. It would be known as the Office of Congressional Complaint Review, and the rule change would require that "any matter that may involve a violation of criminal law must be referred to the Committee on Ethics for potential referral to law enforcement agencies after an affirmative vote by the members," according to Goodlatte's office.

Lawmakers would have the final say on their colleagues under the change.

Democrats, led by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, reacted angrily.

"Republicans claim they want to 'drain the swamp,' but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in, the House GOP has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of their actions," the California Democrat said in a statement. "Evidently, ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress."

by Donna Cassata, AP |  Read more:

Image: La Vie Orleans Tours

Japan Copes With the Disappearing Eel

[ed. Probably won't be ordering much unagi for a while.]

One hot evening last July, I visited the Michelin-starred unagi, or eel, restaurant Nodaiwa, which sits in a quiet basement beneath Tokyo’s glamorous Ginza shopping district. Next door is the world’s most famous sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, which was the subject of a documentary from 2012 called “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” The restaurant is now so famous that a sign, written in English, sits outside its entrance, asking visitors not to take photographs.

In recent years, less benign developments have forced Nodaiwa to place a sign at its entrance as well. Whenever I visit, I count myself lucky to find the following message written on it, in Japanese: “Today we have natural Japanese eel.”

The restaurant started serving grilled eel out of a timber farmhouse, near the famous Tsukiji Fish Market, about two hundred years ago. And through five generations of continuous operation such a sign was unnecessary, even laughable, given the abundance of Japan’s native species of freshwater eel. But, in 2013, Japan’s government added Anguilla japonica to its official Red List of endangered fish, after researchers found that wild unagi populations had declined by about ninety per cent in the course of just three decades.

At Tsukiji, wholesale prices for farm-raised unagi imported from China immediately surged to a record high of around forty U.S. dollars per kilogram, and remained there for much of 2013. Prices for the wild-caught, “natural Japanese” eels served at upscale restaurants like Nodaiwa climbed even higher, by as much as fifty or sixty per cent.

But the government had been late to recognize the extent of the problem, which had already taken a toll on many famous restaurants specializing in kabayaki, a signature unagi preparation. In March, 2012, a year before the species was declared endangered, the beloved unagi restaurant Suekawa closed its doors, after sixty-five years of business, and it was followed a month later by the popular restaurant Yoshikawa. Then, in May of 2012, one of Japan’s best-loved kabayaki restaurants, called Benkei, closed its doors after more than six decades of serving eel in Tokyo’s historic “lower city.” The restaurants that survived were buying eels for ten times the price that they’d paid just eight years earlier, according to one vender at Tsukiji Fish Market. The family restaurant chain Hanaya decided to pull eel dishes from its summer menu.

For other types of seafood, farm-raised stocks remain relatively stable when wild catches decline. But unagi, which hatch at sea but mature in freshwater, cannot be effectively bred in captivity, so farm-raised stocks rely on young eels, known as glass eels, which are harvested at sea, then raised to maturity at eel farms in China, Korea, and Japan.

Overfishing of the glass eel is, undoubtedly, the source of the problem. Each year, Japanese people eat more than a hundred thousand tons of eel, which usually amounts to about seventy-five per cent of the total global catch. Roughly half of that annual eel consumption takes place during the summer months, when Japanese tradition holds that the nourishing unagi helps maintain one’s stamina against the withering heat. Eric Rath, a history professor at the University of Kansas who specializes in Japan’s culinary traditions, told me that this belief is “an idea that comes from the eighth-century ‘Collection of Myriad Leaves,’ the earliest collection of Japanese poetry and Japan’s most esteemed locus classicus for customs.” Grilled eel is so strongly identified with the midsummer months that it is the official food of a national holiday called the Day of the Ox.

The crisis brought on by diminishing unagi catches is, therefore, multilayered: an environmental crisis for the endangered species and its habitat, a financial crisis for the centuries-old unagi industry, and a cultural crisis for the Japanese public.

by Joshua Hunt, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Markus Kirchgessner /LAIF

If Republicans Dismantle ACA, Insurers Likely to Bolt

There’s a joke among insurers that there are two things that health insurance companies hate to do – take risks and pay claims. But, of course, these are the essence of their business!

Yet, if they do too much of either, they will go broke, and if they do too little, their customers will find a better policy. This balancing act isn’t too hard if they have a pool sufficient to average out the highs and lows. I speak with some experience as the former CEO of one of these firms.

Employee-sponsored insurance has fit this model fairly well, providing good stability and reasonable predictability. Unfortunately, the market for individuals has never worked well.

Generally, this model forces insurers to take fewer risks so that they can still make money. They do this by excluding preexisting conditions and paying fewer claims. In such a market, fewer people are helped, and when they are able to get insurance, they pay a lot more for it than if they were part of an employee-sponsored plan.

The Affordable Care Act changed all of this. Companies were required to stop doing these bad things. In exchange for taking on substantially more risk of less healthy patients, they were promised more business by getting access to more potential customers.

The federal government offers subsidies to help pay the premiums for consumers whose income falls below a certain level. The law also stipulates that all people must be covered, or they face a penalty. This so-called individual mandate also guaranteed business for the insurance companies, because it led healthy people into the risk pool.

To entice insurers into the market, the ACA also offered well-established methods to reduce risk. For example, it built in protections for insurers who enrolled especially sick people. It also provided back-up payments for very high-cost cases and protected against big losses and limited big gains in the first three years.

These steps worked well in establishing a stable market for Medicare drug plans when this program started under President Bush in 2006. Competition there is vigorous, rates are lower than estimated and enrollees are satisfied. In other words, the market works well.

Congress did not honor the deal

But when the time came to pay up for risk reduction in the Obamacare exchanges, Congress reneged and paid only 12 percent of what was owed to the insurers. So, on top of the fact that the companies had to bear the risk of unknown costs and utilization in the start-up years, which turned out to be higher than they expected, insurers had to absorb legislative uncertainty of whether the rules would be rewritten.

It is no wonder that this year they have dramatically increased premiums, averaging 20 percent, to compensate for the extra risk they didn’t factor into the original lower rates. In contrast, underlying health costs are rising at about 5 percent.

Repeal and replace?

And now comes the reality of the “repeal and replace” initiatives from the Republicans. If the uncertainty of this market was large before with the ACA, it is almost unknowable under whatever comes next. Thus the initial exit of some latecomers, including United Healthcare, and undercapitalized minor entrants, such as nonprofit co-ops, is almost certain to become a flood of firms leaving the exchanges. They have little choice since the risks are too large and the actuarially appropriate rates are still not obvious given the political turmoil and changing rules.

Some in Congress seem to think that passing the “repeal” part immediately but delaying its implementation for two or three years will somehow leave everything as it is now. But this naïve notion misses the fact that the riskiness of the Obamacare individual insurance exchange markets will have been ramped up to such a level that continuing makes no sense.

Even if a company reaches break-even in the “delay” years, it will lose when the repeal is effective. If the premium subsidies now available to lower-income enrollees go away immediately and the mandate to sign up for an insurance plan disappears, then the number of people purchasing individual policies on the exchanges will drop like a rock. In fact, it is clear that even debating this scenario is likely to be self-fulfilling, since insurers must decide on their participation for 2018 by the late spring of 2017. Look for many to leave then.

by J.B. Silvers, The Conversation |  Read more:

Image: Thomson Reuters via:

Seasteading Plans for French Polynesia

A futuristic plan to build a floating techno-libertarian city in a French Polynesian lagoon has left some local residents worried they could be the next unsuspecting inhabitants of a peaceful planet in a science-fiction movie.

“It reminds me of the innocent Ewoks of the moon of Endor who saw in the Galactic Empire a providential manna,” said Tahitian TV host Alexandre Taliercio. “They let them build what they wanted on earth and in orbit, but that’s not to say that the Empire shared the blueprints of the Death Star with them.”

The proposal for a seastead – an autonomous oceanic colony; think homesteading, but wetter - took a significant step on Christmas Day, when a Silicon Valley group announced it had reached an agreement with the French Polynesian government, with officials poised to explore serving as the group’s host.

Seasteaders said it was a breakthrough that could change the world, but Taliercio worried that rich Americans simply wanted to use his home to dodge taxes.

“These millionaires,” he said, “lulled by an illusory desire to free themselves from the existing states, seem to have much more to gain than we do.”

The idea of seasteading – escaping the laws, regulations, and taxes of life on terra firma by establishing an outpost in international waters – has long enchanted libertarians.

“The question of whether seasteading is possible or desirable is in my mind not even relevant. It is absolutely necessary,” the billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel said at a 2009 seasteading conference.

After Thiel helped launch the Seasteading Institute with a $500,000 investment, seasteading became the movement of the moment in Silicon Valley, where regulation and government bureaucracy are anathema and the billionaire’s success as an investor – his current fortune is largely due to his early stake in Facebook – has given him the reputation of a visionary.

The logistical and financial challenges of establishing a colony in international waters, however, proved steep. So this year the Seasteading Institute began negotiations with French Polynesia, which is a part of France, but has significant autonomy.

On 30 November, French Polynesia’s cabinet gave president Edouard Fritch a mandate, and he will travel to San Francisco in January to sign an agreement to develop a “special governing framework” for “seazones”, according to Randolph Hencken, the Seasteading Institute’s executive director.

Hencken said by email that the agreement stipulated that the institute must prove that seasteading will provide economic benefits and not harm the environment, and that the government will not provide any subsidies.

“Our seasteading collaboration with French Polynesia was initiated by the Tahitians themselves and will bring jobs, economic growth, and environmental resiliency to the region,” Hencken said.

Hencken predicts a close relationship between the seastead and the islands. In an interview with Business Insider in October, he suggested that he would be able to take a speedboat to French Polynesia to take yoga classes and go to restaurants. The islands would also provide a construction base, he said, further reducing costs.

While Hencken argued that seasteading would be a boon for French Polynesia, exemption from taxes is a key factor in the seasteading movement.

In his 2009 speech, Thiel argued that “anything that can be done to create much larger numbers of countries will be very good”, largely because the proliferation of nations would drive down marginal tax rates.

“If we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries.”

It is that attitude that draws the suspicion of local residents like Taliercio, who questioned whether “facilitating the tax evasion of the world’s greatest fortunes” would be healthy for South Pacific nations.

by Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian |  Read more:

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A Skeptic Fact-Checks Yoga's Health Claims

I did not want to join yoga class. I hated those soft-spoken, beatific instructors. I worried that the people in the class could fold up like origami and I'd fold up like a bread stick. I understood the need for stretchy clothes but not for total anatomical disclosure. But my hip joints hurt and so did my shoulders, and my upper back hurt even more than my lower back and my brain would. not. shut. up. I asked my doctor about medication and he said he didn't like the side effects and was pretty sure I wouldn't, either.

So I signed up for Gentle Mind and Body Yoga, the pre-K of yoga classes. I think the principle is that you get into some pose that has cosmic implications and then hold the pose until you are enlightened or bored silly. I like the bridge pose, where you lie flat on your back and put a rubber block under your butt. I purely hate the eagle pose, where you wind your arms around each other and then wrap your legs around each other and stand on one foot; I drop like a sprayed mosquito.

The teacher is forgiving: "Yogi's choice," she says, meaning that I'm now a yogi and I can do what I want. She says we're not trying to get anywhere, and I deeply appreciate not trying to get anywhere.

I enjoy a stretchy pose where you sit with a knee crossed over a leg and the opposite arm wrapped around the knee but the point is, says the teacher, to wring the toxins out of your internal organs. I'm not going to wring out my internal organs. Sometimes she wants us to lower our shoulders and raise our chests to open up our hearts — a phrase that gives me cardiac-surgical creeps. The best is the sponge or corpse pose, which is what it sounds like. I'm fully competent at being a sponge, except you're supposed to breathe in all the way up your left side and breathe out on your right because this activates your left and right brains. I just breathe on both sides.

Then we sit on some folded-up locally-sourced blankets that smell like unwashed humanity, with legs crossed. The teacher says this is called sukhasana which means easy seat, but it's no such thing. So I stretch my legs out in front of me, yogi's choice. We end in sukhasana with our hands in prayer and say to each other namaste, which is apparently Sanskrit for the godhead in me salutes the godhead in you, but which my brain hears as basta, which is Italian for stop it, enough.

I'm OK with all this, even the pretend science which I'm free to ignore or better yet, to subject to my fellow Last Word on Nothing blogger Michelle Nijhuis' stellar B******* Prevention Protocol (BPP), which in these days of blatant disinformation if you haven't read, clipped out and taped to your computer screen, you may as well join an ant colony.

Some b.s. you don't need a protocol to detect, so I didn't even try to find out whether twisting my body wrings the toxins out of my internal organs or whether breathing through my left nostril stimulates my right brain.

But it's true that after yoga, climbing steps doesn't hurt, waiting for Greek carryout promised 15 minutes ago isn't irritating, and on the drive home my brain doesn't do anything except drive. Does yoga work? I'd answer this, but working through the full BPP takes time.

So I took three shortcuts.

by Ann Finkbeiner, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Jenn Liv for NPR

The Moving Sofa Problem

"Odd," agreed Reg. "I’ve certainly never come across any irreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field. Have you spoken to any spatial geometricians?"
                                          —Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency"

The mathematician Leo Moser posed in 1966 the following curious mathematical problem: what is the shape of largest area in the plane that can be moved around a right-angled corner in a two-dimensional hallway of width 1? This question became known as the moving sofa problem, and is still unsolved fifty years after it was first asked.

To understand what makes this question tricky, let's think what kind of "sofa" shapes we can construct that can move around a corner. How about a unit square?

Well, a unit square only has area 1; surely we can do better? For example, a semicircle with radius 1 is another simple example that works:

The semicircular sofa has a larger area than the square one, ᴨ/2 (approximately 1.57). It is also more interesting, because in order to move around the corner it rotates, whereas the square sofa merely translates. Now, if only we could combine rotation and translation, maybe we could construct an even bigger sofa shape? Indeed, the mathematician John Hammersley noticed that if the semicircle is cut into two quarter-circles, which are pulled apart and the gap between them filled with a rectangular block, we get a larger sofa shape, which could be moved around the corner if only a smaller semicircular hole is also removed from the rectangular block. Here is the resulting shape, that is starting to look a bit more like an actual sofa:

Hammersley's idea works for every value between 0 and 1 of the radius of the semicircular hole at the bottom. The shape of maximal area in this family (shown above) is obtained when the radius is chosen to be 2/ᴨ (approximately 0.637), which gives an area of 2/ᴨ+ᴨ/2, or approximately 2.2074. This is much better than the area of our "idiot's sofa," the unit square. Hammersley thought his construction may be optimal, but this turned out to be false. In 1992, Joseph Gerver found a better shape with a slightly bigger area of around 2.2195. Here it is:

Gerver did not prove that his construction is optimal, but it was derived from considerations of local optimality. Roughly speaking, the area of the shape is in equilibrium when making small perturbations to the path through which the shape is transported to move it around the corner. This leads to differential equations that can be solved to find formulas for the different pieces of the shape (there are 3 straight line segments and 15 curved pieces, each described by its own formula). Thus, it seems quite plausible that Gerver's shape could be the correct solution. Gerver conjectured that it is, and it remains the best one known today.

The moving sofa problem has several other variants. One of them, studied by John Horton Conway and others, asks for the largest area sofa that can be moved around a 90-degree turn both to the right and to the left. By extending the techniques used by Gerver in his 1992 paper, I found such an "ambidextrous sofa" shape with an area of approximately 1.64495, which may be the largest possible area.

by Dan Romik | Read more:
Images: Dan Romik

Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

[ed. Right on schedule. Another month, another sleazy Facebook revelation.]

Facebook has long let users see all sorts of things the site knows about them, like whether they enjoy soccer, have recently moved, or like Melania Trump.

But the tech giant gives users little indication that it buys far more sensitive data about them, including their income, the types of restaurants they frequent and even how many credit cards are in their wallets.

Since September, ProPublica has been encouraging Facebook users to share the categories of interest that the site has assigned to them. Users showed us everything from “Pretending to Text in Awkward Situations” to “Breastfeeding in Public.” In total, we collected more than 52,000 unique attributes that Facebook has used to classify users.

Facebook’s site says it gets information about its users “from a few different sources.”

What the page doesn’t say is that those sources include detailed dossiers obtained from commercial data brokers about users’ offline lives. Nor does Facebook show users any of the often remarkably detailed information it gets from those brokers.

“They are not being honest,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “Facebook is bundling a dozen different data companies to target an individual customer, and an individual should have access to that bundle as well.”

When asked this week about the lack of disclosure, Facebook responded that it doesn’t tell users about the third-party data because it’s widely available and was not collected by Facebook.

“Our approach to controls for third-party categories is somewhat different than our approach for Facebook-specific categories,” said Steve Satterfield, a Facebook manager of privacy and public policy. “This is because the data providers we work with generally make their categories available across many different ad platforms, not just on Facebook.”

Satterfield said users who don’t want that information to be available to Facebook should contact the data brokers directly. He said users can visit a page in Facebook’s help center, which provides links to the opt-outs for six data brokers that sell personal data to Facebook.

Limiting commercial data brokers’ distribution of your personal information is no simple matter. For instance, opting out of Oracle’s Datalogix, which provides about 350 types of data to Facebook according to our analysis, requires “sending a written request, along with a copy of government-issued identification” in postal mail to Oracle’s chief privacy officer.

Users can ask data brokers to show them the information stored about them. But that can also be complicated. One Facebook broker, Acxiom, requires people to send the last four digits of their social security number to obtain their data. Facebook changes its providers from time to time so members would have to regularly visit the help center page to protect their privacy.

One of us actually tried to do what Facebook suggests. While writing a book about privacy in 2013, reporter Julia Angwin tried to opt out from as many data brokers as she could. Of the 92 brokers she identified that accepted opt-outs, 65 of them required her to submit a form of identification such as a driver’s license. In the end, she could not remove her data from the majority of providers.

ProPublica’s experiment to gather Facebook’s ad categories from readers was part of our Black Box series, which explores the power of algorithms in our lives. Facebook uses algorithms not only to determine the news and advertisements that it displays to users, but also to categorize its users in tens of thousands of micro-targetable groups.

by Julia Angwin, Terry Parris Jr. and Surya Mattu, ProPublica | Read more:
Image: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Ozoni

Ozoni. New Year's mochi soup.
Image: Anna K.

Hipsters Broke My Gaydar

At a holiday crafts fair, a cute woman with a half-shaved head and a septum piercing pushed a tin toward me. “Smell this — it smells awesome,” she said, smiling. People brushed past me; the sun lit the woman’s head like a halo.

I reached for the tin, which had an image of a mustache on it. Our fingers touched, and I noticed a tattoo of the “female” symbol on her wrist.

“If your boyfriend has any facial hair,” she said, “this’ll make his face less scratchy for you!”

The tin held $14 beard pomade. I blinked, startled; I don’t have a boyfriend. If she casually assumed I was straight, that means she probably isn’t queer. But … how?

I backed away from her table. I was surrounded by strangers; I’d lost my way. I used to have a talent, but now it’s gone, vanished, like a beautiful dream I can’t remember.

I once had wonderful, startlingly accurate gaydar. I spent years writing a humor blog about the topic to educate fellow queers. Now I can’t always tell right away. It’s ruining my life.

In cities, trendy young people — queer and straight, male, female and non-binary — are blending together, look-wise. That’s because mainstream style is now hipster style. But here’s the thing: Hipster style is just queer style, particularly queer women’s style.

Put another way: Lesbians invented hipsters.

Don’t feel bad. This is good for you — it means you get to wear more outdoor gear. But since you now all wear carabiners as key chains, we lesbians no longer have any private signals to each other. We’re all screwed, except none of us are, because we can’t find one another anymore.

Think I’m wrong? There have always been people ahead of their time and on the edges of society, whose culture later spreads to the masses (beat poets, punks, hippies) or is stolen outright (jazz, hip-hop, pretty much everything by black people).

But there is only one group of people who live out every single aspect of hipster culture today.

Lesbians.

Lesbians were working on communal organic farms and freaking out about pesticides decades before the rest of the country. Who do you think made food co-ops cool?

Lesbians did, my child.

We lesbians have been making our own pickles and brewing gross health teas forever. We’ve had a community-supported agriculture farm share since your grandmother was feeling feelings while “practicing kissing” with her best friend (before getting engaged to your grandpa).

Now quick — describe society’s idea of a “typical hipster” for me.

Did plaid flannel come to mind? Work boots? Weirdly cut or especially shaggy hair? Maybe a bike?

How odd. You just described the cartoon stereotype of a lesbian.

Give me your undercuts, your messenger bags, your androgynous “dapper” clothing. Give me your commitment to environmentally friendly transportation, your $8 cider (the only gluten-free option at the bar) and the password to your Etsy store where you sell cloth menstrual pads screen-printed with astrological symbols. Your coffee mug stamped with the words “Male Tears” — give it to me.

All of these things are the property of my people. We did this to society. We, who have always listened with one ear (pierced in multiple places) to the rhythmic heaves of Mother Earth’s lunar tides, have finally made y’all really, really gay.

by Krista Burton, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sophia Foster-Dimino

Six Easy Twists on the Bloody Mary

Some cocktails, you like; others, you crave. And when in search of morning-after hair of the dog, no other drink compares to the bloody. Savory, spicy, salty, and often camouflaging the booze within, the Bloody Mary is a purpose-built cocktail, intent on restoring the drinker to a sounder state. In other words: It’s perfect for New Year’s Day.

But just as it can be hard to muster up the energy to make a pot of coffee when caffeine is all you need, whipping up a great bloody when the need arises is easier said than done. Sure, Zing Zang is a noble way to go, but it's a new year, and you can do better.

That’s why we’ve rounded up six no-fail twists on the classic, each from one of New York’s top mixologists or chefs. They’re exactly what you’ll want if you’re craving the type of complex drink you’d order at brunch—a flavor-packed tomatillo bloody or clarified “bloodless” Mary, perhaps—but lack the time, patience, or fully sober state of mind to execute your vision. (...)

The Booziest Mary

from Marcus Samuelsson of Red Rooster Harlem

Samuelsson’s “Bloody Rooster” gets a bright lift from citrus and olive brine, and a higher-than-usual proportion of vodka makes it a serious eye-opener.

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups tomato juice
1/4 cup grated horseradish
1/8 cup fresh orange juice
1/8 cup fresh lime juice
1/8 cup Cholula hot sauce
1 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp. green olive brine

Mix together well in a sealable container. Cover and refrigerate until ready to use. Makes enough mix for about 10 drinks.

For each drink
1.5 oz. bloody mix
1.5 oz. vodka

Pour bloody mix and vodka into a collins glass and stir. Fill the glass with ice and stir again. Garnish with a lemon wedge and pickled okra—ideally on a bamboo skewer.

The Detox Mary
from Naren Young of Dante

With the aid of a juicer, this “All Day Bloody Mary” mix comes together in minutes. And with enough vegetables to pack a Naked juice, it’ll fortify you in more ways than one.

Ingredients
4 cups fresh tomato juice
1/2 cup carrot juice
1/2 cup celery juice
1/2 cup fennel juice
1/2 cup cucumber juice
1/2 cup red bell pepper juice
2 oz. lemon juice
1/2 tbsp. tomato paste
1 tbsp. ground Maldon salt
3/4 tbsp. celery salt
3/4 tbsp. ground black pepper
1.25 oz. Worcestershire sauce

In a large, sealable container, dissolve tomato paste in lemon juice. Add all remaining ingredients and stir well. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Makes enough mix for about 10 drinks.

For each drink
5 oz. bloody mix
1.5 oz. vodka (Aylesbury Duck recommended)
0.25 oz. Ricard pastis
2 dashes green Tabasco sauce
2 dashes red Tabasco sauce

Combine all ingredients in highball glass with ice and stir. Garnish with any and all of the following: skewer of pepperoncini, cherry tomato, and/or cornichon; cucumber stick; grated horseradish.

by Carey Jones, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Dante

Alabama Beats Washington 24-7 in Peach Bowl

[ed. Oh well... thanks Huskies, it was a great season anyway]

Inequality and Skin in the Game

There is inequality and inequality.

The first is the inequality people tolerate, such as one’s understanding compared to that of people deemed heroes, say Einstein, Michelangelo, or the recluse mathematician Grisha Perelman, in comparison to whom one has no difficulty acknowledging a large surplus. This applies to entrepreneurs, artists, soldiers, heroes, the singer Bob Dylan, Socrates, the current local celebrity chef, some Roman Emperor of good repute, say Marcus Aurelius; in short those for whom one can naturally be a “fan”. You may like to imitate them, you may aspire to be like them; but you don’t resent them.

The second is the inequality people find intolerable because the subject appears to be just a person like you, except that he has been playing the system, and getting himself into rent seeking, acquiring privileges that are not warranted –and although he has something you would not mind having (which may include his Russian girlfriend), he is exactly the type of whom you cannot possibly become a fan. The latter category includes bankers, bureaucrats who get rich, former senators shilling for the evil firm Monsanto, clean-shaven chief executives who wear ties, and talking heads on television making outsized bonuses. You don’t just envy them; you take umbrage at their fame, and the sight of their expensive or even semi-expensive car trigger some feeling of bitterness. They make you feel smaller.

There may be something dissonant in the spectacle of a rich slave.

The author Joan Williams, in an insightful article, explains that the working class is impressed by the rich, as role models. Michèle Lamont, the author of The Dignity of Working Men, whom she cites, did a systematic interview of blue collar Americans and found present a resentment of professionals but, unexpectedly, not of the rich.

It is safe to accept that the American public –actually all public –despise people who make a lot of money on a salary, or, rather, salarymen who make a lot of money. This is indeed generalized to other countries: a few years ago the Swiss, of all people almost voted a law capping salaries of managers . But the same Swiss hold rich entrepreneurs, and people who have derived their celebrity by other means, in some respect.

Further, in countries where wealth comes from rent seeking, political patronage, or what is called regulatory capture (by which the powerful uses regulation to scam the public, or red tape to slow down competition), wealth is seen as zero-sum. What Peter gets is extracted from Paul. Someone getting rich is doing so at other people’s expense. In countries such as the U.S. where wealth can come from destruction, people can easily see that someone getting rich is not taking dollars from your pocket; perhaps even putting some in yours. On the other hand, inequality, by definition, is zero sum.

In this chapter I will propose that effectively what people resent –or should resent –is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting the income or wealth bracket, and getting to the soup kitchen. Again, on that account, the detractors of Donald Trump, when he was a candidate, failed to realize that, by advertising his episode of bankruptcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, they removed the resentment (the second type of inequality) one may have towards him. There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money. (...)

The Static and the Dynamic

Let us make a few definitions:

Static inequality is a snapshot view of inequality; it does not reflect what will happen to you in the course of your life

Consider that about ten percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top one percent and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top ten percent. This is visibly not the same for the more static –but nominally more equal –Europe. For instance, only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than sixty percent of those on the French list were heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are really even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries.

Dynamic (ergodic) inequality takes into account the entire future and past life

You do not create dynamic equality just by raising the level of those at the bottom, but rather by making the rich rotate –or by forcing people to incur the possibility of creating an opening.

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Medium | Read more:
Image: William Powell Frith

Stanley Kubrick, “Untitled (I Hate Love), 1950.”
via:

Flying Cars of the (Near) Future

People have dreamed about flying cars for decades, but the technology has always seemed far out of reach. Airplanes have long been too big, expensive, dangerous, loud, and complex for personal aviation to be more than a hobby for rich people.

But that might be about to change. “There’s a couple of technologies that are maturing and converging” to make small, affordable airplanes feasible, says Brian German, an aerospace researcher at Georgia Tech.

German argues that lighter and more powerful electric motors, batteries that can store more energy, and more sophisticated aviation software could transform the market for small aircraft.

Indeed, several companies are already working on prototypes of car-size airplanes that could soon become cheap, safe, and versatile enough for ordinary people to use them regularly. Google co-founder Larry Page has secretly funded one startup in this market, Zee Aero, since 2010. In 2015 he also invested in another called Kitty Hawk, led by former Google self-driving car guru Sebastian Thrun.

The flying cars of the future won’t look exactly like the ones on The Jetsons. There’s a good chance you’ll rent them on demand from a company like Uber instead of buying one that parks in your driveway — a possibility Uber explored in a recent white paper. But a future where millions of people take short trips by air on a regular basis could be closer than you think.

Silicon Valley innovations are spilling over into aviation

A conventional airplane takes off horizontally, building up enough speed for the wings to carry it skyward. That means a normal airplane needs a long runway to take off and land. Vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, by contrast, take off vertically like a helicopter, then switch to flying horizontally once they’re in the air. That allows them to take off and land in locations where conventional airplanes can’t.

VTOL airplanes are not a new technology — craft like the Harrier and the V-22 Osprey have been around since the 1960s. But these airplanes have never been very practical. They’re complex and expensive, and require pilots with specialized training to fly them.

But a shift from internal combustion engines to electric motors dramatically changes this equation. Electric motors can be much lighter, simpler, and cheaper than traditional aircraft engines powered by fossil fuels — and they’re getting lighter and more powerful every year. And that opens up a lot of new opportunities for airplane designers.

To see what the small, electric-powered aircraft of the future might look like, check out this image from a patent filing by Zee Aero, the Page-funded startup. It shows a tiny personal airplane not much wider than a conventional parking space (you can get a sense of scale from this photograph of a man standing next to a prototype):

It takes a lot more thrust for an aircraft to take off vertically than it does to keep the aircraft moving once it’s in the air. So Zee Aero’s design has eight vertical propellers that are used for takeoff, while there are just two in the back to provide horizontal thrust. Once the plane is soaring through the sky, the eight vertical propellers can be turned off to save power.

This kind of design wouldn’t work with conventional aircraft engines because 10 engines would be way too heavy. But electric motors can be made extremely small and light, allowing even a car-size vehicle to have 10 of them.

Of course, electric motors aren’t a new invention. But they’ve gradually gotten lighter and more powerful over time. Beyond that, it has taken rapid progress in two other areas to make VTOL vehicles practical: batteries and aviation software.

The big advantage of traditional airplane fuel is that it can pack a lot of energy into a small package, minimizing the amount of weight airplanes have to carry and allowing them to travel long distances without refueling.

“Right now, batteries that you could actually put in an airplane wouldn’t let you fly very far,” German says. “But you give it a few more years, and the writing’s on the wall that you will be able to make a very practical aircraft.”

Improvements in battery technology are a spillover benefit of innovations elsewhere in Silicon Valley. The burgeoning markets for laptops, smartphones, tablets, and electric cars have inspired companies to pour billions of dollars into better battery technology. As a result, the energy density of batteries has been improving steadily. And each time batteries improve, electric airplanes can be a little lighter and fly a little farther on a single charge.

German says battery technology isn’t quite there yet. He predicts the energy density of batteries will need to approximately double for small electric airplanes to really take off.

Batteries don’t improve as rapidly as computer chips, so it’s hard to say exactly how quickly batteries will improve. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently building a giant battery factory, has said that battery density typically improves by 5 to 8 percent per year, which implies that density could double in the next decade — though that could require finding new battery chemistries.

The other key breakthrough is better software. An airplane with 10 propellers is just too complex for a human pilot to manage effectively. But computer software can easily manage 10 propellers at once, supplying power to the propellers where the most thrust is needed.

And German says multi-propeller designs have significant safety advantages. “If you lose one, you still have some left,” he says. “You can design a lot of redundancy.”

The combination of smaller, more powerful electric motors, better batteries, and sophisticated software will open up dramatically new possibilities for aircraft design. I focused on Zee Aero’s 10-propeller design above, but there are lots of other prototypes under development.

by Timothy B. Lee, Vox | Read more:
Image: Joby Aviation and Zee Aero

Power Poser

When big ideas go bad

Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on power poses has been viewed 37 million times. For comparison purposes, Kanye West’s video "Famous," which features naked celebrities in bed together, has been viewed 21 million times. Cuddy’s talk is the second-most-watched video in TED history, behind only Ken Robinson’s "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" — and, at its current pace, will eventually take over the No. 1 spot, thereby making power poses the most popular idea ever on the most popular idea platform. (...)

As scientific ideas go, power poses could hardly be more clickable. For starters, it’s simple to understand: Standing like Wonder Woman or in another confident pose for two minutes is enough, Cuddy informs us, to transform a timid also-ran into a fierce go-getter. Even better, this life hack comes straight from an Ivy League professor who published her findings in a peer-reviewed journal bolstered by charts and percentages and properly formatted citations. This wasn’t feel-good conjecture; this was rock-solid research from a bona fide scientist.

What went unmentioned on those shows, however, was that the study supporting Cuddy’s claims had begun to crumble. Well before the publication of her book, another research team had tried and failed to replicate the most-touted finding — that assuming a power pose leads to significant hormonal changes. In addition, the intriguing discovery that power poses made subjects more willing to take risks seemed dubious. In the wake of the apparent debunking, online science watchdogs sank their teeth into the study, picking apart its methodology and declaring its results risible.

Then, in late September, one of Cuddy’s co-authors, Dana Carney, did something unusual: She posted a detailed mea culpa on her website, siding with the study’s critics. "I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real," wrote Carney, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley’s business school. Her note went on to say that, while the research had been performed in good faith, the data were "flimsy" and the design and analysis, in retrospect, unsound. She discouraged other researchers from wasting their time on power poses.

So how did arguably the most popular idea on the internet end up on the scientific ash heap? For that matter, how could such questionable research migrate from a journal to a viral video to a best seller, circulating for years, retweeted and forwarded and praised by millions, with almost no pushback? The answer tells us something about the practice and promotion of science, and also how both may be changing for the better. (...)

Eva Ranehill was intrigued by power poses. Ranehill, a postdoctoral student in economics at the University of Zurich, had studied gender differences in risk-taking and competitiveness between boys and girls in an attempt to understand and, ideally, combat stereotypes. Maybe, she thought, body posture could play a role in overcoming the gender gaps she had observed.

She decided to give it a go. The design of Ranehill’s study mostly mirrored the original, though there were a few changes. For instance, in the original study, subjects were told how to stand by the experimenters; in the Ranehill study, the instructions were given, by a computer, a less-personal approach intended to eliminate any accidental influences. Also — and this was the biggest difference — Ranehill’s study put 200 subjects through the experiment, more than four times as many as the original.

Ranehill didn’t get the same results. Not even close. Testosterone didn’t go up, cortisol didn’t go down. Standing in a power pose didn’t cause people to take more risks in a gambling game. Ranehill hadn’t set out to undermine power poses; she had wanted to build on the idea. But after trying and failing with 200 subjects, it was obvious that something was amiss. "We started talking to others who had done studies on power poses, and it was clear we were not the only ones who couldn’t replicate it," she says.

Ranehill was disappointed, if not entirely surprised. She knew that in recent years the field of social psychology had been dealing with growing suspicions about the reliability of some of its best-known and most exciting findings. Last year an attempt to replicate 100 randomly selected psychological studies, an effort led by Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, found that fewer than half passed the test. It wasn’t so much a case of a few rotten apples, as some hopeful observers had claimed, but rather an entire barrel gone bad. One of the main culprits of this sorry state of affairs is thought to be sample size. Too few subjects means there’s a much greater chance that a seemingly significant result is just noise in the data.

Andrew Gelman wrote about the Ranehill study last year in Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, the deceptively dull title of his often-irreverent blog. Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University and director of the university’s Applied Statistics Center. He’s taken it upon himself as a sort of hobby, or perhaps a mission of mercy, to expose and correct what he sees as glaring ineptitude in psychological studies.

One problem Gelman has zeroed in on repeatedly is researcher freedom. There’s too much of it, he says. When conducting a study, researchers get to decide which data to exclude, how to code data, and how to analyze the data they produce. They’re also at liberty to alter their theory to comport with any outcome. When you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for, it’s tempting to seize on some effect — illusory or not — and proceed to manufacture a narrative about why it matters. Choose what works and discard the rest.

This is sometimes called "p-hacking," a reference to p-value, a tool used to determine a study’s statistical significance. Gelman doesn’t like that term, because he thinks it implies that researchers are intentionally skewing their results. In some cases they are: Psychology has been shown to have its share of charlatans. But in most cases, he believes, researchers are fooling themselves, too. That’s why he prefers the less disparaging and more poetic phrase "garden of forking paths," borrowed from the title of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Scientists are, in Gelman’s formulation, leading themselves down the wrong path.

And it happens constantly. You can hear the exasperation in his voice when he talks about the number of flawed studies that worm their way into the pages of seemingly respectable journals. "Once you’re aware of it, you start seeing it everywhere," he says. "It’s like when you’re in New York City and you look around, you don’t notice anything, but when you start looking down at the ground, you see rats everywhere."

Gelman counts power poses among the vermin. "I feel like I care more about the effect of power poses than Amy Cuddy does, in some way, in that I actually care if it really works," he says. "And I don’t think it does."

by Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education |  Read more:

Image: uncredited