Master Feed : The Atlantic |
- Will Humans Still Be Humans in an Age of Artificial Intelligence?
- The House Manages to Pass a Farm Bill—Barely—by Dropping Food Stamps
- Farm Bill Deal To Hungry Americans: You're on Your Own
- Our Undue Focus on Long Life
- Another Useful Video on the San Francisco Crash
- My Mother Regretted Her Abortion
- I Hated <i>The Newsroom</i>'s First Season—and Can't Wait to See the Second One
- Meanwhile, in the Beltway Bubble: D.C. Is Out of Step With America on Snowden
- The World's Largest Building, of Course, Is Now in China
- The Perils of Giving Kids IQ Tests
- Should Struggling Countries Let Investors Run Their Cities?
- Liberals Are Going to Hate the Senate's New Student-Loan Deal
- What's the Matter With MSNBC?
- The True Story of the Wall Street Bull (as Told by the Wall Street Bull)
- Surveilling the Birds
- How Azerbaijan Is Like 'The Godfather'</em>
- 'There's No Tougher Job Than Being a Mom'
- Sometimes Sunscreen Catches Fire
- An Ode to Computer Shopper</em>
- 5 Landmarks That Could Soon Be Swallowed by Rising Seas
- For the First Time, Astronomers Have Determined the Color of an Exoplanet
- <i>Sukkah City</i>: Revisiting the Crazy, High-Concept, Temporary Jewish Huts of NYC
- Confucius in the Cockpit, and Other Items to Read, and Ignore, on Asiana 214
- If Marijuana Is Legalized, Who Will Start Using More of It?
- Edward Snowden's Leaks May Actually Strengthen U.S.-China Relations
| Will Humans Still Be Humans in an Age of Artificial Intelligence? Posted: 11 Jul 2013 03:33 PM PDT Almost as soon as it arrived as a concept, artificial intelligence has occupied a hefty portion of humans' technological anxieties. We worry about machines taking over our jobs (and/or our emotions, and/or our lives). Even as we appreciate the ease that AI has brought to our lives -- the commercial recommendations that recognize our desires, the language processing that understands our curiosities, the information indexing that satisfies them -- we have been conditioned to be suspicious of intelligence that doesn't come in the form most familiar to us: the folds of an organic brain. But what happens 10 or 20 or 50 years down the road, when artificial intelligence has expanded its capabilities -- and, presumably, its role in our lives? What will that mean for humans, as a culture and as a species? In the video above, PBS's Off Book series explores those questions. While humans have long turned to their tools to expand their capabilities, what will happen when those tools are themselves intelligent -- when those tools, perhaps, have consciousness and consciences of their own? "Once somebody develops a good AI program," NYU's Gary Marcus says, "it doesn't just replace one worker. It might replace millions of workers." And that, he continued, may bring another concern when it comes to our relationship with our notional robot overlords: "What happens if they decide that we're not useful anymore? I think we do need to think about how to build machines that are ethical. The smarter the machines get, the more important that is."
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| The House Manages to Pass a Farm Bill—Barely—by Dropping Food Stamps Posted: 11 Jul 2013 01:50 PM PDT  The Republican-led House on Thursday narrowly passed a split-off version of a five-year farm bill minus its traditional authorization for food stamp and other nutrition programs, over protests from Democrats and some agriculture and conservative groups. The 216-to-208 mostly party-line vote was tense, and the passage of the 608-page bill represented a big challenge for GOP leaders who failed last month to get a broader measure passed. Now, however, uncertainty reigns over how negotiations on a final version may proceed with the Senate. Moreover, the White House warned late Wednesday that President Obama would veto any farm bill that does not also address food-aid policy. "Have a heart. Where's your conscience?" asked Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., of Republicans on the House floor before the vote. "What makes this country great is we have a tradition of taking care of the least among us ... making sure the hungry have enough to eat." Other Democrats took to the floor in the lead-up to the vote to similarly cast Republicans as sticking it to poor people. "This is wrong," said Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. "Taking food out of the mouth of babies -- I don't think so." But Speaker John Boehner insisted that the aim of removing food stamps from the bill for the first time since the 1970s was to "get a farm bill passed." Just last month, the House GOP leaders had suffered a chaotic, embarrassing defeat of their broader, $940 billion version that included food stamps, watching as 62 fellow Republicans joined most Democrats in opposing that legislation. Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, told Democrats on the floor he believed Thursday's version of the bill is, in fact, an "honest" and "sincere" attempt by party leaders to get a bill done so the House could go to conference with the Democratic-led Senate, reconcile differences, and come up with a final bill. He said that the intent is not to abandon poor people. "What we have done is excluded the things that would cause the bill to fail ... what we are trying to do is take this to conference," said Sessions. If that happens, he said, conferees for the Senate can then make their case to House conferees for food-stamp funding in a final bill. The already Senate-passed version of a more traditional farm bill cuts nearly $4 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, over 10 years. The original House bill failed, even though it contained $20.5 billion in food stamp cuts over the same period. Republicans on Thursday indicated they will vote on a stand-alone food stamp bill at a later date. But Democrats said they were skeptical, and they suggested the GOP maneuvering is ultimately about political messaging and, possibly, letting funding for food stamps sunset. Minority Whip Steny Hoyer said he believes the split bill was brought to the floor only so Republicans can accomplish one objective: "to make it appear that Republicans are moving forward with important legislation even while they continue to struggle at governing." And Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said he also doubts Republican leaders, in fact, really ever intend on bringing back to the House floor any bill that the Senate and House conference might send back. Especially, he said, if the conference report resembles more the Senate bill, and ends up having significant Democratic support, but not much support from their own House Republican members. Asked about whether he'd bring such a conference report to the floor, Boehner did not provide much rebuttal, saying only, "If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, everyday would be Christmas." Whatever the ultimate goal, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and other leaders have been scrambling since the defeat of the original bill last month to find a formula that might attract enough House votes to pass. That formula, it turned out, was to send a bill to the floor that dealt only with agriculture and made certain changes within some programs. Some conservatives have been pushing hard for such a reconsideration of the very make-up and contents of a farm bill. They complain it is deceptively named because now about 80 percent -- or $750 billion -- of its funding authorizations are now related to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, not agriculture programs. "This is the first farm-only farm bill in 40 years," boasted Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., who has for a year been pushing for splitting the bill, on the floor. "Today, we can pass a bill that sends a clear message: The days of deceptively named, budget-busting bills are over." Other changes were made to the House GOP's defeated original bill to attract more Republican votes, including a repeal of a law that has required Congress to reauthorize farm funding every five years or the legal language governing farm programs would automatically revert to what was in place in 1949. But some of those changes found in the new version were blasted Thursday by conservative and other groups, as anything but meaningful reforms. For instance, Heritage Action sent out a statement objecting to the bill's being sold to lawmakers in part with its repeal of the 1949 law. But Heritage said it would create a new law that would prevent lawmakers in an even broader way from reconsidering, in the form of regular reauthorization, some farm policies. "Instead, market-distorting programs would continue indefinitely, like the government-imposed tariffs on sugar imports and quotas on domestic sugar production, which cause Americans to pay two to four times higher prices for sugar than consumers in other countries," said Heritage. A statement from Environmental Working Group, similarly panned the bill, explaining, "At a time of record farm income and record federal deficits, the House bill increases unlimited crop insurance subsidies by more than $9 billion and creates special insurance subsidies for both cotton and peanut farmers." It said the bill would make these expanded subsidies permanent, even as it allows conservation and other critical programs to expire in 2018. It is unclear whether the Senate will be willing to go to conference because the Republican bill doesn't even contain nutrition programs. On Tuesday, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., issued a statement noting that more than 500 farm and conservation groups had opposed splitting the bill. "If the House is serious about supporting rural America, they need to pass a comprehensive farm bill like the Senate bill that passed with broad bipartisan support," she said. For its part, the White House was projecting little doubt that Obama would not sign such a bill if it were presented to him. A statement released Wednesday night said the bill does not contain sufficient commodity and crop insurance reforms and does not invest in renewable energy, an important source of jobs and economic growth in rural communities across the country. The statement added, "This bill also fails to reauthorize nutrition programs, which benefit millions of Americans -- in rural, suburban and urban areas alike. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is a cornerstone of our nation's food assistance safety net, and should not be left behind as the rest of the Farm Bill advances." 
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| Farm Bill Deal To Hungry Americans: You're on Your Own Posted: 11 Jul 2013 01:47 PM PDT  Last night, House Republicans made good on their promise to split the apparently unpassable farm bill in two--the farm part, with its many and controversial subsidies to big agriculture, now in the form of crop insurance, and the nutrition part, the $80 SNAP, or food stamp, program. And just now, they passed the 608-page bill they released, 216-208. As with pretty much everything to do with the going-on-two-year struggle to pass a new five-year farm bill, this has more to do with political theater than collaboration. Eric Cantor made a point of announcing the division during an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival a few weeks ago (which did not impress Conor Friedersdorf, who commented that the moderator, Ramesh Ponnuru, "may as well have asked, 'Could you recite conservative boilerplate in a monotone?'"). "We'll get it passed by the end of July," he said of his split bill. Already, some were calling the move an attempt by Cantor to highlight John Boehner's last-minute failure to muster enough votes to pass the last iteration--which came to grief over the proposed $20 billion in food-stamp cuts--and to position himself as the next, stronger, speaker of the house. That was certainly the best political explanation for a move that seemed to have nothing to do with bipartisanship or realism. And today's vote will certainly strengthen his campaign to displace Boehner, if the speculation is right. The idea of the split makes intuitive sense. Anyone who looks at the farm bill for a few minutes--or, like Dan Imhoff, devotes a book to it, or, like Marion Nestle, an entire semester's course to it--sees what a chimera or, more to the point, a monster it is. It has next to nothing to do with the farms most people think of--the ones growing mixed crops, the ones that supply farmer's markets. It doesn't mention environmental protection or land conservation, though some of the country's most important safeguards are in it. And it doesn't mention nutrition assistance or hunger, though fully four-fifths of it are food stamps. Why not keep the agricultural parts, even if they benefit only industrial agriculture, in what's called the farm bill, and call the food-assistance portion what it is? That would get the farm bill back on the rails, and stop letting SNAP debates hijack every vote. Here's why not: because that means, as anyone in the anti-hunger community recognizes, pushing the 47 million Americans on food stamps onto an ice floe. The last time Republicans tried to saw off food stamps from the bill, as Jerry Hagstrom recounts in an excellent overview of the most recent farm bill failure, it set back food assistance efforts for more than a decade:
Many people, then, remain invested in the status quo. And however you view Cantor's proposal--as transparently cruel grandstanding or as long-overdue common sense--nothing much is likely to come of it. Hours before today's vote, the White House announced that President Obama will veto the bill if it ever reaches his desk. Even the Heritage Foundation, which wants a split, doesn't think that Cantor's bill goes nearly far enough in curtailing current farm programs and subsidizing crop insurance. Today's vote gives you a good reason to watch two videos: one a recent documentary on hunger in this country, one a quick and bright account of teaching kids to cook that turns unexpectedly devastating. In fact, it gives you a mandate. I first saw A Place At The Table last summer, in a preview performance at the Aspen Ideas Festival, after which I did a Q&A with Kristi Jacobson, the film's co-director. It was hard to formulate questions fast, because I was so affected by the film, which quietly but insistently traces the stories of several people and families who struggle to get enough food. The gift of the film to make you see something under your eyes every day and, by its close attention to the particular and not the general, to make you understand in a visceral way that hunger is all around you--and something you need to do something about. The film is distributed by Magnolia and Participant, which did the same for Food, Inc.; until they committed to the film, though, Jacobson explained, it was the usual documentary story of raising money piecemeal and always facing the possibility that shooting would come to a halt. Jacobson was a filmmaker and Lori Silverbush, her directing partner, a writer, who had been deeply affected by mentoring a young woman she came to understand was troubled largely because she didn't have enough to eat. Silverbush's spouse, Tom Colicchio, who has joined his wife in devoting large amounts of his time to calling attention to hunger, told me after a screening in Washington last February, when the film opened, that he'd been raising money for hunger relief for 25 years but "the problem only got worse. It was time to understand the systemic reasons." The film explains those reasons, and highlights the surprising role of Richard Nixon in winning an effective, early victory against hunger that successive Republicans succeeded in rolling back. And it makes selective use of several of the country's sanest commentators on this history and current state of hunger programs, particularly Marion Nestle and Janet Poppendieck, of Hunter College, and Raj Patel. But what will stay with you are the stories, particularly two. Rosie is a Colorado fifth-grader whose natural energy and curiosity we watch being continually diffused and hampered by a lack of enough to eat. The teacher who helps her and her mother get food without losing their dignity, Leslie Nichols, reveals unexpectedly and after we watch her on her missions of mercy that she too grew up in a hungry family. And the heroine is Barbie Izquierdo, a beautifully spoken young Philadelphia mother who dreams of a college education and swears she will never feed her children Spaghetti-O's, as her mother had to feed her. So we see her take two buses to get to the nearest market that sells fresh produce, and feel the weight of the time to wait for both and then carry back the heavy grocery bags--all to put into practice the advice that food writers and nutritionists blithely give about making sure your family eats more fresh and less processed food. The length of the trip alone would make you go head for the nearest fast-food outlet. The film's most devastating moment is when Barbie lands a job she loves--helping other people get the food stamps that allowed her to bring home those grocery bags--but at a salary that disqualifies her and her family from food stamps. So, just as she is finally doing something she believes in and cares about, we watch as she silently puts bowls of warmed-up Spaghetti-Os in front of her children. There's a feel-good follow-up to Barbie's story, as you can find out if you go hear Jacobson or Silverbush talk about the movie--whose long-term life and relevance, as with Food, Inc., is likely to be on campuses and from viewings on iTunes, Netflix, and DVD. Information on all at the site; possible action steps to take after watching it is here. A Place At The Table is an hour and 24 minutes--a fairly fast 1:24, I'd say. But if you only have 2:38, use it to watch Megan Bradley, a young, bright, pretty blonde woman who went to culinary school and started cooking in restaurants and in the Hamptons, but with surprising background in food stamps herself. (And if you don't want to watch video at all, read Lisa Sutherland's defense of food stamps and how they helped her become a successful PH.D nutritionist and food-industry executive.) I met Bradley in May at a leadership conference of Share Our Strength, the country's leading anti-hunger organization certainly as it involves cooks and members of the restaurant community. The official star speaker of the conference was Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, who resoundingly reminded the audience, and the Republicans who weren't listening, that 92 percent of the 47 million on SNAP are children, the elderly, and the disabled. "If people understood just how vulnerable this population is at a time of economic struggle," Billy Shore, the founder with his sister Debbie of SOS, told me this morning, "people would understand [that separating off SNAP from the farm bill makes no sense. This is politics at the expense of kids." But the real star was Bradley, who was ostensibly there to speak about her work teaching children how to cook as part of Cooking Matters, a national education program SOS runs. But what silenced the crowd was her talking about her educated, proud family needing food stamps, and what that was like for her. It's quick, and sincere, and un-self-pitying. Watch the short clip and see what you think of Cantor's victory. 
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| Posted: 11 Jul 2013 01:44 PM PDT  University of Delaware Library / Flickr Earlier this week data published in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicated that the life expectancy of people in the United States has increased over the past two decades by three years, to 78.2. This means that the average American today enjoys an extra 1,100 days of life. However, the news is not all good. For example, the U.S. still lags behind most of the world's other rich nations on a number of health indices, including rates of heart disease, lung cancer, and diabetes. Moreover, during the same period, the U.S. ranking in healthy life expectancy fell from 14th to 26th. As one news outlet put it, "although we are living longer, we are not living better." The statistics surrounding life expectancy are important, and in general it is highly desirable that we find ways to prevent needless deaths. No one wants to die before their time, particularly if we are paying this price for something so trivial as an extra daily nut fudge sundae. On the other hand, the idea of "living better" deserves serious examination. What do we mean when we say that someone is living well or living poorly? Especially galling is the fact that much poorer countries, including Chile, Portugal, and Slovenia, are actually doing better in terms of their citizens' mortality rates. It is tempting to compare metrics on waistlines, blood glucose levels, or relative risk of developing cancer, in part because we love the competitive spirit behind such rankings. We love to think, for example, that the U.S. leads the world in number of patent applications, justifying our claim to be the most innovative nation on earth (in fact, we're number 3). Likewise, we take great comfort in the notion that the U.S. has the highest per capita income in the world (actually, we're somewhere between number 5 and 10). Many of our national pastimes are competitive sports with clear winners and losers, and we carry our love of competition right through to the hospital and into the cemetery. So telling us that our ranking in preventing premature deaths has fallen from 14th to 26th really gets under our skin. We want to be number one, or at least moving up in the rankings. Regardless any absolute increase in life expectancy, we are inevitably disturbed to discover that we are falling further behind. Especially galling is the fact that much poorer countries, including Chile, Portugal, and Slovenia, are actually doing better in terms of their citizens' mortality rates. And some Americans, such as those living in Appalachia, are actually no healthier than Bangladeshis. What could be the reason? One possibility is that we are not spending enough money on health and healthcare. But this is a difficult argument to sustain, in part because the U.S. pays out far more than any other nation on earth, outspending our nearest competitors by more than 50 percent. If the way to obtain health is to spend money on healthcare, then the U.S. should rank as the number one healthiest country on earth by a substantial margin. But we don't. This suggests that health is not a commodity that can be purchased like automobiles or gallons of gasoline. And this is certainly true. While there are some broad positive correlations between economic standard of living and health status, it is clearly not the case that wealth causes health. In fact, some very wealthy people have died quite young. Consider Christina Onassis, reputed to be the wealthiest woman in the world, who died at age 37. By contrast, some very poor people have lied to a ripe old age. For example, Mother Teresa, who took a vow of poverty as a young woman and lived without a dollar to her name throughout most of her life, lived to be 87. To some of us, it seems initially something of an affront to be told that there are things we cannot purchase. Yet a moment's reflection shows this necessarily to be the case. An obvious example is time. Even the richest person on earth cannot buy an extra year, hour, or even second. To be sure, a rich person has an advantage in obtaining the best medical care and might be first in line for an organ transplant if needed, but again, health is not simply a matter of purchasing power. Rich, poor, and everyone in between soon come to the same end, from which no investment portfolio can protect us. Beneath our appetite for competition and our desire to be number one lurks a deeper desire, the impulse to be in control. And above all, we want to control our fate, to feel secure in the knowledge that we all get what we deserve. Work hard in the marketplace and you will be rewarded with a secure, well-paying job and lush retirement. Eat right, exercise, and avoid bad habits such as smoking and alcohol abuse and you will lead a long and healthy life. Show us what it will take to get back on top, doc, and we Americans will rise to the challenge. The problem, however, is that the mist of health statistics often obscures the mountain we are really trying to climb. It is true that U.S. life expectancy lags behind that of a number of other nations. It is true that if we could lower rates of smoking and obesity, we could probably bump these numbers up. But a more sober analysis reveals that life expectancy is a pretty poor indicator of health. We are attracted to it because it is straightforward to measure and makes it relatively easy to keep score. But we cannot tell from a person's life expectancy how well they are actually living. Suppose through some wonder of modern biomedical science we could suddenly double our life expectancy by staying in bed 20 hours per day, or giving up all solid foods, or never again reading a book. Would we do it? To say that we are willing to pay any price in order to increase the length of our lives is to say that we have forgotten what it really means to live. The Struldbruggs in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels are immortal specimens, but they are also miserable human beings, whose unending lives prove to be not blessing but curse. Before we spill too much ink bemoaning the U.S.'s declining standings in the world life expectancy race, we should devote a bit more time to reflection and conversation around what really makes a good life. Though Wolfgang Mozart and Martin Luther King died before the age of 40, they managed to lead extraordinarily productive and admirable lives that enriched the rest of mankind. By contrast, many of us may realize our ambition to become nonagenarians or even centenarians and yet contribute too little that really makes a difference. By this standard, our fiercest competitor is right here at home. The real measure of a life is not how long it lasts. The real measure of a life is what we make of each and every day. We have exactly the same number of minutes per day as the Gateses and Buffetts of the world. How effectively are we making use of this time? I suspect that the best way to lead a truly full life is not by straining every sinew to keep our hearts beating to the last possible moment, but instead by bringing ourselves and others as fully to life as possible. And I won't be surprised to learn someday that living deeply also does far more than diet and exercise to keep us going as well. 
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| Another Useful Video on the San Francisco Crash Posted: 11 Jul 2013 12:55 PM PDT
Let me start by saying that the static screenshot above (not clickable) and the embedded video below, from which it comes, are not about Asiana flight 214 and what did or did not happen to it. But the video is worth checking out because it gives an idea of what pilots mean when they refer to making a "visual approach." The clip is from a German series (via reader JZ, who is not German but Chinese) and it shows the crew of an enormous Lufthansa Airbus 380, as it comes in for a visual approach to runway 28R at San Francisco. That is the parallel runway -- R for right, L for left -- to runway 28L on which the Asiana plane came to grief. You see both of the runways, side by side, in the shot above. If you skip ahead to about time 5:45 of this clip, you'll see how such an approach looks from pilots' perspective. At that point, about two minutes from touchdown, the plane is about 2500 feet up and several miles out. Between there and the landing you'll see the way the crew works through its check lists, keeps an eye on the runway to judge the right glide patch and another eye on the airspeed and other crucial indicators, and manages the gradual bleed-off of altitude-plus-airspeed that creates the least-disruptive transition between being in the air and being on the ground. You'll see that there are multiple back-ups and reminders -- crew members calling out altitude, automated announcements of distance to the ground, perhaps (though I didn't see it) and ILS signal loaded to display the proper glide-path too. But fundamentally a pilot is watching his way toward the touch-down point, which is what seems to have gone wrong in the Asiana case. Logistics notes: If you click the playable video below, you'll see the whole approach -- with narration in the original German, which is how the embeddable version comes. If you'd like to get it in English, you can go here. The video doesn't prove anything about the cause of the Asiana crash, but it does a very good job of displaying how a normal good-weather approach over San Francisco Bay looks. And one more aircraft trivia note: if you listen to Air Traffic Control traffic, you know that large planes, like the Boeing 747 or 777, are identified as "heavy." "United 888 heavy, turn left heading 270." The Airbus 380 is so big that its extra identifier is "super," as in "Lufthansa 454 super." 
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| My Mother Regretted Her Abortion Posted: 11 Jul 2013 12:50 PM PDT  In a recent New York Times opinion piece called "My Mother's Abortion," Beth Matusoff Merfish tells of her experience sitting with her mother in the gallery of the Texas State Senate while Democratic senator Wendy Davis filibustered the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. In 1972 as a college student, Merfish's mother crossed state lines to find a place to have a legal abortion. She went on to build a career as an abortion rights activist. Merfish writes to applaud her mother's actions and to encourage other women to put a face on abortion by coming forward with their abortion experiences. Just a few days after Merfish sat in that senate gallery with her mother, "yell[ing] in indignation" as Republicans sought to end the filibuster and bring the bill to a vote, I sat quietly in a conference room at the Dallas-Fort Worth Hyatt Regency with my mother. She was about to share the details of her abortion experience to an audience at the National Right to Life Convention. Like Merfish's mother, my mother had her abortion in 1972. She was living in New York City for the summer and was preparing to begin her junior year at Harvard when she became pregnant. Abortion was already legal in New York, and advertisements promoting the new right seemed to be everywhere. Abortion looked like a straightforward solution to her problem--a way to turn back the clock. "At age 20," my mother said, "I had no inkling of the mental and emotional darkness I was about to enter. I couldn't have grasped the immense psychological toll abortion would take for years into the future--unrelenting tears, guilt, shame, and depression." While taking full responsibility for her decision to have an abortion, my mother believes she was led to what she calls her "tragic, irreversible decision" by a series of lies and distortions: distortions about fetal development, doublespeak about choice and rights, and glorification of "planned" and "wanted" children. As my mother told the audience that day, she did not begin to heal until she understood the reality and victimhood of her aborted child. She realized that whatever hardship the baby might have caused her, it could not compare to the pain she was suffering in the wake of abortion. As long as she rationalized her choice with the notion that having a baby would have ruined her life, her secret grief festered. But one bright afternoon at her kitchen table, a moment of realization came full force. There was no moral basis for her abortion. Her so-called choice had ended the life of an innocent human being who was her own child. When she embraced these difficult truths, she was finally able to acknowledge her grief, find the peace she longed for, and begin the healing process. Much like Merfish, I spent years actively involved with the abortion issue without realizing the toll that abortion had taken on my own family and life. When I was young, my parents ran a pro-life organization that lobbied the Southern Baptist Convention to take a pro-life stance. Our message was clear: Every unborn child is an innately valuable human person bearing the image of God. But worried that confessing her own mistakes might have the perverse effect of making me more likely to repeat them, my mother waited to tell me until I was in my early 20s. I did not know as a young child stuffing envelopes with pro-life literature or distributing pro-life voting guides before an election day that among the millions of lives lost to abortion was my own half-sibling. And I did not know on the days my mother would lie in bed crying for hours that she was grieving for her aborted child. Stories like my mother's are rarely spoken out loud. The pain and guilt of abortion are too deep. And, sometimes, those willing to speak do not find others willing to listen. Many people seem to assume that most women reflect positively on their choice and that they have experienced little emotional, psychological, or physical repercussions--and some of those people are reluctant to consider stories that challenge that view. Surely every woman's experience is unique, and some women may feel they have suffered no ill effects from their abortions. But research on women who have had abortions suggests that my mother's experience is not uncommon. Women who lose a child to abortion, many of whom do not progress through a normal grief process that would usually accompany a pregnancy loss, are at higher risk for everything from depression, to substance abuse, to suicide. Indeed research has shown that the experience of some women following abortion is a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. People in the pro-choice movement want women considering abortion to believe that the most difficult part of their choice will be the step through the door of the abortion clinic. For women like my mother, far more difficult was the step out the door--and every step after that for the next 20 years. Even as the stories of post-abortive women and their pain remain hidden, any association between abortion and pain of any sort is unacceptable even to mention in pro-choice circles. As my mother pointed out in her address, the actual title of the legislation that was the subject of Ms. Davis's storied filibuster was hardly ever spoken by its opponents or the press. Merfish's article is a case in point. She rails against the bill for restricting the rights of women but never mentions the bill's name--the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act--or stated purpose: to limit abortions performed during the later stages of pregnancy when the child could suffer physical pain during the procedure that ends its life. While the research on precisely when unborn children begin to feel pain continues to be debated in the abortion community, and tensions are running high, the least a piece like Merfish's could do is engage with the bill on its own terms. Until all people, on all sides of the debate, can acknowledge the pain of abortion--be it the pain of the mother or of the child--we will be a nation full of people who don't fully know themselves. And now to the point on which Ms. Merfish and I agree. It is the women of our mothers' generation--those who have lived for decades in the aftermath of an abortion decision--who have the power to shape Americans' beliefs about abortion. They have the power to bring the truth of their experiences into the light. We owe it to them, to ourselves, and to our unborn children to listen to all of these stories. 
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| I Hated <i>The Newsroom</i>'s First Season—and Can't Wait to See the Second One Posted: 11 Jul 2013 12:32 PM PDT  HBO When The Newsroom premiered last year, I was sitting in a living room filled with friends, all excitedly talking about what this new Aaron Sorkin show would be. The promos had Will McAvoy, played by golden-retriever lookalike Jeff Daniels, sitting behind his anchor's desk seeming both pensive and conflicted in the way that Sorkin likes his heroes to seem. So the group could assess a few things: We would be following a newscaster who, while maybe morally bankrupt in his personal life, is a man of character and social responsibility behind that desk. One could only assume that he would have a complicated office relationship with a brilliant but difficult woman because, well, it's Sorkin.
The series opens on a liberal-conservative debate with our hero McAvoy sandwiched in the middle. He's bored by the predictable argument between the two sides from the not-too-distant past. If you think Obama is a socialist then Reagan was too, and so on. Our hero has had enough. Temple rub. Bridge-of-the-nose squeeze. The moderator points at McAvoy and says, "I want a human moment from you." Then we get a vision of a concerned Emily Mortimer in the audience, and then McAvoy is yelling at a blonde undergrad as to why America is not the greatest country in the world. The problem was not the soapboxing or the unbelievably rapid-fire way that McAvoy lists statistics. At this point, you either accept that the world Sorkin creates is one where people are approximately three percent better than actual human beings, or you don't. I will never argue about Sorkin's genius or complain about his style. I am completely and unapologetically on board. No, I think the room-wide eyeroll came when Mortimer, sitting in the audience of the college auditorium, held up a sign that read, "But it can be." We have all phrases we repeat, devices we use, and Sorkin is no different. In fact, famously so. This opening scene, where we see McAvoy yell at a doe-eyed girl about how America is slipping, took me right back to Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, where I remember watching a frustrated Tom Jeter, played by Nate Corddry, yell at his sweet Midwestern parents about the differences between sketch comedy and "skits." I loved that scene and I still do, even though the reasons have changed. I devoured comedy albums as a kid. Couldn't get enough of The Kids in the Hall, SNL, or The State. Watching this little 30-second rant about the proper term seemed like a personal victory to me somehow. "We don't do skits, Mom. Skits are when the football players dress up as the cheerleaders and think it's wit. Sketches are when some of the best minds in comedy come together and put together a national comedy show that's watched and talked about by millions of people!" It wasn't until years later that I realized this guy was yelling at his parents for using the wrong word while their other son was fighting in Afghanistan, which I assume is how most people saw it. And watching that opening scene from The Newsroom where our hero is hurling perspicacious abuse at this undeserving 20-year-old, I couldn't help but see parallels. But I wondered who exactly I was supposed to be cheering on. The elite informing the ignorant quickly became a theme of The Newsroom, and it was not apologetic about it nor should it have been: Television news and the government in 2010 were dominated by Tea Party hysterics, a bleak economy, and a seemingly unending war in the Middle East. News Night, had it actually existed, would have been a much-needed haven from the demands to see the president's birth certificate. But even when you agree with every word that McAvoy is saying, he is never challenged by an intellectual equal. So while his rant in that college forum would have been refreshing at the time, you're left wishing he wasn't such a dick about it. Sorkin has created something perfectly infuriating, where I'm not sure that I'm enjoying it, but I am completely engrossed. By the time we reached the title card, we had already lost two people from our viewing party. It became clear that this show would not be about human moments but a series of jabs at the state of our country in 2010. In an interview with Vulture, Sorkin explained the setting: "So the idea to set the show in the recent past happened out of necessity. But then it became a kind of creative gift. For one thing, the audience knows more than the characters do, which is kind of fun. And it gives me the chance to have the characters be smarter than we were, which is always nice." It's nice in the way that is cheating. While Sorkin continues on to say that reporting on fictional news would have made the show harder to believe, the clarity that two years gives does quite the opposite: The characters always make the right choice both morally and strategically, which of course isn't believable. For example, the new floppy-haired executive producer Jim Harper, played by John Gallagher Jr. (who's like The Office character Jim Halpert only in name, looks, and mannerisms), within minutes of stepping into the ACN newsroom receives a news alert about a fire at BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well--and immediately recognizes the huge importance of it. But before he sounds the alarm on one of the biggest environmental crises the US has ever suffered, Harper makes sure to set up his own complicated office relationship with a difficult women. Maggie Jordan, played by the usually likable Allison Pill, is one of the most challenging characters to watch on television. Written presumably to be the show's comic relief, Maggie is inept at her job and almost incapable of performing the tasks that a normal human being has to perform to get through the day. Throughout the season we watch her repeatedly trip, get snagged in things, and be mean to Jim for no other reason than that is what Sorkin thinks people who are sexually attracted to each other should do. But here's the thing: People who are sexually attracted to each other don't fight for episodes on end, or throw their attractive, less annoying roommates at each other. They have sex and date and even might have chemistry. We as an audience are repeatedly told that these two are destined to be together, that their lives run parallel to that of McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale (played by Mortimer), who also fight with each other instead of fucking each other. Don't get me wrong, Sorkin can write romance. The love affair between Sports Night's Dan Rydell and Casey McCall is one of the greatest in contemporary television history. But each time Jim and Maggie are forced closer together, I couldn't help but scream "run!" at the screen. Because complicated is one thing, and unpleasant is another. Maggie Jordan is unpleasant and a hazard to office equipment. By Episode Four I was no longer watching the show socially, because none of my friends were still watching. Sunday night had so quickly gone from being a night with dinner and friends to one of me in a dark living room in front of the television, rolling my eyes at every didactic rant from Will or failed joke from Maggie. Their trifles, their obsessions with Bigfoot, their references to Don Quixote all seemed like less interesting reincarnations of characters we'd seen before. But I couldn't stop. There is a strange insensitivity to the show, certainly not intentional. Take the fourth episode, titled "I'll Try To Fix You," which is truly Sorkin's love letter to American broadcasting. The episode spends equal time annoying its audience with speculation about Bigfoot while overwhelming them with the odd of the choice to play Coldplay's "Fix You" over a montage of the SCN staff scrambling in the wake of the Tucson shooting that killed six people. The song, from what I can gather, is about a controlling boyfriend who wants to change his weak partner. It played in its entirety while the staff argues over whether they should run with the news that US Representative Gabrielle Giffords had been shot. The song was released five years prior to when the episode was supposed to take place. I remember it being prominent at my junior prom. Why was this choice made? Why this song? I had no one to discuss this strange decision with, except for a creature that really was only in the room with me due to thousands of years of evolved symbiotic dependence. "They keep referencing Don Quixote dies at the end, recanting everything he believed in!" I shouted at my dog, to no real answer. "I know they want a return to chivalry but when Quixote died, his breed went extinct. Is that what they're insinuating?" Again, mostly silence from the canine segment of the audience. The thing is, I kept watching. I don't really understand why. From what I can tell, I didn't enjoy or look forward to it each week, but it was done with out question. It was ritual. Every Sunday night I'd settle in my darkened living room to yell complaints to my dog. In the final episode of the season Will, while high and vulnerable I guess, leaves Mackenzie a voicemail saying that he never stopped loving her blah blah blah, which is already eye-roll worthy. However, Mackenzie never gets the message because her phone was hacked. (Although she could have deleted it by accident, considering that she spent much of the season apologizing for sending an embarrassing email to the entire company. There is no question that Sorkin finds his women the most charming when they're fumbling.) Will refuses to tell Mackenzie the contents of the voicemail and we, as an audience, are asked to believe that this man is unwilling to confess his love to this woman--a woman with unwavering loyalty and immunity to his verbal abuse--but will continue to work with her professionally for 80 hours a week. How are we supposed to root for people whose motivation can only be justified with a shoulder shrug and a comment like, "I don't know, maybe they're masochists or something?" It's not believable or relatable and thus it becomes unimportant, much like the show itself. By the time we reached the title card, we had already lost two people from our viewing party. We later see the gossip columnist Nina Howard, played by Hope Davis, sitting alone at her home computer. She seemingly has run out of celebrities to write about in New York and has turned her attention to a cable-news anchor and his producer. With a glass of wine in hand, she clicks on the MP3 file of Will's voicemail (spoiler alert) to play it one last time. It should be noted that it is the only file on her desktop. She then drags the file to the trash, right clicks, and selects "Empty Trash." To show that she means business, I guess. This small action angered me to no end. It showed such attention to a microscopic and ultimately unimportant detail, while the overall plot unravels instantly under logical questioning. But hey, at least there is one woman on the show with at a base understanding of how a computer works. Despite all of the frustrations, though, I'm going to keep watching. In general, if a show starts to drag or if a character gets amnesia or something, I'm out. Yet Sorkin has created something perfectly infuriating, where I'm not sure that I'm enjoying it, but I am completely engrossed. I want to see what he going to do next, what new inanimate objects Maggie will trip over. Quite frankly, I'm really looking forward to rolling my eyes so hard I'm worried they'll fall out of my head when Will and Mackenzie inevitably get back together. The performances are either brilliant--Jane Fonda, Olivia Munn, and Sam Waterston's bowtie--or embarrassing, as with every other female character on the show. With Season Two premiering on Sunday, we can expect to see Gaddafi's downfall, Occupy Wall Street, and someone refusing to eat at Chick-Fil-A. Maggie will be chased by two men and will undoubtedly keep choosing the wrong one. Will and Mackenzie will torture each other while Fonda sparkles. Most likely, there will be a montage of election footage set to Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars." 
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| Meanwhile, in the Beltway Bubble: D.C. Is Out of Step With America on Snowden Posted: 11 Jul 2013 11:53 AM PDT
He went to China to reveal closely held America secrets, had his passport revoked and a warrant issued for his arrest, fled to Russia with the aid of an accused sex offender, and has been offered asylum by Venezuela, a country whose anti-Americanism is legendary. "He's a traitor," House Speaker John Boehner told ABC's Good Morning America in mid-June. He articulated the views of many in official Washington when he added: "The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk. It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are. And it's a giant violation of the law." Said Senate Intelligence Committee Dianne Feinstein, also in mid-June: "I don't look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it's an act of treason." And yet, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, "American voters" -- having had a bit of time to reflect on the question -- "say 55-34 percent that Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower, rather than a traitor." "Almost every party, gender, income, education, age and income group regards Snowden as a whistle-blower rather than a traitor," the pollsters reported. "The lone exception is black voters, with 43 percent calling him a traitor and 42 percent calling him a whistle-blower." The poll also tracked some major changes since 2010 in American views of anti-terror programs. But it's the views on Snowden I find most interesting: They suggest that the Snowden case is, like perceptions of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky drama, another one of those stories where public opinion and opinion inside the Beltway have diverged in a way that speaks more highly of the American people than of Washington insiders. The majority of voters do not think Snowden has betrayed his country, but rather provided important information about government wrongdoing. You would never know that from listening living in Washington, where an intelligence official recently told The Washington Post that the information Snowden obtained was "'not even close to the lion's share' of what the NSA is engaged in." I think that was supposed to be reassuring. And yet, if you asked the same folks interviewed by Quinnipiac about it, somehow I'd suspect that's not how they'd see it. 
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| The World's Largest Building, of Course, Is Now in China Posted: 11 Jul 2013 11:32 AM PDT  A side view of the New Century Global Center, in Chengdu, China. (Entertainment and Travel Group)Residents of Chengdu, capital of China's Sichuan province, never imagined that they would one day go to the beach in their hometown; after all, Chengdu is over 1,000 miles from the coast. But thanks to the New Century Global Center, they'll now get that chance: The gigantic new structure has its very own beach, complete with artificial sea breezes and sunsets. Who needs Thailand? And that's not all: the New Century Global Center, which is now the world's largest building, offers a lot of other amenities in its 19 million square feet:
To put 19 million square feet in perspective, consider this: You could fit three Pentagons in the New Century Global Center. Or 20 Sydney Opera Houses. And the best part? The entire structure required just three years to build. Kind of puts that six months you took to assemble your barbecue in perspective, doesn't it? What does the building actually look like? Here are some more photos:  The New Century Global Center, from the front. At 19 million square feet, it is the world's largest building. (Entertainment and Travel Group) The building's signature feature: an internal beach. (Feature China/Bancroft Group) The building also features a water park, shops, and an IMAX cinema. (Feature China/Bancroft Group)
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| The Perils of Giving Kids IQ Tests Posted: 11 Jul 2013 10:39 AM PDT  Scott Barry Kaufman knew he was different from his classmates. The evidence was overwhelming: he was about to enter the third grade for the second time, and he was subjected to beatings on the bathroom floor, doled out by bullies who regularly reminded him that he would never, ever be anything other than a failing third grader. As Kaufman recounts in a book released this spring, his family finally had his intelligence tested, and that afternoon with the school psychologist would change the course of his life.
Kaufman, writing of his experience in Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. The Truth About Talent, Practice, Creativity, and the Many Paths to Greatness, may have thought he knew what was at stake when he visited that school psychologist for testing, but he would not fully grasp the influence that afternoon of testing would have on the trajectory of his life until much later. The psychologist who tested Kaufman concluded that he had a relatively low IQ, a score low enough to earn him the label "seriously learning disabled." On that basis, Kaufman was not sent to the elite private school his parents had been considering. Instead, he was sent to a school for children with learning disabilities. "My fate," Kaufman writes in the book, which came out in June, was "sealed by a single test." When any adult, let alone a teacher, hands a child a label such as "seriously learning disabled," they tip the first domino in a cascade of events that will determine the course of an entire life. The reality of our educational system is that some children will be left behind; it's unrealistic to pretend otherwise. However, if our goal is to give each child at least the potential to succeed, we should take a moment to consider whether labeling students - particularly when those labels are the products of dubious science and flawed standards - is a bane or a boon to our children. We proclaim "seriously learning disabled," "gifted," "athlete," "not good at math," as if we have the power to see their lifetime developmental endpoint.
What no one bothered to tell the teachers and psychologists in Kaufman's school is that the measure of a child's intelligence is far more complicated than a quotient that can be represented in a single number. Furthermore, intelligence is not a data point that, once pinned down, stays put forever. How much intelligence and aptitude shifts over a lifetime is highly dependent on environment, and here's the really bad news for Kaufman's teachers: people who believe intelligence is fluid, and can be increased through hard work, are much more likely to put in that hard work and show that intelligence is fluid. Unfortunately, children who believe their intelligence is fixed are far more likely to avoid challenges and simply allow the label to speak for itself. Put simply, children who believe they can become smarter, become smarter through effort and persistence. On first glance, it would be tempting to label all kids as "gifted" in the belief that they would then work up to that expectation, but that's not the way it works . According to the research of Stanford's Dr. Carol Dweck, both positive and negative labels, whether "gifted" or "seriously learning disabled," encourage a "fixed mindset," or the belief that nothing children do or think will change their intelligence. For "gifted" kids, that can mean that they are so worried about marring the shiny veneer of that label that they never risk failure, and for the "seriously learning disabled" kids, the grungy tattiness of their label can lead to apathy and hopelessness.
Fortunately, Scott Barry Kaufman did not allow himself to fall in Dweck's "fixed mindset," and he spent much of his young life attempting to convince everyone around him - teachers, administrators, his parents - that that his IQ, the two-digit representation of his potential that he'd been assigned when he was eleven years old, was incorrect. Kaufman embodies Dweck's "growth mindset," where the intrinsic motivation to achieve comes from within, where learning is its own end rather than a means to an A or a trophy.
Kaufman was absolutely confident that he was not the sum of his IQ, that some mistake had been made, and if someone - anyone - would just give him a chance to show his classmates and his teachers what he was truly capable of, his true identity would be revealed. Unfortunately, Kaufman's teachers put their faith in power of the number elicited in that fourth grade IQ test, and continued to expect little of him. Alas, the only person with high expectations for Scott Barry Kaufman was Scott Barry Kaufman.
An IQ score is a lovely, simple, and tidy number. It takes up very little room on a school record, it's easy to remember, and renders the elaborate and complex workings of human intelligence down to one, user-friendly quotient. Above 140? Genius. 90-110? Average. Below 70? "Definite feeble-mindedness," according to Lewis Terman, professor of psychology at Stanford University. He took the much more comprehensive testing strategy invented by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1905, and turned it into the standalone, numerical measure of intelligence we use today. Terman had high hopes for his IQ score; he wanted to use the test to identify people of both low intelligence (though Terman favored the term "feebleminded") and the intellectually gifted. He had big plans to identify and institutionalize the feebleminded in order to eliminate crime and poverty while exalting the gifted as the next, best hope for the future of humanity. Scott Barry Kaufman could have done a lot worse than imprisonment in the learning resource room; for a while Terman's devotees lobbied for forced sterilization for the feebleminded.
Labels are not bad in and of themselves. Labels, like grades, are tools. We classify learning disabilities because children with dyslexia require very different academic support than children with Asperger's. In order to help these very different children, we must identify and understand their deficits and the resources those children will need. I have sat in on many meetings in which we - teams of psychologists, teachers, parents, learning specialists, and administrators - work to find the ideal combination of resources for kids with learning challenges. I have even recommended intelligence testing for students who, despite their persistence, diligence and effort, are not succeeding in school. I've seen testing lead to real academic and cognitive improvement, thanks to individualized education plans and access to learning resource professionals. However, when teachers and parents get lazy, and allow labels to supplant cultivation of potential, we fail. We fail our children, and we fail as educators and parents. For far too many children, the assignation of a label signals a death knell for future effort, learning, and academic achievement. Maybe it's time to try a new system of labeling. What if we started putting our faith and bets behind our students' effort and potential rather than a two- or three-digit number determined by a single instance of testing? What if we praised our students' efforts to learn and grow and improve rather than praised them for showing up at school or on the soccer field, label affixed and prominently displayed? What if we watched those kids carefully, and taught them that they are not the measure of their IQ, but of their efforts to do their very best with what they have? What if?
Scott Barry Kaufman left the resource room that day and never looked back. He ripped up his label, held on tight to his growth mindset and his well-honed skills of grit, diligence, and persistence, and rode that potential all the way to a Ph.D from Yale. Years later, he returned to high school to thank the teacher who questioned his presence in that learning resource room, and to talk to the special education students. That classroom got a lesson in the true measure of intelligence that day. Other classrooms, and other children, are still waiting. 
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| Should Struggling Countries Let Investors Run Their Cities? Posted: 11 Jul 2013 10:03 AM PDT  Women scuffle with a soldier during a protest near the National Congress in Tegucigalpa January 25, 2013. (Jorge Cabrera/Reuters) Last month, the Honduran Congress approved the creation of independent commercial cities called Employment and Economic Development zones (or "ZEDE" for their Spanish acronym). Supporters of the ZEDEs, including Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, hope they will offer an alternative to the corruption and governance challenges that hamstring Honduras's economy. They believe that replacing parts of Honduras's ineffective regulations with new rules and institutions overseen by international experts will stimulate much-needed competition, economic growth, and foreign investment. Striving to create sort of a Hong Kong on the Caribbean is controversial, however, and detractors fear that the ZEDEs will fail, undermine the country's already weak institutions, and also hurt the land rights of marginalized indigenous groups. Honduras is one of the poorest and most insecure countries in Latin America: an estimated 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and it has the highest per-capita homicide rate in the world, according to the UN. Income inequality, broken institutions and corruption are the norm. Honduras also suffers from political instability and a culture of impunity, which were reinforced by a recent military coup. Past reform efforts have failed in large part because of opposition from a small group of entrenched elite families that control key state institutions and entire sectors of the economy. Against this backdrop, the government has sought out new approaches to tackling Honduras' problems. It started to explore the concept of charter cities in 2009 after the president's chief of staff viewed a TED talk by the famous economist Paul Romer on the subject. According to Romer, autonomous economic zones attract investment, create jobs, and promote economic activity. They do so by adopting separate, investor-friendly regulatory environments governed by other countries with proven track records (e.g. the U.K. or Canada) instead of the often-corrupt local institutions. A zone's adoption of another country's regulatory regime provides the stability, predictability, and transparency that businesses seek out. It also allows the host nation to experiment with new (and hopefully superior) regulatory regimes before deploying them throughout its territory. Romer rejects the notion that such zones are neocolonial because they do not rely upon two key underpinnings of colonialism -- coercion and condescension. Local leaders remain sovereign. They elect to invite another country to assist with the administration of the zone, specify the scope of authority ceded to the other country, and determine how that country is to be compensated. Romer cites Mauritius's decision to use the Privy Council -- the U.K.'s highest court -- as the court of final appeal in Mauritius as a successful example of outsourcing certain administrative procedures to other countries. The arrangement promotes investment in Mauritius by giving investors confidence that any disputes related to their investments will be resolved fairly by the experienced and neutral Privy Council as opposed to less-respected local courts. The Lobo Administration seized upon this concept as a potential answer to Honduras' economic and political woes, and it has worked over the past three years to build such zones on Honduran territory. In early 2011, the Congress passed a law allowing for the creation of ZEDEs, which was subsequently struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. A new law was drafted to address the concerns of the Supreme Court and included a series of constitutional amendments to allow for the creation of such zones and the grant of autonomous judicial power to them. That law was approved on June 12 and Honduras is now moving forward with the establishment of the first of 12 planned ZEDEs. Local residents are scheduled to vote on them in November 2013. According to Shanker Singham, an international trade and competition expert advising interested parties on this initiative, the ZEDEs are inspired by Romer's ideas but add significantly to them. Honduras is focused on how an autonomous regulatory regime can unleash the forces of competition and generate substantial wealth creation. The structure of the ZEDEs ensures that Honduras itself--not only outside investors--derives maximum benefit from them. As investors and businesses begin to locate their activities in a ZEDE, its land becomes more valuable (just as it did in Singapore, as that small nation became a hub of economic activity), which generates wealth for landowners, including the local government, investors, and so on. Similarly, the economic activity within the ZEDE generates profits in the form of taxes, concession fees, and equity stakes in new ventures. The government receives a sizeable share of this money. Honduras would also benefit from the new jobs created in and around the zone through existing international businesses that relocate there and from new businesses that form there. Economic growth is possible because the vested interests that traditionally benefit from lack of competition (and oppose reform efforts) do not exist in these as-of-yet undeveloped areas. After all, no powerful family would have had any reason to use its money and influence to obtain, for example, a monopoly in a barren part of the country devoid of commercial activity. Under this vision, each ZEDE would be governed by a board that would have authority to establish the zone's regulatory system (which is independent from Honduras' existing laws). The Board would be comprised of elements of the host government and investors, as opposed to an outside government. The board delegates the day-to-day management of the zone to the administrator -- an outside technocrat -- who is given authority to oversee an investor-friendly environment. The administrator also works with a developer on the physical development of the zone's land (a goal of the ZEDEs is to promote construction on previously unused land). The recent constitutional amendments help ensure the regulatory autonomy of the zone and the government's commitment not to intervene in its affairs. The broad contours of the concept have historical precedent. There are several well-known examples of successful zones, including the City of London, Hong Kong, Dubai, and the Bahamas. In the City of London, there is a board comprised of aldermen and the Lord Mayor; the aldermen are chosen via direct election by both individuals and businesses that operate in the City, and the City has long had rights and privileges that distinguished it from the rest of England, such as the ability to regulate its banks independently and keep its markets open seven days a week, instead of the much more limited hours of other markets in the country. In Hong Kong, which followed a different path to "one-country, two-systems," there is a legislative council whose members are chosen by a small group of HK citizens who are themselves elected to represent various professional and other organizations. In the Bahamas, a private entity (the Grand Bahamas Port Authority) acts as both developer and regulator under an agreement with the Government of the Bahamas. There are a host of special economic zones in China and elsewhere that are also designed to stimulate investment and business growth. For these reasons, several countries are currently working to establish ZEDE-like areas, including Morocco and Georgia. Not everyone in Honduras supports the creation of ZEDEs, however. Some lawyers, activists, and other opponents stress that ZEDEs are an affront to Honduran sovereignty. They even argue that the creation of separate judicial systems jeopardizes rights enshrined on the Honduran Constitution. Indeed, weak institutions may enable the ZEDEs to be captured by corporate interests that take advantage of Honduras instead of growing its economy. They also fear that the limited land rights of indigenous Garifuna groups will be further threatened. Even if these criticisms prove to have merit, ZEDEs may be a smart move for Honduras. It may very well be easier to solve the country's systemic governance challenges -- which drive its poor economic outlook and dire public security situation -- by starting afresh, even within small parts of its territory. The new regulatory systems in the ZEDEs could set an example for the rest of the country to emulate. Starting with ZEDEs in small, undeveloped parts of Honduras allows for the fine-tuning of their rules (which are new to the country) and avoids confronting entrenched interests (i.e. the handful of families with a stranglehold on Honduras's economy) that blocked previous reform efforts. That way, the success of the ZEDEs could be proved before potentially expanding them to larger swaths of Honduran territory. Only time will tell if ZEDEs help Honduras tackle the myriad challenges facing its weak state or further undermine its tenuous stability. Creating a new Hong Kong or Dubai on the Caribbean may be difficult, but even incremental success could catalyze much-needed economic growth and improvements to the rule of law in Honduras, not to mention set an example for other developing countries to follow. 
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| Liberals Are Going to Hate the Senate's New Student-Loan Deal Posted: 11 Jul 2013 09:40 AM PDT After lots of late-night wrangling, the Senate appears to have struck a bipartisan deal on student loan interest rates, some of which doubled earlier this month. What's more, Senate sources say it will likely pass the House as well. So what's in the bargain? Here's a quick rundown. Much as they were before summer of 2006, the rate on new loans will now be based on the government's own cost of borrowing. According to Inside Higher Ed, undergraduates will pay interest equal to the yield on 10-year Treasury notes, plus 1.8 percent. For grad school loans, it will be the T-Bill plus 3.8 percent, and for parent loans the government will add 4.5 percent. Rates will be fixed for the life of the loans, and capped for 8.25 percent for undergraduates, and 9.25 percent for grad students. Based on the Congressional Budget Office's interest rate projections (table B-1), here's what that will look like.
So how does that compare to now? Until it doubled earlier this month, the rate on need-based subsidized Stafford loans was a fixed, 3.4 percent. For regular Staffords, student pay a fixed 6.8 percent. Meanwhile, parents and grad students currently pay the same 7.9 percent rate. So the second Treasury yileds rise above 5 percent, which theoretically should happen if the economy ever really gets healthy, pretty much all new borrowers will be paying more than students (or parents) today. Also, subsidized loans, which tend to go to poor and middle class students, will no longer carry a lower interest than unsubsidized loans, as they have for the past several years. So that's the technical stuff. But how should we all feel about it? Well, if you've been angry about the profits the government currently earns off student loans, then by all means, continue grumbling. According to The New York Times, Democrats say they don't want the legislation to add or subtract form the deficit. In other words, the Department of Education will keep making the same exact returns on its lending as today. If, on the other hand, you're a fiscal conservative who thought fixing interest rates by a vote of Congress was always a harebrained idea that would eventually add to the deficit when Treasury rates jumped, then you should be fairly pleased. But, if you're like me or many of the higher ed policy folks I talk to, you should just be happy this issue might finally be behind us. Student loan interest rates impact borrowers around the edges of their finances, yes. But as Mark Kantrowitz of Finaid.org is fond of saying, the real problem facing borrowers is the amount of debt they take on, not the cost of debt. I would add that the dizzying variety of payment options and the lack of counseling many borrowers receive are also more important than interest rates, at least when it comes to delinquencies and defaults. Since this issue first emerged during the presidential campaign, it's been an utter distraction from those fundamental problems. Getting beyond the side-show might open up space for more productive conversations, finally. 
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| Posted: 11 Jul 2013 09:35 AM PDT
Reuters MSNBC bills itself as the "place for politics," but if you've been watching the network lately, it's been all Zimmerman trial, all the time. Political director Chuck Todd grew so frustrated with the coverage preempting his Daily Rundown show that he barely concealed his exasperation on-air, as evidenced by a video from the Washington Free Beacon that quickly went viral. Most of the network's flagship news shows, from Hardball with Chris Matthews to Politics Nation with Al Sharpton, seem to spend more time talking about Trayvon Martin than President Obama. It's nothing new for cable news these days - CNN, FOX News and Headline News have all put the trial at the center of their coverage. But the strategy is especially noticeable when it comes to MSNBC because its numbers have been in sharp decline over the last few months. The network that found success being the aggressively liberal alternative to CNN during the 2012 presidential election is now finding itself with a ratings headache on its hands. And it seems to be abandoning its politics-first play for the easy ratings of nonstop courtroom coverage - following CNN's tabloid turn, if you will. Asked if the amount of Zimmerman mania was causing any eye rolling at the network, one MSNBC insider said: "It's less the amount of coverage because everyone does that and especially after CNN covering [Jodi] Arias [murder trial] did so well. And we have a large African-American viewership that's interested. The issue is whether we cover it the right way, as a legal issue, which we're mostly doing or does it get covered like it's 2012, when there was no indictment, as a political fight. I worry." Balancing liberal politics and news, politics and other subjects--it's all an issue for MSNBC this summer. Earlier this month when the cable news ratings for the second quarter of 2013 came out, there was a head-jarring decline in MSNBC's numbers. After a great 2012 in which the liberal-leaning network had bested CNN and, at times, caught up to perennial leader Fox News Channel, MSNBC's was losing the race. By a lot. It had just 576,000 primetime viewers, by one metric, a figure that's down 16 percent from the heady days of 2012. The question as to why offers some insights into MSNBC's future and, perhaps, the still-unresolved challenges facing a liberal network during a Democratic administration. "When you're too predictably a mouthpiece for the administration and you cast your lot with the president's performance, there's a risk," said David Shuster, who left the network for Current TV when his contract expired in 2011. He pointed to Fox's higher production values as one of the reasons for the conservative network's ongoing ratings dominance lead and the high-brow nature of MSNBC's prime time lineup as one of the reasons for its most recent decline. MSNBC declined to comment for this story, but cable news veterans -- including former MSNBC alumni -- offered their own theories of what ails the network. One common theory is that MSNBC feels threatened by a resurgent CNN. "MSNBC's apparent success was owing to CNN's failure," says a former cable executive. "CNN was run so poorly that it made MSNBC look fantastic by comparison. " That seems ready to change. Jeff Zucker, the former head of NBC Universal and the guiding hand behind 16 years of Today show victories, has buffed the look of CNN, bringing in network stars like Chris Cuomo and Jake Tapper. But more importantly, his expanding definition of breaking news to include the Zimmerman trial gives CNN more room to run. CNN has been the place for breaking news and its audience reliably swells when there's a big event. (MSNBC insiders deride that as "muscle memory" owing to CNN's 16-year head start in the 24-hour news biz and say it will fade in time.) CNN's newsy rep would seem to account for much of its gain over MSNBC in the second quarter--a time span which included the Boston Marathon bombings, the Cleveland kidnappings, and the Oklahoma tornadoes as well as the Jodi Arias trial, which powered its Headline News channel ahead of MSNBC. But in June at the end of the dismal second quarter, MSNBC's ratings picked up. "All those viewers who tuned into CNN for their big quarter haven't stuck around," says one cable executive. Other insiders posited the theory of progressive decline -- liberals are less fired up now that we're in the second term of the Obama administration. There's no easy way to measure that but it would certainly seem like there's less interest in politics as well as liberal commentary at least on TV. MSNBC rode waves of liberal enthusiasm and election-related interest in 2012 and 2008. But with Obama down in the polls and no election at hand, and Congress famously gridlocked, the place for politics, as MSNBC bills itself, may not be the sexiest best pitch. MSNBC continued to run its "The Place for Politics" chyron during the Zimmerman trial on Tuesday morning which would be as incongruous as boasting "The Place for Courtroom Trials" while airing a presidential convention. Critics also suggest that MSNBC no longer has much diversity in the evenings. It's not that MSNBC needs a conservative host. It's that the nighttime hours from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM are too erudite, too sophisticated and too earnest to hook a wide swath of viewers. Some believe the network suffered from moving blunt Ed Schultz to the weekend. The former football player and liberal radio talk show host could be irascible and even buffoonish at times--he called Laura Ingraham a "right wing slut...a talk slut" and apologized for it--but his populist instincts contrasted with the evening's urbane mien. Indeed, Fox from 8:00 to 11:00 may operate in a conservative space but it has more diversity in its style of host. Sean Hannity is different than Greta Van Susteren who is different than Bill O'Reilly. Keith Olbermann, for all his bombast, was a powerfully skilled broadcaster and while his departure for Current TV in 2011 may have pleased MSNBC executives it left the network's lineup with a big hole. In a sign of how things have turned, Olbermann recently signed a deal as the lead postseason baseball anchor for TBS, while many of MSNBC's primetime stars are dealing with speculation over their declining ratings. Olbermann, no stranger to controversy, even waded in himself on Twitter, writing that the network had "collapsed" since he left and that he hadn't heard from his protégé Rachel Maddow since. Others smell blood, too. Bill O'Reilly took a shot at MSNBC last week as he often does after Chris Matthews referred to Sen. Ted Cruz as looking a bit black Irish. "It's all falling apart," O'Reilly said of MSNBC. Collapse? Hardly. Vulnerable? For sure. 
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| The True Story of the Wall Street Bull (as Told by the Wall Street Bull) Posted: 11 Jul 2013 09:33 AM PDT What if New York City's famous charging bull could talk? Mark Nickolas's short film, My Life in the Canyon of Heroes, answers just this question. The clever film traces the history of the Wall Street bull from the perspective of none other than the animal himself. With the voice of a friendly middle-aged New Yorker, he recounts his life, from his birth as a defiant piece of guerrilla art, up through his murkier days as the Occupy Wall Street movement's symbol of financial greed and excess. The short is nominated for Smithsonian magazine's In Motion video contest, along with 24 other finalists. The contest recognizes videographers that "explore and document the world around us." Voting is open to the public, and the grand prize winner will be announced on July 15, 2013. 
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| Posted: 11 Jul 2013 09:30 AM PDT An hour's drive east by southeast from Pittsburgh, hidden among the picturebook-perfect red barns, white fences, and green fields of the Lignonier Valley, lies an equally carefully maintained landscape of bird research -- a nature preserve whose ponds and wildflowers have been augmented with mist nets, field microphones, a songbird recording booth, and a one-of-a-kind rotating flight tunnel.
On a recent morning, Venue joined researchers Luke DeGroote, Amy Tegeler, Mary Shidel, Kate Johnston, and Matt Webb, as well as several dozen warblers, catbirds, and a cuckoo, for a tour of the various devices of bird surveillance at the Powdermill Avian Research Center (PARC), part of Carnegie Museum of Natural History's Powdermill Nature Reserve. Founded in 1961, PARC is the longest-continuously running bird banding station in the United States, and has assembled one of North America's largest census data sets on migratory songbird populations. Six days a week during the spring and fall (and only slightly less often during the winter and summer), DeGroote and his team head out before dawn to unfurl the Center's 61, 40-foot long, eight-foot tall nylon mesh mist-nets. Over the course of the morning, until either the temperature reaches 78 degrees or the time hits 11 a.m., whichever comes first, these superfine, over-sized volleyball nets form a network of barely visible barriers stretched between trees, along the banks of artificial ponds, and hanging parallel to overgrown hedgerows, trapping both droplets of dew and unwitting birds from the atmosphere.
The majority of the nets have stood in the same place for the past half-century, raised and lowered each day to create a sort of avian calendar, marked by the arrival and departure of different species within the northern Appalachian landscape. Indeed, as we accompanied DeGroote on his rounds, he noted that the preponderance of warblers signaled that the spring migration was drawing to a close. While carefully untangling a Kentucky Warbler and a stunning Scarlet Tanager (the first male of the season, apparently) from the first net, and stowing them in cloth bags attached to a system of color-coded carabiners he wore on a chain around his neck, DeGroote explained that the landscape is pruned and maintained to remain as similar as possible to its 1970s "early successional" state: arrested in a state of post-agricultural regrowth that will never be allowed to mature into secondary forest. The more things the banders can keep the same within their own research ecology, the more valuable their data becomes for detecting changes in bird populations and behavior. It is both a control landscape, anchoring the variables of the various experiments, and a landscape of control.
Bird-banding, we quickly realized, does not make for a relaxing morning. Every minute spent away from its normal activities eats into a bird's valuable refueling and breeding opportunities, so PARC's operation is set up with assembly-line efficiency. Back at the banding station, DeGroote and his colleagues unhooked bird bags from their necks and hooked them onto a washing-line pulley for processing. PARC catches roughly 13,000 birds each year (their up-to-date tallies are posted online), 3,000 of which are recaptures. The other 7,000 need to be issued with a unique 9-digit number ("bird Social Security," joked DeGroote), which they will carry with them for the rest of their lives on a small aluminum cuff gently fitted around one leg. On the wall, behind the bird pulley, was a map showing all the places PARC bands have been reported, with sightings as far afield as Peru. DeGroote held a bird in one hand and typed with the other, measuring and entering data on weight and wing length, all the while continuing a running commentary on sage grouce dance-offs, the particular chirrup a bird makes when it is released ("like it's saying 'potato chip'"), and the dietary choices to blame for the cuckoo's notorious stink (too many caterpillars). By blowing gently on the birds' stomachs, he revealed more data points: their fat stores (visible through translucent skin) and breeding condition.
The only pause in the otherwise seamless process came when trying to determine the birds' age. The quality of their feathers is apparently the main giveaway--baby birds grow all of their feathers in a hurry so that they can get out of the nest, and then have to regrow some to a higher standard. The difference is almost impossible for a novice to spot--the juvenile feathers have slightly less of sheen, and the plumage pattern is muddier--and it is sometimes quite challenging even for experts. As we watched, hypnotized by the banding team's practiced, economical motions, PARC's bird processing line ground to a brief halt over the cuckoo, whose spotted tail feathers were of inconclusive quality. DeGroote pulled down a reference book to look for additional clues before playing it safe with a broad "older than two years" designation, and swinging smoothly back into action. Even the architecture had been modified to account for this avian activity: a small hole in the wall, complete with a sliding panel, acted as a quick-release hatch for any birds not destined for additional research. With the banding as its baseline activity, PARC balances releasing birds quickly with the opportunity to conduct additional research, and this season was also hosting a West Nile virus swabbing station, as well as its own ongoing programs for flight tunnel and bioacoustic research.
We accompanied Amy Tegeler, the bioacoustics program manager, over to her recording studio, with a gorgeous and talkative black, orange, and yellow American Redstart in tow. In addition to its mist nets, the landscape around PARC is also miked, with three pole-mounted "sky ear" recording devices, based on a simple plastic flowerpot design originally developed by Bill Evans.
As they migrate, most songbirds emit short, single-note nocturnal flight calls. No one, Tegeler explained, is quite sure why they do this--she likened it to trying to make a phone call while running a marathon--although the generally accepted hypothesis is that it has to do with maintaining flock spacing and avoiding collisions. Researchers are not only interested in learning about these nocturnal calls for their own sake, however: the idea behind PARC's bioacoustics program is that, by using software to analyze recordings of the nocturnal soundscape, it will be possible to conduct a remote, automated census of migration and species numbers. This, Tegeler was quick to explain, won't replace bird banding. Instead, a bioacoustic survey can pick up species that aren't often caught in nets, can be used in environments that would be difficult for humans to reach or set up nets in the first place (remote rainforest and cities, for example), and offers the opportunity to conduct lower-resolution counts across a larger landscape (perhaps even as a citizen science effort--the microphone costs about $50 to make out of parts readily available at a hardware store and RadioShack).
While exciting, the technique is still in its infancy, and the Raven Pro software that Tegeler uses to extract flight calls from the hours of night recordings--cross-species cryptanalysis as app--also flags, unfortunately, each and every raindrop impact as a bird. After spring migration season, Tegeler estimates that she ends up with 75,000 audio clips, only 5,000-10,000 of which are actually calls. Sorting through the terabytes of data takes months. ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Rosetta Stone-thumb-570x446-126766.jpg) To help improve the software identification rate, PARC has built a custom-designed bird recording studio, which it uses to capture a "Rosetta Stone" library of "clean" nocturnal flight calls, to replace the fuzzier field recordings currently used as reference. To demonstrate, Tegeler dropped our Redstart into an "acoustic cone" (actually a black-out fabric cylinder built from a long-sleeved T-shirt and two embroidery hoops from Jo-Ann), hung it between four mics in a soundproof booth, closed the door, and sat down at the control desk with her headphones on. The whole set-up looked like something Paul McCartney might use to re-record a vocal track--that is, if he liked to sing suspended in mid-air in complete darkness.
With her headphones on, Tegeler played our avian rock star two minutes of American Redstart nocturnal flight calls recorded in the field, interspersed with silence, and the croak of a spring peeper frog as a control. From within the booth, the bird responded to the calls with four high-pitched squeaks--in the process, yielding a perfectly clean recording for Tegeler and other researchers in her field to work with. ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/American Redstart and Savannah Sparrow spectrographs-thumb-570x228-126745.jpg) With most common birds recorded, this migration season, Tegeler has been collecting data to try to establish what other information, beyond species identification, is embedded in nocturnal flight calls. ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Zeep Double Upsweep Downsweep-thumb-570x138-126770.jpg) "There are patterns to the calls, but we don't yet understand why, or what they mean," Tegeler explains, adding that the calls themselves can be separated into distinct types, named for their sound: buzzy, zeep, upsweep, downsweep, and chip. An entire acoustic ecosystem awaits decoding: some species will respond to other species' flight calls, others, for reasons known only to themselves, won't; and Tegeler can hear variations within a species' calls, based on an individual bird's age and sex. ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Moonwatching diagram-thumb-570x420-126762.jpg) Astonishingly, before bioacoustic research got started just a few decades ago, the only way to gather data on nocturnal bird migrations was a technique called "moon-watching," in which researchers and volunteers would point a telescope at a full moon from twilight until dawn, counting and identifying birds silhouetted against its disk. Now, nocturnal flight call surveys are matched with radar bioscatter analysis in a new scientific discipline called "aeroecology," or the study of the planetary boundary layer and lower free atmosphere as a biological ecosystem. ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Radar Bioscatter-thumb-570x356-126764.jpg) Meanwhile, bioacoustic bird monitoring is just one area of an emerging field of acoustic ecology: researchers are using sound to assess population shifts in species as diverse as whales and bark beetles, while the National Park Service recently recognized soundscapes as an intangible asset, worthy of historical protection, and has begun installing field microphones across their lands to conduct a system-wide acoustic survey. ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Equipment_KEFJ_670-thumb-570x475-126751.jpg) From the ways in which humans use invisible information to see birds, we moved to the bird's final stop in their short, PARC-assisted detour--a device designed to test how birds see human infrastructure.
One of only two bird flight test tunnels in the world, this prototype was built in partnership with Christine Sheppard of the American Bird Conservancy, in order to test how birds interact with different window treatments. An astonishing number of birds--more than a billion, according to the most recent estimates, or roughly five percent of the country's total avian population--die each year as a result of flying into the glass facades of urban America. ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Screen Shot 2013-07-11 at 11.55.09 AM-thumb-570x385-126993.png) ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Dead birds ABC-thumb-570x371-126749.jpg) Sheppard's goal is to measure "relative threat values" for different kinds of glass patterns or finishes, in order to develop a recommendation for the most bird-visible (and thus bird-friendly) glass. And the device she has designed to do that is extraordinary: a stretched-out shed combined with the trompe-l'oeil trickery of a Baroque cathedral. Matt Webb, the technician in charge of these bird/window strike-avoidance studies, retrieved a bagged Grey Catbird from the banding station ("they love flying in the tunnel"), in order to show us how the system works. He released the Catbird from its bag into a tiny hole at one end of the tunnel, and, as it flew down the ten meter-length darkened shed, a video camera connected to his laptop recorded the bird flying toward the plain glass control panel covering half of the tunnel's other end, rather than the crazy-paving patterned glass on its right.
As we braced sympathetically, anticipating impact, the bird was saved by an invisible mist net (the same kind the banding team use). It hopped about in the felt-lined tunnel, completely unharmed and making the miaow-ing sound for which the species is named, while Webb logged the result, walked around to the side, opened a small door in the tunnel wall, and released it. This particular manufacturer's "bird-friendly" glass, Webb told us, has a 73 percent avoidance rate, meaning that out of 120 tunnel test flights (each using a different bird), 88 had presumably seen the pattern, and chosen to avoid it by flying toward the clear--and hence invisible--glass to the left. Not all birds are suitable research subjects, Webb explained: Yellow Warblers "get confused" and fly around in all directions; our vocal friend the American Redstart often sees the safety net, rending the whole test moot; and House Sparrows and other cavity-nesting birds simply make themselves at home in one of the tunnel's dark corners. The tunnel itself is an experimental prototype: it is based on a design originally created by Austrian scientist Martin Rössler to test free-standing glass panels used in highway barriers, and Sheppard is already fine-tuning the next-generation tunnel from her base in the the Bronx. Briefly, it is worth noting some resonances here between Sheppard's architectural design for tracking and framing bird flight and a body of much earlier work done by bio-media pioneers such as Étienne Jules-Marey, who performed his own controlled studies of bird flight.
Jules-Marey's work combined innovations in multi-lens camera design and wearable media for birds with an interest in the science of flight to produce astonishing documents of animal bodies in motion.
These often took surreal form, including a proposal for hooking birds up to a machine that could register individual wing beats.
In any case, at the moment, Sheppard's current flight-monitoring structure is mounted on a turntable so that it can follow the sun, thus ensuring that its mirrors bounce sunlight onto the front of the glass at the same angle all morning. Inside the tunnel, and for the birds that fly through it, it is always the same time of day. When we followed up with her by phone, Sheppard explained that this feature, while ingenious, is not perfect:
In Sheppard's new design, the entire tunnel is housed in a shipping container, which allows for a much more closely controlled, and potentially more sophisticated, set of lighting parameters--"daylight" bulbs at various angles and intensities will be able to mimic different times of day, while sodium-vapor lamps could simulate the effects of nighttime light pollution. The shipping container also weather-proofs the structure: although we visited on a sunny, calm morning, the current tunnel has been known to pivot with a sudden gust, giving bystanders a nasty shock. Most important, however, is the fact that the new tunnel will increase capacity. "With only one tunnel," explains Sheppard, "we actually can't do enough testing to conduct our own research and test prototypes for glass companies that are trying to develop products for bird-friendly design. And, because we definitely want to encourage the market for bird-friendly products, we've been doing a lot of commercial testing over the last two years."
Even as scientists move toward a better understanding of avian perception (Sheppard told us of one project to build a model of the avian retina using a digital camera equipped with a series of specially designed filters), they still can't necessarily model how the bird will react to that visual information--"the 'what do the birds think about this?' question," as Sheppard puts it.
Although the American Bird Association already knows (and recommends) several strategies for bird-friendly design, their goal is not to arrive at a single avian-endorsed glass solution. Instead, Sheppard says:
In other words, PARC's spinning, elongated garden shed, with its trompe l'oeil sky, wing mirrors, and slide-in glass panels, is a cross-species translation tool--a structural device designed to test whether the built environment makes perceptual sense both to people and to birds.
As the last stop on our tour of this well-oiled bird surveillance machine disguised as a nature reserve, the flight tunnel provided an intriguing counter-perspective, asking, in this artificially shaped landscape disguised as a natural preserve, how birds see our habitat and what their perceptual frame might require from our own future designs. 
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| How Azerbaijan Is Like 'The Godfather'</em> Posted: 11 Jul 2013 09:28 AM PDT  Oil worker Namik Aliyev stands next to a billboard of Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev (left) and his father late President Haidar Aliyev as he waits for a helicopter on the island of Chilov in the Caspian Sea, about 70 km (44 miles) east of Baku on January 23, 2013. (David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters) Few developments speak so well of how far Caucasian dictatorships have come since the grey days of the Soviet Union as the fabulously wealthy and incredibly investment-savvy 15-year-old male heir of Azerbaijan's ruling family. When he was a mere 11 years old, Heydar Aliyev, the son of Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev, purchased $44 million in luxury mansions on Palm Jumeirah, the elite artificial archipelago built by Dubai and known for housing both holidaying British soccer players and thieving Russian tax officials. $44 million is, in the words of the Washington Post's Andrew Higgins, who broke the story in 2010, "roughly 10,000 years worth of salary for the average citizen of Azerbaijan." But young Heydar wasn't the only member of his family engaged in Gulf property speculation. His two older sisters, Leyla and Arzu, were also listed as owners in Dubai's Land Department registry. Together, the three Aliyev children invested in $75 million in Dubai real estate, which certainly is impressive considering that their father's official annual income as a public servant is just $228,000. When asked for comment by Higgins, who showed how the date of birth and name for the listed Dubai owner was the same as Ilham's dauphin, Aliyev's spokesman Azer Gasimov replied: "I have no comment on anything. I am stopping this talk. Goodbye." The reader will therefore understand why I didn't bother to try to reach Gasimov to explain Heydar's other high-profile but low-recognition investment. Now 15, the Aliyev son and likely heir to Azerbaijan's political dynasty has also got himself a sideline in commercial banking, judging from corporate filings I've obtained. These documents show that he controls a parent company that owns, through an offshore subsidiary, almost half of Russian mega-bank VTB's Azerbaijani subsidiary. Nothing wrong with that, you say. It's a fine idea to give a pubescent a solid education in the credit industry, what with all global shenanigans that have taken place in the last five years. There are only two problems. The first is that VTB, which is the second-largest bank in Russia and is 75 percent-owned by the Russian government, is also one of the fastest-growing financial institutions on the planet, with retail, commercial and investment arms in 19 countries, including the United States. It has been, and continues to be, dogged by civil lawsuits filed in multiple jurisdictions because of its issuance of loans that have led High Court justices to wonder "what, if any, due diligence" was carried out beforehand. VTB has been accused to being little more than a vehicle for the enrichment of its executives and for the Kremlin's "economic diplomacy" in luring foreign direct investment to Russia--a Putinist Lehman Brothers. In 2011, it took in about $712 million in German and French pensioner deposits, and earlier this year, it featured prominently and unflatteringly in the Cyprus credit implosion,given the $13.8 billion in assets it had tied up in the Mediterranean country long rumored to be a money-laundering haven. Embattled Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny is particularly fond of exposing VTB's dodgy history; in September 2012, his Foundation for Fighting Corruption published a comprehensive report examining some of the highlights (full disclosure: I edited it). The second problem is that in May of this year, Azerbaijan's sovereign wealth fund invested $500 million in VTB's secondary public offering (SPO). It was joined by Qatar's and Norway's sovereign wealth funds and, collectively, all three gobbled up 55 percent of the SPO. According to Herbert Moos, VTB's chief financial officer, "We have been working with the [Azerbaijani sovereign wealth fund] on a real estate investment in Moscow, their first investment, and they have a 20 percent allocation to Russia so they made a strategic decision to invest in us and become a business partner." Good thing Heydar has ample real estate experience, otherwise his father's regime might have balked at the prospect of throwing a cool half a billion into a bank heavily owned by the baby of the Aliyev family. Here's what we can prove from open-source financial filings and Panama's surprisingly helpful corporate registry. On November 9, 2009, Ataholding, an open joint-stock company that manages AtaBank, one of the biggest commercial banks in Azerbaijan, purchased 48.99 percent of VTB's Azerbaijani subsidiary. The remaining 51 percent is owned by VTB and thus mostly owned by the Russian government. As of December 31, 2009, AtaBank's investment was valued at 10,887,310 Azerbaijani manats, which at today's exchange rate is around $13.8 million. Ataholding is 51 percent-owned by a Panama-registered shell company called Hughson Management, Inc., of which, as the Ataholding financial statement for 2009 informs us, Heydar Aliyev has the controlling interest. At least that's in the iteration of the statement I received. (Here's a PDF copy and mark that the metadata dates its drafting in 2010.) Curiously, and perhaps owing to the diligent spadework of Andrew Higgins, the Ataholding statement currently hosted on the company's website does not include the notes section of the earlier copy, which features this disclosure:
Hughson Management is still currently listed as the majority owner of AtaBank. Now, there have been exactly two prominent Heydar Aliyevs in Azerbaijan's recent history. The first was a KGB chief turned Communist ruler of the Soviet autonomous region (1969-1982) and was the kind of Stalinoid satrap-cum-mafia kingpin who found it necessary to bribe Leonid Brezhnev in order to remain in power. Gorbachev's rise in Moscow coincided with this Heydar's eclipse in Baku. He subsequently became first the de facto head of the republic, as the USSR was falling apart, and then the first president of post-Soviet Azerbaijan in 1993. Heydar ruled until 2003, which is the year he died. That would have made it difficult -- though probably not impossible given that Azerbaijan one of the world's most corrupt countries -- for him to be found owning banks five years later. The elder Heydar was immediately succeeded by his son Ilham, the State Department's Michael/Sonny metaphor whose own "election" in 2003 Human Rights Watch characterized as the rotten fruit of "bureaucratic interference and political intimidation against the opposition [which made] a free and fair pre-election campaign environment impossible." Terms limits for presidents were abolished in 2009, the same year the regime clamped down on domestic press freedoms and took the BBC, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Voice of America off the air. Here's how the U.S. embassy in Baku described Ilham Aliyev in 2009:
*** What else do we know about Hughson Management, the parent company of Ataholding? Well, the president and treasurer of it are, respectively, little Heydar's older sisters, Arzu (now aged 24) and Leyla (who just turned 28 last week). Here's a nice shot of the entire Aliyev brood looking very happy and glamorous. Arzu and Leyla were linked to a highly lucrative Azerbaijani telecom company called Azerfon in a much-discussed piece of investigative journalism conducted by Khadija Ismayilova of RFE/RL in June 2011. Ismayilova found that Azerfon was owned by three Panama-registered entities, another company registered in a Caribbean tax haven jurisdiction, and Azerbaijan's state-owned Aztelekom company. The three Panama-registered companies each owned a 24 percent stake: one of these was Hughson Management. And although Ismayilova cited the governance structure of Hughson in her article, she did not disclose that the owner was Heydar Aliyev, which adds telecom mogul to his real estate and banking portfolio. (Just wait till he gets to college.) She did, however, connect Hughson to a mysterious third party, a Swiss financier and art collector named Olivier Mestelan, who owns the Kicik QalArt gallery in Baku and founded the Art ex East Foundation. He was profiled prominently in the Moscow-published "style magazine" Baku, the editor-in-chief of which is none other than Leyla Aliyeva, who is very style-conscious indeed. The Mestelan profile stated that the Swiss national owns property in Azerbaijan and visits the country several times a year. But he evidently does a bit more than that. In August 2011, this State Department cable named Mestelan as one of the "top Azerbaijani officials...of particular interest" to the U.S. government owing to these officials' cozy relationships with Baku's first family, chiefly President Ilham and his wife Mehirban Aliyeva. These are not relationships that Aliyevs wish to see explored by muckraking journalists. Following her exclusive, Ismayilova was targeted by a particularly nasty campaign of state harassment, which included her being sent an envelope filled with "pictures of a personal nature" and a message reading: "whore, behave, or you will be defamed." These images were later published in Azerbaijani newspapers associated with the ruling New Azerbaijan Party, of which President Aliyev is also the chairman. Ismayilova later discovered and documented surveillance wires that had been installed in the walls and ceilings of her home kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, apparently while she was out of the country just days after RFE/RL published her piece. The government's "investigation" of the tapping of Ismayilova's residence was a whitewash. Of further interest is the fact that, according to Hughson's more recent governance filings, Olivier Mestelan left the company as secretary in April 2012, about a month before second RFE/RL report -- this one co-written by Ismayilova -- demonstrated how the Aliyev regime had assigned the Azerbaijani International Mineral Resources Operating Company, Ltd (AIMROC) the right to develop a gold mine valued at $2.5 billion in Chovdar, a mountainous village in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, which was ravaged by years of war with Armenia. AIMROC, widely thought by angry Chovdar residents to be a British company, is in fact owned by four separate shells, only one of which (Globex International) is British. RFE/RL found that Globex International was itself owned by three Panama-registered companies, each of which listed Leyla and Arzu Aliyeva and Olivier Mestelan as senior managers. As of this writing, Mestelan is also listed as a member of the " supervisory board" of Ataholding, the company that owns AtaBank and half of VTB's Azerbaijani subsidiary. I'll do the State Department a favor and cast Mestelan as the "Tom Hayden" of the Aliyev family. 
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| 'There's No Tougher Job Than Being a Mom' Posted: 11 Jul 2013 09:27 AM PDT  "There's no tougher job than being a mom." A recent Parents magazine poll found that 92 percent of mothers agree with the statement. The statement is easy to ridicule when you think about how challenging some non-mom jobs are, as Jill Filipovic pointed out on Twitter:
Comedian Bill Burr has taken issue with the "mom is the most difficult job on the planet" line in the past on similar grounds, comparing mothering to being a coal-miner: What would you rather be doing: drilling to the center of the Earth, shaking hands with the Devil? Every time there's a rumble in the ground you're waiting for the whole thing to collapse down on you so they can write that folk song about you? Or would you rather be up in the sunshine, running around with a couple of toddlers that you can send to bed anytime you want?
Nevertheless, the sentiment is ubiquitous. After one of his 2012 campaign surrogates criticized Ann Romney because she'd "never worked a day in her life," President Obama told an Iowa TV station "there's no tougher job than being a mom." Oprah Winfrey regularly trots out a similar phrase: "I always say moms have the toughest job in the world if you're doing it right," she says on her website. Procter & Gamble crafted a huge, award-winning Olympics ad campaign around the idea that "Being a mom is the hardest job in the world. But it's also the best." One of the earliest examples of this mom-in-chief cheerleading comes not from a politician or a celebrity or a corporation, but from a writer and lay theologian. In 1955, C.S. Lewis wrote a letter to a stay-at-home mother encouraging her not to see her work as futile, but rather as deeply valuable: I think I can understand that feeling about a housewife's work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. Notice that Lewis says being a mother is the "most important" work, not "toughest" or "most difficult." The distinction is significant. It doesn't do mothers any favors to overemphasize the hard work that goes into being a mom--the claim is too easy to ridicule and disprove. And anyway what many moms find undesirable about parenting is how un-stimulating it is: how repetitive and numbing it can be, especially compared with paid work outside the home. Emphasizing the importance of caring for children and running a household sticks closer to the truth--and may even inspire dads as well as moms to take it seriously. 
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| Sometimes Sunscreen Catches Fire Posted: 11 Jul 2013 08:57 AM PDT  Last June, Brett Sigworth of Stow, Massachusetts, was standing in front of his backyard grill when suddenly "his body was engulfed in flames." "I've never experienced pain like that in my life," he told the local CBS affiliate. The flames spread over his body in every place that he'd put sunscreen, leaving him with second degree burns across his neck, chest, back, and ears. The particular Banana Boat spray-on product that he used has since been removed from the market. Last week, though, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it "has become aware of five separate incidents in which people wearing sunscreen spray near sources of flame suffered significant burns that required medical treatment. The specific products reported to have been used in these cases were voluntarily recalled ... However, many other sunscreen spray products contain flammable ingredients, commonly alcohol. " Never apply aerosolized sunscreen near an open flame, to yourself or a child. Even after you've safely applied it elsewhere, the FDA recommends that you not barbecue, not even smoke, while wearing it. Don't weld or order crème brûlée, either -- if it's the kind that they bring to your table while it's still flaming. Tell them, hey, don't bring it out here flaming, please. If they insist, just leave the restaurant. Tell them, "Hey, I don't deserve this kind of shabby treatment from you, man. I'll go make my own crème brûlée, which is probably better than yours." Don't actually make your own crème brûlée, though. For the human body to be reduced to ashes, according to the History Channel, it needs to reach around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Dignity can be reduced at a much lower temperature, but if you're like me and thought that these sunscreen catastrophes might explain the mysterious/fascinating/terrifying accounts of spontaneous human combustion, they don't. This would be a short-lived, superficial burn. ... Unless the flames got into an open wound and spread throughout your subcutaneous body fat, which can burn really hot and fast. Anyway enjoy your cookouts this summer. Really do wear sunscreen, probably every day all year. 
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| An Ode to Computer Shopper</em> Posted: 11 Jul 2013 08:43 AM PDT  Harry McCracken, a tech writer with a memory, brings word that PCWorld, his long time employer, has exited the print magazine business, leading him to declare "the era of computer magazines ends." If that's true, and I think it is, then I must offer a few words on behalf of my personal favorite from the era: Computer Shopper. Computer Shopper was like Vogue or Vanity Fair for nerds: You read it for the ads. Which it was filled with. Come to think of it, I'm sure they ran articles, but I don't think I ever read one. And yet it was thick, like a phone book, and you could find a whole world of PCs and components inside. If you never saw it, you probably can't imagine the number of advertisements for every single computer thingie that appeared between its covers. The magazine, more than any article could manage, showed you the crazy sprawling world of personal computing. For a kid like me out in Washington, it meant that I wasn't alone in my fascination with the falling price of RAM. The names of the companies from back then are like the scent of a grandma's pie for somebody else. I know Micron remains a real company, but for me, the name is charged with the lightness of my youth, and the mystery and contingency of all that came after. The quarter-page ad, the desire for a new CPU fan, PE, the smell of a gym, Muggsy Bogues, hemp necklaces, my Doc Martens and jean shorts, the wonder of making out against the brick wall behind Mr. Bennet's class. (See: Micron! That takes me back.) Without even noticing, pulling that tome onto my lap over the years, I started to acquire the feel for Moore's Law, which says that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every year and a half or two. In that formulation, it's hard to wrap your head around the implications, but as a kid, when you have very little disposable income, it meant that everything got cheap quickly. What was hopelessly out of reach when the school year began might be something you could buy by Christmas break or summer. Looking around, this was not happening with toy prices or (later) car prices. Computers were special this way. The other thing I used to do back then was wander the aisles at CompUSA at the agglomallation of big box stores in Jantzen Beach, Oregon (yes, I made that word up). Inside every box was a new capability. I distinctly remember the photo-editing tools you could buy to warp and distort photographs. One made all pixels manipulable like thick oil paint. Computers could take things that were rigid and make them viscous, wobbly. Of course, this was all before I had any real sense of technology as an object of study, or the ideas that could be smuggled inside these machines. It was a time of pure enjoyment, thinking how I had as much computational power as the people who sent men to the moon, if only I could learn to use it. I'm sure kids nowadays have similar experiences. But I suspect they are different in two key ways. One, I grew up in a mixed analog-digital time, part of a transitional generation. I took film photographs and scanned them. I dialed in to local BBSs because of long-distance telephone call costs. I mean, I read print magazines about computer parts. The digital world was in the process of being created right inside and on top of the preceding analog infrastructure. Recall the modem noises of yore: "What you're hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network." Two, while communication was a part of my teenage years, standalone computing formed the core of my computer experience. The fundamental thing was what you could get *your computer* to do. The computing world of my youth was not about making the world more open and connected. Sharing was tertiary. Computing was a solitary, painfully nerdy experience, even in the early days of the Internet. Getting two or three non-spam emails in a day about some project you'd been working on for months? That was huge! Now, one's friends are everywhere one looks. People don't talk about transistor counts doubling, but user counts doubling. It's a different kind of digital nativism, if that term was ever really worth anything. So, goodbye PCWorld, goodbye Computer Shopper. May dissertations be written about you some day. 
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| 5 Landmarks That Could Soon Be Swallowed by Rising Seas Posted: 11 Jul 2013 08:26 AM PDT
So, you spent last weekend celebrating American independence with patriotic fervor and you're now enthused about the preservation of American history and culture and all things awesome and bygone. Right? Keep that historical buzz going for a moment to contemplate five sites the National Trust for Historic Preservation -- the country's preservers-in-chief -- thinks are most vulnerable to flooding caused by sea level rise. Even though the the Trust fields regular requests for planning assistance from coastal cities across country, the group says no comprehensive models yet exist to address sea level rise and its threat to historic landmarks. That's bad, says Anthony Veerkamp, a program director with the Trust, because without first taking stock of what we might lose, "inevitably there will be adaptation strategies that do lesser or greater harm to historic resources." Here are five sites the Trust are most worried about: 1. San Francisco's Embarcadero
California's Bay Area can expect sea levels to rise by up to 55 inches by the end of the century, putting an estimated 270,000 people and $62 billion worth of San Francisco urbanbling at risk of increased flooding. That presents a major challenge to the three-mile stretch of San Francisco's downtown Embarcadero district, which features more than twenty historic piers, a bulkhead wharf in twenty-one sections, a seawall built in the late 1800s, and the iconic Ferry Building, fully commissioned in 1903. California's seasonal king tides already overflow San Francisco's sea walls and occasionally spill into the Embaracadero, providing a preview for what might happen more regularly if sea levels continue to rise. 2. New York City's Battery
When Superstorm Sandy slammed New York City, waters surged with the added force of a high spring tide over Lower Manhattan's sea walls, producing a "storm tide" more than 14 feet above the average, smashing a 50-year record. In the Battery -- that most southern tip of Manhattan from where New York City boomed -- flood waters rose in Castle Clinton, a fortress built to prevent a British invasion in 1812, now a museum and entry point for historical tours of New York harbor. Castle Clinton itself was transformed into New York's first immigration facility: 8 million people entered the US through here (then called Castle Garden) from 1855-1890. The New York City Panel on Climate Change predicts flooding like this at the Battery will beup to five times more likely by mid-century. 3. Miami Beach
Miami Beach might nowadays conjure images of bared flesh and art parties, but accompanying the polished pecs is a unique collection of Art Deco, Mediterranean Revival, and MiMo architecture (Miami Modernism is a flamboyant post-World War II style featuring sweeping curved walls, pylons, and stucco-colored avant garde shapes). "Miami Beach is remarkably vulnerable," Veerkamp says. "You've got threats coming from both sides, from the bay and the Atlantic." The EPA suggests that, by the year 2100, there is a 50 percent chance of a 20-inch sea-level rise at Miami Beach. The majority of the city is a flood zone: the OECD lists Miami as the number-one most vulnerable city worldwide in terms of property damage, Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone writes in his definitive article "Goodbye, Miami," with more than $416 billion in assets at risk. 4. Gay Head Lighthouse, Mass.
Perched on a spectacular escarpment in Martha's Vineyard, the Gay Head Lighthouse was first lit in 1856 (for lighthouse nerds, it was one of the first in the US to receive a first-order Fresnel lens, which has a jagged-surface that uses less glass and allows light to be projected over greater distances than previous models). The National Trust for Historical Preservation says the lighthouse is in danger of toppling over the edge of the Gay Head Cliffs, a consequence of a century's worth of erosion which the Trust says is being accelerated by climate change-induced storms. It is estimated that in two years, there will not be enough land left to accommodate the machinery and equipment needed to move the tower.
Right on the Chesapeake Bay, and featuring an historic naval academy, Annapolis--a largely intact pre-industrial colonial city boasting the largest collection of 18th century buildings in America--is regularly flooded by high tides, which are expected to double in frequency by 2050. Scientists say sea levels in the bay are rising at twice the rate of the national average, due to geological sinking and climate change. Maryland itself could experience an additional 5 or more inches of sea level rise, over and above what is being experienced globally, in the next 100 years.
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| For the First Time, Astronomers Have Determined the Color of an Exoplanet Posted: 11 Jul 2013 08:25 AM PDT ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/heic1312a-thumb-570x407-126954.jpg) Scientists have identified, at this point, more than 900 exoplanets -- planets that exist outside our solar system, orbiting other stars. We know those planets are out there; but we know that, in large part, through indirect measurements rather than through simply peering at them through telescopes. One of them is HD 189733b, located 63 light-years away from us, and one of the nearest exoplanets to Earth that can be seen crossing the face of its star. Because of that, HD 189733b has been studied by teams of astronomers hoping to learn more about the bodies that orbit other stars. Recently, the Hubble Space Telescope turned its attention to the planet, and they've announced a new discovery based on that research: they've determined the color of HD 189733b. Which marks the first time that scientists have determined the true color of a planet in another solar system. "This planet has been studied well in the past, both by ourselves and other teams," says Frédéric Pont, leader of the Hubble observing program and an author of the paper announcing the find. "But measuring its color is a real first -- we can actually imagine what this planet would look like if we were able to look at it directly." That color? Blue. Rich blue. If seen up close, the Hubble team puts it, HD 189733b "would be a deep azure blue, reminiscent of Earth's color as seen from space." So how did the team make that determination? They measured the light reflected off the surface of HD 189733b. Since the planet is both faint and close to its star, the team needed to isolate the planet's light from its star's light -- which they did using Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). They examined HD 189733b before, during, and after the planet passed behind its host star. And "we saw the brightness of the whole system drop in the blue part of the spectrum when the planet passed behind its star," Oxford's Tom Evans, first author of the paper, explains it. "From this, we can gather that the planet is blue, because the signal remained constant at the other colors we measured." That blue color does not mean, the team is quick to note, that the Earth-hued planet is earthly in other ways. This out-of-our-solar-system version of the "pale blue dot" is, in fact, an enormous gas giant -- think Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus -- that orbits very close to its host star (think Mercury). Its atmosphere clocks in at over 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, and features periodic hazes and violent flares. Its winds whip at more than 4,000 miles per hour. Oh! And it rains glass. Yes, glass. So HD 189733b is not habitable. But it is classifiable -- as, in particular, a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant that orbits closely to its host star. Our solar system lacks a hot Jupiter of its own -- Jupiter being, simply, Jupiter -- so we have to rely on studies of bodies like HD 189733b to learn more about that class of planets. And color is its own kind of data. While "it's difficult to know exactly what causes the colour of a planet's atmosphere, even for planets in the Solar System," Pont puts it, Hubble's new observations "add another piece to the puzzle over the nature and atmosphere of HD 189733b. We are slowly painting a more complete picture of this exotic planet." 
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| <i>Sukkah City</i>: Revisiting the Crazy, High-Concept, Temporary Jewish Huts of NYC Posted: 11 Jul 2013 08:06 AM PDT  Christopher Farber On September 19, 2010, 12 otherworldly structures appeared mysteriously overnight in Union Square, New York, comprising a mirage-like installation called Sukkah City. Each newly designed dwelling was a sukkah, described in the Old Testament Book of Leviticus when God commands Moses to tell the Israelites to live in "booths" for seven days. But these 12 were not the common variety of the small, modestly constructed shacks where Jews symbolically celebrate their release from bondage in Egypt. Rather, they were architectural re-interpretations of the sukkah. One was made entirely out of discarded cardboard. Another had a huge log as its roof, resting on glass walls. Another looked like a huge tumbleweed. All were winners all of an unusual design competition, the genesis of which is recorded in a new documentary, Sukkah City, directed by Jason Hutt, which premiered yesterday at the Jerusalem International Film Festival. During the weeklong holiday of Sukkot in late September or early October, observant Jews live, or simply eat their meals, in temporary enclosures ordained by God and constructed according biblical guidelines. The idea to radically transform the sukkah while following religious proscriptions was the brainchild of Joshua Foer, a writer and journalist, and Roger Bennet, a co-founder of Reboot, a non-profit group that encourages Jews disconnected from their heritage to engage in cultural and spiritual inquiry--and perhaps even reconnect with Judaism. Hutt learned about plans for Sukkah City in the Brooklyn Arts Council newsletter requesting proposals from designers to create high-concept sukkahs. "Sukkah City sounded like the perfect application of the competition tradition--to breathe new life into an ancient archetype that, over time, has become a generic pop-up box," he told me in an email. "The design brief was basically the original biblical rules for the sukkah, and having architects and designers re-imagine it with their 21st century tools and creativity promised to be an exciting experience, and an interesting film." Sukkah City was not billed as a purely religious event. "Building and dwelling in a sukkah is definitely considered a religious act or mitzvah," Hutt explained. "But it's not like reading from the Torah. Anyone can build and dwell in a sukkah." In fact, only one of the 12 winning teams had a Jewish member. "I think what's great about Judaism is that it's more than a religion--it's a culture, a people, a history," Hutt said. "Many non-Jewish New Yorkers probably know more about certain aspects of Jewish life than disconnected Jews living outside of New York."  Michael Surtees For many years a traditional sukkah has stood in Union Square. But Sukkah City beckoned New Yorkers of all stripes to wander through, learn about the holiday and appreciate the artistry of the structures. "The sukkah is one of the only times where the Jewish liturgy has an architectural expression," architecture critic Paul Goldberger says in the film, "so it's amazing no one thought of this sooner." Documentary filmmaking is a process of discovery for Hutt, whose last film was about Dmitriy Salita, a Russian immigrant, professional boxer, and devout Jew--and about the diverse characters (boxing trainers, promoters, Rabbis) supporting Salita's devotion to both pugilism and religion. "I choose topics that provide me entrée into a world where I've never been before and subjects that I'm curious to observe and learn about," he said.  Christopher Farber The jury for the competition included a variety of practitioners, academics or critics, among them The jury looked at 600 designs and chose 12 diverse interpretations, each representing the symbolic reasons the sukkah exists--the exodus, homelessness, fragility, humility, and a connection to nature. "I was incredibly impressed by the level of passion and expertise, but also commitment," Hutt said. "It was a lazy summer day but everyone took the process very, very seriously, and the dialogue and ideas were quite extraordinary." The jury looked at 600 designs and chose 12 diverse interpretations, each representing the symbolic reasons the sukkah exists--the exodus, homelessness, fragility, humility, and a connection to nature. "Each structure told its own story, and so I think they were all worthy in their own way," said Hutt. "Foer says in the film, the charge of the jurors was 'not to choose the 12 best sukkahs, but the one best Sukkah City.'" The film offers a "rare and an intimate glimpse inside a juried architecture competition," Hutt said, "explores the artistic process to both create and build innovative structures, and reveals why and how competitions are important to architects and the architecture community." Rather than religious, the film is ultimately about the artistic process of designers and architects, and more broadly, ideas and the execution of ideas. "I think Josh Foer and Roger Bennett demonstrate as much creativity and resourcefulness as the winning architects in translating Sukkah City from an innovative and ambitious idea to a wildly successful reality that was attended by over 200,000 people." It also captures the excitement around an art installation in one of New York City's great public spaces, and the effect it had on New Yorkers.  Christopher Farber The core audience may be the Jewish community (and it will play the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival July 30, and August 4 and 5), but Hutt has received invitations and inquiries from other festivals both Jewish and non-Jewish. It's not a particularly dramatic documentary, but its value is in how it documents a one-of-a-kind happening. "Certain films are exciting and hold up over time because they capture a particular moment in time, whether that's Bob Dylan's 1964 tour of England in Don't Look Back or Albert Maysles's film The Gates [about Christo's Central Park installation]," Hutt said. He went into the filming process thinking this would be a unique moment in the city: "I'd guess that Sukkah City was probably the largest non-Orthodox, non-Israel centered public expression of Jewish life in the history of New York." 
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| Confucius in the Cockpit, and Other Items to Read, and Ignore, on Asiana 214 Posted: 11 Jul 2013 07:59 AM PDT The investigation goes on, it will take a while before all the facts are in, and so on. In the meantime, here is a handy triage guide on what to read today: 1) The flying professors. One day after the Asiana 214 crash in San Francisco, Kenneth and Steven Hall -- two brothers who teach aerospace engineering, fly planes, and collectively blog as the Flying Professors -- offered an analysis that has held up well. As the obvious bolt-from-the-blue external explanations for the crash were being eliminated -- factors like engine failure, fuel-line freeze-up, powerful wind shear or other weather problem -- the Professors looked at the most basic evidence of what was happening immediately before the crash. They quickly noticed that the plane had "energy management" problems, and was not on a "stabilized approach" as it neared the runway. This analysis boils down to the idea that the plane first had too much "energy" as it descended for landing -- it was too high and was going too fast -- and then, after over-correcting, it ended up with too little energy and was too "low and slow" as it slammed into the seawall. As the days have gone on, most of the evidence has fit this hypothesis, including the reports that the flight crew attempted to "go around" -- to bring in full engine power and climb away for another approach -- just before impact. I'll send you over to the Professors to fill in all the details, and to explain the significance of charts like this one, which shows the speed trends of the Asiana flight, in red, and another flight that landed safely, in gray.
Short version of what you're seeing above: note that the gray-line flight slows steadily until it is 4 miles from touchdown, then holds a more or less constant approach speed, while the speed of red-line flight doesn't ever stabilize. 2) Dazzled. According to a story in SFGate yesterday, one of the Asiana pilots has told investigators that "a flash of light temporarily blinded him 34 seconds before impact."
Anything is possible, I wasn't there, we don't know everything the pilots were handling, and so on. Still I would bet heavily against this playing any part in final explanations of the crash. (And in fairness the pilot might just have been noting it as a fact, rather than saying that it mattered.) Everyone who has landed a plane has dealt with awkward-sunlight or occasional reflection issues, and anyone flying alone has done so without another professional pilot sitting in the other seat. And of course by the final 34 seconds the speed/stability issues would already have been evident.
3) Cultures of flying. In the past two days I have received great sheaves of messages laying out "cultural" explanations for the crash. Usually these involve (a) systems of training in East Asian societies, which according to these analyses place too much stress on rote learning and too little on fluid adaptability, and (b) problems in "Cockpit Resource Management," or CRM, in East Asian airline crews, specifically and supposedly a reluctance of lower-ranking officers to challenge a superior who is making an obvious mistake. I will look through these shortly and try to select a best-examples sampling of them. I should say that I start out being highly skeptical of this whole line of thinking. (Even though I think you can use aerospace ambitions as a revelatory lens for understanding a society and economy more generally.) If an (apparently) mishandled approach shows something about Korea -- or East Asia, or Confucius, or rote-learning systems -- then what do we make of the many thousands of Asian-piloted flights that land smoothly and safely throughout Asia every single day? On the other hand, anyone who has dealt with Asian students at Western universities has observed different patterns of study, of in-class questioning, of research styles, and so on. More to come when I sift out these messages. For now, go to the Flying Professors.
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| If Marijuana Is Legalized, Who Will Start Using More of It? Posted: 11 Jul 2013 07:54 AM PDT  Will older people start using more marijuana if it's legalized? (Ben Smith/Flickr) Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, doesn't think kids and teens are going to start using marijuana more frequently if the drug is fully legalized across the country. The reason is simple: They can already get pot pretty easily. "There are three national surveys in which young people say it's now easier to buy marijuana today that it is to buy alcohol. In every high school in America, marijuana use is now more or less omnipresent. In the surveys for the last thirty years, 80 percent of young people say it's easy to get marijuana. So I don't think that's the group where it's going to go up. If anything, you're going to take away some of that forbidden fruit attraction to marijuana," he said during a panel discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week. So who will start using more marijuana if it's fully legalized? Nadelmann, a legalization advocate whose organization was founded to stop the "war on drugs," points to the grandparents of the world. "It's going to be people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s," he said. "It's going to be older people going, 'Damn, it helps with that arthritis, I didn't realize that.' Or, 'It helps me sleep at night,' or 'I actually find I prefer it to having a drink at the end of the night, or 'You know what, I prefer it to the pharmaceuticals my doctor is giving me for my mood or my anxiety.'" It's difficult to judge which populations would be most affected by the full legalization of marijuana in the U.S. Currently, federal law bans all sale and possession of the drug, but 18 states plus Washington, D.C. allow the use of medical marijuana, and voters in Colorado and Washington state approved ballot initiatives that allow limited possession for recreational use. Opponents often argue that legalization will increase abuse among young people, although use is already somewhat common: From 2009 to 2012, nearly half of 12th graders and a third of 10th graders across the country reported having used weed at least once, according to research conducted by the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institutes of Health. If Nadelmann is right, then, legalization opponents who are worried about increased drug use among young people have misplaced their concern. What's more is that the use of synthetic alternatives to marijuana, marketed as "fake weed," has already been rising among young people. This synthetic sister to weed is reportedly available at gas stations and convenience stores, and although kids often assume it's legal, five of the chemical compounds found in synthetic cannabis are are Schedule I controlled substances under federal law. The point? Whether or not the substance is truly legal might not matter; kids have been using pot and pot look-a-likes regardless. You can see Nadelmann's full comments on marijuana legalization below: Via the Aspen Institute For full coverage of the Aspen Ideas Festival, see here. 
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| Edward Snowden's Leaks May Actually Strengthen U.S.-China Relations Posted: 11 Jul 2013 07:53 AM PDT  A Chinese protests outside the US Consulate in Hong Kong on July 9, 2013. (Reuters/Bobby Yip) The reason why both Americans and Chinese have become so nostalgic for the great Nixon/Kissinger-Mao Zedong/Zhou Enlai breakthrough in 1972 is because that was the last time that Sino-U.S. relations experienced a dramatic breakthrough. Now, most policy wonks on both sides sense we need another jolt to kick the way we interact into a higher gear, but nobody quite knows how to accomplish that. "The Prism-gate affair is itself like a prism that reveals the true face and hypocritical conduct regarding Internet security of the country concerned." When he met Obama recently at Sunnylands, Chinese President Xi Jinping lofted the idea of a "new great power relationship." But then, the cyber security issue that the Obama administration had already put on the front burner -- especially the cyber theft of private corporate intellectual property -- got written even larger by l'affaire Snowden. This gave Chinese nationalists a nice opportunity to mount a high horse and even the score up a bit, as Ministry of Defense spokesman, Yang Yujun, did when he defiantly proclaimed, "The Prism-gate affair is itself like a prism that reveals the true face and hypocritical conduct regarding Internet security of the country concerned" which by "making baseless accusations against other countries shows double standards and will be no help for peace and security in cyberspace." To many, the incident came as a real setback to any hopes for a major new diplomatic breakthrough.  MORE FROM CHINAFILE And yet, there could be a bright side to this story. With the world's only superpower -- to which China has long looked with a complex mix of admiration and envy mixed with resentment and animosity -- now unexpectedly forced to eat a super-sized portion of humble pie, and the Chinese enjoying a rare moment of schadenfreude, the playing field may have suddenly leveled a bit. That's important because, even though there is a real difference between the motives for and the kinds of surveillance that each country engages in, if there has been one thing that has galled Chinese in their relations with the West and Japan, it is the enduring presumption of their inequality, an imbalance that has deep roots growing out of their history of decline while being imperialized and exploited by foreigners. It has been Beijing's insistence on this notion that the Great Powers somehow still look down on them that has continued to make Beijing's relations with Washington so often fraught. But suddenly here was America also knee-deep in mud, thus creating a moment of cryptic equivalence that felt irresistibly sweet to many Chinese. As Romans 3:23 reminds us Americans, "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." A patriotic Chinese doesn't have to be a churchgoer to enjoy such a moment. The foreign predation, exploitation, and occupation during the 19th and 20th centuries which characterized China's fall from grace allowed the Chinese Communist Party to spin an elaborate and convincing ideological narrative of national victimization. For an empire once able to assume superiority without a second thought, to have declined so precipitously and ignominiously that by the early 1900s it had come to be known as "the sick man of Asia" represented an agonizing fall. From the first Opium War (1838-42) and the endless string of "unequal treaties" subsequently forced on it by the Great Powers, what most rankled China's political elite -- Nationalist and Communist alike -- was the deficit of respect and equality afforded them. A popular expression of the pre-1949 period was, "be backward and get beaten," (louhou aidai, 落後挨打), suggesting how Chinese then saw their hapless plight. Indeed, all of Mao's chest pounding and brutality, as well as Deng's later down-to-earth pragmatism, can be seen as an urgent, although sometimes misguided, effort to "rejuvenate" (fuxing, 复兴) their country, to somehow claw their way back from poverty and backwardness to what they longingly referred to as "wealth and power" (fuqiang, 富強) so that the Great Powers could no longer bully them. Throughout the last decades, China's bravado has all-too-often belied its intense yearning to have the "great powers" treat it as an equal. But even as American leaders now insist that they, too, want a new and more equal relationship, the U.S.'s default mode of interaction has all too often impressed Chinese as still being frozen in the old mold of a Western "great power" possessed of a self-proclaimed superior democratic system and a more enlightened set of modern values, looking down on and pressuring a benighted Asian land still steeped in outdated authoritarian practices. To Americans, such an approach may have an undeniable moral logic, but that does not mean face-conscious Chinese have not chafed under it. And, of course, as China has become stronger, its leaders have become ever less willing to countenance such old-style foreign lecturing and pressure. Thus, when it comes time to jointly deal with urgent issues like climate change, currency manipulation, Asian maritime disputes, the Syrian conflict, or the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issue, they approach negotiations with a chip on their shoulder. With the world's only superpower now unexpectedly forced to eat a super-sized portion of humble pie, and the Chinese enjoying a rare moment of schadenfreude, the playing field may have suddenly leveled a bit. Now, however, as we head into the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the fact that for the moment China does not finds itself cast as sole hacker-in-chief and Internet villain creates a symbolic moment when we may perhaps find the us-and-them atmosphere somewhat changed. But, a word of caution is due here: changing China from the outside has always been like bending metal. We may not admire their Leninist system of government, but what seems increasingly clear is that, while it will not do to abandon our principles, in China foreign pressure all-too often produces little but blowback. By suggesting how putting ourselves on a more equal footing may serve as a solvent, the Snowden affair may also help us see that projections of America as the all-knowing, all-righteous, all-mighty, and all-too ready to hector father-figure-to-the-world -- a depiction that old-style Party propaganda in China tirelessly exploits -- is not destined for success, especially for a country to whom equality and face are so important. Of course, there will be no magic if America alone makes new vows to seek a more equal and collaborative relationship if China, too, does not also shed some historical baggage. And a good place to begin would be to start retiring the old narrative of China as a victim. It is time for the Party to acknowledge that China is no longer a "semi-colonial, semi-feudal" country living in the early 20th century, and that Western imperialism is not what it used to be and the Great Powers are no longer so "great." In short, it's time to retire the hoary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist narrative of foreign oppression, exploitation, and persecution of an inferior confected by the Party over the century. Only then will Chinese be able to put the humiliation of their unequal past behind them, transcend their deep sense of grievance, and finally reformat the suspicious mindset that has characterized so much of their approach to the U.S. to become true equals. If, for example, the U.S. and China could now actually begin to work toward some new protocols on cyber-surveillance and theft, it would be a real breakthrough. That may strike some as idle dreaming. But then, it is President Xi who has recently taken to speaking of dreams, trying to kindle his own people's interest in a so-called "Chinese dream." So, why not also a joint dream of a more equalized and mature U.S.-China relationship? Yes, the fact that China's erstwhile "people's republic" is a one-party state makes such a reverie seem far-fetched. But that didn't stop Nixon and Kissinger from acting. And besides: Is there really any other option than to somehow jointly work things out? Not really. And here, a greater sense of equality can only help. This post also appears at ChinaFile, an Atlantic partner site. 
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This piece is by James West of 
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