Taylor Swift vs. Ticketmaster

The Ticketmaster site crashed on Tuesday after about a bazillion of the gazillion Taylor Swift fans tried to buy tickets to her new Eras Tour.

Ticketmaster has been a thorn in the side of entertainers and fans alike for years, with service fees often adding 25 percent or even more to the original ticket price. For example, a recent ticket to the Jane’s Addiction/Smashing Pumpkins concert that cost $196 ended up being $231.

Fans trying to get tickets to an in-demand concert found some unlikely allies: politicians pushing an antitrust agenda. Self-described democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted a “reminder” that “Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in.”

The Context

Ticketmaster is nearing its 50-year mark, maintaining dominance through massive changes in the music revenue business. The ticket giant purchased Live Nation, the events promoter and venue operator, in 2010 and owns exclusive rights to first sales of a good number of concerts.

The deal was not a big company buying a competitor, but instead the predominant ticketing company for the live events industry (Ticketmaster) and a concert promotion company (Live Nation).

Ticketmaster’s influence over concerts and the rising costs of event tickets haven’t gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver called Ticketmaster “one of the most hated companies on earth.” (...)

Economic Lens

Ticketmaster has been criticized and investigated — but still rules the world of ticket sales in the entertainment industry

The antitrust concern with Ticketmaster is about its 2010 merger with Live Nation. The merger immediately drew hackles from critics for potentially giving Ticketmaster an unfair advantage in the entertainment ticket industry.

It went through only after the Justice Department under President Barack Obama completed a lengthy antitrust investigation that required the merged company to comply with some conditions to do the deal. That included signing an agreement that barred them from “retaliating against any venue that chooses to use another company’s ticketing services or promotional services.”

But problems persisted almost a decade later, according to the Justice Department. And Live Nation agreed to extend its original agreement not to force venues to use Ticketmaster through 2025.

Earlier this year, Ticketmaster and Live Nation were sued by a class of ticket-buyers for allegedly violating antitrust rules by maintaining an “illegal business arrangement under which Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the U.S., threatens to withhold shows from major venues if they do not select Ticketmaster as their primary ticketing service provider,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote in a January article. (...)

Even if a fan is able to grab a Taylor Swift presale ticket, they’ll still have to pay processing and service fees — which can quickly add up to make a ticket that is seemingly affordable on its face much more expensive when it’s time to pay for it.

Critics say even with Justice Department oversight, the company is still functioning as a monopoly.

How does Ticketmaster/Live Nation stay on its throne? “Because Live Nation manages more than 500 major music artists, the company can demand that venues interested in hosting performances with those artists exclusively use Ticketmaster as their ticketing service, thus eliminating any potential competition,” the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project wrote in a report. The group has advocated for the Justice Department to undo the merger.

by Matthew Zeitlin, Cameron Hood, and Suzette Lohmeyer, Grid |  Read more:

Image: Noam Galai/ Getty Images
[ed. If she didn't predict this she's getting bad advice. If she did, and has decided to take on TM, then good luck and godspeed. But who knows? Taylor Swift’s Ticketmaster Disaster Keeps Getting Worse (The Cut); and, Taylor Swift says her team was assured ticket demands would be met for her Eras tour (NPR).]

Mikhail Zarovny

via:

America Has an Earthquake Early-Warning System Now — On Your Phone

Your phone can now warn you before an earthquake arrives.

Yes, before.

“Be-be-boop! Be-be-boop! Earthquake,” rang an app on my iPhone at 11:42 a.m. on Oct. 25. “Drop, cover, hold on, shaking expected.”

A 5.1-magnitude earthquake had just struck about 50 miles away in California’s Silicon Valley. I leaped out of my chair and grabbed a wall. A few seconds later, the ground began to rumble.

This feat of science and personal technology is the best example I’ve seen of how smartphones can help protect tens of millions of us from significant danger. I’ll show you how to get it.

Known as ShakeAlert, America’s earthquake early-warning system was developed by the U.S. Geological Survey and partners to give you typically up to 20 seconds of advance warning before significant shaking arrives, or even a minute in extreme circumstances. If you’re close to the epicenter, you might not get much notice — but it could still be enough to protect yourself.

After nearly two decades of development, ShakeAlert is now operating in California, Oregon and Washington state, where it’s considered 83 percent complete. The USGS is considering expanding the system to Alaska next.

ShakeAlert got one of its largest tests with that October earthquake, when it took less than 10 seconds for the system to send about 2.1 million warnings to Californians like me. Thankfully, there were no reports of major injuries. For me, the little bit of early notice helped me prepare mentally for what was about to come.

The experience also left me wondering: How can a push alert reach my phone faster than shaking does? “That’s a multistage process, and really I find it just fascinating that we can do it all,” says Dave Croker, a member of the ShakeAlert operations team at the USGS.

I met up with Croker at a USGS field station a few miles from California’s notorious San Andreas Fault, where he showed me how the system fits together — starting with your cellphone.

How to get earthquake alerts on your phone

Smartphones have a capability that Croker says is a game changer for earthquake safety: They always know your location. (...)

If you have an Android phone, you’re good to go. Google added ShakeAlert to its operating system in 2020 after the California portion first came online. The warnings pop up automatically on your phone’s lock screen, so long as you have location services and emergency notifications enabled. These alerts are tuned to arrive for earthquakes that are both at least magnitude 4.5 and are also expected to produce noticeable shaking at your location. (If severe shaking is expected, Android will send a special take-action alert.)

If you use an iPhone, there’s a bit more work involved. You’ll need to download and run a free app such as MyShake, made by the University of California at Berkeley, or QuakeAlertUSA, made by Early Warning Labs. Unfortunately, you’ll have to repeatedly give the app permission to know your location at all times. (Apple, which has been heavily touting other iPhone safety features, said it didn’t have anything to share about integrating earthquake alerts into iOS.)

Regardless of what kind of phone you use, ShakeAlert can still find its way to you if an earthquake of magnitude 5 or higher hits. For areas also likely to surpass a high shaking threshold, wireless carriers are equipped to automatically send warnings to every phone using a similar emergency system to Amber Alerts. You just need to have government alerts activated in your phone’s settings.

by Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Monica Rodman/The Washington Post
[ed. See also: How to never miss an emergency alert from shootings to wildfires (WP).]

Ruminating on Life Transitions as Fall Shifts to Winter

In Southcentral Alaska this year, there wasn’t much of a transition from what we Alaskans call fall — that fleeting, fiery period — to what now feels like winter. One day the rain stopped, the next snow dumped.

Or, that’s how it felt.

Still, I find myself feeling like I’m playing catch-up with the season. I feel like I’m in an intermediary space, and am thinking about what it feels like to be here. If there wasn’t enough autumn for me, I’m now creating one in my mind.

My husband teases me for the way I talk to people I meet for the first time. He tells me I am an interrogator, bent on learning life stories. “Maybe they don’t want to tell you everything about what makes them them,” he says.

I don’t pry for its own sake. I’m not trying to unearth anything someone doesn’t want to tell me. But I am interested in people. I’m interested in new — to me — perspectives. And I value spaces that enable the sharing of those perspectives.

Maybe that’s why I’m a podcast junkie. That’s probably why I love long hikes or backpacks with people — there is enough open air and time to fully share stories. And that’s also probably why I am, as my husband lovingly points out, nosy.

Related, I like situations that stir up feelings. Or, I think I do. Sometimes I don’t love the feelings that get prodded loose. But I’ll take that over stasis.

Transitional periods create opportunities for that kind of stirring; eventually, that kind of story formation and sharing. Something gets changed or is in the process of changing. A thing that once was starts to transform into something new. That process of changing mixes things up, turns them over and shakes them out where I can see them.

Before they become what they are going to be — a story that gets told, for instance — the elements of change are just kind of free radicals out there, figuring out what they are before settling back into a new pattern.

For me, while in one of these periods, I’m what you might call a “brooder” — I get into the mulling; I think to the point of overthinking. I focus on the turning over of each of the pieces that are now more visible than before. I start to dream vividly. I go for long walks.

Eventually, all of this leads to action. But before that can happen, I need a good long while to sit with what’s coming up and sort it out for myself.

Here’s the thing about a transition period though: It can be hard to see as a whole when I’m in it. My lived experience is that a transition period is made up of moments, just like every other moment in my life. Here I am, just like always. I can rationally tell myself all I want that I’m in some kind of in-between, liminal space but when I’m actually in it, it’s just me living.

This year, I find myself brooding over a few different things and a few different definitions of transition.

One, as I already mentioned, is late fall. What does it mean to move from summer to autumn to winter in Alaska? It’s bittersweet. Most of the time there’s a semi-secret, riotous, earnest relief about not having to go at 110% all of the time, like I do when it’s 24-hour daylight.

Then, there’s the fear of impending winter. What will it be like with so little light? What will I feel? How hard will what I call “the weirds” — some version of depression — sink in, and how will I cope with it?

Fall has its own bright, fleeting moment of berry-picking in blazing tundra, but then it fades quickly and becomes an almost purely transitional zone of cold weather and barren trees but no snow.

Those are the days that can be the hardest. While I know objectively that winter will set in, my day-to-day experience still takes forever. It’s dark, but not yet the kind of dark that’s illuminated by white snow on the ground. I’m just about ready to welcome full winter, but it’s not here yet. It’s cold but not fully frozen.

by Ali Harvey, ADN |  Read more:

Image: Loren Holmes / ADN

US Regulators to Vote on Largest Dam Demolition in History

The largest dam demolition and river restoration plan in the world could be close to reality Thursday as U.S. regulators vote on a plan to remove four aging hydro-electric structures, reopening hundreds of miles of California river habitat to imperiled salmon.

The vote by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on the lower Klamath River dams is the last major regulatory hurdle and the biggest milestone facing a $500 million demolition proposal championed by Native American tribes and environmentalists for years.

Approval of the application to surrender the dams' operating license is the bedrock of the most ambitious salmon restoration plan in history, and if approved the parties overseeing the project will accept license transfer and could begin dam removal as early as this summer. More than 300 miles (483 kilometers) of salmon habitat in the Klamath River and its tributaries would benefit, said Amy Souers Kober, spokeswoman for American Rivers, which monitors dam removals and advocates for river restoration.

“This is an incredibly important milestone,” she said. “This project really carries important lessons for rivers and the conservation movement, and the most important lesson is the leadership of the tribes. It’s because of the tribes that these dams will come out and the river be will restored.”

The vote comes at a critical moment when human-caused climate change is hammering the Western United States with prolonged drought, said Tom Kiernan, president of American Rivers. He said allowing California's second-largest river to flow naturally, and its flood plains and wetlands to function normally, would mitigate those impacts.

“Instead of having reservoirs where a significant amount of that water evaporates, it’s better to have that river flow and allow the flood plains and wetlands filter the water and bring it down to groundwater where it doesn’t evaporate.”

The Klamath Basin watershed covers more than 14,500 square miles (37,500 square kilometers) and the Klamath itself was once the third-largest salmon producing river on the West Coast. But the dams, constructed between 1918 and 1962, essentially cut the river in half and prevent salmon from reaching spawning grounds upstream. Consequently, salmon runs have been dwindling for years. (...)

But plans to remove the dams have been controversial.

A group of homeowners who live around Copco Lake, one of the large reservoirs, have fought the dam removal plans for years and say the values of their lakefront homes have plummeted. A coalition formed to oppose the demolition plan argues that the money set aside to cover the demolition isn't adequate, and that cost overruns and liability concerns would fall on the shoulders of taxpayers.

They also question whether removing the dams will work to restore salmon because of changes in the Pacific Ocean that are also affecting the fish, said Richard Marshall, head of the Siskiyou County Water Users Association.

“The whole question is, will this add to the increased production of salmon? It has everything to do with what’s going on in the ocean (and) we think this will turn out to be a futile effort,” he said. "Nobody’s ever tried to take care of the problem by taking care of the existing situation without just removing the dams."

Rate payers in the rural counties around the dams are also angered by the project, which is funded by $200 million from PacifiCorp and $250 million from a voter-approved water bond in California.

U.S. regulators raised flags about the potential for cost overruns and liability issues in 2020, nearly killing the proposal, but Oregon, California and PacifiCorp, which operates the hydroelectric dams and is owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway, teamed up to add another $50 million in contingency funds.

The utility would face steep costs to add fish ladders and other environmental mitigations to the outdated dams in order to renew their hydroelectric license and in recent years has diversified their energy portfolio enough to absorb the loss of the dams, the company has said.

by Gillian Flaccus, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Jeff Barnard, File
[ed. This should have happened years ago. There are way too many unnecessary and derelict dams scattered throughout the country (read Cadillac Desert to understand why). Quite a stretch to conflate dam removal with climate change, but opposition arguments are equally as feeble and predictable. Even the license holder/operator wants the dams removed.]

Annie Lennox

[ed. A treasure.]

Florida Man Makes Announcement

The key problem of the Republican party is that Trump does not care about “his” party. He does not even really care about being president again. Trump must run to stay out of jail. That is why all the media speculation about whether he has announced too early is silly. The former president is facing an onslaught of legal cases, on a broad variety of issues – mishandling of classified documents, insurrection, and tax fraud – for which he needs a lot of money and political coverage. As a mere citizen, even as a former president, he holds much less leverage than as a primary candidate, who may not be able to win the presidency for the Republican party but is probably still strong enough to lose it for them.

by Cas Mudde, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Harnik/AP
[ed. So much packed into one paragraph - what it says about politics, government, our legal system, and media. Title from Murdoch's recent issue of the NY Post.]

The Submarine

"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.

Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits." Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories.

Our PR firm was one of the best in the business. In 18 months, they got press hits in over 60 different publications. And we weren't the only ones they did great things for. In 1997 I got a call from another startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. I told him they were PR gods, worth every penny of their outrageous fees. But I remember thinking his company's name was odd. Why call an auction site "eBay"?

Symbiosis

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the Web let small merchants compete with big ones. This was perfectly true. But the reason reporters ended up writing stories about this particular truth, rather than some other one, was that small merchants were our target market, and we were paying the piper.

Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.

At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times.

The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity. You don't pitch stories to them. You have to approach them as if you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it seem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought of themselves.

by Paul Graham, PaulGraham.com |  Read more:

Image: Bukvoed (Creative Commons via:)

[ed. This is a classic, fairly old essay (2005) that's likely still true (if not more so). For more recent works, see: How to Lose Time and Money; and, Is There Such a Thing As Good Taste?] 

Bluey: Smoochy Kiss

[ed. And fluffies. My grandaughter loves Bluey.]

What in the World Happened to the Supreme Court?

Back in may, after waves of protesters converged on the Supreme Court in response to the leak of the draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, a black fence appeared around the Court’s perimeter. Eight feet tall and deemed “unscalable” by the authorities, it offered an eerie echo of how the Court’s neighbor on Capitol Hill had looked behind barricades erected after the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

What happened at the Capitol on that January day was an attempted coup. What happened at the Supreme Court in June 2022 was a power grab of a different sort, driving the law far to the right in service of an agenda that most Americans don’t share.

June 2022 caught many Americans by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. The majority votes that erased the right to abortion, that put a constitutional stranglehold on states’ and cities’ efforts to keep guns off the streets, that further tightened religion’s grip on civil society, and that cast an ominous shadow over the policy-making apparatus of the modern federal government were the products of a project that goes back decades, one that unfolded in the full view of anyone who bothered to watch.

The decisions that term were the culmination of the single-minded pursuit of a goal that united cultural conservatives, deregulatory free marketeers, anti-abortion zealots, affirmative-action opponents, and all the other disparate elements of the political right in one common aspiration: the capture of the Supreme Court. That aim made perfect sense. Although in theory many of the objectives sought by this coalition of convenience should have been achievable through politics, popular will stood in the way. Efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade by amending the Constitution had failed spectacularly; public support for the right to abortion had, in fact, increased immediately following the Court’s 1973 ruling (and has increased even more now, following Roe’s overturning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). There was little that conservatives could do to make their agenda more appealing at the ballot box. That meant getting the Court was not simply the obvious choice; it was the only choice.

This was a goal that animated the conservative movement, first in defeat and then in triumph. Triumph arrived four months into the Trump administration, when the Senate confirmed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court vacancy that by previously unquestioned norms had been President Barack Obama’s to fill. A phrase began to make its way around Washington in that early Trump period, shared among mainstream Republicans who were growing anxious about the chaos emanating from the White House. “But we got Gorsuch,” they said to one another, sometimes shortening the phrase to a kind of code: “But Gorsuch.” It served as a reminder that although the new president was making them nervous, Senator Mitch McConnell’s strategy had kept the real prize in safe hands.

Bringing the country to June 2022 took more than Gorsuch, of course. It required Justice Anthony Kennedy’s replacement by Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 and Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the eve of the 2020 election—another norm-shattering McConnell feat. But although getting Gorsuch wasn’t the end, neither was it the beginning. (...)

At least one justice has openly expressed her concern. In a notable series of pointed remarks since mid-summer, Justice Elena Kagan has sounded an alarm. “If over time the Court loses all connection with the public and the public sentiment, that is a dangerous thing for democracy,” she said at a conference of federal judges in Montana. Kagan, a dissenter in Dobbs, did not explicitly mention the decision, but the reference was unmistakable. Scholars agree, warning that the gulf Dobbs opened between the public and the Court, and the majority’s blatant disregard of public sentiment, presents a serious threat to the Court’s legitimacy. “Indeed, the Dobbs decision may be the most legitimacy-threatening decision since the 1930s,” James L. Gibson, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis and a prominent scholar of the Court’s relationship to the public, wrote in an unpublished paper he posted on an academic website. (...)

The justices took up the case that became Dobbs because a majority was determined to change the law of abortion for the whole country, come what may. The Court has great power, but it seems to have lost any sense of its great responsibility.

What happens if the country decides that the Court is deploying its power irresponsibly, even illegitimately? There is no modern template for such a scenario. That’s why the crisis for the Court is also a crisis for political science about the Court, a fact that would be of merely professional concern were it not so illuminating of the full dimension of what has occurred.

by Linda Greenhouse, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty/The Atlantic

[ed. See also: The Supreme Court’s ‘Dead Hand’ (The Atlantic).]

The Ames Window

[ed. Fun with Science.]

One of the Biggest Problems in Biology Has Finally Been Solved

AlphaFold AI program predicted the 3-D structure of every known protein

There’s an age-old adage in biology: structure determines function. In order to understand the function of the myriad proteins that perform vital jobs in a healthy body—or malfunction in a diseased one—scientists have to first determine these proteins’ molecular structure. But this is no easy feat: protein molecules consist of long, twisty chains of up to thousands of amino acids, chemical compounds that can interact with one another in many ways to take on an enormous number of possible three-dimensional shapes. Figuring out a single protein’s structure, or solving the “protein-folding problem,” can take years of finicky experiments.

But earlier this year an artificial intelligence program called AlphaFold, developed by the Google-owned company DeepMind, predicted the 3-D structures of almost every known protein—about 200 million in all. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior staff research scientist John Jumper were jointly awarded this year’s $3-million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for the achievement, which opens the door for applications that range from expanding our understanding of basic molecular biology to accelerating drug development.

DeepMind developed AlphaFold soon after its AlphaGo AI made headlines in 2016 by beating world Go champion Lee Sedol at the game. But the goal was always to develop AI that could tackle important problems in science, Hassabis says. DeepMind has made the structures of proteins from nearly every species for which amino acid sequences exist freely available in a public database.

Scientific American spoke with Hassabis about developing AlphaFold, some of its most exciting potential applications and the ethical considerations of highly sophisticated AI.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

Why did you decide to create AlphaFold, and how did you get to the point where it can now fold practically every known protein?

We pretty much started the project roughly the day after we came back from the AlphaGo match in Seoul, where we beat Lee Sedol, the world [Go] champion. I was talking to Dave Silver, the project lead on AlphaGo, and we were discussing “What’s the next big project that DeepMind should do?” I was feeling like it was time to tackle something really hard in science because we had just solved more or less the pinnacle of games AI. I wanted to finally apply the AI to real-world domains. That’s always been the mission of DeepMind: to develop general-purpose algorithms that could be applied really generally across many, many problems. We started off with games because it was really efficient to develop things and test things out in games for various reasons. But ultimately, that was never the end goal. The end goal was [to develop] things like AlphaFold.

It’s been a mammoth project—about five or six years’ worth of work before CASP14 [Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, a protein-folding competition]. We had an earlier version at the CASP13 competition, and that was AlphaFold 1. That was state of the art, you know, a good deal better than anyone had done before and I think one of the first times that machine learning had been used as the core component of a system to try and crack this problem. That gave us the confidence to push it even further. We had to reengineer things for AlphaFold 2 and put a whole bunch of new ideas in there and also bring onto the team some more specialists—biologists and chemists and biophysicists who worked in protein folding—and combine them with our engineering and machine-learning team.

I’ve been working on and thinking about general AI for my whole career, even back at university. I tend to note down scientific problems I think one day could be amenable to the types of algorithms we build, and protein folding was right up there for me always, since the 1990s. I’ve had many, many biologist friends who used to go on about this to me all the time.

Were you surprised that AlphaFold was so successful?

Yeah, it was surprising, actually. I think it’s definitely been the hardest thing we’ve done, and I would also say the most complex system we’ve ever built. The Nature paper that describes all the methods, with the supplementary information and technical details, is 60 pages long. There are 32 different component algorithms, and each of them is needed. It’s a pretty complicated architecture, and it needed a lot of innovation. That’s why it took so long.

by Tanya Lewis, Scientific American |  Read more:

Image: Tobias Hase/dpa/Alamy Live News

[ed. From the referenced Nature paper:]

"Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of their function. Through an enormous experimental effort, the structures of around 100,000 unique proteins have been determined, but this represents a small fraction of the billions of known protein sequences. Structural coverage is bottlenecked by the months to years of painstaking effort required to determine a single protein structure. Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics. Predicting the three-dimensional structure that a protein will adopt based solely on its amino acid sequence—the structure prediction component of the ‘protein folding problem’—has been an important open research problem for more than 50 years. Despite recent progress, existing methods fall far short of atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available. Here we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known."

Foo Fighters & Guests

[ed. Pretty good for a couple of old guys. Dave does a credible Robert Plant cover.]

Michael Moore on the Midterms 'Blue Tsunami'

In the lead up to last week’s midterm elections in America, the punditocracy of commentators, pollsters and political-types were almost united: a “red wave” of Republican gains was on the cards.

But one dissenting voice stood out: that of leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. Against all the commonplace predictions, he had forecast Democrats would do well. He called it a “blue tsunami”.

That proved to be true in his home state of Michigan, where Democrats won governor, house and senate for the first time in 40 years, often by large margins. It’s been more of a blue wall across the rest of the country, where Republican gains mostly failed to materialize, with the exception of Florida. But even so, the strong Democrat performance has stunned people on both sides of the US political divide, delighting the left and sparking hand-wringing on the right.

With the Democrats retaining power in the Senate, and a chance that even the House could remain in their control, suddenly Moore is looking like a prognosticator par excellence.

“I never doubted it – there was no way the Republicans were going to have some kind of landslide,” Moore said in an interview.

But, he added: “I don’t have any special powers, I’m not related to Nostradamus or Cassandra, but I was stunned once again that nobody was willing to stick their neck out. I was just trying to say that common sense, and data – and if you’re not living in a bubble – should bring you to the same conclusion that there are more of us than them.”

“We’ve won seven of the last eight elections in the popular vote, we’ve got more registered, we have a new crop of young people every year, plus the fact that 70% of eligible voters are either women, people of color, or 18 to 25 year olds, or a combination of the three,” he said. “That’s the Democratic party’s base”.

In the last of his increasingly popular mass emails, Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth #41, published on Wednesday, he wrote a devastating critique of the conventional wisdom of a US electorate focused on economic woes, fearful of crime and resigned to the loss of abortion rights, while non-plussed by the election-denying Republicans.

“We were lied to for months by the pundits and pollsters and the media. Voters had not ‘moved on’ from the Supreme Court’s decision to debase and humiliate women by taking federal control over their reproductive organs. Crime was not at the forefront of the voters ‘simple’ minds. Neither was the price of milk. It was their democracy that they came to fight for yesterday,” he penned. (...)

He wants a more positive message from the left, based less on scaring people and more on inspiring them. Already a self-defeating post-Trump narrative is taking shape, Moore believes, and it revolves mostly around Florida governor Ron DeSantis. “Oh, DeSantis is going to win because he’s like Trump but he’s smarter oooh, oooh”.

DeSantis does represent the kind of forceful, base-pleasing call-to-arms that Democrats fear. “He is clever to rent private jets and fly refugees up to Martha’s Vineyard,” Moore says. “Do you know the sort of orgasmic feeling that happens inside a right-winger when they see him doing something wonderful and crazy like that, slamming it right in the liberals face.”

The left can learn a lesson from that playbook: get creative, though not cruel. He points out that wasn’t until 10pm the night before the vote that Democrats finally put up a campaign ad featuring LeBron James, the most popular basketball player in America, asking voters in Georgia to vote against Herschel Walker in Georgia.

“Why didn’t they do that months ago? They wait until the last night to put up one of great African American sports stars?” (...)

Moore says two out of three emails he got after starting his email newsletter were from readers who signaled that they’d depressed themselves into thinking the mid-terms were a lost cause. Their reasoning followed, again, the narrative line of Biden’s low approval rating, inflation, the economy, crime and so on. They ignored the still burning rage of the loss of women’s reproductive rights.

“I said, what’s inflation or past elections got to do with anything? We don’t live in that time anymore. There are now going to be more women doctors than men, more women lawyers than men. Don’t you have a clue that there is something going on? You can’t take human rights away from an entire gender and not have that blow up in your face”.

by Edward Helmore, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Anthony Harvey/PA

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A Radically Different Model of American Education

Since 2021, the stagnation surrounding American higher education has given way to the first inklings of dynamism with the efforts of the University of Austin (UATX) team to found and accredit a new liberal arts college “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.” Like any start-up, UATX has faced detractors, dismissing the university as a pipe-dream, political pet project, or both. Nevertheless, those who question the feasibility of UAustin are sorely misinformed. A Political Economy Project talk on Monday, September 26 by the university’s Chief Academic Officer, Jacob Howland, made clear that UATX has already begun disrupting the American academy.

From its promotional materials and online presence, it is clear that the University of Austin tries to market itself as something altogether different from its competitors. After all, in a country with more than 5,000 institutions of higher education, it is imperative for a school to separate itself from the pack. Nevertheless, Howland clarified that the difference UATX attempts to offer its potential students is a fundamental one. The University of Austin does not seek to reform America’s traditional model of a university but rather upend it.

The changes Howland listed in his talk, entitled “Revitalizing American Higher Education: The Promise of the University of Austin,” are radical.

 

In place of large, on-campus administrative bureaucracies, UATX plans to make administration remote, outsourcing positions abroad. Not only will this arrangement save university funds, Howland noted, but it would also pay foreign workers livable, US-level wages. Further, the school will forgo—along with competitive varsity sports—what he called “club-med amenities”: climbing gyms, student recreation centers with ball pits and golf simulators, napping stations, private pools, and the like. UAustin has even rethought the principle of reserving classroom space for each academic department—at UATX, departments will have control over their budgets and bid for classrooms in a market. The money saved by this and other initiatives, Howland said, will go towards instruction.

UAustin has even rethought the principle of reserving classroom space for each academic department—at UATX, departments will have control over their budgets and bid for classrooms in a market. The money saved by this and other initiatives, Howland said, will go towards instruction.

Indeed, financial health seems to be a major focus of the entire UATX project, along with teaching quality. In Howland’s view, financial instability is a root cause of the decay in higher education. A lack of funds leads administrations to chase income over quality leading to the replacement of good professors with adjuncts. “Financially unstable universities inevitably erode academically,” Howland said. And yet, UATX’s vision includes no room for tenure. After all, the professor explained, 80% of large universities have or are considering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements (read: affirmative action) for the coveted academic appointment. Such a system has led to increasing (leftist) ideological conformity amongst college faculties, with out-and-proud conservatives unlikely to receive tenure or even be hired at most institutions.

This status quo, Howland’s speech made clear, is antithetical to the values and mission of UATX. Far from trying to emulate its explicitly conservative counterparts in Hillsdale College and Liberty University, UATX seeks to be a “trans-political” space, where all ideological sides can be considered. Howland stated this principle succinctly: “Intellectual pluralism in place of sclerosis.” To make this a reality, the young institution will offer academics graduated term contracts with deliverables. The trade-up for no tenure, Howland said, would be the promise of low course loads and hard-to-find competitive salaries. Academic freedom in this tenure-less paradigm would be guaranteed by an external and independent committee that would adjudicate conflicts between faculty and the administration. (...)

In place of a major, UATX will offer juniors and seniors the opportunity to study in one of the university’s “Centers of Inquiry.” Described on the university website as “a combination of interdisciplinary research institutes, think tanks, and start-up incubators,” the centers will serve as homes for the creative, scholarly, or entrepreneurial culminating projects undertaken by each upperclassman. Announced centers include one for “Politics, Economics, and Applied History” and another for “Mathematics, Technology, and Engineering.” The point of the projects, Howland emphasized, is for students to connect with people and employ resources outside the university. Accomplishment is to be far less important than process.

by Lintaro P. Donovan, Dartmouth Review | Read more:
Image: The University of Austin’s logo. Courtesy of the University.
[ed. Yeah, good luck with that. See also: Have the Founders of the University of Austin Been in a Classroom Lately? (TNR).]

Twitter Poisoning

I encountered Donald Trump a few times in the pre-social media era, and he struck me as someone who was in on his own joke. He no longer does. Elon Musk used to be a serious person more concerned with engineering and building businesses than with petty name-calling. He didn’t seem like the kind of person to amplify a preposterous, sordid story about Paul Pelosi. Kanye West was once a thoughtful artist. Now known as Ye, he radiates antisemitism on top of his earlier slavery denialism.

I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot. (“Other social media” sometimes coming into play after ejection from Twitter.) When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.

I’m not claiming that Twitter is the sole influence, of course. Traditional demons summoned by great wealth have not vanished. I have no access to what goes on in the brains of other people. What I’m talking about is plain public behavior. The personalities of a great many famous and powerful people have changed in a similar way — a way we could do without.

I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.

The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying.

My purpose is not to ridicule anyone, though it might be impossible to be perceived in any other way, given the near-monopoly status that ridicule has taken on in the era of social media. The human brain did not evolve to handle modern chemicals or modern media technology and is vulnerable to addiction. That is true for me and for us all.

Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning, which is the underlying mechanism of social media addiction. This is the core mechanism analogous to the role alcohol plays in alcoholism. (...)

What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning? There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets. This works because his followers are similarly poisoned and can relate so well.

To be clear, whiners are much better than Stalins. And yet there have been plenty of more mature and gracious leaders who are better than either, even if we can no longer agree about who they were, because of our intense tribalism, which is amplified by the prevalence of social media addiction.

I’ll suggest a hypothesis about the childishness that comes to the surface in social media addicts. When we were children, we all had to negotiate our way through the jungle of human power relationships at the playground. When we feel those old humiliations, anxieties and sadisms again as adults — over and over, because the algorithm has settled on that pattern as a powerful way to engage us — habit formation restimulates old patterns that had been dormant. We become children again, not in a positive, imaginative sense, but in a pathetic way.

By Jaron Lanier, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sargam Gupta

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