In recent weeks, the Taliban have threatened to burn down cellular towers throughout Afghanistan unless the main wireless companies shut down service between 5 p.m. and 3 a.m. each night. Why? Taliban commanders are convinced that coalition forces are using the cell networks to track their fighters. (They don't seem to understand that while coalition forces might use the Afghan mobile networks for some intel, they certainly aren't dependent on them. Thank you, spy satellites.)
And now they've made good on their threat. In a country that is nearly wholly reliant on wireless communications (for lack of any land-line infrastructure), the main mobile networks (all privately run) have begun switching off service at night after attacks on 10 cell towers, the latest on Tuesday night. Score this round for the Taliban.
I can only hope that the frustration of not being able to make calls past dusk will inspire public condemnation of the men who forced the blackout. But then again, the government vowed to help the private sector stand up to Taliban pressure. And that unsuccessful stand hardly inspires confidence.
As the space debris settles from the U.S. operation to take out its own satellite, the policy repercussions are quite clear: We have entered a new space age. Here's why, according to International Herald Tribune:
[O]fficials and experts have made it clear that the United States, for better or worse, is committed to having the capacity to wage war in space. And that, it seems likely, will prompt others to keep pace... What makes people want to ban war in space is exactly what keeps the Pentagon's war planners busy preparing for it: The United States has become so dependent on space that it has become the country's Achilles' heel."
This refers to the U.S. military's heavy use of satellite capabilities. So, was the United States wrong in brushing aside recent calls for de-weaponization of space? Not according to Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Space weapons are not the problem, he argues, nor is it effective to ostensibly ban them as Russia and China have proposed:
The biggest deficiency in the Russian-Chinese draft treaty is that it focuses on the wrong threat: weapons in space. There aren't any today, nor are there likely to be any in the immediate future. The threat to space assets is rather from weapons on earth -- the land- and sea-based kinetic, directed-energy and electromagnetic attack systems. The treaty entirely ignores these."
The United States' technological capabilities and needs are contributing to a loss of innocence in how the country approaches space. U.S. space policy has become a nearly impossible balancing act of maintaining defensive capabilities without becoming a strategic menace. If Tellis's argument -- that a treaty cannot provide the sweeping restrictions and enforcement necessary to keep space peaceful -- proves true, it implies an uncertain, worrisome future. The U.S. satellite shootdown may thus herald a bigger change than was anticipated. Could this have been "the kinetic kill vehicle heard 'round the world?"
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton may think they have their hands full with NAFTA, but just wait until it's time to renegotiate DSFTA, the Deep Space Free Trade Agreement. In the latest issue of Astropolitics, political scientist John Hickman thinks where no social scientist has thunk before in his new article, "Problems of Interplanetary and Interstellar Trade."
Hickman believes that interplanetary trade could be one of the primary economic drivers for space exploration in the future. The potential problems are by no means minor, however. First of all, the vast distances between solar systems would probably prohibit the transportation of tangible goods. (Though, as Hickman points out, transatlantic trade probably seemed just as fanciful to traders in renaissance Europe.) There may however be potential for trade in non-tangible goods such digital entertainment, or scientific information with newly discovered alien species. But even this is not without dilemmas that would give Austan Goolsbee a migraine.
How will we enforce contracts or copyright laws on a civilization 20 light-years away? How will we set up a banking system or transferable currency without any tangible goods to trade? How will we protect ourselves from strange new ideas and ideologies that may destroy the fabric of our society? Worst of all, how will we trade with a species that may not even have a concept of trade?
Economic exchange itself might be "alien" to the aliens. Members of an alien species may not experience the same intense sense of self that is exhibited in rationally self-interested economic exchange among humans. Instead, a collective identity could be dominant. Money might not exist and without it neither would complex markets or banking. If they do engage in economic exchange it might take a form akin to potlatch, the competitive gift-giving for status solely among members of the same tribe traditional among societies in Melanesia and the Pacific Northwest. Moreover an alien species might not live in separate societies and could thus have no conception of trade between different societies with different cultures.
Can we maintain our free-market values and still trade with these hippie space communists? Hickman proposes establishing a "solar system monetary union" or publicly administered "planetary clearinghouse" under which interplanetary merchants could operate. The good news is, even after discovering alien life, we would still need to decode their language and acquire a basic cultural understanding before we can even think about initiating trade. This should give us enough time to bone up on all 285 Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
Travis Daub contributed to this post.
UPDATE: Tyler Cowen weighs in --
[R]eciprocal, tit-for-tat exchange would work just fine, provided that a) relativity did not slow down the exchange of information too much, and b) not too many Ohio voters watched that movie where the aliens send us their genetic information, embedded in an apparently innocuous transmission, and trick us into downloading those instructions and then cloning them en masse... In other words, we probably cannot trade with aliens.
Late Wednesday night, the U.S.S. Lake Erie used its Aegis missile-defense system to shoot down an ailing reconnaissance satellite as it passed over the Pacific. Aegis is a key piece of the larger U.S. missile-defense system, combining extremely sophisticated ship-borne radars with heat-seeking interceptor missiles that can reach targets in low orbits (such as short- to mid-range ballistic missiles). After successfully using Aegis to knock out a target it was ostensibly never designed for, some may ask if this test of the system proves that the American missile-defense system works.
In a word, the answer is no. The mission is a qualified success for Aegis, since satellites and ballistic missiles share many characteristics at certain stages of flight. But taking out a crippled satellite and destroying an attacking ballistic missile are not the same thing. Most importantly, the satellite's trajectory was known in great detail and it could not maneuver under its own power. That's not the case for enemy ballistic missiles, which have unknown trajectories for large portions of their flights (though we can often guess where they're headed). Advanced missiles, moreover, are likely to be able to maneuver themselves midcourse and release decoys to confuse the missile-defense interceptors. Since
Finally, Navy personnel were able to choose the location and timing of the intercept. This allowed them to maximize visibility, to wait until the seas were calm enough for an ideal launch, and to keep as many radars and telescopes as necessary nearby to guide the interceptor and track the launch. The satellite was also several times larger than a ballistic missile would have been and was therefore easier to see.
That said, the fact that the Pentagon was able to reprogram missile-defense hardware for an anti-satellite shot in roughly a month is a geopolitically loaded development.
For the first time ever, the United States will use a ship-based missile to take out a satellite. In the next day or two, the world will witness a modified weapons capability that will have significant policy implications. But it's the "how" story behind the scenes that has Russia sweating.
The spy satellite malfunctioned hours after reaching orbit in December 2006. When re-entry became imminent beginning in January of this year, the U.S. Navy got busy computer coding. The Navy can now outfit a standard missile (SM-3) that was designed for intercepting other missiles with a new brain that gives it the ability to target spacecraft. In this instance, the missiles will come from an Aegis cruiser, but ground-based missiles like the ones the United States wants to put in Poland can be larger and have farther range.
Theresa Hitchens, director of the space security program at the Center for Defense Information, noted the comments of General James E. Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said in a press conference that it took the Navy three weeks to reconfigure the new targeting software. The implication? Hitchens told me:
If [the United States] wanted to develop that type of software (that could be downloaded into the missiles that would be placed in Poland), we could in a very short period of time. So I understand why the Russians might be pretty nervous about this."
A little software change, in other words, could end up posing a big threat to strategic spacecraft in the future. General Cartwright insisted this new capability will be executed on a "one-time reversible basis." But there's no way the U.S. military would throw away the keys to a new generation of missiles. The Russians would probably prefer that this Pandora's box not be opened, but once it is, all space-faring countries are going to have a new threat to worry about.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about a U.S. spy satellite that had gone haywire and might need to be shot down. I noted how diplomatically sensitive it would be for the United States to do so after telling China that anti-satellite tests are a big no-no. Some commentators downplayed the possibility that the United States would really shoot the satellite down, but now comes word that it's gonna happen: The U.S. military will use its missile-defense system to blow the errant satellite to smithereens.
Mind you, a missile-defense system is not supposed to be a dual-use satellite killer. U.S. officials have pledged compliance with space and weapons treaties by giving other countries advance notice before shooting off space missiles. They also insist the move is necessary to prevent contamination from toxic substances and is not a showcase of U.S. weapons capability. Still, in the wake of the Chinese satellite missile hoopla, it smacks of "Anything you can do, I can do better."
What's more, shooting the satellite down could create orbital debris, which was a major point of criticism after the Chinese experiment. U.S. officials insist the Chinese test was different in nature as it was higher in altitude and the resulting debris poses a much longer-term threat. They estimate the mess from the U.S. operation will fall to the Earth within a few weeks, whereas debris from the Chinese test will be a danger for decades.
Meanwhile, Russia and
Recent reports from European diplomats have revealed a worrisome development: Iran is testing a new, more sophisticated type of centrifuge for enriching uranium. On a technical level, this demonstrates the skills of Iran's engineers, who appear to have applied "considerable technical creativity" to solve problems caused by manufacturing limitations along with export controls and sanctions. Politically, it demonstrates that Iran has, for now, no intention of bowing to U.N. Security Council demands and ceasing its enrichment activities.
Dubbed the IR-2, Iran's new centrifuge model is an Iranian-designed variant of the P-2 centrifuge used in Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. The original P-2 design, obtained by
Even though the IR-2 appears to be easier for
While not proof that
That said, relatively little concrete information on this development is in the public domain. Watch this space for more detailed commentary when the IAEA releases its next report, hopefully at the end of the month.
Wired's Megan McCarthy took a look at where employees at Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are sending their campaign donations:
Microsoft employees have donated a total of about $130,000 to Clinton, far more than any of the other six major candidates, according to a searchable database of the political donations at Fundrace, a project of the Huffington Post.
At Google, donations favored Obama over the New York senator by $97,771 to $46,610.
Yahoo staff also donated more money to Obama's campaign by almost two-thirds.
Here's the full breakdown. Not so many Republicans in Silicon Valley, eh?
When pricing a house next door to the contaminated site of a former uranium smelter, even a house with waterfront access, most realtors would aim low. In Sydney, though, one such house is on the market for roughly $3.6 million. The realtor describes the site nearby, full of radioactive dirt contaminated with "traces" of uranium and thorium, as just "a slight variation from the norm."
Not surprisingly, the house has been on the market for awhile. Many potential buyers have expressed interest, but so far nobody has purchased it (the crackle of Geiger counters from across the street may have something to do with this). As nuclear power expands, though, it is worth examining just how dangerous such contamination can really be.
Few specifics about the case in Sydney have been released, but it is possible to speak generally about the materials involved. Uranium is only mildly radioactive, and exposure even to high levels of uranium is not known to cause cancer (high levels, if ingested, can cause kidney and tissue damage, though). So, "traces" of it are unlikely to be dangerous. Thorium can give you cancer if you inhale it in large amounts (or possibly when you ingest it), but has not been known to cause birth defects or fertility problems, as some other radioactive materials can. Again, "traces" of thorium are likely harmless.
The wild card in this situation is the radioactivity from the soil. When certain types of powerful radiation encounter everyday materials, those materials can become "activated." In other words, they become radioactive (to a weaker degree) themselves. However, after nearly a century, the soil at this site in Sydney would have reverted to a very low, though perhaps above "background," level of radioactivity. (The New South Wales government and an independent consultancy say the radiation level is higher than background, but safe.)
While a higher than usual level of radiation in the area sounds scary, it is probably not all that dangerous. Many studies have found that constant exposure to low levels of radiation does not pose a health risk. One study, performed by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, found no increased cancer risk for people living near 62 large nuclear facilities. If nuclear power spreads, we should remain vigilant, but there is no need for paranoia.
More than 95 percent of international telephone and data traffic travels via undersea cables. Knowing that, it's still surprising that an accident in Egypt can bring down most of the Internet... in India. Today, Internet users from Cairo to Calcutta are either without the Web or their service is operating at a fraction of its normal capacity. The culprit? A ship off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, dragged its anchor and snagged two major underwater telecommunications cables. Unfortunately for Internet addicts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, and India, the SeaMeWe-4 and FLAG Europe-Asia cables, which carry the majority of Internet service between Western Europe and the Middle East and South Asia, were the ones cut. See the handy map below from the folks at TeleGeography for the specifics:
Stephan Beckert at TeleGeography told me that cuts to undersea cables are actually quite common, but rarely does it happen to two cables at once—and to cables that bear so much traffic. Of course, disasters do happen: Internet and telephone service in Asia was disrupted for weeks in December 2006 after nine undersea cables were damaged due to a big earthquake off the coast of Taiwan. But there's not as much risk of disruption when there are a host of other cables (such as between, say, North American and Europe) for traffic to spill onto. Here's a fascinating map of the traffic our current system of underwater cables can handle:
It's unclear when normal service could be restored to the affected countries; it could be a few days or as long as two weeks. The Arabist, an anonymous blogger based in Egypt, sarcastically predicts "complete social breakdown" when people find themselves unable to update Facebook every few minutes. Here's hoping it doesn't come to that.
A U.S. spy satellite has gone rogue and will likely come crashing down to the surface sometime in the next month or two. That's bad news, as the satellite is roughly the size of a school bus and may contain hazardous material. (The largest historical instance of "uncontrolled entry" was Skylab, which crashed and burned in 1979 in the Indian Ocean and the western Australian outback. Luckily, nobody was hurt.)
The satellite's fall to Earth presents an interesting dilemma for the U.S. administration. Let gravity take its course, and there's a chance innocent people could get hurt. Shoot it down, and the Bush administration might get into diplomatic trouble with China and create an unintended international precedent. Remember when, after China's anti-satellite missile test last January, the United States was harshly critical of the Chinese government? If the United States is now forced to shoot its own satellite down, it may only reinforce the impression abroad that America just does whatever it wants in space, but looks askance at strategic space activities by other countries. Beijing may leap at the chance to accuse Washington of promoting a double standard.
This is exactly why it's time to push for an international treaty banning space weapons, opponents of the weaponization of the final frontier might argue. I don't want space missiles from other countries pointed at my house any more than the next guy, but I do wonder if a space arms race isn't the more likely outcome. The capabilities space affords corporations and governments are just too powerful to leave unprotected, unfortunately, and the Chinese probably see "Star Wars" as one area where they can catch up with the United States.
Tyler Cowen relays some disturbing news:
It turns out, by the way, that the world's supply of Cavendish bananas -- the ones we eat -- is endangered by disease (more here) and many experts believe the entire strain will vanish. Most other banana strains are much harder to cultivate and transport on a large scale, so enjoy your bananas while you can. The previous and supposedly tastier major strain of banana -- Gros Michel -- is already gone and had disappeared by the 1950s, again due to disease. Today, European opposition to GMO is one factor discouraging progress in developing a substitute and more robust banana crop.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has just officially unveiled its plans to build the world's first carbon-neutral city. Situated on Abu Dhabi's desert outskirts, "Masdar City" is designed from the ground up to be the first completely environmentally sustainable city and a hub for renewable energy research. The UAE's rulers hope Masdar will eventually house at least 1,500 businesses and 50,000 people, powered by solar and other renewable energy sources.
Residents will be able to get by on foot, despite the region's blistering climate, thanks to architectural techniques that promote shading and help generate cooling breezes. Stops for the city's solar-powered "personalized rapid transport pods" will be no further than 200 meters apart. Lord Norman Foster, the founder and head of the architectural firm in charge of the Masdar development, said the project "promises to set new benchmarks for the sustainable city of the future." Is he right? Is the project even viable?
Ann Rappaport, an urban and environmental policy specialist at Tufts University, spoke with FP about the project a while back. She seems to share Foster's optimism:
[F]or almost everything, it's easier to do it right the first time. That's true of a new building versus renovating an old building, [so] why shouldn't it be true of [building] a new city, [rather] than transforming an old one? ...
[Y]ou can think about spatial patterns, you can think about their notion of creating walkable spaces... shading—all these things that we now understand to be very important to our carbon budget. We just weren't thinking about that hundreds of years ago when our major world capitals were developed. So that's exciting.... [Your first reaction may be that this is] a city in the middle of a place that others might define as a desert. On the other hand, I think that climate change is challenging us all to think about where the good locations are for human development.... When many of the world's foremost cities were developed, we were looking at transportation access by boat, and now that means that these cities are really vulnerable to sea level rise... [T]he prospect looks attractive, and perhaps the devil's in the details, but it’s not a ludicrous concept.
No country needs this type of innovative thinking about the environment more than the UAE, designated by the World Wildlife Fund as the country with the world's worst per capita ecological footprint. Obviously, one project is not enough to exonerate the country's wasteful and unsustainable practices. But at least it's a start.
How do you provide healthcare to citizens in a country where nearly 75 percent of the population lives in the country, and more than 75 percent of the country's doctors live in cities? India's answer: telemedicine.
The Indian government has been investing in the technology to make healthcare accessible and affordable for the country's rural population, according to The Lancet. Telemedicine works like a regular medical consultation—except the doctor is on a computer screen peering through a webcam, and the patient's vitals are monitored by traditional equipment such as stethoscopes hooked up to computers (a more precise explanation can be found here and here). Sometimes a general physician is present, but the specialist reading and interpreting the information is located remotely.
The country's first telemedicine center was established in the state of Andhra Pradesh in 2000, and since then many analysts have come to believe that telemedicine "could be the future for health care in India." Today, there are about 500 telemedicine centers across the country, linked to about 50 specialist hospitals. So far the centers have provided "teleconsultations" to an estimated 150,000 patients—a drop in the ocean in a country of more than 1 billion. According to anecdotal accounts, however, initial skepticism about "impersonal" health consultations is waning and patients who have been treated through telemedicine appear satisfied with the care. Meanwhile, public-private partnerships are continuing to expand the size and the scope of telemedicine facilities.
Telemedicine, like the use of cellphones for health, could be a revolutionary step in medical provision for the poor. Rural residents won't need to travel as great a distance in order to access sophisticated medical treatment, and doctors won't need to move to rural areas. As of now, telemedicine consultations cost around $22—still beyond the reach of most Indians. But the government is promising to provide the consultations free of charge for the poor, though it's not clear if this is entirely feasible since many clinics are operated privately.
But as revolutionary as it might be, the growth of long-distance medicine raises some questions about accountability. What happens if a patient is misdiagnosed, or sent away with a clean bill of health when there is actually an underlying problem? Can anyone fairly be held responsible? Nonetheless, it does seem like the benefits at the moment outweigh the risks. As one surgeon and hospital director argues:
In terms of disease management, there is [a] 99% possibility that the person who is unwell does not require [an] operation. If you don't operate you don't need to touch the patient. And if you don't need to touch the patient, you don't need to be there.
Come to think of it, there's no reason to think Indian specialists and doctors couldn't start treating patients in this manner who hail from anywhere in the world, including the United States. Indeed, Indian doctors are already providing diagnostic interpretation of radiological images, including X-rays, CTs and MRIs, for American patients from hospitals in places as far away as Bangalore.
Today India's Tata Motors unveiled the $2,500 Tata Nano, a tiny four-door "People's Car." Some industry analysts say it could revolutionize Indian society the way the Ford Model T did in the United States 100 years ago. Unsurprisingly, Thomas Friedman has already warned Indians not to follow the first world and turn their country into one filled with even more traffic congestion and air pollution. We'll have to wait and see how many takers there are for the Nano, but meanwhile, here's a Nano vs. Model T comparison:
|Introductory Price||$2,500||$850 (about $19,000 in 2006)|
|Number of cylinders||2||4|
|Top speed||60 mph (97 km per hour)||45 mph (72 km per hour)|
|Fuel economy||50 miles per gallon (21 km per liter)||13-21 miles per gallon (5.5-9 km per liter)|
|Windshield wiper||Just 1||A vacuum-powered wiper could be added to the driver's side of the 1926 model for $3.50|
Photos: RAVEENDRAN/AFP/Getty Images; INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP/Getty Images
Nearly a year ago, Passport noted that Finnish PM Matti VanHanen, ever the classy guy, dumped his girlfriend via a text message. Ha, ha. But in the Muslim world, apparently there's a serious debate going on as to whether divorce by SMS is valid, and some countries have even had to explicitly ban the practice. In Egypt, however, the law remains unclear:
An Egyptian woman is seeking clarification from a court on whether her husband's declaration of divorce by text message is legally valid, a state-run newspaper reported on Thursday.
After missing a call from her husband on her mobile phone, Iqbal Abul Nasr received a text message from him saying "I divorce you because you didn't answer your husband," Al-Akhbar said.
In line with sharia (Islamic law) men do not need to go to court to file for divorce. A unilateral declaration of divorce by a man, repeated three times, formally ends a marriage.
Egypt actually has a hybrid legal system, meaning that contrary to what most people seem to think, sharia law is already in place in many areas of jurisprudence (though Christians have their own religious courts). A return of the caliphate is not nigh, but if you're a woman in a place like Egypt, the growing Islamicization of the country is bad news indeed. Let's hope the judge rejects this divorce-by-SMS nonsense, if he hasn't already.
I never really quite understood the rationale for having to switch off all electronic devices during airplane takeoffs and landings. The stated reason for the ban is that the devices could somehow interfere with the plane's operation or ignite a fire after a crash.
But Boeing apparently has some more serious kinks to work out with its newest jet, the 787 Dreamliner, which already has 800 advance orders ahead of its November launch. The Federal Aviation Administration fears that a new feature on the plane that allows passengers to connect their mobile computers to the Internet may allow a terrorist to disrupt the plane's control systems. This is especially worrisome, as we know that many terrorists have advanced engineering degrees and could be familiar with how to carry out just such an operation. The Web sites of jihadist sympathizers are often very professionally done and have sophisticated encryption features.
With airport security bans as stringent as they already are, I wouldn't be surprised if an outright ban on electronic devices in the cabin were instituted in the near future. That ought to boost the approval ratings of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration.
The World Bank released a report Wednesday entitled Global Economic Prospects 2008: Technology Diffusion in the Developing World. As the name implies, the report details what kind of technical progress developing countries are making—how many people have computers, access to the Internet, that kind of thing. The report is quite long, so I'm going to focus on a few key points:
The number of people living in absolute poverty in developing countries has decreased from 29 percent in 1990 to 18 percent in 2004. This is one of the upsides of globalization and the spread of technology. As technology spreads to poor countries, incomes grow. Yet as the World Bank acknowledges, it's very difficult to quantitatively prove a relationship between technology and income growth, so the causation here is murky.
There is a large technology gap between the rich and poor. This is one of the downsides of globalization. A good example of this phenomenon is India. India has a robust high-tech industry concentrated in its cities. However, in poorer rural areas less than 10 percent of people have access to a telephone let alone a computer, according to the Bank's own figures. Such stratification is dangerous and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Look at income growth in the United States over the last few decades: the gap between the rich and the poor has grown dramatically. Once this separation starts, it's hard to stop.
Developing countries have difficulty absorbing new technologies and are incapable of innovations. Because of low literacy rates and infrastructure shortcomings in poor rural areas, poor countries have difficulty embracing technology. For instance, computers are great, but are pretty worthless if the person trying to use one can't read. And cell phones are a great way to connect people, but many rural areas in developing countries don't get coverage. These difficulties embracing basic technology make it impossible to innovate.
The spread of technology is inevitable, and it does have enormous benefits. But the second and third points listed above have dangerous implications. Once the fortunes of rich and poor begin to diverge, the trend is nearly impossible to reverse. And problems in developing countries make it very difficult to get technology into the hands of the poor. Hundreds of millions of people are being dug into a technological hole that they can't emerge from. They're being left behind by the global economy.
It might not surprise you to learn that Big Brother looms large in places like China and Russia. But Britain and the United States are near the bottom of the heap too. According to a new study of 47 countries by Privacy International, a human-rights watchdog based in London, those four countries fall in the bottom tier of countries where government surveillance is used extensively. Other locales in the bottom group, labeled "endemic surveillance societies," are Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. The only place where Privacy International considers there to be "adequate safeguards against abuse" is Greece. And the only country where the surveillance situation is improving for citizens is Slovenia.
Granted, the vast majority of Africa is not included in the study, and much of Latin America is overlooked too. Nevertheless, countries where you'd think civil liberties would be the most protected don't do so well. Australia, France, and most of Scandinavia fall in the category where there is a "systemic failure to uphold safeguards." Interestingly, places that were once part of the Soviet bloc perform relatively well. Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Slovenia are cited for having "some safeguards but weakened protection." Where does your country fit in? Click here to find out.
Each year, the cyberspace-based Edge Foundation asks leading public intellectuals a simple question. Last year, the foundation wanted to know, "What are you most optimistic about?" This year's query was, "What have you changed your mind about and why?"
The answers are dense, arcane, and often fascinating.
There a few converts to climate change, including Wired's Chris Anderson. One of the most surprising entries is that of Philip Campbell, the editor in chief of Nature, who comes out in favor of "enhancement drugs" under certain conditions. Sacha Baron-Cohen's brainy cousin Simon, a psychologist at Cambridge, has come to believe that "biology has little time for equality." FP contributor Daniel Kahneman has some new thoughts on what makes us happy. And I had never realized that Brian Eno was once a Mao fan, though I'm glad to see he's seen the light.
As for me, I used to be pessimistic about our ability to solve environmental problems but am becoming much less so, with one glaring exception: I don't think we're going to avert climate change. What about you? Email Passport with your own flip-flops.
(Hat tip: Tyler Cowen)
Reducing dependence on foreign sources of energy is a stated policy goal of the United States. You might think, therefore, that the United States would be eager to take part in an international research effort to harness the energy released by fusion reactions like those that occur in the Sun. But you'd be wrong. Congress just cut the U.S. contribution to the $12 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, a collaboration between the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Russia.
In theory, fusion technology has the ability to provide massive amounts of energy with less radioactive waste and little pollution. Sounds good, right? Of course, the technology is very experimental and rife with such minor problems as, oh, how to heat atomic nuclei to the 100 million degrees required in a fusion reaction and still generate more energy than was used in the process. It may sound like something from Star Trek, but the rewards that could be gained by investing in such technology are astonishing. The United States might someday be able to retire older nuclear fission plants, reduce coal power emissions, and maybe even end imports of oil from unstable regions of the world.
Too bad the U.S. Congress doesn't feel the same way. Along with slashing technology budgets in other areas of crucial R&D research, Congress couldn't be bothered with funding a $149 million commitment to the ITER project for the upcoming year. The 2008 energy and water bill does provide funding for alternative technologies such as solar power ($200 million), ethanol ($250 million) and hydrogen-cell cars ($235.4 million). Fossil fuels managed to grab the biggest piece of the "alternative energy" pie with $708.8 million in funding.
With all the gains that might someday be realized by fusion technology for such a small investment, it makes you wonder where the United States' priorities really lie.
Passport would be remiss this year if it failed to mention that December 2007 is the 10th anniversary of the coining of the word "weblog."
Jorn Barger (the man in the photo) is widely credited with inventing the word "Weblog" on Dec. 17 or Dec. 23 (the exact date seems to vary depending on the source) of 1997 when describing the list of links he had posted on his Web site Robot Wisdom. This list logged sites he stumbled upon while surfing the Web. According to the Wall Street Journal, Barger wrote on his site on Dec. 23, 1997:
I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis.
Barger, who apparently has continued his blogging at this site, seems to be an eccentric character, who purportedly loves James Joyce and who has been accused of being anti-Semitic. Recently, though, Wired magazine was able to track him down and get him to share 10 tips for novice bloggers.
Technically, Barger isn't the first blogger. Justin Hall, for example, chronicled his life online from 1994 to 2005. But Barger is the first to make regular postings using the term "Weblog." (The word "blog" seems to have originated in 1999 when Peter Merholz deconstructed "weblog" into "we blog" in the sidebar of his Web site.) The phenomenon that Barger and others started has today exploded into a cacophony of more than 100 million blogs.
Catholic clergy in Italy have had a lot to get upset about recently. First, Italian Catholics who have a custom of carrying around tiny pictures of saints in their wallets and purses no longer have to worry about their santini becoming worn and tattered. Instead, they can buy a €3 ($4.50 U.S.) weekly subscription from a Milan-based company that lets them download images of three saints onto their mobile phones. (Did Italians ever consider just laminating their santini?) Accompanying prayers cost about 50 U.S. cents, which sounds like a bargain. But a bishop complained to La Stampa newspaper that the downloadable saints are "in really bad taste."
What's really in bad taste, though, is a recent TV commercial for Red Bull energy drink. It was pulled in Italy after a priest complained that it depicted the nativity scene in a "sacrilegious way." The ad shows four wise men, not three, visiting baby Jesus. The fourth wise man offered the infant cans of Red Bull. The commercial ends with fluttering angels in the sky chugging Red Bull and illustrating the company's slogan, "Red Bull gives you wings." You can watch it here:
Of course, Christianity isn't the only religion in which connecting to God via mobile phones has caused a stir. Ring tones that feature Koranic verses and azan, calls to prayer, have had a mixed reception in the Muslim world, as FP noted earlier this year.
Culture almost always takes time to adapt to new technologies. In the 19th century, Muslims were divided about gramophone recordings of their holy book. Saudi clerics denounced the television when it was first introduced to the kingdom. But except for groups such as the Amish, people the world over seem to have found ways to make religion and technology compatible. Some people just need more time to adapt than others.
In India, what was supposed to be a promising "e-government" service has been withdrawn after it became misused as a tool for harassing young women.
Last year, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh started out with an innovative service that was supposed to promote transparency: People could use their mobile phones to text-message a car's license-plate number, and would then receive a message with information about the vehicle, including its date of purchase, the taxes and fees paid on it, and the name, address, and phone number of the owner. The details could assist someone buying a used car or a police officer who quickly needed information about a vehicle involved in an accident, theft, or other crime. (Sounds like it could've also been used to track down someone who cut you off in traffic.)
Instead, it became a way for men to get the contact info of young women drivers and then harass them. The state's Transport Department received a number of complaints from women who were being harassed. Those complaints—along with the fact that the volume of messages sent to the department had jumped "several fold"—caused the texting service to be withdrawn.
The whole story raises questions about how much information should be made publicly available in this day and age. Records of people's births, divorces, house sales, crimes, and, in some cases, even incomes have been publicly available in many places for a long time. But accessing those records usually required a trip to city hall, filling out forms, and paying photocopying and postage fees. Now, in more places around the world, we can access the juicy details of people's lives—such as whether their houses are in foreclosure—all while wearing our pajamas in front of our home computers.
We've all heard about cars powered by wacky biofuels, including switchgrass and leftover French fry oil. Now, two British men who love the environment are trekking from Britain to Timbuktu in a truck whose fuel comes from cocoa butter extracted from waste chocolate (as in, like, misshapen Easter bunnies).
The vehicle is a Ford Iveco cargo truck, and as it travels 4,500 miles to Timbuktu, it will burn 2,000 liters of biodiesel originating from 4,000 kg (8,800 lbs.) of misshapen chocolate. That's enough of the sweet stuff to make 80,000 chocolate bars.
On Friday, the chocomobile crossed the English Channel by ferry, and after a sweet ride through France and Spain, it will hop onto another ferry to Morocco. Once it vrooms through Mauritania, it will plow through Mali's deserts until it arrives at Timbuktu, the city once regarded in the West as being at the ends of the Earth and which today is in a region that is being buried under sand.
The two Brits behind this stunt are, of course, trying to bring attention to biodiesel, a renewable resource that generates lower carbon emissions than fossil fuels. It seems unlikely that fueling vehicles with cocoa butter could be achieved at a large scale—that would require a tremendous amount of chocolate or, perhaps, tanning oil—but if the men's journey makes more people aware of the benefits of biofuels in general, that would be a sweet success.
A new study published Thursday by the American Institutes for Research shows that U.S. students still lag behind their peers in Singapore, South Korea, and Japan in the critical areas of math and science education. Numerous other reports over the last several years have purported to show the same mediocre quality of the U.S. education system. In 2005, Microsoft founder Bill Gates described the U.S. high schools as "obsolete." President Bush mentioned the need for greater emphasis on math and science achievement in his 2006 State of the Union address. And just last month, an influential group of tech-industry CEOs from such companies as Cisco and Sun Microsystems added their voices to the choir of business leaders demanding changes to the U.S. education system.
But what do these reports, studies, and rankings really tell us? Not a whole lot, according to Vivek Wadhwa, whose recent article in BusinessWeek debunks many of the common misconceptions about U.S. math and science education. Even Singapore's minister of education has downplayed the importance of such rankings, despite Singapore's first-place status:
[The U.S.] is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well--like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."
The World Economic Forum's recent 2007/2008 Global Competitiveness Report supports that conclusion. In it, the United States maintained its position as the world's most innovative economy despite the shoddy performance of its math and science education, which ranked 45th. Singapore, meanwhile, stayed in first place in math and science education but came in at a disappointing 23rd in capacity for innovation and 22nd for the availability of scientists and engineers—10 places below the United States in the same category.
Even if U.S. math and science education is not completely inadequate, there is still one area in which the United States can vastly improve: geography. Miss South Carolina's less-than-shining moment earlier this year was no fluke; National Geographic's 2006 Survey of Geographic Literacy found that 63 percent of young people in the United States could not find Iraq on a map and 50 percent couldn't even locate New York.
Astronomers may soon discover the ultimate answer to climate change. A NASA-funded team of astronomers in the United States has just discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star called 55 Cancri. So far, 55 Cancri boasts the most number of planets found in a single solar system outside our own. What's got scientists excited, though, is that the planet falls into the "Goldilocks" category—meaning that the planet's area of space is a "habitable zone" that is neither too hot nor too cold to support liquid water.
The newly discovered planet itself is not somewhere anyone would want to live. Dubbed "55 Cancri f," it's a giant ball of gas 45 times the mass of Earth, roughly like Saturn, and orbits 55 Cancri every 260 days. It's really the neighborhood around 55 Cancri f that has astronomers so enthused, because many of them believe that liquid water could exist on the surface of undiscovered moons or rocky planets nearby. Debra Fischer, assistant professor of astronomy at San Francisco State University, explains:
Right now, we are looking at a gap between the 260-day orbit of the new planet and the 14-year orbit of another gas giant, and if you had to bet, you'd bet that there is more orbiting stuff there."
Berkeley astronomy professor Geoffrey Marcy believes that a rocky, Earth-like planet could be revealed in this space within five years. But don't count on an Earth substitute any time soon—scientists still don't have the technology to view small, potentially rocky planets within this Goldilocks zone just yet, let alone visit them. It so happens that 55 Cancri is 41 light years from Earth. That could pose a problem, since even distant Pluto is roughly 6 light
years hours from the Sun, depending on where it is in its orbit.
In December, a German and Italian-made laboratory module will be added to the International Space Station. This development raised some interesting questions about the legal frameworks that govern the cosmos during Humans in Outer Space – Interdisciplinary Odysseys, a conference held in Vienna in October by the European Science Foundation.
Dr Frans von der Dunk, a scholar at the International Institute of Air and Space Law at the University of Leiden, rejected the notion that U.S. law applies to the entire station:
It was agreed that each state registers its own separate elements, which means that you now have a piece of the US annexed to a piece of Europe annexed to a piece of Japan in outer space, legally speaking."
But what laws cover other outer space territories? The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits earth-bound nations from claiming outer space territories. The moon, for instance, cannot be claimed by any country. But this ambiguity raises other questions. As conference attendees noted, "It is also not clear what legal nationality a child born on the Moon would have."
(Hat tip: Slashdot)
Remember the case of Shi Tao? He's a Chinese journalist who was imprisoned back in 2004 for supposedly leaking state secrets by writing an e-mail to a New York-based pro-democracy group, describing how the Chinese government planned to crack down on local media covering the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Yahoo supplied information about Shi's e-mail address to the Chinese authorities, leading to his arrest and 10-year prison sentence.
Finally, Yahoo is issuing a mea culpa for its role in the case. More specifically, Yahoo's top lawyer is apologizing for failing to tell the U.S. Congress that Yahoo knew more about the case than it claimed in testimony given last year. U.S. lawmakers have been querying Yahoo about its business practices in China for the past couple years. Last year, Callahan said that Yahoo had no information about the Chinese government's wishes for customer information. Lo and behold, it turns out Yahoo was in possession of an order from Beijing seeking information about Shi. Callahan's apology comes in advance of another Congressional hearing next week about the challenges and moral quandaries that U.S. companies like Yahoo face in doing business in authoritarian places such as China. It's great that Yahoo is starting to come clean, but that's undoubtedly little comfort to Shi Tao, who still has at least another seven years to go in prison.
Starting tomorrow, the United States will experience "Movember," a month when men from all ages and walks of life will sport a distinctive mustache, ranging from a little fuzz to an outright walrus look. Don't worry, it's all for a good cause: to raise awareness about prostate cancer, a disease that affects one in six men in the United States.
Since it started in Australia in 2003, Movember—which combines the Australian slang for mustache (mo') with the designated mo-growing month of November—the annual event has raised more than $8 million. Participants, known as "Mo Bros," take donations in exchange for not shaving their upper lips for a month. The money then goes to the main prostate-cancer charity in the home country of the participant. Movember now has official Web sites for six countries, and people from other countries are still able to register and participate.
The Wall Street Journal's Sarah Needleman seems skeptical. She writes, "Convincing... business professionals... to grow mustaches -- even for a cause -- may be tough in the U.S., where mustaches aren't currently in vogue and facial hair runs afoul of corporate grooming norms." But, um, it's not exactly a fashion statement in Australia either—which, of course, is kind of the point. As Adam Garone, one of the three co-founders of Movember, puts it:
The mustache is a vehicle to get [men] talking... What we say is you're essentially donating your face for a month. You become a walking billboard because you walk into a meeting and you're forced to explain yourself."
Indeed, the success of Movember largely depends on men in the corporate world taking a risk to grow a mo'. During the past few years, the competitive spirit in the world of finance has translated into big bucks for prostate-cancer research—around 25 percent of the total Movember money raised, according to Garone. It will be interesting to see how Movember does in its first year in the United States. And it will be almost as interesting to see hordes of Wall Street bankers with their new looks. Good luck, Mo Bros!
UPDATE: Passport reader Arjew Tino writes in with a hard-hitting report from the Movember crowd in DC.
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