Unsightly Mental Blemishes

And the progress on the mysterious white spots on Ceres?

NIL!

But we do have this great new pic, from NASA (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA) (and NewScientist):

A reader comments on a similar situation in Minnesota:

This is not new, nor just confined to South Carolina. Dakota County — for one I am sure of — has been doing this for years, right here in Minnesota. The amount one pays for the electronic monitoring is exorbitant, and the monitoring service actually does a piss-poor job. So do the other parole monitoring people you have to meet with, so bad a job that you run the risk of being reincarcerated simply because of their incompetence (e.g. missing court ordered appointments, etc.). And if you’re in the Dakota county jail, they charge you for your room and board. Another scam perpetrated on the taxpayers and the accused is the bail bond system. In theory, you pay some percentage of your bond to a bail bond company, sort of like buying an insurance policy that they will pay the state if you don’t show. In theory, anyway. In reality, the bail bond companies don’t ever actually pay the court system anything (or rarely). They just pocket your money. The whole “criminal” justice system in this country is company corrupt, dishonest, and nothing at all like “justice”.

I was not aware that Minnesota did this – and I grew up in Dakota County.

The picture remains grim for California.  The Sierra Nevada snow pack is now at a 500 year low, according to a study reported by NewScientist (19 September 2015, paywall):

This year’s April level was at just 5 per cent of the historical average recorded for the month between 1951 and 2000.

It’s bad news for drought-ridden California because melting snow from the Sierra Nevada range fills 30 per cent of the state’s reservoirs (Nature Climate Change, doi.org/7p7). California suffered devastating wildfires this week that were fuelled by the region’s worst drought on record.

LiveScience adds,

And the researchers don’t expect normal snowpack levels to be replenished anytime soon. “We should be prepared for this type of snow drought to occur much more frequently because of rising temperatures,” study researcher Valerie Trouet, a dendrochronologist (a scientist who studies tree rings) at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, said in a statement. “Anthropogenic [human-caused] warming is making the drought more severe.”

The following map courtesy OpenEI and is of the Sierra Nevada Thermal Region.

NASA“s Earth Observatory also contributes:

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured two natural-color images of the snow cover in the Sierra Nevada in California and Nevada. The top image was acquired on March 27, 2010, the last year with average winter snowfall in the region. The second image was acquired on March 29, 2015. In addition to the significantly depleted snow cover, note the change of color in the Central Valley of California and the lack of snow in the interior of Nevada. (Most of the white in 2015 is cloud cover.)

Looking closely at the Tuolumne River Basin in the Sierra Nevada, scientists working with NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) found the snowpack there contained just 40 percent as much water in 2015 as it did at its highest level in 2014—which was already one of the two driest years in California’s recorded history. In its first springtime acquisition of 2015, the ASO team quantified the total volume of water contained in the basin: On March 25, the mountain snowpack was 74,000 acre-feet, or 24 billion gallons. In the same week of 2014, the snow total was 179,000 acre-feet.

The wildfires, so well covered by the media, were certainly exacerbated by the ongoing drought, and it provides opportunities for prison inmates to mitigate sentences and learn new skills, as reported by the BBC:

When painter Henry Cruz was sent to San Quentin prison three years ago, for a crime he doesn’t want to talk about, he never thought he would spend part of his sentence fighting fires. But that’s what he has been doing for the past 18 months.

“It gets scary sometimes, but at the same time, it makes me feel good. Being a firefighter is a privilege – it makes you feel like you are in civilisation.

“I like saving nature, and sometimes people,” he says. “It makes me feel like a hero.”

While I would certainly like to understand the eventual recidivism rate for this subgroup of prisoners, it doesn’t really compensate for the damages and stresses on the state caused by the wildfires and drought.

We rewatched Pixar’s UP (2009) tonight.  Even on the small screen the honest depiction of the consequences of being a time-limited creature serves as the clarifying salt to the sugar of the lovely story that’s all about family and the lengths to which preserving family, and being bold, should be all about.

It surprised me by making me giddy.  Those stories are the ones I treasure.  My wife and I then found cat barf on the bedroom cover, and I cackled with glee.  She tried to put it down the clothes chute, where it stuck, and gales of uproar descended upon her; then the broom was brought to the effort, which promptly became stuck due to its excess length; I then became victim of the finger as I was a trifle indiscreet at the flounderings of Fate.

Now that’s giddy.

A reader thinks the Sex Robots are just over the next hill:

The objections seem all too PC to me. Absent a huge change in humanity, sex robots will push the envelope on robotics, just like porn sites pushed the envelope on web sites. And it’ll be big business, too. Here, the SF writers are way ahead of the game, too. Example reading: “Saturn’s Children” by Charles Stross (2008), “Blue Champagne” by John Varley (1986), and “Hammer’s Slammers” by David Drake (1979, ref. “flirts”).

A profit in everything, including prisons, as we’ve discussed before.  The International Business Times reports on another move to extract cash from even the merely accused:

It all started with a traffic violation. Green, a 49-year-old father of five from Lugoff, South Carolina, about 30 miles northeast of Columbia, acknowledged that he shouldn’t have been driving at all. He didn’t have a license. But last October, his mother’s car, a 1994 Chrysler, had broken down at a nearby Taco Bell. So he hitched a ride to go retrieve it for her.

On his way home while driving his mother’s car, he failed to use his turn signal at an intersection, and a local police officer pulled him over.

Green was arrested, placed in handcuffs and taken down to the local county jail, where he waited overnight until his elderly mother was able to post the $2,100 to bail him out. A condition of Green’s bail, ordered by the judge, was that Green wear — and pay for — an electronic monitoring device.

Green, who lives on a monthly $900 disability check, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Pay for it?” Green said. “I never heard of that.”

But he was indeed hearing correctly. In Richland County, South Carolina, any person ordered to wear the ankle monitor as a condition of their bail must lease the bracelet from a private, for-profit company called Offender Management Services (OMS), which charges the offender $9.25 per day, or about $300 per month, plus a $179.50 set-up fee, according to county documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request made by International Business Times.

Amazing – they’ve effectively fined a man convicted of nothing AND redirected the fine to a private company.  I’d have to say the responsible parties in Lugoff, SC, have screwed up at least two different ways, since the bail money will be returned to the family so long as the accused makes it to the trial, while the money for the GPS is long gone, so it’s a fine with no legal backing.  And then giving the money to a private company under the guise of a lease?  Strike two.  And the whole scheme … well, anyone who likens corruption to a pig rooting out truffles should be salivating on this one.

And, of course, my current hobby horse applies.

(h/t Josie Duffy @ The Daily Kos)

Akin to the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (here and here) comes a Campaign Against Sex Robots:

Over the last decades, an increasing effort from both academia and industry has gone into the development of sex robots – that is, machines in the form of women or children for use as sex objects, substitutes for human partners or prostitutes. …

• We believe the development of sex robots further objectifies women and children.
• The vision for sex robots is underscored by reference to prostitute-john exchange which relies on recognizing only the needs and wants of the buyers of sex, the sellers of sex are not attributed subjectivity and reduced to a thing (just like the robot).
• The development of sex robots and the ideas to support their production show the immense horrors still present in the world of prostitution which is built on the “perceived” inferiority of women and children and therefore justifies their uses as sex objects.
• We propose that the development of sex robots will further reduce human empathy that can only be developed by an experience of mutual relationship.

Jeremy Hsu on Lovesick Cyborg blog at Discover.com comments:

But the call for a blanket ban on the development of sex robots raises several questions. First, it’s unclear why robotic technology should be singled out for a ban when many other existing technologies already contribute to the reinforcement of gender inequality in society. The same argument about technology leading to objectification and reinforcement of gender inequality could be made for pornography, dating apps or online services, and sex or romance simulation games.

I suspect the answer is that this particular technological application is still in its infancy, at best; the campaign should like to strangle it in its crib, if I may say it.  The others are out and about and thus difficult to stifle.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown @ Reason.com has worked this territory before.  Since Reason is libertarian, it’s no surprise she’s cheering the industry onwards:

You have to give robotics researcher Kathleen Richardson credit for one thing: she’s forward-thinking when it comes to moral panics. In a half-baked new paper, the De Montfort University research fellow is full of dire warnings about technology that doesn’t even exist yet in the marketplace: sex robots.

“I started thinking, ‘Oh, no, something needs to be said about this,'” Richardson told The Washington Post about her early forays into sex robot research. “This is not right.” Her misgivings culminated in a paper titled “The Asymmetrical ‘Relationship’: Parallels Between Prostitution and the Development of Sex Robots,” presented at a computer ethics forum in Leicester, England, earlier this month. In it, Richardson argues that the development of sex robots would “further reduce human empathy” and “reinforce power relations of inequality and violence.”

She also notes this may all be a tempest in a teapot:

Research on why men pay for sex has found, more than any other common denominator (variety, convenience, etc.), a desire for mutuality. Clients want to feel, at minimum, like a sex worker somewhat enjoys her time with them. In a 1997 study of male prostitution clients ages 27 to 52—nearly half of whom were married—a desire for sex was frequently met with “social, courting behaviors that were often flavored with varying degrees of romance.” Interviewing clients at a New Zealand massage parlor, researcher Elizabeth Plumridge found they “all wanted a responsive embodied woman to have sex with. This they secured by ascribing desires, response and sexuality to prostitute women. They did not know the true ‘selves’ of these women, but constructed them strategically in a way that forwarded their own pleasures.”

I’d want to talk to an expert before accepting this viewpoint – the context is too obscure.  Is this a world-wide study?  What percentage of johns fit this quasi-idealistic scenario – and how many guys are there just to get their rocks off?  And how many are looking to slap the prostitute around?  This certainly doesn’t fit into the stories published about enslaved sex workers.

To my mind, there are three groups to consider here: the johns, the prostitutes, and the robots.  From what I’m reading, there’s little consideration given to the last group.  The problem is characterization: is the hypothetical robot just something that rocks back and forth and moans a lot?  Or, at the other end of a spectrum, is it a fully cognizant AI?

The latter assertion is not only more interesting, but more compelling for a couple of reasons.  First, the technological urge to forever improve your invention (or, as engineers put it, fixing what ain’t broke) will result in smarter and smarter sex robots; second, as the johns realize the smarter robots deliver a better experience (which I’ll assert without supporting argument), they’ll demand better robots.

The subject appears to be quite complex.  A fully cognizant AI … well, does it care about sex & relationships?  If it cares about relationships, sex – if that can mean anything to a computational intelligence – may or may not be of interest.  The reproductive strategies of an AI may be as trivial as duplicating the current state of the AI into hardware capable of executing the underlying computation; or it may be a complex game of crossbreeding the survival strategies of multiple AIs in a process conceptually reminiscent of biological sex.  While human takeaways from sex range from pleasure to children, would an AI take pleasure – or anything – from sex with a human?  Even if programmed to be capable, that is a different subject from programmed to actually gain anything useful from the activity. And that, in turn, presumes that an AI is actually programmed in the classical sense.  While, if computationally based, a certain amount of programming will be necessary, the vast majority of the material will be data and derived algorithms – and, with respect to this discussion, that means it’s rather impossible to answer the question of the moment.

So, banning sex robots may mean depriving a general robot from a key part of the human experience: a supposition of worth that cannot be estimated – because it may range from 0 to infinity, in computational terms.  One could accuse the Campaign of a quaint provincialism, if one was so minded; however, the subject is serious enough that the charge might come across as flippant.

Finally, TechInsider references David Levy:

But David Levy, author of “Love and Sex with Robots” told the BBC that humans and robots in intimate relationships will be a common sight by 2050.

“There is an increasing number of people who find it difficult to form relationships,” Levy told the BBC. Sex robots, he said, “will fill a void.”

This assumes a basic compatability.  I have not read his book, so perhaps he’s already treated the subject, but that little quote, as out of context as it might be, strikes me as filled with dubious assumptions.

… and then this pops up.

Walter Einenkel @ The Daily Kos goes ballistic.

Once you have a microscope, everything goes under that lens.  Two stories caught my eye over the last two weeks that bring breaching sector categorization into sharp relief.  The first has been well-noised about: hedge-fund manager Martin Shkreli bought the rights to Daraprim.  The Atlantic hasn’t much good to say:

As CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, he acquired an anti-parasite medication called Daraprim and immediately increased the price from roughly $13.50 to $750. In the last 72 hours since that made national news, Shkreli’s attitude and confidence have been duly noticed, reminding Americans that we live in the only country where drug companies set their own prices for life-saving medications. His confidence is the kind of confidence that manifests as Burberry polo shirts and semi-ironic emulation of Flo Rida; conspicuous consumption that does not play well to those suffering toxoplasmosis-induced seizures, preventable with Daraprim.

He’s hedging his bets now – apparently he was in full-fledged private sector mode, where the rule is make as much money as you can.  Not a health sector rule.

The other story has not made so many headlines.  Treehugger.com‘s Melissa Breyer reports on an impending loss of snake venom antidote:

But as it turns out, the world will have run out of Fav-Afrique [an anti-venom effective against 10 lethal African snakes] by June of 2016 and no more is being made. …

The anti-venom is made by French company Sanofi Pasteur – they are the only manufacturers, but they ceased production last year because they were priced out of the market and are now making a rabies treatment instead. Alain Bernal, a Sanofi Pasteur spokesman, told BBC that the company had offered to transfer the anti-venom technology to others, adding, “Nothing has materialized yet.”

Newsweek adds to the picture:

The pharmaceutical company which manufactured the drug stopped production in 2014 and there will now be a two-year gap before a replacement product becomes available in 2018. …

[Rob Harrison, head of the Venom Research Unit at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine] adds that the problem is exacerbated by the proliferation of cheap but ineffective antivenom treatments which are not bite-specific. Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, is “awash” with antivenoms that come from other continents “that are marketed aggressively and very cheaply but are ineffective,” says Harrison.

The Health sector doesn’t offer choices to curry favor with consumer’s fashion sense, but to increase efficacy.  Once again, in both of these cases, we see the operationality of the private sector intruding into another sector, leaving it damaged and incapable of accomplishing important goals.  At one time, at least in the USA, marketing of drugs was banned and we could at least hope that the most effective drugs were available – rather than worrying about marketing of drugs to people who know nothing about proper evaluation of the drugs.

Some questions about interactions between sectors are very difficult, but this one seems easy enough – ban medical advertising.

Thinking of buying a seal fur coat?  Think again.  NewScientist (12 September 2015, paywall) reports that it contains mercury:

SEAL fur may be toxic. Mercury is building up even in pristine areas, and it’s coming from an unexpected source – moulting elephant seals.

Industrial pollution can release mercury into the environment, where it may end up as an organic compound called methylmercury. This is taken up by bacteria, and it builds up in organisms much higher up the food chain, including top predators such as elephant seals.

But it doesn’t end there. “Elephant seals undergo a catastrophic moult,” says Jennifer Cossaboon of San Diego State University in California. “It comes off in big sheets of fur and the top few layers of skin.”

A reader comments on the thread:

I think we’ll face a Bladerunner like problem if we aren’t ethical towards AI, but I also don’t worry that sentient, feeling AI will actually be created in my lifetime.

I think if it’s achievable, someone will find a way to that goal within the next 50 years.  I’m just not sure a computer-based solution is possible.

Anders Sandberg gets it.  That is, that there are ethical questions arising from the attempt to create an artificial intelligence.  He writes in NewScientist (12 September 2015, paywall):

It is the third problem that really interests me. Would emulations feel pain? Do we have to care for them like we do for animals or humans involved in medical research?

Exactly.  If you achieve your goal – creating an artificial intelligence – then is it ethical to deactivate the program, turn off the hardware at the end of the day?  Does the fact that we created that intelligence – depending on how you define create, as it’s very much a team enterprise – also give us the right to inflict pain upon and end the existence of the artificial intelligence?

The answer may technically be YES, but it would be a measurement of our maturity and intelligence to realize causing anguish to a living, thinking being – one that may feel and think on our level – is a moral hazard.  Anders agrees:

My suggestion is that it is better to be safe than sorry: assume that any emulated system could have the same mental properties as the organism or biological system it is based on, and treat it accordingly. If your simulation just produces neural noise, you have a good reason to assume there is nothing in there to care about. But if you make an emulated mouse that behaves like a real one, you should treat it like you would treat a lab mouse.

And then he continues onward to even more interesting questions, which may be unique:

What about euthanasia? Living organisms die permanently, and death means the loss of their only chance at being alive. But an emulated brain could be restored from a backup: Lab Rat 1.0 would awake in the same way no matter how many copies had been tested in the past. The only thing lost when restoring it would be the memories of the previous experiment. There may still be pleasures and pains that count. In some ethical views, running a million supremely happy rat simulations in the background might be a “moral offset” for doing something painful to one.

Maybe.   But the awareness of the imminence of extinction of this copy of the AI, if it causes anguish, is this a problem?

SpaceWeather.com notes the experiment conducted by some students with corn and cosmic rays:

SPACE CORN FAILS TO APPETIZE: Regular readers of Spaceweather.com know that we have been flying simple life forms to the edge of space onboard helium balloons to test their response to space weather. Some fare better than others. Yeast, for instance, is incredibly tough. The microbes easily survive temperatures as low as -60 C and cosmic ray dose rates 100x Earth-normal. Corn, on the other hand, appears to be more fragile. In the spring of 2015, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched seed packets of corn and other vegetables to the stratosphere during geomagnetic storms. Bruce Binion bought some of these seeds as a gift for his father, a veteran farmer, who planted them alongside regular corn as an experiment. Here are the results:

“I must say this experience has been quite fascinating,” reports Binion. “Compared to regular corn, the ‘space corn’ stalks were quite short, tasseled out quite early, and the ears were stunted. As can be seen in the picture, above, Dad has a normal, good-eating ear from the same garden area shown for reference beside a couple of ears grown from your space seeds.”

In summary, cosmic rays do not seem to agree with corn. Sorry, astronauts!

Back in April we covered the guy who was convinced Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker would win by never admitting to be wrong.  Today, before a single primary has been run, Walker dropped out.  His exit message is intriguing, as reported by Talking Points Memo:

Walker said he was reminded at church that the Bible “is full of stories about people who are called to be leaders in unusual ways.”

“Today, I believe that I am being called to lead by helping to clear the field in this race so that a positive, conservative message can rise to the top of the field,” Walker said. “With this in mind, I will suspend my campaign immediately.”

He went on to directly take on Trump, who has dominated the rest of the field in the polls since getting into the race this summer.

“I encourage other Republican presidential candidates to consider doing the same so the voters can focus on a limited number of candidates who can offer a positive, conservative alternative to the current frontrunner,” Walker added.

It sounds like he may have been ordered to stop campaigning and just take out the frontrunner, doesn’t it?  He’s young enough that he could run again next cycle, or the next, or the one after that.  His support in the polls has dropped from top tier to miniscule as many polls have noted.  Here’s one from HuffPo with commentary from Sam Wang at the Princeton Electoral Consortium:

Considering Fiorina’s problems with accuracy and her dismal performance as Hewlett-Packard’s CEO, it seems likely that her rise will also be transient. If 2012 is a guide, she will last one or two months then fade, just as Cain, Gingrich, Santorum, and Bachmann did – and now, maybe Donald Trump.

Walker’s fallen below 2% and Jeb! is stuck around 8%. Assuming those trends persist, the highest-finishing serious candidate is Marco Rubio. As I have said before (link to The New Republic), Rubio is a relatively likely consensus candidate. In the past, the GOP has usually settled on a strong general-election candidate. Rubio polls relatively well against likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. If the past is a guide, then at some point party donors/actors and primary voters may fall into line.

Uff-da – Rubio?  The guy who thinks we’re in existential danger, the like of which has never been seen before?

Well, it’s hard to knock the guy with his money on Walker – this entire season has been enormously erratic, not to mention entertaining for those of us with a taste for moral abominations, which resembles most of the GOP field.  Given Minnesota’s close-up view of Walker, I suppose I’m not surprised at his implosion; the next question is where will he land?  Will he run again for Governor after his current term, or would they boot him out?  Is there a secure position awaiting him somewhere?

I remember how the late Minnesota Senator Rod Grams awaited such a position after being booted out after one term as Senator – and nothing ever arose, despite the dominance of the Republicans in that period.

Rick Santorum, desperate for anyone to even admit he exists, comes out with the latest dubious proposal.  From BuzzFeed:

“It’s like, if all the tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail,” Santorum told Glenn Beck on Thursday. “Every problem that the State Department has, the answer is diplomacy. Why? Because if it’s not diplomacy, they don’t have a job.” …

“I have said that,” Santorum replied. “I said that when I ran four years ago — the first thing I’d do is abolish the State Department and start all over.”

Uh huh.  And, Rick, you think they’re autonomous and just make bad treaties without oversight?

This is why we have executive positions, baby!  Like the one you’d have us believe you’re running for!  The Secretary of State comes to you with, hey, this is what we can do, and, like, you say, no way, not good enough, let’s bomb them instead!

This is the crap that happens when, faced with picking from orders from above and reality, you pick the former and then apply logic.  Logic without good assumptions, i.e., factual understanding, is just another form of garbage. Just harder to recognize as such.

The only thing money is good for is the good you can do for others with it.

• Marlene Smith (no doubt echoing many others)

A new dinosaur has been discovered (three years ago) and analyzed, and it’s unusual in that most of the skeleton was recovered.  From the discoverer, Triebold Paleontology:

A recent fossil discovery just completed in the Triebold Paleontology Laboratory is a new undescribed species of ceratopsian from the Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous. This relatively small, horn-faced herbivore’s skull measures just over a meter in length and approximately 80% of the skeleton was recovered. Portions of the skeleton of this exciting specimen bear traces of skin impressions.

Here’s a Triebold blog post on the specimen.

Atlas Obscura gives a description of the living creature:

Imagine, basically, a baby rhino, except a lizard with horns, and you’re about there.

(Photo courtesy Triebold Paleontology)

Why are the skeletons always posted with the mouth open?  It motivates a certain auditory delusion in my head, which I sort of wonder would be realistic.

And, for those of us outraged by comparisons of mammals with lizards, we can all blame CNN.

Now the onus is on Iran to begin implementing the deal, as noted by AL Monitor:

The next JCPOA benchmark is “adoption day,” Oct.18, when Iran must begin to make changes in its nuclear infrastructure in compliance with the JCPOA, working with the International Atomic Energy Agency. US officials this week summarized what needs to happen before sanctions are lifted, including “taking out thousands of centrifuges and putting them into IAEA-monitored storage [at the Natanz enrichment facility) … taking out a very large amount of infrastructure, specifically some of the pipework and electrical infrastructure that allows for the enrichment process to work; …

& etc – an impressive list.  They finish with,

Only when Iran takes these and other steps, including a report from the IAEA on the past military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program, does the process shift to the next benchmark, “implementation day,” when certain sanctions are lifted. Implementation day is expected to take place in spring 2016, but could be longer, or even never. It all depends on Iran.

The Tehran Times reports,

It is thought unlikely that international sanctions will be lifted before next year. The timing depends on when Iran meets its commitments and the IAEA confirms Iran has resolved all outstanding issues with the agency.

And The Iran Project suggests the deal isn’t quite done yet:

Speaking with reporters on Saturday [presumably September 19 – Hue], the Supreme Leader’s top aide, Ali Akbar Velayati, was cautious about the confirmation of the deal by Iranian officials: “I should say that the nuclear negotiations have not ended yet since the legal authorities should still make a decision about it, and it is still soon to make any comments before the legal authorities declare their decision.”

Velayati noted the ongoing review by Parliament: “This will continue until we come up with definite results and we hope that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s interests and expediencies will be met in this trend.”

Actually, not bad at all.  From NewScientist (12 September 2015, paywall) comes Deborah MacKenzie’s report:

Even without a worker shortage, migrants needn’t be a burden. On 4 September the World Bank, the UN’s International Labour Organization and the OECD club of rich countries issued a report concluding that “in most countries migrants pay more in taxes and social contributions than they receive.”

In a study last year, researchers at University College London found both European and non-European immigrants to the UK more than pay their way. Non-Europeans living in the UK since 1995 brought £35 billion worth of education with them. Those who arrived between 2000 and 2011 were less likely than native Brits to be on state benefits, and no more likely to live in social housing. Unlike natives, they contributed a net £5 billion in taxes during that period.

That is partly because most migrants are young and need relatively little in the way of benefits. Their economic impact approaches that of natives as they age and assimilate. But the positive effect can be substantial: Carlos Vargas-Silva of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford reported this year that letting in 260,000 immigrants a year could halve the UK’s public debt 50 years from now.

As much as I’m delighted to see research such as this, a pop-sci magazine like NewScientist does leave one wondering if the researchers explored such questions as whether or not average age of each wave of refugees increases as the the conflict continues, and what is the marginal impact of that last refugee?  Are the members of the last wave as productive and positive in their eventual contributions to society as the first wave?  In other words, the context is changing as more and more refugees accumulate in country X – does this change the economic output of the refugees?

Granted, most resentment is simply xenophobia cloaked in economic concerns, and some governments do not permit that to influence policy.  For example, Germany vs UK:

One EU country seems unfazed: Germany says it can take 800,000 asylum seekers this year. It counts on immigrants to replenish its ageing workforce and the EU’s emergency asylum rules say resettled refugees can legally work. Germany had 200,000 more deaths than births in 2012, more than compensated by 391,000 immigrants. In contrast, UK prime minister David Cameron bowed to public pressure and this week said the country would take just 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020.

It’ll be interesting to see who has the greater regrets in 50 years.

Think invasive exotics are responsible for the extinction of local species?  Think again, reports Fred Pearce in NewScientist (5 September 2015, paywall):

The UK government’s Non-native Species Secretariat (NNSS) declares that invasive species have “contributed to 40 per cent of the animal extinctions that have occurred in the last 400 years“. Its source is the Global Biodiversity Outlook 2 report, published in 2006 by the secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

They, in turn, say the stat came from a 2005 paper by Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, who was in turn drawing on a 1998 paper by David Wilcove, now at Princeton University.

As is clear from the paper’s title, “Quantifying threats to imperiled species in the US”, Wilcove was not talking about actual extinctions but an extinction threat, and in the context of the US (in fact, his data largely related to Hawaii). Wilcove told me his paper was being misused. Although informed of this, the NNSS has kept the claim on its website. …

Uh oh.  Eventually we reach this juicy detail:

The report cites a 2005 paper in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, by Miguel Clavero and Emili Garcia-Berthou of the University of Girona, Spain. But that turns out to be just four paragraphs long.

It reports, but gives no details of, an analysis of a quarter of the 680 extinct species in an International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) database. The authors told me they had not kept the details of their analysis, nor notes on which species they had included.

Ya gotta be kidding me.  They sound as bad as … myself.  And that’s bad.  The reason for this dubious paper?

This work was a riposte to a rather longer paper by Jessica Gurevitch and Dianna Padilla of Stony Brook University in New York, who looked at the same IUCN database and concluded that just 2 per cent of all extinctions had alien species listed as a cause.

Especially for a rebuttal, failing to keep your notes, or the details of the analysis, is inexcusable – thus, Fred’s turn of phrase, “Chinese Whispers”.  And it turns out many citations and conclusions come to rest on this report.  While no one’s denying there must be concerns about invasive species – whether we’re talking the zebra mussels in Minnesota’s lakes or the rather more exotic pythons in the Everglades of Florida – understanding the true numbers is key to the proper allocation of resources towards the problem, as the magnitude of the problem is unquestionably the key.  In fact, here’s a chilling example of a failure to defend against an invasive species properly:

(Image courtesy Imgur)

Before anyone gets too misty eyed over VW, it turns out they’re just another heartless corporate titan.  TreeHugger.com reports on a forced recall ordered by the Obama White House:

… to recall around half-a-million vehicles, accusing them of using “software intentionally designed to circumvent environmental standards for reducing smog.” …

The deception wasn’t just an accident or a software bug. The cars were actually designed to detect when they are undergoing emission testing and provide false readings:

The Environmental Protection Agency issued the company a notice of violation and accused the company of breaking the law by installing software known as a “defeat device” in 4-cylinder Volkswagen and Audi vehicles from model years 2009-15. The device is programmed to detect when the car is undergoing official emissions testing, and to only turn on full emissions control systems during that testing. Those controls are turned off during normal driving situations, when the vehicles pollute far more heavily than reported by the manufacturer, the E.P.A. said. (source)

The illegal software concealed true nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, a contributor to smog linked to health issues like asthma.

As I wander about in left field, we can be sure this will be the result of some bad employees, and I don’t doubt it – most such scandals are the results of some bad manager, they rarely go right to the top (an exception would be the Siemens scandal of a few years ago – I think this Economist article is covering the right scandal).  But, hey, when it comes to donating money to political organizations – then they’re all good corporate citizens.  There’s an apparent contradiction going on here.

A reader comments on InfluenceMap:

Since they gave Nestle a C+, they apparently don’t mind that Nestle is raping California water supplies.

http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2015/07/23/review-nestle-water-permit-neglected-decades/30562241/

From The Desert Sun:

High in the San Bernardino Mountains, on a steep slope covered with brush and ferns, a bunker-like stone structure protrudes from the mountainside. Behind its locked metal doors, water is collected from wells and flows into a pipe to fill bottles of Arrowhead 100% Mountain Spring Water.

The U.S. Forest Service has long been allowing Nestle to pipe water out of the national forest from a collection of wells using a permit that lists an expiration date of 1988. The company has been paying the San Bernardino National Forest an annual permit fee of $524, and the water has continued to flow, even as the drought has prompted questions about the potential impacts on a stream and wildlife in the national forest.

Further in the article I note that the Forest Service denied a number of permit applications from Nestle; they claim their failure to re-examine the original permit was a problem of resources and oversight, nothing deliberate.

Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is using his position to attack private prisons, as noted by Salon:

Bernie Sanders just made good on an early campaign promise and introduced a bill in the Senate to outlaw what he called the “morally repugnant” practice of incarcerating Americans in private prisons and called for the reduction in the nation’s prison population.

On Thursday, the Vermont independent introduced The Justice Is Not for Sale Act which bars the federal government from contracting with private companies. Sanders’ bill was introduced as a part of a package of legislation sponsored by Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona, Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Bobby L. Rush of Illinois, aimed at making important criminal justice reforms including increased oversight on the predatory banking and telephone services for inmates.

A good move to confine private sector activities to the private sector.

(h/t Eric Nelson @ The Daily Kos)

I’m going with Sanders vs Carson.

Both candidates hold the quality of novelty in terms of nation-wide.  This is important in a nation that is steeped in the importance of novelty.

Sanders: Bernie brings qualities of sincerity, passion, and what I’ll call visionary pragmatism to the race.  The idea of a one payer health system may seem radical, even socialist, yet he can point at many socialist health systems as costing less while yielding better results; the libertarian argument, with which I have a certain sympathy, that the context differs in that we have to support drug development while other nations simply leach off the United States, will have little impact since the libertarians, by and large, have chosen to throw their lot in with the GOP rather than the Democrats.  The progressive wing (which differentiates from the socialist wing, who may be ambivalent about Sanders) will like him not only for his progressive policies, but also, perhaps against their own will, for his feistiness, i.e., for example, his gun policies.

This is no knock on Hillary – exceedingly bright, hard-working by all reports, major credentials.  She’d probably make a fine President.  But she’s too familiar, even when her husband steps up and hits a home run of a speech, as he does from time to time.

Carson: Regardless of the wishes of the GOP leadership (as we’ve seen with the Trump takeover of the race), Carson has perhaps the best shot at winning the GOP nomination.  In this case, it’s due to the reactivity of the GOP’s membership to various charges: he’s black, he’s exceedingly well-educated and has a fantastic standing in the community as an eminent retired surgeon, and yet he’s apparently religious to a fault.  Trump, to give him his due, has his business successes (and failures, although they are hardly mentioned), he has a charisma to him, and the willingness to trumpet lies and half-lies that appeal to the biases of the base; Fiorina may appear to be made of steel, but as the national press has pointed out, her grip on the issues is more than a little faulty, and her most important project, leading H-P, was a disaster.  Carson has non-political credentials, which appears to be important to the GOP base, and will bring a new, yet familiar viewpoint to the office; I could easily see a replay of the important Bush II campaign moment when some voter, during an interview, declared she felt Bush had been picked by God to be President.  (Evidently God hated us during that campaign.  Or hated Bush.)  Carson’s breezy confidence is deeply appealing, and his credentials validate many of the biases of the base.

And, yeah, this is a knock on the GOP candidates and base.  There’s a difference between the trumpeted “deep, talented field” of the GOP, and it’s true nature: a bunch of power-hungry politicians who are either as goofy as the GOP base and/or leadership, or are willing to lie through their teeth for power.