“All Vaclav wants is for people to look at all the areas of emissions—producing electricity, manufacturing, transportation, and so on—and propose realistic, economically viable plans for reducing emissions in each one.”
Bill Gates
Murdoch
Seth Godin
"As a public speaker, I see far more than my fair share of presentations. Worse, a lot of them are from people getting paid to give them - and they're horrible. Horribly produced, horribly ineffective."
Many professionals who give presentations are not actually selling a product, so does all this selling and pitching stuff really apply, say, to academics, researchers, or to the guys down the hall in the accounting department? This was a question asked in the Atkinson interview. Seth comments:
"It seems to me that if you're not wasting your time and mine, you're here to get me to change my mind, to do something different. And that, my friend, is selling. If you're not trying to persuade, why are you here?"
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in dissent, “Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.
“The classic Harriet Hall quote — “always ask who disagrees and why” — is one of the most influential nuggets of information in my whole life and career. It’s right up there with “billions and billions” and “the 3 most dangerous words in medicine: in my experience” (that one from another SBM alumnus, Dr. Mark Crislip). It’s one of the most important things I have ever learned … because it’s the key to learning about so much more.
The and why is the special sauce. Most reasoning is motivated reasoning. So what’s the motive? Why someone disagrees is critical context.”
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Shelley
A hierophant (Ancient Greek: ἱεροφάντης) is a person who brings religious congregants into the presence of that which is deemed holy.[1] As such, a hierophant is an interpreter of sacred mysteries and arcane principles.
“It was the 30-year anniversary last week of Sky TV's first UK satellite broadcast, a date that somehow passed largely unmarked, no doubt due in part to a widespread perception of Rupert Murdoch and his corporation as some sort of low-browed, profiteering, amoral, sociopathic corporate mega-parasite.”
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
To limit the freedom of the individual in the name of the wellbeing of the collective.
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Martin Luther King Jr said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
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George Orwell
“There will be a bitter political struggle, and there will be unconscious and half-conscious sabotage everywhere. At some point or other it may be necessary to use violence. “
“On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages. However, the actual details of the story did not come to me for some time until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”
The aim is to give information about a topic which the other students will then debate. The topic should therefore be something which you think will divide the other students. So, the death penalty, probably not a good topic. Students will already have a firm view and most students will share the same opinion. Possibly a debate on how the use of the death penalty is being changed by the financial crisis and whether governments’ main principles should be economic or financial in deciding policy might work. Should governments pay for hostages? Maybe.Should governmantes admit they pay for hostages/ pay ransoms/ supply arms to dodgy groups/break the law?
Here’s a few of my recent favourites, with a few ideas as to why they worked. Should dwarf-tossing be allowed? On the face of it, a bit off the wall, but it provoked a good debate on moral acceptability of a wide range of activities.
Are Sciences Po degrees “Mickey Mouse” diplomas? I feared this would not stimulate debate, but it worked well because the presenter gave roles to the students.
Read from notes? No. The idea is to look at your presenting and speaking skills, not your reading and writing skills. Use notes? Yes, in moderation. Maybe cue cards?
It doesn’t always work, occasionally a good topic just won’t take off. I would like you to end the presentation by starting the debate, so a presentation giving facts about a country isn’t enough. You must finish the presentation with at least 2 questions- it’s the debate I’m interested in, and your participation in other people’s presentations, not your particular presentation. This is ungraded and should last somewhere between 2 and 10 minutes- this is deliberately vague as the goal is the debate, not the presentation.
Correcting errors/mistakes- what is the best way to do this?
So what are we going to do in this class? (from Scott Thornbury)
Aim for developing intuitions (‘a feel for what is right’) rather than knowledge of rules and terms – this requires a lot of exposure and use, combined with regular ‘grammaticality testing’ , “why is this wrong?”
Pattern sensitization: study texts and transcripts for regularities, even if these are not specifically grammatical (it might just be the repetition of certain words or phrases).
As with the presentations, it won’t always work, but that’s what I’m aiming to do. Please feel free to comment on whether you think these are useful or realistic aims and in what ways I could better achieve them (and to what extent these aims depend on the students).
Compositions
Either print them out and hand them to me, or, preferably, email them to me.
Just how bad are things? How long have we got? Should we save this world or move on to the next one? Should we send humans or eggs on the spaceship? What do we owe the future?
doughnut
song
steady state economy
jobs link gdp
Henry Wallich, who was a former governor of the Federal Reserve in the US, came right out and said this:
"Growth is a substitute for equality of income.
So long as there is growth, there is hope,
and that makes large income differentials tolerable."
And one intervention we could use
would be to have a minimum and a maximum income throughout society.
By a minimum income I don't mean a minimum wage,
conditional on working at McDonalds,
I mean a basic minimum entitlement,”
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fractional reserve banking system
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Elizabeth Holmes Theranos
former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; former Defense Secretary William Perry; former senators Sam Nunn and William Frist; Richard Kovacevich, a former chief executive officer of Wells Fargo & Co.; William Foege, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control; Gary Roughead, a former U.S. Navy admiral; Riley P. Bechtel, a former board chairman of Bechtel Group Inc., and James Mattis, a former U.S. Marine Corps general who later served as a defense secretary in the Trump administration.
Is it “mostly men” who want to discover the elixir of life?
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
Although Marx is popularly thought of as the originator of the phrase, the slogan was common within the socialist movement. For example, August Becker in 1844 described it as the basic principle of communism[7] and Louis Blanc used it in 1851.[8] The French socialist Saint-Simonists of the 1820s and 1830s used slightly different slogans such as,"from each according to his ability, to each ability according to its work"[9] or," From each according to his capacity, to each according to his works.”[10] The origin of this phrasing has also been attributed to the French utopian Étienne-Gabriel Morelly
In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist system will be capable to produce; the idea is that, with the full development of socialism and unfettered productive forces, there will be enough to satisfy everyone's needs.[4][
literally "Proletarians of all countries, unite!",[5] but soon popularised in English as "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!").[5][note 1] A variation of this phrase ("Workers of all lands, unite") is also inscribed on Marx's tombstone.
Five years before The Communist Manifesto, this phrase appeared in the 1843 book The Workers' Union by Flora Tristan.[8]
The International Workingmen's Association, described by Engels as "the first international movement of the working class" was persuaded by Engels to change its motto from the League of the Just's "all men are brothers" to "working men of all countries, unite!".
A Socialist Party which genuinely wished to achieve anything would have started by facing several facts which to this day are considered unmentionable in left-wing circles. It would have recognized that England is more united than most countries, that the British workers have a great deal to lose besides their chains, and that the differences in outlook and habits between class and class are rapidly diminishing. In general, it would have recognized that the old-fashioned ‘proletarian revolution’ is an impossibility. But all through the between-war years no Socialist programme that was both revolutionary and workable ever appeared; basically, no doubt, because no one genuinely wanted any major change to happen. The Labour leaders wanted to go on and on, drawing their salaries and periodically swapping jobs with the Conservatives. The Communists wanted to go on and on, suffering a comfortable martyrdom, meeting with endless defeats and afterwards putting the blame on other people. The left-wing intelligentsia wanted to go on and on, sniggering at the Blimps, sapping away at middle-class morale, but still keeping their favoured position as hangers-on of the dividend-drawers. Labour Party politics had become a variant of Conservatism, ‘revolutionary’ politics had become a game of make-believe.
In England there is only one Socialist party that has ever seriously mattered, the Labour Party. It has never been able to achieve any major change, because except in purely domestic matters it has never possessed a genuinely independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of the trade unions, devoted to raising wages and improving working conditions. This meant that all through the critical years it was directly interested in the prosperity of British capitalism. In particular it was interested in the maintenance of the British Empire, for the wealth of England was drawn largely from Asia and Africa. The standard of living of the trade-union workers, whom the Labour Party represented, depended indirectly on the sweating of Indian coolies. At the same time the Labour Party was a Socialist party, using Socialist phraseology, thinking in terms of an old-fashioned anti-imperialism and more or less pledged to make restitution to the coloured races. It had to stand for the ‘independence’ of India, just as it had to stand for disarmament and ‘progress’ generally. Nevertheless everyone was aware that this was nonsense. In the age of the tank and the bombing plane, backward agricultural countries like India and the African colonies can no more be independent than can a cat or a dog. Had any Labour government come into office with a clear majority and then proceeded to grant India anything that could truly be called independence, India would simply have been absorbed by Japan, or divided between Japan and Russia.
To a Labour government in power, three imperial policies would have been open. One was to continue administering the Empire exactly as before, which meant dropping all pretensions to Socialism. Another was to set the subject peoples ‘free’, which meant in practice handing them over to Japan, Italy and other predatory powers, and incidentally causing a catastrophic drop in the British standard of living. The third was to develop a positive imperial policy, and aim at transforming the Empire into a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics. But the Labour Party's history and background made this impossible. It was a party of the trade unions, hopelessly parochial in outlook, with little interest in imperial affairs and no contacts among the men who actually held the Empire together. It would have had to hand the administration of India and Africa and the whole job of imperial defence to men drawn from a different class and traditionally hostile to Socialism
The history of the past seven years has made it perfectly clear that Communism has no chance in western Europe. The appeal of Fascism is enormously greater. In one country after another the Communists have been rooted out by their more up-to-date enemies, the Nazis. In the English-speaking countries they never had a serious footing. The creed they were spreading could appeal only to a rather rare type of person, found chiefly in the middle-class intelligentsia, the type who has ceased to love his own country but still feels the need of patriotism, and therefore develops patriotic sentiments towards Russia.
while I was writing about this, I came upon a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl was a German psychiatrist who'd spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp. And he wrote that, while he was in the camp, he could tell, should they ever be released, which of the people would be OK, and which would not. And he wrote this: "Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing: your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. This is what determines the quality of the life we've lived -- not whether we've been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or suffering. What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities, what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind we allow them to trigger."
Consider gasoline & television as drugs. After all, they give you experiences that change your consciousness which you could not achieve without them and every objection you've outlined to alcohol, tobacco and meth applies to them.
- Massive negative externalities: We're on the verge of hitting 420 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere and that's definitely not nice.
- Vast amounts of time significantly impaired: Have you ever looked at someone else transfixed by a TV show and wondered how different their subjective experience is compared to getting high?
- Tens of thousands killed every year: Only a small portion of the increase in obesity in the US over the past 40 years needs to be attributable to increased TV watching before you're looking at a cause of morbidity & mortality that's on par with lung & mouth cancer.
- Heavily vested interests resist any effort to control use: Well, hell, heavily vested interests protecting their ability to extract economic rent characterizes every aspect of American life these days. How is this any different? Furthermore, now that tobacco smokers have to go outside (because the law does have a role here when it comes to direct impacts of one person's behavior on other people's lives), how do smokers' choices affect my life?
I don't believe Carl Hart when he says that he's not addicted to heroin. I don't think it's wise for people to mess with their opioid receptors for fun because each of us is likely to need those drugs for pain control in the second half of our lives. However, people do things every day that I think are stupid. The salient question is what the threshold for the law to intervene should be.
I favor taking the use of drugs out of the legal framework to a substantial degree since it's not a particularly useful frame. Addicted people need a doctor & a counselor, not a cop & a judge. However, the law should heavily punish behavior under the influence of drugs that risks other people's lives. For instance, in Germany the legal drinking age is 14 with your family and 16 on your own, but if you're caught drinking & driving they drop the hammer on you first time. That, to me, strikes the proper balance between a citizen's civil liberties and societal obligations. Raising children, as always, complicates this question of the state's proper role in the lives of its citizens considerably. I believe addiction is punishment enough and if the government can help parents get clean & sober, that seems considerably more likely to help their children than putting parents in prison.
"There’s this myth that if you just leave these drug addicts alone or whatever, they will eventually decide to get help on their own because addiction sucks."
I don't believe that myth. Some drug addicts will go right over the edge and kill themselves, always. To me, the useful frame for this question is whether making clean drugs available in a regulated market increases or decreases the number of people who will fuck up their lives with hard drugs compared to the status quo. It's undeniable that more people will try drugs under those circumstances. The question is whether getting rid of the incentives in a black market to cut drugs with other chemicals and moving the treatment of addiction entirely out of the legal system would reduce the total amount of suffering, given that the overall number of users will go up.
It's also worth considering, particularly when it comes to opioids, how life circumstances intertwine with addictive drugs. The experience of American soldiers in Vietnam who developed a heroin habit overseas but did not resume that habit once they returned is a good illustration of this. Some of them absolutely did bring that habit back with them ("Sam Stone" is now playing in my head), but the number is surprisingly low. I'd have to refamiliarize myself with the subject to give you more specifics.
"I don’t think a just society lets people kill or maim themselves with hard drugs, not does it allow others to profit from the horror show that is addiction."
I think a just society gets to pick who profits, corporations or criminals. To operationalize this belief, you have to effectively repress black markets. How has that gone so far? How could it be done in a way that's compatible with our society's other ethical commitments?
Moral outrage against the Sackler family is entirely understandable and their ill-gotten gains should absolutely be seized (selling Oxy in and of itself is not what I object to, it's how they marketed the drug), but in the end, how useful is moral outrage? The element of the opioid crisis that really haunts me is realizing how many of my fellow Americans prefer feeling nothing (never having used opioids, that is the closest I can get to the subjective experience) to their regular, everyday life, how many people want to just check out.
As of 2021, only three firms are able to manufacture the most advanced semiconductors: TSMC of Taiwan, Samsung of South Korea, and Intel of the United States.[15] Part of this is due to the high capital costs of building foundries. TSMC's latest factory, capable of fabricating 3 nm process semiconductors and completed in 2020, cost $19.5 billion
NXP Semiconductors N.V. is a Dutch multinational semiconductor designer and manufacturer with headquarters in Eindhoven, Netherlands that focuses in the automotive industry. The company employs approximately 29,000 people in more than 30 countries. NXP reported revenue of $11,06 billion in 2021.[3]
Originally spun off from Philips in 2006, NXP completed its initial public offering, on August 6, 2010, with shares trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol NXPI. On December 23, 2013, NXP Semiconductors was added to the NASDAQ 100.[4]
On March 2, 2015, it was announced that NXP would merge with Freescale Semiconductor in a $40 billion deal
Some animals are equal
Anatole France
Anatole France In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn't do” to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid‐Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness
There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organized societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxemburg said, is “freedom for the other fellow.” The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: “I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.” If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of Western civilization means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakeable way. Both capitalist democracy and the Western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Charles John Huffam DickensFRSA (/ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870)
One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child labour. There are plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books, but usually they are suffering in schools rather than in factories. The one detailed account of child labour that he gives is the description in David Copperfield of little David washing bottles in Murdstone & Grinby's warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age of ten, had worked in Warren's blacking factory in the Strand, very much as he describes it here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly because he felt the whole incident to be discreditable to his parents, and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they were married.
I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby.
And again, having described the rough boys among whom he worked:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship... and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my bosom.
Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens himself.
Who owns uk media?
The United Kingdom print publishing sector, including books, server, directories and databases, journals, magazines and business media, newspapers and news agencies, has a combined turnover of around £20 billion and employs around 167,000 people.[32] Popular national newspapers include The Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph. According to a 2021 report by the Media Reform Coalition, 90% of the UK-wide print media is owned and controlled by just three companies, Reach plc (formerly Trinity Mirror), News UK and DMG Media. This figure was up from 83% in 2019.[33] The report also found that six companies operate 83% of local newspapers. The three largest local publishers—Newsquest, Reach and JPI Media—each control a fifth of local press market, more than the share of the smallest 50 local publishers combined.[33
“When I see equations, I see the letters in colors. I don’t know why,” wrote Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. “I see vague pictures of Bessel functions with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around.”
Feynman was describing his grapheme-colour (GC) synesthesia – a condition in which individuals sense colours associated with letters and numbers.
Synesthesia is a family of conditions where individuals perceive stimulation through more than one sense.
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.
And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.
One of the great mysteries of the brain is the purpose of dreams. And you propose a kind of defensive theory about how the brain responds to darkness.
One of the big surprises of neuroscience was to understand how rapidly these takeovers can happen. If you blindfold somebody for an hour, you can start to see changes where touch and hearing will start taking over the visual parts of the brain. So what I realised is, because the planet rotates into darkness, the visual system alone is at a disadvantage, which is to say, you can still smell and hear and touch and taste in the dark, but you can’t see any more. I realised this puts the visual system in danger of getting taken over every night. And dreams are the brain’s way of defending that territory. About every 90 minutes a great deal of random activity is smashed into the visual system. And because that’s our visual system, we experience it as a dream, we experience it visually. Evolutionarily, this is our way of defending ourselves against visual system takeover when the planet moves into darkness.
I’d certainly like to text 50% faster, but am I going to get an open-head surgery? No, because there’s an expression in neurosurgery: when the air hits your brain, it’s never the same.
has the chernobyl explosion been positive or negative for the environment and the ecosystem
The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 was a disaster that had severe consequences for the environment and the ecosystem. The explosion released a large amount of radiation into the atmosphere, which contaminated a large area of land, including parts of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. This contamination had a negative impact on the environment, including the air, water, and soil.
The explosion and the subsequent release of radiation had a number of negative effects on the ecosystem in the region. Many plants and animals were killed or suffered from radiation sickness, and the populations of some species declined significantly. The contamination also affected the health of people living in the area, as well as the economic well-being of the region. In the years following the disaster, efforts were made to clean up the contaminated areas and to mitigate the effects of the radiation on the environment and the ecosystem. Despite these efforts, the impact of the Chernobyl disaster on the environment and the ecosystem is still being felt today.
Les étudiants de deuxième année ont bouclé leur dossier de mobilité il y a quelques jours. 417 étudiants ont passé le TOEFL, avec beaucoup de succès. Je saisis cette occasion pour vous remercier de votre travail au semestre d'automne.
Lors de cette session d'automne, le score moyen au TOEFL d'un.e étudiant.e de 2ème année fut de 95/120, soit un niveau C1. Les étudiant.e.s de Sciences Po "sur-performent" dans toutes les compétences par rapport à la moyenne nationale sauf en Writing où nos étudiant.e.s se situent légèrement au-dessus de la moyenne nationale. C'est la raison pour laquelle il demeure judicieux de faire travailler cette compétence en donnant à écrire au minimum 3 essais de 250-300 mots à la maison pendant le semestre. Je vous prie de bien vouloir trouver ci-joint la charte des langues pour plus de détails.
Au semestre de printemps, ce sera au tour des Masters 2 de passer le TOEFL (ils recevront un voucher très prochainement pour s'inscrire à une session en centre ETS de préférence, sans avance de frais). Pour rappel, il faut présenter un score de 100/120 au TOEFL pour être diplômé de Sciences Po.
The second year students have completed their mobility file a few days ago. 417 students took the TOEFL, with great success.
During this fall semester, the average TOEFL score of a 2nd year student was 95/120, which is a C1 level. Sciences Po students "over-perform" in all skills compared to the national average, except in Writing, where our students are slightly above the national average. This is why it is still a good idea to work on this skill by having students write at least 3 essays of 250-300 words at home during the semester.
In the spring semester, it will be the turn of the Masters 2 students to take the TOEFL (they will receive a voucher very soon to register for a session in an ETS center, preferably without any advance payment). As a reminder, a score of 100/120 on the TOEFL is required to graduate from Sciences Po.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
“Henry David Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." This is the root.
Members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly common business model in their head, a business model focused on their life after government, their life as lobbyists. Fifty percent of the Senate between 1998 and 2004 left to become lobbyists, 42 percent of the House. Those numbers have only gone up, and as United Republic calculated last April, the average increase in salary for those who they tracked was 1,452 percent.”
“This is my friend Aaron Swartz. He's Tim's friend. He's friends of many of you in this audience, and seven years ago, Aaron came to me with a question. It was just before I was going to give my first TED Talk. I was so proud. I was telling him about my talk, "Laws that choke creativity." And Aaron looked at me and was a little impatient, and he said, "So how are you ever going to solve the problems you're talking about? Copyright policy, Internet policy, how are you ever going to address those problems so long as there's this fundamental corruption in the way our government works?"
So I was a little put off by this. He wasn't sharing in my celebration. And I said to him, "You know, Aaron, it's not my field, not my field."
He said, "You mean as an academic, it's not your field?
I said, "Yeah, as an academic, it's not my field."
He said, "What about as a citizen? As a citizen."
Now, this is the way Aaron was. He didn't tell. He asked questions.”
Responsibility and obligation are dismal words in mainstream culture, so perhaps there will be other stories that recognise this process as reciprocity and relationship, in which we give back, in gratitude and respect for all the Earth does for us. Even short of that, we can recognise our self-interest in maintaining the system on which life depends.
Fortunately, as the climate movement has diversified, one new organisation, Clean Creatives, focuses specifically on pressuring advertising and PR agencies to stop doing the industry’s dirty work. Likewise, climate journalists are exposing how fossil fuel money is funding pseudo-environmental opposition to offshore wind turbines.
As the climate activist and oil policy analyst Antonia Juhasz recently told me, the climate movement is now going after every aspect of the fossil fuel industry, including funding by banks and, via the divestment movement, shares held by investors; donations to politicians; insurers; permits for extraction; transport; refinement; emissions, notably through lawsuits concerning their impact; shutting coal-fired power plants; and pushing for a rapid transition to electrification
For example, I see people excoriate the mining, principally for lithium and cobalt, that will be an inevitable part of building renewables – turbines, batteries, solar panels, electric machinery – apparently oblivious to the far vaster scale and impact of fossil fuel mining. If you’re concerned about mining on indigenous land, about local impacts or labour conditions, I give you the biggest mining operations ever undertaken: for oil, gas, and coal, and the hungry machines that must constantly consume them.
Extracting material that will be burned up creates the incessant cycle of consumption on which the fossil fuel industry has grown fabulously rich. It creates climate chaos as well as destruction and contamination at every stage of the process. Globally, burning fossil fuels kills almost 9 million people annually, a death toll larger than any recent war. But that death toll is largely invisible for lack of compelling stories about it.
We have the solutions we need in solar and wind; we just need to build them out and make the transition, fast. Looking to wildly ineffectual carbon sequestration and other undeveloped technologies as a relevant solution is like ignoring the lifeboats at hand in the hope that fancy new ones are coming when the ship is sinking and speed is of the essence.
if we can’t win everything, then we lose everything. There are so many doom-soaked stories out there – about how civilisation, humanity, even life itself, are scheduled to die out. This apocalyptic thinking is due to another narrative failure: the inability to imagine a world different than the one we currently inhabit.
While I often hear people casually assert that our world is doomed, no reputable scientist makes such claims.
A climate story we urgently need is one that exposes who is actually responsible for climate chaos. It’s been popular to say that we are all responsible, but Oxfam reports that over the past 25 years, the carbon impact of the top 1% of the wealthiest human beings was twice that of the bottom 50%, so responsibility for the impact and the capacity to make change is currently distributed very unevenly.
By saying “we are all responsible”, we avoid the fact that the global majority of us don’t need to change much, but a minority needs to change a lot.
Last year, the veteran environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote a brilliant analysis pointing out that if you have money in one of the banks funding fossil fuels – especially, in the US, Wells Fargo, Chase, Citi, and Bank of America – your retirement funds or savings account may have a much larger climate footprint than you do. The impact of your diet and how you get to work may pale in comparison to the impact of your money in the bank. The vegan on the bicycle may still be contributing to climate chaos if her life savings are in a bank lending her money to the fossil fuel industry.
Individual impact, leaving the ultra-wealthy aside, matters mostly in the aggregate. And in aggregate we can change that. On 21 March, McKibben, via his new climate group Third Act (on whose advisory board I sit), and dozens of other climate groups will be organising actions by people with money in, or credit cards from, the key US banks, to try to force those institutions to stop funding fossil fuels. Our greatest power lies in our roles as citizens, not consumers, when we can band together to collectively change how our world works.
You ban the insecticide DDT, and a lot of bird species stop dying out. You ban chlorofluorocarbons, and the hole in the ozone layer stops growing.
“Our use of Perusall at both Mercy College in NY, where I teach undergraduate Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Sustainability, and Justice and Environmental Psychology, and at the University of South Florida’s Patel College of Global Sustainability where I teach graduate courses in Climate Mitigation and Adaptation, Navigating the Food/Energy/Water Nexus, Zero-Waste Concepts for a Circular Economy and Envisioning and Communicating Sustainability,”
Thomas Culhane, University of South Florida, Patel College of Global Sustainability
But Bloomberg has declared that Bettencourt's only daughter, Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, is now officially the world's richest woman, ahead of Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress. Bloomberg puts Bettencourt Meyers' net worth at $42 billion, compared to $37.7 billion for Walton.
Françoise Bettencourt Meyers (French: [fʁɑ̃swaz bɛtɑ̃kuʁ mɛjɛʁs]; born 10 July 1953) is a French businesswoman, philanthropist, writer, pianist and billionaire heiress, the richest woman in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$75.3 billion as of March 2022, according to Forbes. She is the only child, heiress of Liliane Bettencourt and granddaughter of L'Oréal founder Eugène Schueller. Her mother died in September 2017, after which her fortune tripled with her investments through her family holding company, Tethys Invest, and the high valuation of L'Oréal shares on the stock exchange.[1]
Liliane Henriette Charlotte Bettencourt (French pronunciation: [lil.jan be.tɑ̃.kuːʁ]; née Schueller; 21 October 1922 – 21 September 2017) was a French heiress, socialite and businesswoman. She was one of the principal shareholders of L'Oréal. At the time of her death, she was the richest woman, and the 14th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$44.3 billion.
In 1950, she married French politician André Bettencourt, who served as a cabinet minister in French governments of the 1960s and 1970s and rose to become deputy chairman of L'Oréal. Mr. Bettencourt had been a member of La Cagoule, a violent French fascist pro-Nazi group that Liliane's father, a Nazi sympathizer, had funded and supported in the 1930s and whose members were arrested in 1937. After the war, her husband, like other members of La Cagoule, was given refuge at L'Oréal despite his politically inconvenient past.[7]
In 1957, Bettencourt inherited the L'Oréal fortune when her father died, becoming the principal shareholder. In 1963, the company went public, although Bettencourt continued to own a majority stake. In 1974, in fear that the company would be nationalised after the French elections, she exchanged almost half of her stake for a three percent (3%) stake in Nestlé S.A.[10]
As of December 2012, Bettencourt owned 185,661,879 (30.5%) of the outstanding shares of L'Oréal, of which 76,441,389 (12.56%) shares are effectively held in trust (for her daughter). The remainder is owned as follows: 178,381,021 (29.78%) shares owned by Nestlé, 229,933,941 (37.76%) shares are publicly held, and the remainder are held as treasury stock or in the company savings plan.
, in 2007 Bettencourt was jointly "awarded" a Black Planet Award, an award given for destroying the planet, along with Peter Brabeck-Letmathe for proliferating contaminated baby food, monopolising water resources, and tolerating child labour.[2
Bettencourt was reported to be one of the most high-profile victims of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, losing €22 million. She was the first investor in a fund managed by Access International Advisors, which was co-founded by René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet. De la Villehuchet killed himself on 22 December 2008, after it became known that his funds had invested a substantial amount of their capital with Madoff.[37]
In June 2010, during the Bettencourt affair, Bettencourt became embroiled in a high-level French political scandal after other details of the tape recordings made by her butler became public. The tapes allegedly picked up conversations between Bettencourt and her financial adviser, Patrice de Maistre, which indicate that Bettencourt may have avoided paying taxes by keeping a substantial amount of cash in undeclared Swiss bank accounts. The tapes also allegedly captured a conversation between Bettencourt and French budget minister Éric Woerth, who was soliciting a job for his wife managing Bettencourt's wealth, while running a high-profile campaign to catch wealthy tax evaders as the budget minister.[38] Moreover, Bettencourt received a €30 million tax rebate while Woerth was budget minister.[39]
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Mazur
Don’t teach- help students learn
Lee Shulman - the plural of anecdote is not data
8.48 brains
9.47 notes
10.49 build mental models
14.15 ss not teacher convince
14.34 the more you know, the harder it is to teach?
UNESCO Paris, Île-de-France, France On-site 2 weeks ago Over 200 applicants
Full-time · Mid-Senior level
1,001-5,000 employees · International Affairs
Under the overall authority of the Assistant Director-General of Education (ADG/ED), and the direct supervision of the Director of the Division for Peace and Sustainable Development (ED/PSD), the incumbent will lead the design, coordination and execution for programme and projects in the Section of Health and Education , and play a significant role in policy and strategy direction, development and integration, and resource optimization.
Be responsible for all issues regarding international normative instruments related to the work of the Section, and in alignment with Priority Africa, Gender Equality and the meaningful engagement of children and young people, and aligned to the UNESCO Strategy on Education for Health and Well-being and its three pillars on comprehensive sexuality education, safe learning environments free from school violence including bullying, and school health and nutrition;
He reviews the books he read that year- I love this casual dismissal of QED because it’s not Feynman. He was also light years ahead of most people in noticing people like Yudkowsky and Taibbi (in the news today because of the twitter files).Duflo and Banerjee- long before they won the Nobel prize. And recommending Gallwey a long time before Bill Gates! Lean business methods, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Didion, Tony Blair and how accounting firms work- this was just one year for Swartz!
QED by Peter Parnell
Not bad, by any stretch, but on the page, for anyone who’s familiar with Feynman’s actual writings, this can’t help but feel thin.
The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames Matt Taibbi is my favorite political journalist. He writes with a raw honesty that manages to be both politically biting and hilarious.
Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo God, what a book! Poor Economics is a series of tales of foreigners trying to save the far-flung poor, while failing to realize not only that their developed-country ideas are terrible disasters in practice, but also that everything they've learned to think of as solid—even something as simple as measuring distance—is far more fraught, and complex, and political than they ever could have imagined. It's a stunning feeling to have the basic building blocks of your world questioned and crumbled before you—and a powerful lesson in the value of self-skepticism for everyone who's trying to do something.
The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey This book touched me deeply and made me rethink the entire way I approached life; it's about vastly more than just tennis. I can't really describe it, but I can recommend this video with Alan Kay and the author that will blow your mind.
The conversation eventually turned to the fact that Palanpur farmers sow their winter crops several weeks after the date at which yields would be maximized. The farmers do not doubt that earlier planting would give them larger harvests, but no one the farmer explained, is willing to be the first to plant, as the seeds on any lone plot would be quickly eaten by birds. I asked if a large group of farmers, perhaps relatives, had ever agreed to sow earlier, all planting on the same day to minimize losses. “If we knew how to do that,” he said, looking up from his hoe at me, “we would not be poor.”
Mother Teresa is a byword for saintliness, but have you ever stopped to ask why? Christopher Hitchens makes a convincing case that she’s something closer to a monster. Everyone I’ve told about this book is shocked by the concept, but it’s a short book with a pretty compelling argument.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that this book is merely the author attempting to cash in on their minor friendship with Joan Didion, but I love Didion so much that I’m just grateful for the stories.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that a big part of the appeal of this book is watching Tony Blair get arrested for war crimes, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a first-rate political thriler.
Ries presents a translation of the Toyota Production System to startups — and it’s so clearly the right way to run a startup that it’s hard to imagine how we got along before it. Unfortunately, the book has become so trendy that I find many people claiming to swear allegiance to it who clearly missed the point entirely.
The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen
A dreadful little book, which boils down to nothing more than a vast tract of economic illiteracy. Take just the insanity that is chapter 2. Cowen takes as his dictum:
The larger the role of government in the economy, the more the published figures for GDP growth are overstating improvements in our living standard.
For example, as government-insured health care takes up a larger proportion of our country’s spending, we can’t accurately measure how our living standards are improving since it’s paid for at set rates by government instead of through a competitive market process to set accurate prices.
Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Olympus — why is there so much accounting fraud? Why isn’t this stuff caught? In this serious but briskly-written work, Abigail Brown explains the incredible story of how accounting firms actually work. Paid by the people they’re supposed to be auditing, accounting firms have developed an elaborate culture of corruption, letting them aid and abet the most egregious forms of dishonesty.
(Disclosure: Ms. Brown and I were lab fellows together at the Harvard Center for Ethics.)
But, does one topic have to be connected to the next or can we just flit like a butterfly from topic to topic, alighting where the mood takes us, quickly departing if there is no interest in this particular flower?
: the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)What psychologists call apophenia—the human tendency to see connections and patterns that are not really there—gives rise to conspiracy theories.—George Johnson
: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual patternThe scientific explanation for some people is pareidolia, or the human ability to see shapes or make pictures out of randomness. Think of the Rorschach inkblot test.—Pamela Ferdinand
Last term we looked at the question- can we predict the future and we discovered the answer depends on which future you’re describing- weather, rain, temperature, where, stocks, shares, hedge funds,the price of oil.
The Inner Game of tennis
Best guide to getting out of your own way:The Inner Game of Tennis, by Timothy Gallwey. This book from 1974 is a must-read for anyone who plays tennis, but I think even people who have never played will get something out of it. Gallwey argues that your state of mind is just as important—if not more important—than your physical fitness. He gives excellent advice about how to move on constructively from mistakes, which I’ve tried to follow both on and off the court over the years.
When “leaders” dehumanize groups of people, they indirectly incite violence against “others”. #StochasticTerrorism Colorado Springs night club - LBGTQ Buffalo Tops - Blacks El Paso Walmart - Mexican Americans Pittsburgh Synagogue - Jews #January6 US Capitol - Democrats & Pence
Musk
“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk said in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”
Instead of buying a finished rocket for tens of millions, Musk decided to create his own company, purchase the raw materials for cheap, and build the rockets himself. SpaceX was born.
Within a few years, SpaceX had cut the price of launching a rocket by nearly 10x while still making a profit. Musk used first principles thinking to break the situation down to the fundamentals, bypass the high prices of the aerospace industry, and create a more effective solution.
The PayPal Mafia phenomenon has been compared to the founding of Intel in the late 1960s by engineers who had earlier founded Fairchild Semiconductor after leaving Shockley Semiconductor.[3] They are discussed in journalist Sarah Lacy's book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good.
ot long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ”
Jobs’s sensibility was more editorial than inventive. “I’ll know it when I see it,” he said.Illustration by André Carrilho
It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”
Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Jobs’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 p.m., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase. . . . He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”
Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. He then charts the even greater triumphs at Pixar and at a resurgent Apple, when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes. “At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated,” Isaacson writes:
Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.
One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.
In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”
Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox parc, after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.” Smart phones started coming out in the nineteen-nineties. Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, more than a decade later, because, Isaacson writes, “he had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to.” The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was married to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs to his fiftieth-birthday party. As Jobs tells Isaacson:
This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”
Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for others’ ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, “He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, ‘That’s no good. That’s not very good. I like that one.’ And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea.”
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Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it. After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, he tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, “Your commercials suck.”
“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.”
“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.”
Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated.
When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”
I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars—the headers that run across the top of windows and documents—that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn’t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, “Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”
The famous Apple “Think Different” campaign came from Jobs’s advertising team at TBWAChiatDay. But it was Jobs who agonized over the slogan until it was right:
They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think differently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”
The point of Meisenzahl and Mokyr’s argument is that this sort of tweaking is essential to progress. James Watt invented the modern steam engine, doubling the efficiency of the engines that had come before. But when the tweakers took over the efficiency of the steam engine swiftly quadrupled. Samuel Crompton was responsible for what Meisenzahl and Mokyr call “arguably the most productive invention” of the industrial revolution. But the key moment, in the history of the mule, came a few years later, when there was a strike of cotton workers. The mill owners were looking for a way to replace the workers with unskilled labor, and needed an automatic mule, which did not need to be controlled by the spinner. Who solved the problem? Not Crompton, an unambitious man who regretted only that public interest would not leave him to his seclusion, so that he might “earn undisturbed the fruits of his ingenuity and perseverance.” It was the tweaker’s tweaker, Richard Roberts, who saved the day, producing a prototype, in 1825, and then an even better solution in 1830. Before long, the number of spindles on a typical mule jumped from four hundred to a thousand. The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task.
A shill, also called a plant or a stooge, is a person who publicly helps or gives credibility to a person or organization without disclosing that they have a close relationship with said person or organization.
1. How to Make Wealth: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html 2. How to Start a Startup http://paulgraham.com/start.html 3. Hiring is Obsolete (maybe his best) http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html 4. The Hardest Lesson for Startups to Learn http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html 5. The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html 6. Why To Not Not Start a Startup http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html 7. Holding a Program in One's Head http://paulgraham.com/head.html 8. Cities & Ambition (cited by Jeff) http://paulgraham.com/cities.html 9. Relentlessly Resourcesful http://paulgraham.com/relres.html and 10. What Startups are Really Like (previously cited by Charlie)
Schumpeter The case against globaloney
Apr 20th 2011
GEOFFREY CROWTHER, editor of The Economist from 1938 to 1956, used to advise young journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. He might have changed his advice if he had lived to witness the current debate on globalisation. There is a lively discussion about whether it is good or bad. But everybody seems to agree that globalisation is a fait accompli: that the world is flat, if you are a (Tom) Friedmanite, or that the world is run by a handful of global corporations, if you are a (Naomi) Kleinian.
Pankaj Ghemawat of IESE Business School in Spain is one of the few who has kept his head on the subject. For more than a decade he has subjected the simplifiers and exaggerators to a barrage of statistics. He has now set out his case—that we live in an era of semi-globalisation at most—in a single volume, “World 3.0”, that should be read by anyone who wants to understand the most important economic development of our time.
Mr Ghemawat points out that many indicators of global integration are surprisingly low. Only 2% of students are at universities outside their home countries; and only 3% of people live outside their country of birth. Only 7% of rice is traded across borders. Only 7% of directors of S&P 500 companies are foreigners—and, according to a study a few years ago, less than 1% of all American companies have any foreign operations. Exports are equivalent to only 20% of global GDP.
________________
=SIR – Liberal economists invariably support frictionless labour markets. In an ideal world we would have nothing else. But in the world we’ve got, the question has to be asked: does a government have an obligation to protect the livelihoods of those citizens who were born or are already resident in a country? This is one of the issues that has fuelled the tea party and it is not going to go away.
Karl Sutterfield Denver
SIR – Your leader calling for the lifting of limits on skilled immigrants to Britain (“Scrap the cap”, November 20th) ignored some of the main reasons to keep such restrictions. Britain’s infrastructure cannot cope with more people. The country is already bursting at the seams. Skilled immigrants with large families often turn to local councils for housing, but the authorities have nowhere to put them; hospitals and schools in inner city areas are overwhelmed.
A.J. Shearburn Cape Town
SIR – Immigration is the backbone of globalisation. The grievances of those who fear immigrants are understandable, but bigotry and discrimination are not acceptable and people should overcome their fears. Immigration is a very natural thing and trying to cap it is like trying to cap the rain.
Okwechime Ekene Glasgow
WikiLeaks' latest
More dope, no highs
Blushes, frowns but no explosions in the latest WikiLeaks’ disclosures
Dec 9th 2010 |
DISINGENUOUS and caustic, yes. But demonising America’s diplomats on the basis of the few hundred cables disclosed so far would be hard. Nor is it easy to argue that WikiLeaks has done devastating damage to America’s interests.
The most controversial disclosure in recent days was probably a long list of commercial and other installations deemed critical to America’s national security. That included the landing points of undersea cables; the names of firms making vital vaccines; and big ports. But the list had obvious omissions and nothing on it was secret. Published on the Pentagon’s website it would hardly have raised an eyebrow.
More damaging may be reports from diplomats in north Africa, which underline what had previously been just savage gossip. A former American ambassador to Morocco is quoted as bemoaning “the appalling greed of those close to King Muhammad VI”. A company owned by the royal family, a private secretary and a political-party leader are all named in terms that would, in a journalistic context, risk a libel suit. The cables also depict Morocco’s military as riddled with corruption, “particularly at the highest levels”.
Cables from Tunisia, another close American ally in the region, bluntly depict the regime of president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali as a sclerotic police state increasingly tarnished by nepotism. “Corruption in the inner circle is growing,” says one cable. “Tunisians intensely dislike, even hate, First Lady Leila Trabelsi and her family.” In a chatty account of a lavish dinner at the beachside villa of the president’s son-in-law, the American ambassador marvels at desserts flown in from St Tropez, the multitude of servants, and a pet tiger that ate four chickens a day. The host may be interested to know that while bragging about his clout he struck his guest as “demanding, vain and difficult”, with a limited knowledge of or interest in world affairs.
On similar lines, an American official in Saudi Arabia describes un-Islamic mores at a clandestine Halloween party, hosted by a royal prince. Alcohol and prostitutes abounded at the event, attended by 150-plus Saudis. The host’s status kept the fearsome religious police away. Such parties, the writer concluded, were increasingly typical in the kingdom. In autocratic rigid societies, such reporting may do more than just jangle nerves.
Catch-22 A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions: "In the Catch-22 of a closed repertoire, only music that is already familiar is thought to deserve familiarity" (Joseph McLennan).
The rules or conditions that create such a situation.
A situation or predicament characterized by absurdity or senselessness.
A contradictory or self-defeating course of action: "The Catch-22 of his administration was that every grandiose improvement scheme began with community dismemberment" (Village Voice).
A tricky or disadvantageous condition; a catch: "Of course, there is a Catch-22 with Form 4868-you are supposed to include a check if you owe any additional tax, otherwise you face some penalties" (New York).
[After Catch-22, by Joseph Heller 1923-1999.]
"When it comes to human rights and religious freedom, China remains on the wrong side of history" (President Bill Clinton, June 1998).
The wrong side of history? By JAY AMBROSE Scripps Howard News Service
Hillary Clinton recently did it, I learned on reading a newspaper article.
She's hardly the only one, but when she said that Republicans seeking some tough measures dealing with illegal immigration were "on the wrong side of history," I found myself suddenly wondering whether this expression is growing in popularity or I am just noticing it more. Either way, I think those who use it are on the wrong side of careful thought, and ought to cut it out.
What does it mean to say someone is on the wrong side of history? Something like this, as best I can tell: History is moving discernibly and inevitably in a uniform, progressive, good direction, and if you hold to ideas or purposes contrary to that direction, you will find yourself more or less discarded, left by the wayside, a fossil of an era that was happily wiped out.
Though my scouting about indicates conservatives may use the expression as often as leftists, it clearly has deep roots in the thinking of Karl Marx, who supposed there was an economically determined class struggle the consequences of which were clearly predictable.
First off, of course, we don't know where history is headed. We can study all kinds of data and make some well-informed, insightful guesses that have a great probability of being accurate, at least in the near term, but we cannot really know for sure what's going to happen. One reason is that too much is at play.
No mind - no computer - is capable of taking in and weighing all the many, even millions of factors that might influence events. Remember the old saying about a horseshoe being lost because a nail was lost, and then the horse and rider and consequently a battle and finally an entire kingdom? We know there's truth here - small things can make a big difference - and we know we are seldom going to take that nail into account when foretelling a kingdom's future.
Another reason - and a reason that history is not inevitable - is that history is what's done by people, and people can create new realities. They can, among other possibilities, change their minds.
At any given moment, you might think that cultural, technological and other forces are pushing people this way or that, only to find that first one and eventually many more are making up their minds differently, maybe because of a charismatic leader, a special book, a single, revealing incident or the drip, drip, drip of new information. As for progress being the undeniable way of history, it isn't. For hundreds of millions of us, life is better than it was a thousand and more years ago for people, but for many other millions, it is barely better, if that. Life in any society can improve and then get worse. It is conceivable that at this moment in America we are in a golden age the likes of which humanity will never again experience. What's to come is not necessarily precious, and at any rate, what's the final stopping place?
Some of these consequences have been rather large. With Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, holed up at home with an armed guard watching him 24 hours a day, the crisis in the eurozone looks even worse than it did before.
Some of the consequences are rather small. Now that the Frenchman is off the speaker circuit, all sorts of peculiar people are being asked to take his place on various podiums around the world. Last Tuesday, I received such an invitation. It came from a man who runs a course in diversity and inclusion at Sciences Po, the elite French university. He explained that DSK had been approached to talk to the students but that “Regarding the latest events, I have started to look for a new keynote speaker”. The upshot: could I step into the breach instead?
This has to be the oddest e-mail I’ve ever received. DSK is not the obvious person to talk about diversity. Indeed, if you think of a Venn diagram, and put him in one circle and the worthy agenda of diversity in another, there would seem to be no overlap. But even if there was no mistake in asking the ex-head of the IMF to talk on the subject, what desperate, scattergun process led from him to me?
Though I haven’t yet replied, I’m inclined to say no, partly because the thought of DSK is putting me off. It’s not because I don’t fancy stepping into the shoes of a man accused of a very serious sexual assault – which he denies. The problem is simply that I don’t like the idea of deputising for someone who was sorting out the financial crisis and might have been president of France.
There is a delicate psychological etiquette to inviting people to do things when they are second choice; the man from Sciences Po hasn’t quite got it right. The first rule is to pretend that the person being asked is your first choice, even if they are your 50th.
Everyone, even people who pretend to be above such vanities, likes to think they are special. I turned down something the other day simply because I’d been told another columnist, whose work is beyond feeble, had been asked first. It may be pathetic, but it’s how it goes.
There is a second rule that sometimes overrides the first. It says that you can – and should – mention the name of the first choice candidate when they are unambiguously more important or talented than the second. Thus the invitation will flatter the also-ran into thinking they are in elevated company.
This second principle should mean that it is the greatest honour to be asked to step into the shoes of someone as big as DSK. But actually it isn’t. He is far too many miles above me in the pecking order for such a principle to work. To stand in for someone like him feels too random to be flattering. And to give such a speech would be a pleasure to no one: if you think you are going to be addressed by one of the most important men in the world, you aren’t going to be terribly happy to listen to a jobbing journalist instead.
There is, however, a more powerful reason for saying no to the invitation. The man from Sciences Po tells me that my name had been mentioned to him as the FT’s “expert on D&I”. The truth of the matter is that I’m so far from being an expert I couldn’t at first think what D&I was. I’ve subsequently worked it out, but don’t have much new or interesting to say about diversity; less on inclusion; and nothing at all to say about the two initials smugly sitting there separated by an ampersand as if they were something everyone’s heard of, like B&B or S&M or G&T.
But before I dispatch my refusal, I’m having another thought. Maybe this very invitation – with its weird juxtaposition of Sciences Po, D&I and DSK – does give me something new to say about diversity, after all.
On the one hand it shows that the onward march of the politically correct diversity agenda with its devotion to the advancement of women and ethnic minorities has proceeded so far that students at one of the most intellectually rigorous universities in France study it as an academic subject.
But at the same time, out of the ivory tower and back in the real world, a man who led an institution in one of the most politically correct countries in the world stands accused – not of perpetuating the glass ceiling, but of dragging a woman across the floor. lucy.kellaway@ft.com
I don't particularly appreciate DSK but I find your article irrelevant and arrogant. Have you thought about declining politely and keeping quiet? These lines serve no purpose but the eye-catching title in the front page. Considering the high purpose of your writings, I agree the invitation from Science-Po was probably a mistake...
This is like looking at the target language from 30,000 feet. But that’s where the learners are already. They’re very used to not really understanding texts, so why should they want to not really understand them in the classroom, too? While it may get students into a text (and compensate for the lack of visual information, in the case of audio-only listening tasks), an over-dependence on top-down processing (i.e. using background knowledge, non-linguistic and contextual clues, etc) may delude both learners and teachers into thinking that linguistic information can safely be ignored. Or that having no more unanswered questions about a text (a state that Frank Smith calls ‘zero uncertainty’) is not a realistic, nor even a desirable, outcome. As a second language user, I hate having unanswered questions. I hate being in the cinema at an Almodóvar film surrounded by cackling Spaniards, and not getting the joke. I hate missing the plane because I misheard the announcement and went to the wrong gate. I don’t like 50% uncertainty, or even 5% uncertainty. I crave zero uncertainty.
Scott Thornbury blog
In 1966, Leonard Newmark wrote a prescient article called How not to interfere with language learning. For various reasons, the notion of not interfering has come back to me repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. A colleague sent me a copy of a book he recently published, called The Mindful Teacher (MacDonald & Shirley, 2009). In this, he and his co-author advocate an antidote to what they describe as ‘alienated teaching’, and recommend strategies teachers can use to become more ‘mindful’. One such strategy (or synergy) is simply stopping. “And then stopping again. And then again.” They comment: “It might seem ridiculous to imagine that simply stopping could be described as emancipatory. We are socialized to believe that being busy is a virtue.” However, this constant busy-ness distracts us from responding, in a calm and reflective manner, to the complex nature of classroom events. So, drawing on principles derived from meditation, they make a good case for “stopping and taking an inner account of what is transpiring, and not allowing yourself to be rushed into actions that you might regret later” (p. 65)
Scott Thornbury blog
I heard people ask much the same thing. Is this art? Or, to put it another way, this isn’t art, is it? It’s the wrong question. The right question is, why does it matter to you? What is depressing about the art question is that art itself has been answering it for more than 120 years. “Is it art?” is a question asked by the culturally insecure, those who need to know that the bag they carry their opinions and prejudices in is a real Louis Vuitton. Here is a simple rule: art isn’t anything. The purpose of art isn’t to be art; it’s to move, to be inspiring, depressing, exciting, to manipulate, to realise feelings and thoughts that are too subtle and deep to put names to.
On the other hand, the purpose of wallpaper is to paper walls. Don’t mistake craft for art. Art may use craft, but that’s not what makes it art. The proof of art is the same as the proof of pudding: it’s in the consumption. You’ve got to feel it to know it. And if you want to know if something is art, look at the way other people feel it. We view art differently from the way we look at anything else. There are four sorts of art: good art and bad art, successful art and unsuccessful art. Successful art is not necessarily good art, and unsuccessful is not necessarily bad. A A Gill The Sunday Times
Americans are committing fewer crimes, though nobody seems to know quite why
Jun 2nd 2011 |
INTUITIVE theories are often easier to believe in than to prove. For instance: conventional wisdom says that the crime rate should rise during a recession. When people are out of work and out of money, the thinking goes, they turn to crime. But the evidence backing this theory is at best equivocal. There seem to be some links between crime and economic conditions, but they are neither as direct nor clear as one might assume. Crime rose during the Roaring Twenties then fell in the Depression. America’s economy expanded and crime rates rose in the 1960s. Rates fell throughout the 1990s, when America’s economy was healthy, but they kept falling during the recession in the early 2000s (see chart).
And during the current downturn, the unemployment rate rose as the crime rate fell. Between 2008 and 2009 violent crime fell by 5.3% and property crime by 4.6%; between 2009 and 2010, according to the preliminary Uniform Crime Report released by the FBI on May 23rd, violent crime fell by another 5.5% and property crime by 2.8%. Robberies—precisely the crime one might expect to rise during tough economic times—fell by 9.5% between 2009 to 2010. The decline in violent crimes was sharpest in small towns, where the rate dropped by more than 25%, and among regions sharpest in the South, which saw a 7.5% decline. Only two cities with more than 1m people—San Antonio and New York—saw their crime rates rise. And some perspective is warranted there: in 1991 around 2,200 people were murdered in New York. Last year just 536 were. Overall, America’s violent-crime rate is at its lowest level in around 40 years, and its murder rate at its lowest in almost 50.
According to the social scientists, this was not supposed to happen. In 1995 James Wilson, who came up with the “broken windows” theory of crime prevention widely credited with making New York safer, warned that by 2000 there would be “30,000 more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now. Get ready.” One year later John DiLulio, another political scientist who studies crime, warned of a wave of “juvenile super-predators” wreaking havoc by 2010. Yet even as they wrote, the violent-crime rate had already begun to fall. Except for a bit of a rise from 2004 to 2006, it has fallen every year since 1991.
Although nobody predicted the striking decline in crime during the 1990s, in hindsight theories explaining it abound. Some give credit to smarter police tactics: particularly quantitative methods and “broken windows” policing. Others point to the increased availability of legal abortion in the 1970s, resulting in fewer children born to teenage, unwed and poor mothers: precisely the sorts of children who commit crimes at high rates during adolescence. There is also the waning of violence associated with the crack market, and the increased incarceration rate, which keeps more criminals off the street for longer (though at tremendous cost).
Although these factors explain the drop since the late 1980s, they do not explain the sharp drop in the past two years. For that Al Blumstein, a criminologist who heads the National Consortium on Violence Research, posits an “Obama effect”, in which the election of America’s first black president inspires a significant number of young black men away from violence. And indeed between 2008 and 2009, the numbers of blacks arrested for murder and robbery each declined by over 2%, though this theory has more narrative than evidentiary appeal.
Another theory concerns lead. Exposure to lead in childhood has been linked to aggression and criminal behaviour in adults. Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, argues that the decline in American children’s exposure to lead since it was phased out of gasoline in the 1970s and removed almost entirely by 1985, accounts for much of the decline in violent crime in the 1990s. It may account for even more, as more of America’s unleaded children enter adolescence and their early 20s. And then there are those perennial bogeymen, video games and the internet, affordable forms of entertainment that keep people inside, and away from real crime and drugs.
Sep 7th 2011, 18:08 by J.G. | LONDON
TO 11 Downing Street for the launch of a book by two Conservative MPs, Matthew Hancock, a former adviser to George Osborne, and Nadhim Zahawi, a former pollster for YouGov. (In the interests of openness, I should say that I agreed to read an early draft of the book.) Masters of Nothing taps into modish fields of research, namely behavioural economics, to argue that the financial crash was the result of human irrationality: our misperception of risk, our tendency to favour evidence that confirms our existing biases, our hard-wired desire to go with the crowd. The authors warn that the crash will happen again unless governments find ways of compensating for these foibles through policy.
This is not the only (and certainly not the most famous) book in recent years to wield the findings of behavioural economics, neuroscience and other embryonic disciplines to kill off homo economicus. The intellectual Zeitgeist has been captured by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, David Brooks's The Social Animal and the ubiquitous Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler.
Mar 3rd 2011 |
The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement. By David Brooks. Random House; 448 pages; $27.
FORTY years ago Walter Mischel, an American psychologist, conducted a famous experiment. He left a series of four-year-olds alone in a room with a marshmallow on the table. He told them that they could eat the marshmallow at once, or wait until he came back and get two marshmallows. Recreations of the experiment on YouTube show what happens next. Some eat the marshmallow immediately. Others try all kinds of strategies to leave the tempting treat alone.
Nothing surprising there. The astonishing part was the way that the four-year-olds’ ability to defer gratification was reflected over time in their lives. Those who waited longest scored higher in academic tests at school, were much less likely to drop out of university and earned substantially higher incomes than those who gobbled up the sweet straight away. Those who could not wait at all were far more likely, in later life, to have problems with drugs or alcohol.
In his fascinating study of the unconscious mind and its impact on our lives, David Brooks uses this story to illustrate how the conscious mind learns to subdue the unconscious. This is not a question of iron will, but about developing habits and strategies that trigger helpful processes in the unconscious, rather than unproductive ones. What matters is to learn to perceive property, people or situations in ways that reduce the temptation to lie, to steal or behave in a self-destructive way.
The author’s aim is to show how recent research has illuminated the complex processes of the brain. “We have inherited an obsolete, shallow model of human nature,” he argues. Study after study, many of them little known, show that people take decisions about their jobs, relationships, actions and morals in ways that involve a complex interaction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. The most important decisions begin in the realm of the unconscious, although they are often influenced by the conscious.
The shaping of this delicate balance begins early in life: the children who were best at leaving their marshmallow on the plate tended to come from stable, organised homes. Culture and the community in which a child is raised help to build the way the conscious and unconscious intertwine. Mr Brooks recounts a survey of diplomats who failed to pay parking fines in New York. By far the worst non-payers came from countries where corruption is endemic: Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria and so on. By contrast, diplomats from Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Israel, Norway and Canada had no unpaid fines at all. “Thousands of miles away from home,” Mr Brooks writes, “diplomats still carried their domestic cultural norms inside their heads.”
What does all this mean for public policy? Mr Brooks complains that policies too frequently rely on an overly simplistic, rationalist view of human nature. That may be true, but all too many daft policies rely on the collective reluctance of the voters to leave marshmallows uneaten on the table. More to the point, how can a country curb crime, create true equality and reduce the social and economic costs of bad decisions? Education systems exist mainly to build the rational mind, and yet the decisions that are most important in making people happy are the ones in which reason plays little or no part: the development of friendships and the choice of a spouse. Public policy has largely ignored this.
May 12th 2011
AS DOES much else in the universe, education moves in cycles. The 1960s and 1970s saw a swell of interest in teaching styles that were less authoritarian and hierarchical than the traditional watching of a teacher scribbling on a blackboard. Today, tastes have swung back, and it is fashionable to denigrate those alternatives as so much hippy nonsense.
But evidence trumps fashion—at least, it ought to. And a paper just published in Science by Louis Deslauriers and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia suggests that at least one of the newfangled styles is indeed superior to the traditional chalk-and-talk approach.
Dr Deslauriers’s lab rats were a group of 850 undergraduate engineering students taking a compulsory physics course. The students were split into groups at the start of their course, and for the first 11 weeks all went to traditionally run lectures given by well-regarded and experienced teachers. In the 12th week, one of the groups was switched to a style of teaching known as deliberate practice, which inverts the traditional university model. Class time is spent on problem-solving, discussion and group work, while the absorption of facts and formulae is left for homework. Students were given reading assignments before classes. Once in the classroom they spent their time in small groups, discussing specific problems, with the teacher roaming between groups to offer advice and respond to questions.
At the end of the test week, Dr Deslauriers surveyed the students and gave them a voluntary test (sold as useful exam practice, and marked on a 12-point scale) to see how much they had learned in that week and what they thought of the new teaching method. The results were striking (see chart). The traditionally taught group’s average score was 41%, compared with 74% for the experimental group—even though the experimental group did not manage to cover all the material it was supposed to, whereas the traditional group did.
According to Dr Deslauriers and his team, their result is the biggest performance boost ever documented in educational research, making the new teaching style more effective even than personal, one-to-one tuition—although measuring the effect immediately after the experiment, rather than waiting for end-of-term exam results (as other research often has), may have inflated the number somewhat. The results are especially impressive given that the deliberate-practice method was applied by teachers with little prior experience of using it, whereas the traditionally taught students had the benefit of a seasoned lecturer with a long record of good ratings from pupils.
One frequent criticism of these sorts of studies concerns something called the Hawthorne effect, an idea which emerged from post-war work on productivity. This is that change of any sort will boost people’s performance simply because of the novelty value it offers. But the exact nature of the Hawthorne effect, and even whether it exists at all, is controversial. Moreover, if it is real, it would be unlikely to apply in this case, because it is supposed to occur mainly among people doing routine jobs, for whom any change in working practices is welcome. That is not a description of a typical undergraduate’s life.
A more serious objection is that the study’s participants may be an atypical group. The sort of people who study engineering may react better (or, indeed, worse) to the deliberate-practice method than, say, those reading fine art or history.
Still, Dr Deslauriers and his team are bullish about the wider implications of their work, which adds to the evidence that it may be possible to improve on the long-established chalk-and-talk method. And the students seemed to enjoy the experience, too. Attendance in the experimental group rose by 20% over the course of the week that deliberate practice was used, and three-quarters of its members said that they would have learned more had the entire course been taught in the same way. In this case, then, the educational hippies may have been right.
As a physics professor who teaches scientists and engineers, and conducts research in physics and astronomy education, I need to point out that at least 30 years of research of this type has been done showing that traditional lecture-only instructions ("chalk-and-talk") is not a very effective way to teach physics, or any other subject. Research on human learning has shown that, for people to learn fundamental concepts of any subject, they must be actively engaged with the material in some way, the opposite of sitting and listening in a lecture hall.
Thus, the results of this article are not surprising, nor are they terribly new. Many different so-called "interactive learning strategies" have been shown to work more effectively than lecture-only. It is only resistance to change, and the extra work of implementing such learning strategies that have slowed their adoption, but they are catching on, especially in the U.S. and Canada. For those who want to see some of the history of this research, they can see a 10-year-old review article of the literature, which even then was reviewing 20 years of research: L.C. McDermott and E.F. Redish, "Resource letter on Physics Education Research," Am. J. Phys. 67 (9) 755 (1999).
I hope that future articles of this type make more of an effort to put this type of work into some historical context, rather than leaving the reader with the impression that this is the first work of its kind.
Alexander L. Rudolph, Ph.D. Professor of Physics California State Polytechnic University Pomona, CA
"hippy nonsense"? That's a strange way to characterize what is standard practice in most business schools.
dr dubie wrote: I never saw a point in listening to someone improvisationally dictate a book. Facts should be professionally written, edited, and illustrated. Discussing them, asking questions, and otherwise engaging is what a textbook can't offer.
Having used active learning in teaching my college level economics classes, I must point out that my teaching evaluations suffered somewhat. Several students were critical of the fact that the professor did not teach them. So much for a university being a community of scholar-learners. On the flip side, the majority of students commented that they learned more in the class than in their other classes. And they enjoyed it, which is saying a lot for most students taking economics.
Oct 14th 2010 |
A PARADOX of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text conveying the information harder to read.
Dr Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three “species” of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge.
Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read.
Participants were given 90 seconds to memorise the information in the lists. They were then distracted with unrelated tasks for a quarter of an hour or so, before being asked questions about the aliens, such as “What is the diet of the Pangerish?” and “What colour eyes does the Norgletti have?” The upshot was that those reading the Arial font got the answers right 72.8% of the time, on average. Those forced to read the more difficult fonts answered correctly 86.5% of the time.
The question was, would this result translate from the controlled circumstances of the laboratory to the unruly environment of the classroom? It did. When the researchers asked teachers to use the technique in high-school lessons on chemistry, physics, English and history, they got similar results. The lesson, then, is to make text books harder to read, not easier.
Obesity
THE blame for rising obesity rates has been pinned on many things, including a more calorific diet, the spread of processed food, a lack of exercise and modern man’s generally more stressful lot. Something else may soon be included in the list: brighter nights. Light regulates the body’s biological clock—priming an individual’s metabolism for predictable events such as meals and slumber. Previous research has shown that, in mice at least, the genes responsible for this can be manipulated so as to make the animals plumper and more susceptible to problems associated with obesity, including diabetes and heart disease. It was not known, though, whether simply altering ambient light intensity might have similar effects.
A team of researchers led by Laura Fonken of Ohio State University has cleared the matter up. As they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they examined how nocturnal light affects weight, body fat and glucose intolerance (the underlying cause of late-onset diabetes) in male mice. They found that persistent exposure to even a little night-time light leads to increases in all three. The only thing that seemed to differ was when the mice ate. In the wild, mice are nocturnal. Unsurprisingly, then, those in the quasi-natural conditions consumed only about a third of their food in the “day” phase. For a mouse exposed to the twilight cycle, however, the figure was over 55%.
How this might relate to people will require further investigation. Mice and humans are physiologically alike, so a similar effect might be expected for people, but the fact that mice are nocturnal and humans diurnal is a serious complicating factor. It is true, though, that the spread of electric lighting means many people eat their main meal when natural daylight is long gone—the obverse of a mouse eating during daylight hours. And that tendency to eat late, though it has never been tested properly, is believed by many nutritionists to be a factor in putting on weight.
When the full explanation for the modern epidemic of obesity has emerged, it is unlikely that the spread of artificial lighting will be the whole of it. But this work suggests it might be a part. When you eat could be as important as what you eat.
Predictions
FOR a man who claims to lack expertise in the field, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an academic at New York University, has made some impressively accurate political forecasts. In May 2010 he predicted that Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, would fall from power within a year. Nine months later Mr Mubarak fled Cairo amid massive street protests. In February 2008 Mr Bueno de Mesquita predicted that Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, would leave office by the end of summer. He was gone before September. Five years before the death of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, Mr Bueno de Mesquita correctly named his successor, and, since then, has made hundreds of prescient forecasts as a consultant both to foreign governments and to America’s State Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies. What is the secret of his success? “I don’t have insights—the game does,” he says.
Mr Bueno de Mesquita’s “game” is a computer model he developed that uses a branch of mathematics called game theory, which is often used by economists, to work out how events will unfold as people and organisations act in what they perceive to be their best interests. Numerical values are placed on the goals, motivations and influence of “players”—negotiators, business leaders, political parties and organisations of all stripes, and, in some cases, their officials and supporters. The computer model then considers the options open to the various players, determines their likely course of action, evaluates their ability to influence others and hence predicts the course of events. Mr Mubarak’s influence, for example, waned as cuts in American aid threatened his ability to keep cronies in the army and security forces happy. Underemployed citizens then realised that disgruntled officials would be less willing to use violence to put down street protests against the ailing dictator.
Mesquita & Roundell, Mr Bueno de Mesquita’s company, is just one of several consulting outfits that run such computer simulations for law firms, companies and governments. Most decision-making advice is political, in the broadest sense of the word—how best to outfox a trial prosecutor, sway a jury, win support from shareholders or woo alienated voters by shuffling a political coalition and making legislative concessions.
But game-theory software can also work well outside the sphere of economics. In 2007 America’s military provided Mr Bueno de Mesquita with classified information to enable him to model the political impact of moving an aircraft carrier close to North Korea (he will not reveal the findings). Game-theory software can even help locate a terrorist’s hideout. To run simulations, Guillermo Owen of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, uses intelligence data from the US Air Force to estimate on a 100-point scale the importance a wanted man attaches to his likes (fishing, say) and priorities (remaining hidden or, at greater risk of discovery, recruiting suicide-bombers). Such factors determine where and how terrorists decide to live. Game-theory software played an important role in finding Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, says Mr Owen.
Henry Ford
United States manufacturer of automobiles who pioneered mass production (1863-1947)
History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we made today. Henry Ford»
It is well enough that the people of this nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. Henry Ford»
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. Henry Ford»
Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're probably right. Henry Ford»
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” H. L. Mencken
Nick Clegg “You can’t be in favour of coalition politics, but against the compromises that coalition necessarily entails.”
George Orwell “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future”.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe”. Albert Einstein
“The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. — Albert Einstein
more recommendations from Aaron
“The idea that Jobs created a reality distortion field around himself was half-jokingly coined by Bud Tribble, who worked on the Macintosh project. But charismatic leadership is not just a cheap Jedi mind trick. Charisma is partly a personal quality, but also a social relation. Because it is a basis for legitimate authority, it’s something people must recognize and in some way assent to in order for it to be effective. Charismatic leaders are internally driven, but they also need to be externally recognized as exceptional and, crucially, they must succeed to some degree in order to find the followers they seek.
As John Lilly remarks, “The stories of how brutal he could be on the people around him — employees, competitors, and everyone else — are legion, and they’re not apocryphal. He could be deeply dehumanizing and belittling to the people around him … As a leader of people, you have to respect how much he (and more importantly, his teams) accomplished. But I struggle with some of the ways that he led, and how they affected good people.” The combination of inner vision, contempt for rules, and the ability to moblize others results in a leadership style that is at once rebellious and autocratic. It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy, but the Pirate Captain is in charge. He can interfere anywhere and his authority is absolute: “If I don’t hear great sound coming out of that prototype by Monday morning, we’re going to remove the amplifier” “I think he’s bluffing”, Andy Hertzfeld told Burrell Smith after this demand. “But what if he’s not?”
The photograph is meant to evoke a sort of monastic asceticism, certainly, but on closer inspection you notice the room is illuminated by what looks like a Tiffany lamp. Jobs admired Charles Lewis Tiffany for his ability to mass-produce beautiful things. As Larry Ellison remarked “The difference between me and Steve is that I’m willing to live with the best the world can provide. With Steve that’s not always good enough.” In much the same way, when it came to managing his organization the charismatic emphasis on a vocation or calling coupled with a contempt for ordinary measures of success resulted in questions like “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” This moment with John Sculley, by the way, is the Mark 1:16-17 of the Apple mythos.
chip on my shoulder “Despite my privileged upbringing, I'm quite well-balanced. I have a chip on both shoulders." - Russell Crowe as John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind"
cf The abbreviation cf. (short for the Latin: confer/conferatur, both meaning "compare") is used in writing to refer the reader to other material to make a comparison with the topic being discussed.
“People criticize Cuddy for hyping her science and making it into a Ted talk. But, paradoxically, I’m now thinking we should be saying the opposite. The Ted talk has a lot going for it: it’s much stronger than the journal articles that justify it and purportedly back it up. I have the impression that Cuddy and others think the science of power pose needs to be defended in part because of its role in this larger edifice, but I recommend that Cuddy and her colleagues go the other way: follow the lead of Dana Carney, Eva Ranehill, et al., and abandon the scientific claims, which ultimately were based on an overinterpretation of noise (again, recall the time-reversal heuristic)—and then let the inspirational Ted talk advice fly free of that scientific dead end. There are lots of interesting ways to study how people can help themselves through tools such as posture and visualization, but I think these have to be studied for real, not through crude button-pushing ideas such as power pose but through careful studies on individuals, recognizing that different postures, breathing exercises, yoga moves, etc., will work for different people. Lots of interesting ideas here, and it does these ideas no favor to tie them to some silly paper published in 2010 that happened to get a bunch of publicity. The idea is to take the positive aspects of the work of Cuddy and others—the inspirational message that rings true for millions of people—and to investigate it using a more modern, data-rich, within-person model of scientific investigation. That’s the sort of thing that should one day be appearing in the pages of Psychological Science.”
Bezos
From start To 1.53
5.27 the ranch visit but don’t live there
Resourcefulness to 6.34
13.29 knives here
To 14.09
From 14.51
To 15.27 out of a 3rd world prison
Food biscuits
To 18.58
42.26 Montessori
To 42.52
Solon call no man happy until his death
Galloway One time, a student was late to class. I kicked him out, and some drama unfolded (our email exchange was forwarded to some news sites). One article got 700K views and 305 comments. At one point, the Dean’s office at NYU Stern was getting an email about our exchange every two minutes. Most were supportive, some not… at all (“I’m not letting my son register at NYU this fall”). The exchange is now part of my syllabus. I’m fairly certain it’s the most-read late policy in the history of academia.
But a speech by union leader Nicholas Klein in 1914 provides a closer version of the misattributed quote:
And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
General henning von tresckow
The assassination must be attempted at all costs. Even if it should not succeed, an attempt to seize power in Berlin must be made. What matters now is no longer the practical purpose of the coup, but to prove to the world and for the records of history that the men of the resistance dared to take the decisive step. Compared to this objective, nothing else is of consequence.
1944. Fest, Joachim. Plotting Hitler's Death, p. 236.
It is almost certain that we will fail. But how will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal?
A man's moral worth is established only at the point where he is ready to give up his life in defense of his convictions.
1-As I said before, don’t worry about it.
Subject verb maybe with like
Like the man says, just do it.
2- Like + noun or pronoun comparison, similarity
I want to be like him.
He sounds like an educated man.
3- for example
I eat a lot of fruit- as bananas
4- some verbs- treat, describe, to be known, use, accept, refer to, class, accept
I’ve never heard about iteration, but I consider any new way to learn is acceptable and could be useful for those who don’t learn with drills.
It is a term for mathematics and computing which I have applied to ELT in order to give ourselves a fluid concept that comes closer to the reality of learning than does the rigid concept of repetition. In my idea of iteration in LT each attempt learns from the previous attempt. So it is based on being watchful aware and present.
(It is surprising that the term proprioception, or the concept by any name at all, is absent from our current methodology).
In 1869 the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev developed the first version of the now very familiar table of chemical elements. This showed all the elements that were known at that time and some that were discovered later. The elements are shown in order of increasing number of protons in the nucleus, starting with Hydrogen (H) which has one proton. The rows and columns are also arranged to highlight families of elements with similar chemical properties, including for example their propensity to interact, or not, with other elements.
“At Diesel, we have a strong position against hate and more than ever we want the world to know that,” explained artistic director Nicola Formichetti. “Love and togetherness are crucial in creating a society we all want to live in, and the future we all deserve. We started working on this campaign last summer. We took a look at the world and we thought: The world doesn’t look very good right now, it doesn’t look very Diesel at the moment and at Diesel, we have a strong position against hate and for positivity and inclusivity and diversity, and more than ever we want the world to know that love and togetherness are crucial in creating a society we all want to live in, and the future we all deserve. And it’s nothing new for us at Diesel; the brand has been commenting on society and culture since the early Nineties.”
he truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species. And why
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That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer. We are so
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Today our big brains pay off nicely, because we can produce cars and guns that enable us to move much faster than chimps, and shoot them from a safe distance instead of wrestling. But cars and guns are a recent phenomenon. For more than 2 million years, human neural networks kept growing and growing, but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had precious little to show for it. What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know. Another singular human trait is
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of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving. We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures. Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores. One of the most common uses of early stone tools was to crack open bones in order to get to the marrow.
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For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.
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A significant step on the way to the top was the domestication of fire. Some human species may have made occasional use of fire as early as 800,000 years ago. By about 300,000 years ago, Homo erectus, Neanderthals and the forefathers of Homo sapiens were using fire on a daily basis. Humans now had a dependable
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But the best thing fire did was cook. Foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms – such as wheat, rice and potatoes – became staples of our diet thanks to cooking. Fire not only changed food’s chemistry, it changed its biology as well.
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Despite the benefits of fire, 150,000 years ago humans were still marginal creatures. They could now scare away lions, warm themselves during cold nights, and burn down the occasional forest. Yet counting all species together, there were still no more than perhaps a million humans living between the Indonesian archipelago and the Iberian peninsula, a mere blip on the ecological radar.
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Africa, 70,000 years ago. We are all ‘pure Sapiens’. Map 1. Homo sapiens conquers the globe. A lot hinges on this debate. From an evolutionary perspective, 70,000 years is a relatively short interval. If the Replacement Theory is correct, all living humans have roughly the same genetic baggage, and racial distinctions among them are negligible. But if the Interbreeding Theory is right, there might well be genetic differences between Africans, Europeans and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years. This is political dynamite, which could provide material for explosive racial theories. In recent decades the Replacement Theory has been the common wisdom in the field. It had firmer archaeological backing, and was more politically correct (scientists had no desire to open up the Pandora’s box of racism by claiming significant genetic diversity among modern human populations). But that ended in 2010, when the results of a four-year effort to map the Neanderthal genome were published. Geneticists were able to collect enough intact Neanderthal DNA from fossils to make a broad comparison between it and the DNA of contemporary humans. The results stunned the scientific community. It turned out that 1–4 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA. That’s not a
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It seems that about 50,000 years ago, Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans were at that borderline point. They were almost, but not quite, entirely separate species. As we shall see in the next chapter, Sapiens were already very different from Neanderthals and Denisovans not only in their genetic code and physical traits, but also in their cognitive and social abilities,
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Express. It is unsettling – and perhaps thrilling – to think that we Sapiens could at one time have sex with an animal from a different species, and produce children together.
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Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history. Whichever way it happened, the Neanderthals (and the other human species) pose one of
In 2013, Burry reopened his hedge fund, this time called Scion Asset Management, filing reports as an exempt reporting adviser (ERA) active in the state of California and approved by the SEC.[19] He has focused much of his attention on investing in water, gold, and farm land. He has said, "Fresh, clean water cannot be taken for granted. And it is not—water is political, and litigious."[20] At the end of the 2015 biographicaldramedy film The Big Short, a statement regarding Burry's current interest reads, "The small investing he still does is all focused on one commodity: water."[20]
Burry predicted Tesla stock would collapse like the housing bubble,[27] saying that "my last Big Short got bigger and Bigger and BIGGER" and taunted Tesla bulls to 'enjoy it while it lasts.'[26] In May 2021, it was reported that he held puts on over 800,000 shares of Tesla.[28] In October 2021, after a 100% rise in Tesla's stock value, he revealed he was no longer shorting it.[29]
His son was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, and Burry believes he himself has Asperger syndrome after reading about the disorder. When he was younger, he noticed that it took him a lot of energy to look people in the eye, and said, "If I am looking at you, that's the one time I know I won't be listening to you".[9][31][6] H
Ethos, Pathos, and Logos are three strategies commonly employed when attempting to persuade a reader.
Pathos, or the appeal to emotion, means to persuade an audience by purposely evoking certain emotions to make them feel the way the author wants them to feel. Authors make deliberate word choices, use meaningful language, and use examples and stories that evoke emotion. Authors can desire a range of emotional responses, including sympathy, anger, frustration, or even amusement.
Logos, or the appeal to logic, means to appeal to the audiences’ sense of reason or logic. To use logos, the author makes clear, logical connections between ideas, and includes the use of facts and statistics. Using historical and literal analogies to make a logical argument is another strategy. There should be no holes in the argument, also known as logical fallacies, which are unclear or wrong assumptions or connections between ideas.
Ethos is used to convey the writer’s credibility and authority. When evaluating a piece of writing, the reader must know if the writer is qualified to comment on this issue. The writer can communicate their authority by using credible sources; choosing appropriate language; demonstrating that they have fairly examined the issue (by considering the counterargument); introducing their own professional, academic or authorial credentials; introducing their own personal experience with the issue; and using correct grammar and syntax.
Two major reports — from 2020 and 2021 — showed a major deterioration in how much the British people trust our leaders. Both analyses go back a long way — to 1986 and 1944 respectively. And, perhaps most alarmingly, both were published before Partygate and the chaos of 2022 — it seems inevitable that trust has nosedived since their release. One is reminded of the claim, by one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters, to have gone bankrupt twice: “Gradually and then suddenly.”
When disaffection reigns, the winners are the politicians who have the least integrity: those most willing to flatter the popular notion that bad people run the world.
This eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with those who genuinely lack scruples attaining high office. Hence the Prime Ministership of Boris Johnson, an abnormally unprincipled figure, who clambered the greasy pole through “boosterism” and “cakeism”, and ended up confirming the electorate’s deepest-held suspicions about the political class. Increase political trust, then, and you reverse the cycle of poor leadership. In the process you become better able to tackle the root causes of the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the refugee crisis, and countless other issues.
Meanwhile the public have learned, in the past decade or so, about MPs’ expenses, non-dom status, Partygate, phone-hacking, bankers’ bonuses, energy company profits and sexual misconduct allegations, to name but a few. These are not, for the most part, novel phenomena. But they might once have gone undiscovered. And even if they’re getting less common, all it takes is one high-profile example for us to conclude that they’re on the rise.
This mirrors the phenomenon dubbed Moynihan’s Law, whereby societies with stronger human rights perceive there to be more rights violations. The better the tools we have to interrogate the government — to probe, challenge or simply observe them in action — the more they will come up short. Fifty years ago, many parliamentarians only visited their constituencies a handful of times a year, for example. Yet a much larger proportion of the electorate trusted MPs’ motives.
So let’s look instead to someone who has become one of the most trusted figures in public life: Martin Lewis.
Lewis is apparently seen by many voters as the sort of person who would be an “ideal UK leader”. The Timesreports that he is more trusted than the average bank. What has Martin Lewis, a TV presenter allegedly worth £123m, done to deserve his reputation as a man of the people? I can see why, if you were a state-schooled MP representing the town where you were born, you might feel a little aggrieved.
Yet the truth is that Lewis’s background matters less than his conduct; in my view, the trust people have in him makes a lot of sense. To begin with, Martin Lewis is studiously neutral — independent both from commercial paymasters and from obvious political leanings. People trust him just as they would trust a neutral to give them an account of a football match, over a diehard fan of either side.
His lack of commercial skin-in-the-game is obviously relevant to the trust people have in him. Much of the cynicism about modern politics stems from the sense that politicians are “on the take”. There have unfortunately been many recent examples to corroborate this — the Cameron-Greensill scandal, for instance — and while I suspect these are not as representative as many think, they fuel the idea of vested interests.
The other key reason for the high trust in Martin Lewis is based on his role as an educator. He unpacks financial systems and products, so that ordinary people can make decisions for themselves — navigating an increasingly complex world. Lewis’s approach here assumes maximum intelligence and minimum information on behalf of his audience. It does not browbeat; rather, it encourages people to understand both the bigger picture and the specific choices and trade-offs available to them.
This role tends not to sit within the average politician’s wheelhouse — the remit being to campaign rather than explain.
In 1983, Hewitt D. Crane and Thomas P. Piantanida performed tests using an eye-tracker device that had a field of a vertical red stripe adjacent to a vertical green stripe, or several narrow alternating red and green stripes (or in some cases, yellow and blue instead). The device could track involuntary movements of one eye (there was a patch over the other eye) and adjust mirrors so the image would follow the eye and the boundaries of the stripes were always on the same places on the eye's retina; the field outside the stripes was blanked with occluders. Under such conditions, the edges between the stripes seemed to disappear (perhaps due to edge-detecting neurons becoming fatigued) and the colors flowed into each other in the brain's visual cortex, overriding the opponency mechanisms and producing not the color expected from mixing paints or from mixing lights on a screen, but new colors entirely, which are not in the CIE 1931 color space, either in its real part or in its imaginary parts. For red-and-green, some saw an even field of the new color; some saw a regular pattern of just-visible green dots and red dots; some saw islands of one color on a background of the other color. Some of the volunteers for the experiment reported that afterward, they could still imagine the new colors for a period of time.
How is this just sitting hidden in a random Wikipedia article? How come there’s no science museum or amusement park where I can use the see-the-impossible-color machine?
5: Elizabeth VN: My Resentful Story Of Becoming A Medical Miracle. This is one of the best examples I’ve read of how a lot of medicine for chronic poorly understood complaints works; doctors shrug, you try dozens of purported miracle cures over the course of decades, if you’re extremely lucky then one of them works, you never learn why or become able to generalize it to other people.
13: New study finds that black people whose ancestors were enslaved on the eve of the Civil War, compared to black people whose ancestors were free at the time, continue to have lower education/wealth/income even today. If true, this provides strong supports the ”cycle of poverty” story of racial inequality, and boosts the argument for reparations. But I’ve also seen studies say the opposite of this. I would be much more willing to accept the new study as an improvement on the old one if not for, well, things like the link above - I have no evidence that anything like that was involved, but at this point it’s hard not to be paranoid. Does anyone know a good third-party commentary on this analysis?
14: Aella on color synaesthesia. Lots of people report feeling like certain numbers are certain colors - but which ones?
here is a lot of debate over whether “critical race theory” is being taught in schools. Zack Goldberg and Eric Kaufmann surveyed 18-20 year-olds about what they were “taught in class or heard an adult say in school” and got nationally representative data. I assume that means we can shift to an exactly equally acrimonious debate over whether the specific things the survey found do or don’t qualify as “critical race theory”. In case it helps, here are some of their figures:
If they stop teaching CRT in schools and need to know what to replace it with, I recommend a lesson on making readable graphs.
Picking up a new language — at any age — creates new pathways that could also make you a better person and may even help stave off dementia.
Being bilingual might also make you a nicer person. There is, says Chung-Fat-Yim, some connection between bilingualism and a theory of mind — the ability to attribute mental states to other people. Bilingual children must know that, say, speaker A can understand both languages, but speaker B can understand only one. The bilingual person has to have “an awareness that different people can hold different mental states about the same event,” she says. The authors of a 2016 study on theory of mind and empathy in bilinguals think that it’s likely that bilinguals also develop greater empathy.
Having a second language can also help to prevent — or at least delay — cognitive decline. “There is a consistent finding that bilinguals are able to stave off symptoms of dementia for about four to six years compared to monolinguals,” says Grundy. And that’s pretty impressive considering the best medications we have can postpone the symptoms for only about a year or so.
Grundy and his team have developed something called the bilingual anterior to posterior and subcortical shift model. That’s a mouthful, so they call it BAPSS, for short. The BAPSS model shows that in the early stages of learning a new language, most of the action takes place in the frontal lobes, in the anterior, or front, part of the brain. But as you get more fluent in your new language, the process shifts to parts of the brain that have to do with what Grundy calls “more automatic motor processing and automatic sensory information.” This is the point where you happily notice that you just read a phrase or answered a question in your new language without having to consciously translate.
Heuristics can be both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on the context in which they are used.
Heuristics are mental shortcuts that allow us to make quick decisions and solve problems efficiently. They are useful because they allow us to make judgments and choices quickly, without having to spend a lot of time and effort analyzing all the available information. This can be particularly helpful in situations where time is of the essence or when we are faced with a large amount of information.
However, heuristics can also lead to biases and errors in judgment. Because heuristics involve simplifying complex problems and making judgments based on incomplete or partial information, they can sometimes result in inaccurate or incomplete conclusions. For example, if we rely too heavily on stereotypes or preconceived notions, we may make judgments that are not based on accurate or complete information.
Overall, heuristics can be a useful tool for making decisions and solving problems, but it is important to be aware of their limitations and to use them judiciously.
illusions
56: How And Why To Be Ladylike (For Women With Autism). I know this blog’s readership is 85-90% male, but I recommend this article anyway. Partly because it doubles as a good explanation of why “ladylikeness” should exist as a concept. But also because I generally believe straight people benefit from reading dating advice aimed at the opposite sex - not just so you can catch their adversarial strategies, but also so you know what constraints they’re working under, why they’re hard, and what they’re after.
Elizabeth Sandifer's article on Siskind's style is style relevant:
stimulate neuroplastic changes in your brain - live the life nature intended
Changing your brain (neuroplasticity) to respond differently to threat is another important approach to reducing anxiety. Instead of constantly generating a reaction to threat via an automatic survival mechanism, you can learn how to create distance between the stimulus and the response. Once you create this space, you can substitute a more functional and appropriate response.
The steps to accomplishing this shift are 1) awareness, 2) separation, and 3) re-programming. “Positive thinking” doesn’t work because it suppresses awareness. However, positive substitution is key.
One metaphor is that of learning a new language. If you want to learn a new language, you can’t accomplish it merely by refraining from speaking English. Your brain will not develop new circuits by trying to alter old ones. In fact, the attention you pay to “fixing” yourself will only reinforce the existing circuits—your native language.
The first two steps of awareness and separation are necessary to stimulate neuroplastic changes in your brain. You cannot redirect until you know where you are at. Then you do need some “space” to accomplish it. Examples of ways to accomplish these two steps are expressive writing, forgiveness, and meditation. This will be discussed later.
Some ways to ”reprogram” your brain include:
* Reconnect with the best part of yourself
* Re-engage with favorite arts, hobbies, music, dance, sports, etc.
* Spend quality time with family and friends (53% of Americans are socially isolated [Cigna]). (If you cannot physically see each other, research has shown that FaceTime/video calls with direct eye contact create the same physical responses we get in person) (Hietanen).
* Re-learn how to play
* Resolve never to discuss your chronic pain, complain, criticize others, or gossip. Your brain will develop wherever you place your attention.
* Somatic work—associating thoughts with physical sensations
* Create a detailed vision of how you want your life to look
* Get organized, in order to execute your vision
* Give back—there are endless possibilities
Again, you might wonder, “How can these types of interventions make a difference?” It has been demonstrated that the brains of patients suffering from chronic pain physically shrink (inflammation destroys neurons), but when pain is successfully treated, the brain re-expands (Seminowicz). Participating in these activities stimulates creativity and growth.
The Starlink constellation currently consists of 3,335 active satellites; roughly half of all working satellites are Starlinks. In the past six months new satellites have been added at a rate of more than 20 a week, on average. SpaceX, the company which created Starlink, is offering it as a way of providing off-grid high-bandwidth internet access to consumers in 45 countries. A million or so have become subscribers.
And a huge part of the traffic flowing through the system currently comes from Ukraine. Starlink has become an integral part of the country’s military and civil response to Russia’s invasion. Envisaged as a celestial side-hustle that might help pay for the Mars missions dear to the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, it is not just allowing Ukraine to fight back; it is shaping how it does so, revealing the military potential of near-ubiquitous communications. “It’s a really new and interesting change,” says John Plumb, America’s assistant secretary of defence for space policy.
Appropriately enough, the story started with a tweet, one sent by Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, two days after the invasion:
@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars —Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space—Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.
Mr Musk replied to him within hours, saying that the Starlink service had been turned on over Ukraine and that the hardware would follow. Within days lorries full of the pizza-sized flat dishes used to access the satellites began to arrive in Ukraine.
By May around 150,000 people were using the system every day. The government quickly grew to rely on it for various communication needs, including, on occasion, the transmission of the nightly broadcast by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. Because the dishes (some of which are round and some rectangular) and their associated terminals are easily portable and can be rigged to run off a car battery, they are ideal for use in a country where the electricity and communication networks are regularly pounded by Russian missiles. When Kherson was liberated in November Starlink allowed phone and internet services to resume within days.
Crucially, Starlink has become the linchpin of what military types call C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance). Armies have long relied on satellite links for such things.
Starlink does not just provide Ukraine’s military leaders with a modicum of connectivity. The rank and file are swimming in it. This is because of the singular capacities of the Starlink system. Most satellite communications make use of big satellites which orbit up at 36,000km. Perched at such a height a satellite seems to sit still in the sky, and that vantage allows it to serve users spread across very large areas. But even if such a satellite is big, the amount of bandwidth it can allocate to each user is often quite limited.
The orbits used by Starlink’s much smaller satellites are far lower: around 550km. This means that the time between a given satellite rising above the horizon and setting again is just minutes. To make sure coverage is continuous thus requires a great many satellites, which is a hassle. But because each satellite is serving only a small area the bandwidth per user can be high. And the system’s latency—the time taken for signals to get up to a satellite and back down to Earth—is much lower than for high-flying satellites. High latencies can prevent software from working as it should, says Ian Muirhead, a space researcher at the University of Manchester. With software, rather than just voice links, increasingly used for tasks like controlling artillery fire, avoiding glitches caused by high latency is a big advantage.
Seeker to shooter
Franz-Stefan Gady, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank, recently visited the Ukrainian front lines and saw an example of what cheap, ubiquitous connectivity makes possible: a sort of Uber for howitzers. Ukrainian soldiers upload images of potential targets via a mobile network enabled by Starlink. These are sent to an encrypted group chat full of artillery-battery commanders. Those commanders then decide whether to shell the target and, if so, from where. It is much quicker than the means used to co-ordinate fire used up until now.
The system also makes drone warfare much easier. In September a Ukrainian naval drone washed up in Sevastopol, the Crimean headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with what looked like a Starlink terminal attached to its stern. In late October seven similar drones were used to mount a successful attack on the port. Ukraine published a video of the attack shot from the boat’s bow. “Ukrainian military operations are hugely dependent on having access to the internet,” says Mr Gady, “so Starlink is a most critical capability.” A Ukrainian soldier puts it more starkly. “Starlink is our oxygen,” he says. Were it to disappear “Our army would collapse into chaos.”
This kind of connectivity is something no previous army has enjoyed. Western armies fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq had access to some vast flows of data. For the most part, though (with special forces being the notable exceptions) they found it very hard to get that information to where it was needed in a timely manner.
One former member of the British armed forces recounts an operation he conducted a decade ago to find some explosives. While he flew to the site where they were thought to be, a surveillance drone showed them being moved elsewhere. Brigade headquarters, which could see the drone’s feed, passed on the intelligence to his company command over a satellite channel by voice. The company command then relayed the news to his helicopter by high-frequency radio. Each hop added time and confusion. In today’s Ukraine, he notes, he could simply have accessed the live drone feed himself.
Such frustrations led the Pentagon to start talking of “Joint All-Domain Command and Control” (JADC2, for those keeping score at home), an approach which would allow information from more or less any drone, plane or soldier to be easily sent to whatever missile, gun or aircraft might be best placed to use it. If that sounds familiar, it should. “What we are seeing with Starlink is where the US wants to be in terms of connectivity,” says Thomas Withington, an expert on battlefield communications. Developing such a capability within the military-industrial complex has been slow; the bureaucracy has proved predictably resistant. Now it seems all but available off the shelf.
This would be of only theoretical interest if Starlink, conceived as a civilian service, were an easy target in times of war. So far it has not been. Russia’s armed forces have lots of electronic-warfare equipment that can locate, jam or spoof radio emissions. But the Starlink signals are strong compared with those from higher flying satellites, which makes jamming them harder. And the way that the dishes use sophisticated electronics to create narrow, tightly focused beams that follow satellites through the sky like invisible searchlights provides further resistance to interference. “Unless you can get a really good bead on where that beam is coming from, it’s very hard to get a jamming signal into the receiver,” says Mr Withington.
If its signals cannot be jammed, the system itself could be attacked instead. In September the Russian delegation to a UN working group on space security hinted that, despite its status as a nominally civilian system, Starlink might be considered a legitimate military target under international humanitarian law—which is probably a fair assessment. In May researchers affiliated with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army published a paper calling for the development of “countermeasures” that could be used against Starlink.
Cyber-attacks like the one aimed at Ukraine’s legacy satellite system on February 24th are one possibility. So far, though, similar sallies against Starlink appear to have been ineffective, in part thanks to SpaceX’s ability to quickly update the system’s software. Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare for the Office of the Secretary of Defence, has said the speed of the software response he witnessed to one attack was “eye-watering”.
Physical attacks are also possible. Starlink satellites relay signals they receive to fairly nearby “ground stations”. They in turn send the data on to the internet or back up to another satellite, depending on where the intended recipient is. They thus represent a vulnerability. But with ground stations which handle the traffic to and from Ukraine on NATO soil, a physical attack would be a severe escalation.
And then there are the satellites themselves. America, China, India and Russia have missiles that can shoot satellites out of the sky. Again, though, using them would seem a severe escalation. It would also be a lot less useful against a constellation like Starlink than against older systems. Knocking out a single Starlink would achieve more or less nothing. If you want to damage the space-based bit of the system, you need to get rid of lots of them.
Scorched orbits
One possibility would be to try to trigger a chain reaction in which the debris from one target goes on to destroy secondary targets, debris from which spreads the destruction yet farther in a sort of scorched-orbit strategy. Such a wholesale attack on a global commons would be a desperate measure. Experts contacted by were also unconvinced that it would be of military benefit. For one thing, debris clouds would start out mostly confined to particular orbits, and expand only gradually. “It’s not obvious to me that, even if you deliberately set out to create as much debris as possible, that you could deny the use of Starlink on a timescale that was relevant to a war,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard who keeps a census of objects in orbit
For another, if debris is tracked, smart satellites can dodge it. Debris created by an irresponsible Russian missile test in November 2021 came within 10km of a Starlink satellite some 6,000 times, according to COMSPOC, a firm which monitors satellites and debris. But no harm has been done, partly because Starlink satellites can tweak their orbits to reduce the risks from incoming debris. They did so 7,000 times in the six months from December 2021.
And when satellites are small and mass-produced, as the Starlink ones are, they can be replaced with much less fuss than would previously have been the case. Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, an ngo, reckons that Starlink’s use in Ukraine marks “the beginning of the end” for the value of anti-satellite missiles. “[It] turns out they’re only useful if your adversary relies on small numbers of really large/expensive satellites.”
A good indicator that adversaries do not see Starlink as fatally vulnerable is that they are scrambling to develop similar things themselves. In 2020 China filed documents with the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body, for a 13,000-satellite constellation of its own. Russia has ambitions for a 264-satellite constellation designed to operate in higher orbits than Starlink. America’s allies are enthusiastic too. In 2020 Britain’s government, Bharti, an Indian multinational, and Eutelsat, a satellite operator, rescued OneWeb, a firm which had gone bankrupt building a constellation of Starlink-like satellites. In November 2022 the EU agreed to begin developing its own low-orbit communications system, IRIS2. Starlink also has an American would-be competitor in the form of Kuiper, a planned constellation bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and of Blue Origin, a rocket firm.
But Starlink has a huge advantage: SpaceX’s launch capacity. SpaceX has the world’s best satellite-launch system, the partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket. That allows it to launch satellites at an unmatchable rate. There were 61 Falcon-9 launches in 2022. The company is talking of getting its Falcon-9 launch rate up to two rockets a week this year, with one a week devoted to Starlink. Each such launch will add another 50 or so satellites.
Starships and enterprise
More is to come. The company is working on a much larger, fully reusable spacecraft called Starship which would be capable of launching some 400 Starlinks at a time, and thus taking the constellation from thousands of satellites to tens of thousands. The long-delayed first attempt to get a Starship out into space and back is expected this year. The programme has seen explosive failures in the past and may well do so in the future; among other things Starships will have to re-enter the atmosphere at much higher speeds than the first stage of a Falcon 9 does. But investors in the company, which is privately held, seem confident. SpaceX raised $2bn in 2022; it is said to be in the process of raising more at a price which values the company at $137bn.
Meanwhile other launch systems are either unavailable, undersized or have yet to get up and running. American rules stop Western companies from buying launch services from China, and since the war began launch contracts with Russia have been cancelled. OneWeb, which relied on Russian launchers for its launches until this year, now uses SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and a launcher developed by India.
The United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin which is SpaceX’s only direct American competitor in the launch market is retiring its current launchers in favour of a new one, the Vulcan Centaur, which has yet to fly. Much the same is going on at Arianespace in Europe. The first flight of the New Glenn launcher being developed by Mr Bezos’s Blue Origin is not expected to take place until the end of the year, if then.
Reinforcements ready to deploy
This means that Mr Musk currently has a dominant position in both the launch market and satellite-internet operations. This concentration of power provides three causes of concern. Mr Musk is an unaccountable single individual; Mr Musk’s other business interests may play a role in his decisions; and Mr Musk is Mr Musk.
In September Ukrainian officials told The Economist that Mr Musk had rejected a Ukrainian request to allow Starlink to be used in Crimea, a part of Ukraine which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014, and where Ukraine has conducted numerous raids on ports and air bases. In October Mr Musk polled his followers on Twitter as to whether Ukraine should cede territory to Russia as part of a peace deal, which provoked outrage from the country’s leaders. Mr Musk replied by suggesting that SpaceX would stop carrying the costs for Ukraine’s use. But he quickly changed course, and relations seem to have settled down since. “I’m super grateful to them for what they’re doing for us,” says Mr Fedorov, the minister for digital transformation. Still, SpaceX has continued to restrict the use of Starlink in Russian-occupied territory, according to Ukrainian officials, a power that is unusual for a commercial company, to say the least.
Per bellica ad astra
If service is denied in some places, it can be permitted in others, even if it is unwelcome. Some countries do not want Starlink services making the internet uncontrollable, and so do not allow the company to operate within their borders. But this can be circumvented when ground stations in neighbouring countries are close enough. Starlink services are currently being used by protesters in Iran, says Mr Musk, despite the country not officially allowing the technology in. In future, service will be possible even in places with no convenient ground stations nearby; the next generation of satellites is intended to be able to pass messages between themselves, rather than sending them back down to the nearest ground station, creating a network which could be much more unevenly tethered to the Earth.
But that does not mean countries will be forced to accept Starlink; some will have ways to fight back. Given the importance of its Shanghai gigafactory to the fortunes of Tesla, Mr Musk’s car company, for example, it would be something of a surprise to see Starlink being made available to internal opponents of the Chinese state. And could Taiwan, if push came to shove, depend on Starlink in the way that Ukraine has come to? Just conceivably not—which may explain why the island is accelerating efforts to develop its own satellite constellation.
All that said, Mr Musk also has reason to keep on the right side of the government closest to him: America’s. And that might make good business sense. SpaceX already gets a lot of money from government contracts—it is NASA’s biggest commercial supplier, and launches big satellites for the country’s soldiers and spooks.
And for all Starlink’s impact in Ukraine, it is not as yet a commercial success. Flat antennae which can scan the skies currently cost more than most customers are willing to pay; the company is subsidising them in the hope that, as the market grows, the costs will fall. But military users of the system can be expected to pay full price, and then some, from day one. In December SpaceX revealed the existence of Starshield, a subsidiary aimed explicitly at serving such customers. It is hard to doubt that the decision to help Ukraine was idealistic. But it could well prove to have been a fortuitous loss-leader, too.■
