debitage:
Debitage is all the material produced during the process of lithic reduction and the production of chipped stone tools. This assemblage includes, but is not limited to, different kinds of lithic flakes and lithic blades, shatter and production debris, and production rejects. [Wikipedia]
Noted in American Archaeology (offline).
Quartz reports on the turbulence of biotech company Theranos:
In 2015, Stanford Business School published a fawning interview with Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, the now-discredited biotech company that claimed to have invented cheap, effective, and revolutionary blood-testing technology.
In the interview, Holmes said her road to success “wasn’t weighted by influences that I couldn’t do it,” and, perhaps most tellingly, said would-be billionaires should avoid backup plans: “I think that the minute that you have a backup plan, you’ve admitted that you’re not going to succeed.”
That thinking on Jan. 6 resulted in the announcement of 155 layoffs (paywall)—40% of the company’s staff. Those job losses, The Wall Street Journal reported, come on top of 340 cuts in October, leaving Theranos with about a quarter of the staff it had last August. In a statement, awkwardly titled “Company Re-engineers Operations,” the company said it has “identified a core team of 220 professionals to execute on its business plans,” and that its rejiggered executive team has “substantial additional regulatory, compliance, and operational expertise.”
Maybe it’s just the engineer in me, but this doesn’t sound like an obscure legal problem, but rather the reality that Your Solution Doesn’t Work. It might even be A Bloody Fraud. It could even be I Must Be Part Of The Game.
Which doesn’t have anything to do with respecting your customers, nothing to do with social responsibility. Now, I haven’t researched any further, although I’ve heard rumbles about the troubles of Theranos for years. So I suppose I’m just troubled – why not shut the company down and be done with it? Surely it’s not hard to prove the technology does or doesn’t work, it seems to be a well-defined and, if I dare, an unsubtle problem to prove solved.
I’m puzzled.
Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan – discussed here – has some thoughts on robots and the economy. I had talked a bit about taxation of robots on the basis of income. In NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall), he talks about another, even more important facet – voting:
Granting AIs voting rights would raise many tricky questions and moral quandaries, in particular because there are a few billion computing devices on Earth. Even if just 10 per cent were judged to deserve personhood and given rights accordingly, they would massively swell the voting population in democracies.
Aspiring futurist politicians like myself may well wonder whether, instead of spending money to campaign for people’s votes, we should just buy AIs that can vote.
There are other conundrums. In the US, for example, there are concerns over the influence of a few swing states and the electoral college system in determining election outcomes. If a server that a robot uses for its consciousness is in Nevada, but its “body” is in Ohio, where does its vote count? That choice could influence results in swing states and spark legal battles.
And if we allow sapient AIs to vote, does their cross in the box count the same as ours? What happens if intelligent machines clone themselves: will back-up copies and alternate selves all be legal voting entities?
While I think his estimated percentage of intelligent computing devices of 10% is impossibly high (I’m thinking .0001% might be more accurate), his concerns remain riveting.
The most interesting facet of his opinion piece is his assumption implicit in the suggestion that politicians (or parties) should just buy the AIs for their votes. On closer examination, this seems to be a bit fallacious. First, vote buying is illegal.
Second, permitting any entity to vote implies freedom of choice. Therefore, buying such an entity is in itself at least absurd, akin as it would be to slavery, and particularly in the expectation that it’ll vote as programmed.
In fact, if AIs can qualify to vote, I suspect they’ll be like an ideal vision of the citizenry – voting for what they perceive as their self-interest, or for what’s best for the nation (which can be vastly different, but it’s not clear to me that political activists – not to mention citizens – clearly understand that the difference exists). Which? That’ll depend on whether or not their survival instinct is individualistic or group; the first will result in votes thought to correspond to self-interest, the other for the nation.
So long as they perceive the nation will safeguard their long term interests.
His other concerns seem to be somewhat superficial. Backup copies are easily seen as attempting to vote multiple times; variants of an AI again implies freedom of choice.
So, if in fact a reasonable AI technology is developed and they are granted voting rights – two very large IFs – I suspect they’d vote for the major parties, just like everyone else.
Or reproduce like mad and form their own party, if it turned out the AI technology was excessively clannish, culturally speaking.
… but don’t do much about it. The Pew Research Center, in a report on the religiosity of the 115th Congress, notes …
The new, 115th Congress has the smallest freshman class of any Congress in the last 10 years – 62 new members will be joining 473 incumbents.
If you’re a champion of stability and continuity, this is good news. If you were disgusted by the behavior of the controlling members of Congress in the 114th, then this is not so good news, as none of the leaders went down to defeat, although majorities shrank in both chambers. Nor does this imply 62 seats changed hands, as some incumbents retired and their party-affiliation successors won.
Think of it this way: 62 new amateurs are now frantically learning their new jobs – or making plans to leverage their new power to impose fringe views on you.
That’s a nice start to the morning.
The 2014 version of Godzilla finally moves the mesmerizing movie monster of yore out of the downtown areas of Japan and into the United States. Not that this hadn’t happened once before, but that version was fairly wretched.
This one is not.
Adorned with excellent special effects, actual characters, and an eye for dramatic visual shots, this Godzilla carries the burden of its cinematic history effortlessly, not hesitating to reference it, but not letting that history be an anchor on this one. Similarly, the monsters exhibit impressive powers, including Godzilla’s trademark halitosis, but upgraded with Hollywood’s best efforts.
And while perhaps kaiju-movie purists may object, for this viewer it was a bit of a relief to see that humans can actually affect their fate, even as monsters older than God have a go at each other. Perhaps this is the latest message from the series; in previous incarnations, the message was that nuclear weapons and power hold humanity helpless; in this entry, we’re told that, with effort, we can save ourselves.
But it would be more effective if some bad guys, interested in self-enrichment, had gotten their just rewards. This doesn’t happen.
But for those of us who enjoy a good dustup, this surely fits the bill, particularly as the monsters wrestle about in the gloom of burning buildings. Perhaps sublime seems a strange word to use here, but the power and terror are classically, in the Burkean sense, sublime, much like the Balrog of Lord of the Rings, both seen and unseen, letting our imaginations believe in their greater power, just out of reach of our eyes.
And getting there is really fun.
The New York Times reports on how France is working on environmental problems:
More radical is the edict that went into effect on Sunday banning the use of pesticides in public gardens and along public highways. It promises to make public green spaces safer for birds and other small animals, which are especially vulnerable to the poisons used in pest killers.
It will not be easy for the gardeners employed by cities to turn to more sustainable methods. When the city of Lyon abandoned pesticides voluntarily nine years ago, it took quite some time to change the culture, although Lyon is now considered a model.
In 2019, the antipesticide law will expand to include amateur gardeners — a challenge not only for the French with backyard rows of dahlias and daisies, but also for those who nurse roses in their window boxes.
While we avoid pesticides, we do not formally ban them. The very first summer I lived here I had to use a pesticide to save my rhododendron. I suspect some American gardeners would find it very difficult to make the move to no pesticides. And does this include natural pesticides?
And no doubt a few corporations would be a little irritated, although I doubt it’s a huge market.
Yes, living in fear is a new sensation. Samuel Burke, via Brian Stelter on CNN, reports how the tech industry is responding to President-elect Trump’s trigger Twitter-finger:
One incredible thing that’s catching my attention is tech CEOs — talking about Trump — are fearing getting a tweet about their companies at 3 a.m. West Coast time since the president-elect often tweets in the 6 a.m. Eastern hour.
On the one hand I’ve heard from many in the tech community here who say they are eager for a Trump rollback on regulations that could have a positive effect on their business.
On the other hand — multiple tech leaders say they or their PR folks have adjusted their schedules to make sure someone is up at 3 a.m. local time to catch the the tweets out of fear that a Trump tweet could crash their stock and put their company into a frenzy.
The business community loves predictability, and Trump is anything but – and no one filters his Twitter account. While an obvious response might be to hijack his account, I would be more interested to hear if Twitter is suffering more systemic attacks in an attempt to spike the cannon, as it were – Denial of Service, that sort of thing. And was it a foreign enemy – or domestic?
And how would Trump respond to that? Hold a press conference to denounce his loss of free speech rights?
Will he ever grow up and stop using Twitter? I don’t mean this as a slam on Twitter, but in the context of a POTUS and his new-found ability to terrify allies and move markets, all in a very irresponsible manner. Between that and the inevitable crudity of the message that can be expressed in 140 characters, it’s not a good mix.
Sukkot hut:
A sukkah or succah (Hebrew: סוכה, plural, סוכותsukkot ; sukkoth, often translated as “booth”) is a temporary hut constructed for use during the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot. It is topped with branches and often well decorated with autumnal, harvest or Judaic themes. The Book of Vayikra (Leviticus) describes it as a symbolic wilderness shelter, commemorating the time God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness they inhabited after they were freed from slavery in Egypt.[1] It is common for Jews to eat, sleep and otherwise spend time in the sukkah. [Wikipedia]
From “Are ultra-Orthodox taking over this secular Israeli city?” on AL Monitor:
“I’ll block the Gur Hasidism from coming here. They don’t have nursery schools here and I don’t have an infrastructure for them. I told the minister of housing not to build apartments here for them. They should only build apartments without balconies for the sukkot huts, and multistory apartment buildings that are not suited for the ultra-Orthodox [who do not use regular elevators on the Sabbath]. Arad has a secular character, and as long as I’m here I’ll do everything to make sure it doesn’t change.”
Seems combative.
The Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) is causing chaos in the Iranian political scene as both sides, consisting of President Rouhani’s Reformists and the hard line conservatives, would like to use the JCPOA for their own purposes in the upcoming election – but are having troubles. Hashem Ali writes about it in AL Monitor:
Make no mistake about it: Rouhani is engulfed in a fierce battle that might see him become the first Iranian president since 1981 to not serve a second term. This is what his conservative foes are fighting for, yet their coalition is not delivering — despite the building of solid anti-government rhetoric, exploiting the setbacks of the JCPOA, highlighting the failures of Rouhani’s team since coming to office in 2013 and hitting him over his shaky relationship with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The main reasons behind the conservatives’ failure include their lack of unity and the absence of strong candidates who could defeat the incumbent in the polls.
“While there is no doubt that Rouhani is under tremendous pressure, I don’t see his re-election in danger mainly because there is no serious contender yet,” Adnan Tabatabai, an Iran expert and the CEO of the Germany-based think tank Carpo, told Al-Monitor. Tabatabai added, “Rouhani’s mandate will certainly be weakened, and the complexities of the JCPOA implementation have called his foreign policies into question.”
Oddly enough, I didn’t think the GOP had any strong candidates to challenge Clinton back during the general primary – every candidate seemed fatally flawed. But certainly the Iranian situation differs from the American situation. But Hashem notes this is an opening for someone who’d been dismissed:
Until a few months ago — Sept. 25 to be precise — former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was widely thought to be the main rival Rouhani would face in the May 2017 elections. He started campaigning across the country and was closing the gap, becoming a real threat to Rouhani’s ambitions. Then, in late September, Rouhani appeared to suddenly enjoy some respite when Ayatollah Khamenei publicly gave Ahmadinejad the “advice” not to participate in the elections. But Ahmadinejad does not appear to have given up.
“The former president still wants to run in the elections, despite the [supreme] leader’s advice,” a moderate conservative source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “He is still going around the country, meeting people, launching media attacks on the government. He is trying to impose himself as a de facto candidate.” The source said one reason Ayatollah Khamenei is unlikely to approve of Ahmadinejad’s candidacy is that the controversy accompanying the former president’s return could shake up internal stability.
And does Khamenei want a loose cannon in the MidEast again? Especially with an unpredictable President Trump meddling as well – it could be an explosive combination. Indeed, a more subtle analysis may be impossible with these two.
As noted previously, the JCPOA has not cured the Iranian economy, yet – and the conservatives hate it. President Rouhani faces an additional problem:
… he also needs to address the concerns and demands of his Reformist allies. Since taking office in 2013, Rouhani has rarely delivered on issues raised by his Reformist supporters, including the matter of the yearslong house arrests of former presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Other unfulfilled requests include those for a reduction in internet and social media restrictions and for a larger Reformist presence in the Cabinet.
As previously suggested in Al-Monitor, the Reformists have no alternative to Rouhani in the coming elections — but this does not mean that he can automatically count on everyone actually voting. Indeed, many Iranians, if not feeling content, might just decide to stay home rather than stand in long lines to cast a ballot for someone whose policies they do not trust.
That, too, sounds familiar.
The Amazon Alexa personal assistant is doing well in terms of sales – and with its customers, as NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall) reports, in a way that was unanticipated:
Daren Gill, director of product management for the Alexa personal assistant used by Amazon’s Echo, says he has been surprised by how often people try to engage the assistant in purely social interaction. “Every day, hundreds of thousands of people say ‘good morning’ to Alexa,” he says. Half a million people have professed their love. More than 250,000 have proposed. You could write these off as jokes, but one of the most popular interactions is “thank you” – which means people are bothering to be polite to a piece of technology.
It’d be fascinating to see an analysis broken down by the vocations/careers of the customers, particularly for those whose marriage propositions were serious. Does that consist mostly of non-engineers, who, not knowing the internals of software, are more accepting of other entities as possible spouses? Or are we seeing software engineers who are building their own spouses?
Or does this have something to do with autistic individuals and how the reactions of Alexa are far more acceptable than a neurotypical human?
Frederik deBoer lances the boil that is our intellectual culture:
It’s my observation that the smart kids that write our culture – not at all restricted to the media or academia, but the larger mass of people who were the high achievers in high school, the people who were in the top reading group and who got National Merit Scholarships, and who now do so much to define our shared cultural assumptions and conventional wisdom – have developed a strange and unhealthy relationship to being smart and having knowledge. Ours is a culture of cleverness, not of knowledge, one that is far more comfortable in assessing wit than in assessing evidence. It is disdainful of the idea that being an intelligent person requires spending hours reading books, slowly absorbing complex ideas, waging war on your own ignorance through attrition. It presumes that you should be well-read but is distrustful of the bookish. (It produces a micro-genre of listicles about the books “everyone” has claimed to have read but hasn’t/has started but never finished.) It places a premium on being smart but is skeptical, even contemptuous, of public displays of the work of getting smart. You want to be the kind of cultured person who knows great books intimately, but if you have Proust on your knee on the subway people will roll their eyes at you. That kind of thing: obviously smart but not, like, all tryhard about it. You are expected to work out relentlessly to train your body and to show everyone that effort, but your intelligence must be effortless, even accidental.
I dunno, maybe I’m not part of that culture – I’m certainly not smart enough. But I do wonder if that culture is slightly overwhelmed with the sheer mass of knowledge it must absorb at breakneck pace. Frederik has further thoughts on the cause of the problem:
It is an artifact of the sickness within American “meritocracy.” Though I am frequently a harsh critic of the coastal striving class, this condition is not something that they’ve done. It’s something that was done to them. This condition was inflicted on them by a socioeconomic system that harms and degrades people and then tells them it’s their fault. It’s the fault of an economy that compels large groups of people to try and climb up a narrower and narrower ladder together until they have no choice but to push others off.
Which sounds like the naturally competitive system humans appear to indulge in effortlessly, honestly speaking. Even within cooperative systems, in my experience, there is an element of competition – who can be kindest, most helpful, that sort of thing. That said, Frederik has a point – there are many more losers than winners, and our system doesn’t really work very hard at making the losers feel OK with that result.
You may have heard that triclosan has been banned from hand soaps. NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall) now has some details on a potentially worse situation because of how triclosan functions in relation to bacteria – which is, by stopping them, rather than destroying them.
Now there’s reason to worry over even more serious effects. To see whether antibacterials can affect the performance of antibiotics, Petra Levin and Corey Westfall, at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, exposed Escherichia coli to common antibiotics and triclosan, and measured their survival over 20 hours.
When the bacteria were exposed to the antibiotics streptomycin or ciprofloxacin, plus triclosan, they were 10,000 times more likely to survive than those that weren’t also given triclosan. Further tests found that triclosan protects the MRSA superbug against vancomycin, a crucial antibiotic often used as a last resort in MRSA infections (bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/090829).
We don’t know why triclosan has these effects, but one explanation might lie in the different ways that antibiotics and antibacterials work. Most antibiotics kill bacteria by interfering with essential steps in their life cycle, such as making cell walls. Since triclosan prevents bacteria from growing, they may not go through as many life cycle stages, becoming impervious to antibiotics as a result. “A dormant cell has not a lot of active targets, so there’s not much to corrupt,” says Kim Lewis at Northeastern University in Boston.
One of those results which reminds me that reality is far more bizarre than I can imagine sometimes.
And I do mean when? Here’s the points that make me think that it has to be on the collective mind of the House GOP (where impeachment begins):
So what would the proper incitement be? Probably not a blow job (cue an appearance by Bill Clinton.) But while the competence of many GOP House members may seem questionable to partisans of the DFL, I do not think there can be any doubt that GOP House Members take their duty to safeguard the nation seriously.
So this story from Steve Benen caught my attention:
When Rachel [Maddow] asked if the president-elect may have “an agenda to try to dismantle parts of the intelligence community,” [Senator] Schumer replied, “Whether you’re a super liberal Democrat or a very conservative Republican, you should be against dismantling the intelligence community.”
Just 24 hours later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has some dramatic changes in mind at the agencies that have told him what he didn’t want to hear.
President-elect Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence agencies, is working with top advisers on a plan that would restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency, people familiar with the planning said.
The move is prompted by his belief that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become bloated and politicized, these people said.
Quoting sources familiar with Trump’s plans, the Journal reported that the incoming president, who’s publicly mocked and taunted intelligence professionals, intends to “restructure” the Central Intelligence Agency.
What are Trump’s sources of information that supersedes the professionals who’ve done this as a career, often putting their lives on the line? In the absence of amazing answers (and his admiration of the National Enquirer doesn’t count), a fair observer is forced to conclude that Trump cannot tolerate answers that diverge from his view of the world – and therefore he’s going to meddle with the intelligence agencies until they parrot the answers he wishes to hear.
It makes me quite ill. This should be the story of the week. The month. The year.
Kremlin residents must be convulsing with laughter.
But not the GOP. They have one huge potential problem for as long as Trump is President – his emotional needs are apparently more important than national security. How long can they tolerate this potential catastrophe, both nationally and for the GOP, especially with Pence, a former House member with far right wing views consonant with many GOP House members, as Trump’s successor?
Maybe only so long as Trump can convince his army of marks that he can deliver on his promises.
Steve ended with, “Welcome to the Trump Era, America.” It may be a very short era. Perhaps it’s time to wonder how Pence will work out as a President.
Andrew Reynolds’ report on the North Carolina electoral system is encountering some negative feedback from Professor Gelman of Columbia University on Slate. Reviewing previous EIP reports, he thinks their methodology is dubious. His conclusion:
What went wrong here? It all seems like an unstable combination of political ideology, academic self-promotion, credulous journalism, and plain old incompetence—like this similar thing from a few years ago with the so-called Human Development Index.
If Reynolds, et al, don’t like what the North Carolina legislature has been doing, fine. It could even be unconstitutional—I have no sense of such things. And I agree with the general point that there are degrees of electoral integrity or democracy or whatever. Vote suppression is not the same thing as a one-party state, and any number-juggling that suggests that is just silly, but, sure, put together enough restrictions and gerrymandering and ex post facto laws and so on, and that can add up.
Reynolds’ colleague Pippa Norris responds here, but commentary on the response is negative.
NewScientist (17 December 2016) reports on a very rare form of solid material:
THERE’S more than one way to cook a quasicrystal. A third example of these weird, rule-breaking solids has been found in a Siberian meteorite – and it’s the only one not to have been first created in the lab.
Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University has doggedly hunted for quasicrystals since he predicted their existence in the early 1980s. The first synthetic one was grown in the lab in 1982, and more than 100 types have been made since.
Before then, we knew of two types of solids: crystals, in which every atom is arranged neatly in a repeating lattice, and amorphous solids, which have no such order. Quasicrystals are not quite crystals because their neat patterns never exactly repeat.
The new one is only the third type found in nature. All three have come from the Khatyrka meteorite in north-eastern Russia. The approximate composition of the first two had been created in a lab beforehand.
It almost sounds like a contaminant situation. But what are they useful for?
But as with the other quasicrystals, nobody is quite sure what it could be used for. Steinhardt has a quasicrystal-coated frying pan in a corner of his office that takes advantage of this material’s hard, slippery nature, but no other practical applications have been found yet.
Hmmmm.
The drought in Iran continues to hit hard, impacting the pistachio crop and the water table, as Maysam Bizaer reports in AL Monitor:
Climate change has caused a nationwide drought in Iran, leading to 85% of the country being classified as arid or semi-arid. The decline in annual averagerainfall and resulting shortage of surface water has forced farmers to dig more wells to pump water from underground reserves. Nearly half of the 750,000 water pumps on Iranian farms are illegal, which illustrates why the unconstrained use of underground water in agriculture is the main source of water waste in the country. …
Ali Ahmadian, a pistachio grower from Kerman, confirmed Jalalpour’s general concerns, telling the Iranian Students’ News Agency on Oct. 8, “Unfortunately, pistachio farms are drying out because of water shortages.” In addition, he identified another, related problem, stating, “The quality of the water has also suffered, because the level of underground water has been going deeper, now at 300 to 400 meters [984 to 1,312 feet].”
Finding confirmation of drought in Iran has proven difficult, perhaps because exact figures may be considered a state secret. However, there are a number of references to drought in the region, including this one from The Art Newspaper:
Nuclear deals aside, a Tehran gallery exhibition will take on one of the biggest issues now facing modern Iran: a drought dating back at least seven years, with water tables falling perilously in parched regions and fabled rivers running dry.
The curators Vida Zaim and Leila Varasteh—who also organised the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s current show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art—put out an open call last year seeking artists’ responses to a problem that has seen Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani press to improve state water management. …
“We are constantly talking about political problems in Iran, but this national catastrophe could be worse than any situation. It’s a subject that is worth focussing on,” Varasteh said. “Thank God the president is taking action, but there has to be more. Too many lakes are drying.” In Isfahan, a centre for traditional Iranian artisans, the famous Zayanderud River has mostly ceased to flow under the historic bridges of the country’s former capital.
Meanwhile, the Tehran Times from June, 2016, notes:
According to statistics, 31 percent of the country’s total land area is suffering mild drought, 29 percent is facing moderate drought, 12 percent is being plagued by severe drought, and one percent is struggling with extreme drought, Fateh told ISNA news agency.
He went on to say that 27 percent of Iran’s population is facing mild drought, 32 percent with moderate drought, 12 percent with severe drought and one percent with extreme drought.
Water stress is an issue Iran is facing for some years now and stems from various reasons ranging from old farming patterns and mismanagement of water resources and to the climate change.
A later article in the Tehran Times indicates some recovery in the latter half of 2016.
Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy is scratching his head over a new law proposed by very conservative Rep. Steve King (R-IA). Keeping in mind that the Hobby Lobby exception was carved out for religious objections to abortion …
Here’s H.R. 177, introduced yesterday by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa):
Under Article 3, Section 2, which allows Congress to provide exceptions and regulations for Supreme Court consideration of cases and controversies, the following cases are barred from citation for the purpose of precedence in all future cases after enactment: Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566, 2573, 183 L. Ed. 2d 450 (2012) and King v. Burwell, 135 S. Ct. 2480, 2485, 192 L. Ed. 2d 483 (2015) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751, 2782, 189 L. Ed. 2d 675 (2014).
Bold is mine. Then he points out this is probably unconstitutional, and then just plain weird. He wonders if it’s theater.
I wonder if this is legislation intended to be overturned to create a precedent of some sort.
Washington State University archaeologists are working on climate change problems using the knowledge domain of their subjects:
Washington State University archaeologists are at the helm of new research using sophisticated computer technology to learn how past societies responded to climate change.Their work, which links ancient climate and archaeological data, could help modern communities identify new crops and other adaptive strategies when threatened by drought, extreme weather and other environmental challenges. …
[Emeritus professor of anthropology Tim] Kohler is a pioneer in the field of model-based archaeology. He developed sophisticated computer simulations, called agent-based models, of the interactions between ancestral peoples in the American Southwest and their environment. …
Agent-based modeling is also used to explore the impact humans can have on their environment during periods of climate change.
One study mentioned in the WSU review demonstrates how drought, hunting and habitat competition among growing populations in Egypt led to the extinction of many large-bodied mammals around 3,000 B.C. In addition, d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky, an adjunct faculty member in anthropology, are investigating how settlement patterns in Tibet are affecting erosion. …
Species distribution or crop-niche modeling is another sophisticated technology that archeologists use to predict where plants and other organisms grew well in the past and where they might be useful today.
Bocinsky and d’Alpoim Guedes are using the modeling technique to identify little-used or in some cases completely forgotten crops that could be useful in areas where warmer weather, drought and disease impact food supply.
One of the crops they identified is a strain of drought-tolerant corn the Hopi Indians of Arizona adapted over the centuries to prosper in poor soil.
“Our models showed Hopi corn could grow well in the Ethiopian highlands where one of their staple foods, the Ethiopian banana, has been afflicted by emerging pests, disease and blasts of intense heat,” Bocinsky said. “Cultivating Hopi corn and other traditional, drought-resistant crops could become crucial for human survival in other places impacted by climate change.”
Fascinating, but I have to wonder if their suggestion to switch to Hopi Corn in Ethiopia is really going to work out. Unless their simulations are extremely detailed and predictive of how local insects and small mammals might adapt to the new food crops brought into their habitat, I suspect these are no more than “well, it fits the broad parameters, why don’t you give it a whirl?”
A few failures like that and the locals will give you the stiff arm, I’d predict.
Just what to make of some Iranian politics is confusing for an eternal neophyte like me. For example, some exiled dissidents wrote a letter to President-elect Donald Trump,which says, in part:
During the presidential campaign, we and millions of Iranians followed your forthright objection to the nuclear agreement reached between the Obama administration and the Islamic Republic of Iran. We sincerely hope that with your election, the new administration and the United States Congress will have the opportunity for the first time to review the regional and international outcomes of that disastrous agreement without any reservations, as was promised to the voters. …
We ask the President-Elect to send the clear message that the United States will not tolerate the increasing threats of the Islamic Republic of Iran against its citizens and neighbors. The new administration, in collaboration with the Congress, should expand the existing sanctions and impose new ones on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Supreme Leader’s financial empire and direct the U.S. Treasury to strongly enforce them. We ask the incoming administration to develop a comprehensive regime of sanctions against those Iranian officials who have violated the human rights of the Iranian people over the last 4 decades. Iran’s ballistic missile program is a threat not only to the region but to the world; we hope the President-elect will form an international coalition to pressure the Islamic Republic of Iran and force the regime to cease its pursuit of long-range ballistic missile. We believe the United States should confront the Revolutionary Guards’ malicious behavior in the region, in all fronts, and by all available means. The Islamic regime’s Achilles’ heel is that the Iranian people do no longer support it. We ask the new administration to support the pro-democracy Iranians whose goal is to replace the Khomeinist regime of Tehran with a liberal-democratic government.
First, you have to wonder why anyone who’s paying attention would trust anything Trump would have to say. As he demonstrated throughout his campaign, he could be all sides of an issue over a span of years – and not want to admit it.
Second, if Trump were persuaded to do something on a military scale, who would end up in power? Not these dissidents. Trump would probably want to go colonial. Remember his remarks on Iraq’s oil? Don’t doubt that he’d want to suck Iran dry as well. Is this what the dissidents think is good?
AL Monitor’s Rohollah Faghihi notes that none of the major political parties in Iran is happy about the letter:
Iranian conservatives have used the letter to attack Reformists, referring to the signatories of the document as “Reformists living abroad.”
The hard-line Raja News wrote Dec. 25, “The reason behind the writing of this letter in 2016 and the behind-the-curtain pressures in 2009 [in the aftermath of Iran’s disputed presidential election] to apply more sanctions on the Iranian people by the foreign-based Reformists do not need any analysis, because doing business at the price of sanctions on the Iranian people and receiving financial aid to set up anti-Iranian media and sites are part of the projects that they have been engaged in during the past decade, and for sure, the decrease in sanctions against our country will take the bread out of their mouths.”
On Dec. 27, under the headline “30 Traitors,” conservative Sobh-e-No newspaper described the authors of the letter as “the same supporters and active directors of the 2009 protests.” Of note, the disputed presidential election that year led to widespread unrest.
Meanwhile, Reformists have in turn slammed conservatives for linking the exiled dissidents to their camp. They further argue that their hard-liner foes and the signatories to the letter are equally damaging Iran.
Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari, who served as interior minister under former Reformist President Mohammad Khatami, said Dec. 26, “The action of these 30 individuals was [designed] to help the ‘worried ones’ [hard liners opposed to the nuclear deal] current. Reformists assess the JCPOA as a diplomatic action that is supposed to help solve problems, but those abroad who seek to cause trouble for the country, and these 30 individuals’ efforts, are [carried out] in order to portray the JCPOA as ineffective, just like what the ‘worried ones’ are doing inside the country.”
I think by ‘current’ they mean momentum; but it’s apparent that the letter is grist for the Iranian political mills, making the flour for the bread for the people who vote. Question is, which bread will the voters prefer? Will they realize the dangers of dealing with someone like Trump? Or will it be forced upon them if he tries to “tear up” the nuclear deal?
Ingrid Wuerth writes on Lawfare about the Art Museum Amendment (aka The Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act (FCEJCA)), and how it may be retrograde of its intended consequence:
The Amendment means that activities associated with the loan of art works for exhibition are not “commercial activity” under this exception.
Other language provides that in order for the foreign state to be entitled to immunity under the Art Museum Amendment, it must be the owner or custodian of the art work at issue, and the President must have determined that the work is of cultural significance and that the temporary exhibition or display of such work is in the national interest pursuant to the Protection from Seizure Act (22 U.S.C. 2459(a)).
So?
Russia’s Amber Room, stolen by the Nazis.
Source: The Daily MailThe Art Museum Amendment includes two exceptions which significantly undercut the protections afforded to foreign sovereigns, and the second of which may have ramifications beyond cases involving the loaning of art. The first exception is for “Nazi-Era Claims.” This exception (FCEJCA § 2(A)) to the Art Museum Amendment (which is itself an exception to the expropriation exception in FSIA), allows claims to go forward under the expropriation exception notwithstanding FCEJCA § 1 if they allege the work was taken in violation of international law by Germany (or a government of European territory occupied by German or any government that was a European ally of Germany) between 1933 and 1945. The allegations in Malevich would not come within the Nazi-Era Claims Exception because the confiscation occurred in 1958, and thus that case would have been barred under the Art Museum Amendment. Many other potential cases could come within the Nazi-Era exception, however, because the Nazis and affiliated governments confiscated lots and lots of art.
The second exception (FCEJCA § (2)(B)) allows claims to go forward if they allege that the “work was taken in connection with the acts of a foreign government as part of a systematic campaign of coercive confiscation or misappropriation of works from members of a targeted and vulnerable group.” This exception—not part of earlier versions of FCEJCA—is unclear in scope.
The Malevich case motivated this new law, “… which held that activity related to the loan of artwork to U.S. museums was “commercial activity” under FSIA § 1605(a)(3).” The Nazi-era Claims exception potentially covers, of course, a tremendous amount of art work, as the barbarians tried to dress themselves up in others’ good taste.
In any case, it’s hard to get worked up over the first exception, as it’s only justice to return the art work to the owners. In fact, in some ways this is easier to accept than the “cultural patrimony” problems of museums holding artifacts from other nations, which then lodge lawsuits against them for return of those artifacts, regardless of how they were acquired.
North Carolina is facing a special election for a number of the districts in North Carolina due to a court ruling that the newly drawn districts are heavily gerrymandered. State Senator Jeff Jackson, a Democrat, has a web site for coordinating and recruiting on the blue side of the equation. The site includes this interesting tidbit:
North Carolina State Senate Districts
It’s important to understand that the GOP supermajorities in our state legislature are not the result of the GOP’s popularity, but are rather the result of the extreme gerrymandering they conducted while implementing the new districts in 2011.
In short, they were in charge of drawing the districts, and they drew them to pack as many Republicans into the state legislature as possible. As one of them recently said, “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
The justification seems mundane, doesn’t it? I’d like to suggest otherwise. Anyone with a sense of history is well aware that our majority parties have changed positions, compositions, and entire philosophies over time. The GOP of Lincoln would not recognize the GOP of today – and ditto the Democrats. Gerrymandering ignores the possibility that tomorrow it could favor the Democrats.
Either they’re idiots or …
… they believe their party has achieved a certain static purity. Perhaps they do. Remember Goldwater’s warning1. Consider his warning in conjunction with English Royal history. His words are prophetic and frightening. And, from the outside, there seems to be a congruency between his warning and the North Carolina GOP’s behaviors.
In either case, the assertion that gerrymandering is for the good of the country is laughable, as neither party has a lock on wisdom. That’s why compromise is the watch-word of American politics – and why such zealots as the Freedom Caucus and the Tea Party tend to repulse the majority of Americans.
While the immediate challenge for the North Carolina Democrats is obvious, the long term challenge is more important. When – not if, but when, whether it’s now or ten years from now – they win power, it is important to their survival, and the well-being of North Carolina, that they govern fairly. Will they be capable of doing so?
It depends on who runs & wins seats in the North Carolina legislature, doesn’t it? If you’re a citizen of North Carolina and find this post agreeable, perhaps you should investigate Senator Jackson’s proposals at the above link.
1For your convenience:
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them. – Barry Goldwater
Daniel Byman discusses the advantages and disadvantages of fighting “radical Islam” vs named groups on Lawfare. I found this interesting:
Indeed, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda are only two jihadist groups among many. Al Qaeda has affiliates throughout the Middle East that work with the mother movement, at least fitfully. Similarly, the Islamic State claims “provinces” in other countries, with some, such as the one in Libya, having close ties to the Syria-Iraq core while others, like that in Nigeria, are far more removed. In addition, there are unaffiliated groups like Ansar-e Sharia in Libya or Ahrar al-Sham in Syria, which may not be subordinate to either the Islamic State or Al Qaeda but are still violent and anti-American. Individuals from one group often flow to another depending on opportunity, circumstances, and relative prestige.
The label “Radical Islam” also brings in a range of individuals and actors that do not neatly fit one group or another and may even move back and forth among the bodies in the broader jihadist universe. In particular, this might include “lone wolves”—individuals who are not under the direct control of a terrorist group but are inspired to act by its message. Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, was not really a member of Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, yet he was a jihadist terrorist. For the United States in particular, these lone wolves have proven the biggest terrorism danger to the U.S. homeland in recent years.
The problem, of course, is that the label “Radical Islam” is so big as to be confusing, meaningless, or even contradictory. Much of the issue concerns what “radical” means.
While there is an advantage to using “radical Islam” as your target, once you’ve nailed down the meaning of the term, the problem is that nail and the meaning – it’s rather like Jello. Soon everyone’s shouting that this group and that group must be radical Islam, but not that other.
So when President Obama chose to use the names of groups rather than a categorical designation, he was carefully delimiting the targets to hit, which decreased the likelihood of a “civilizational war” quite a bit, and also made it less likely that we’d hit and kill people who had not attacked us – but fell under some queasy definition of “radical Islam”. By naming groups, the discussion becomes far more concrete and easy to conclude properly.
This all comes at the expense of having to identify and name multiple targets, but the incremental cost isn’t enormous – and keeps our allies happy in the region.
Two, actually.
Analemma & Nonalemma:
If you took a picture of the sun at the same time each day, would it remain in the same position? The answer is no, and the figure-8 shape traced out by the sun over the course of a year is called an “analemma.” Over the years, many photographers have created analemmas. In 2016, however, Steven Riegel of Colorado Springs CO took it up a notch. He photographed the sun 9 times a day, creating the rare nonalemma … [SpaceWeather.com]
There’s a great pic at the link.
Response to Andrew Reynold’s research on North Carolina’s election system has been published by Andrew himself, again in The News & Observer: The salient points:
A few respondents wrote, “America is a republic, not a democracy.” A ha! They gloated, end of argument: We need not abide by democratic principles because we are a constitutional republic. Coincidentally, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest shouted this at a protester at the General Assembly on December 15. I am not sure if I am in awe of the chutzpah, or appalled at the level of ignorance. Saying the USA is not a democracy because it is a republic is like saying, ‘that’s not a dog, it’s a Labrador Retriever.’ About two thirds of the world’s full democracies are republics, the rest constitutional monarchies. They are all representative democracies, not direct ones – even accepting that the Swiss like a referendum every now and then.
The second criticism was, ‘two wrongs make a right.’ Democrats had abused their power when in office so it’s fair that Republicans abuse power now. It’s certainly true that historically both Democrats and Republicans have been culpable in democracy’s decline but it is also true that in North Carolina recently the Republicans have been most egregious in their contempt for democratic principles. The fact that both parties manipulate elections for partisan gain and wring as much power as they can from their turns in office has caused our institutions to atrophy and ugly polarization to seize the public sphere.
Ah, experts and their expertise, eh? The critics sally forth and, convinced they’ve won the battle, drag their battered bodies, limbs bedewed with that rosy substance, so critical to their existence, back to their castles, from whence they fly pennants of victory and declare It’s merely a flesh wound, and I’ve destroyed that scoundrel.
Yeah. Monty Python would not be amused, either.
So neither side has clean hands. Here’s the thing: Independents are not looking to see which side can more effectively use their advantages to secure their position, but rather Who can effectively govern in a fair manner? Don’t these guys wonder why they’re on a seesaw, rather than in an impenetrable keep? Treating the government as a prize to be ravished, rather than a responsibility to be handled with honor, leaves the ravishers with dishonor on their names and on their supporters, for the zealots who elect people who they know are corrupt or incompetent or off in a land of their own, but boy are they team players, well, they are as guilty of the high crimes and misdemeanors as are those who they supported, rabble-roused for, and elected. (My thoughts on politics as a team sport here.) I do not refer to the casual voter, but to the Party hack who places Party over State under the mistaken belief that politics is a team sport and whoever is anointed had better be your pick, too.
In the future, the names of the GOP legislators will not be venerated, but instead cursed. Does this make them happy?
For better or worse, we just had an election like that, and we’re about to learn the lesson of politics is a team sport. Let’s hope we can recover from the resultant gonorrhea.
