Category Archives: Web Article Review

Project Censored’s Top 25

Project Censored has released its top 25 censored stories for 2017-2018 (2019 is available for sale as a book). Among the interesting ones:

The Florida Parkland High School shooter was a member of the school’s Junior Reserve Office Training Corps and was taught to shoot surplus military weapons by something called the Junior Marksmanship Program.

“Solutions journalism” is a relatively simple idea to offer solutions along with coverage of problems to avoid “negative news overload”.

Natural systems such as rivers are being given legal rights and even personhood in some places.

Regenerative agriculture is an idea to sequester carbon by restoring soil and vegetation on a large scale.

Cell phones might be causing miscarriages.

Also, Russia may be up to no good but at the same time the exhaustive coverage of it may be distracting us from other important issues. Opioid drugs continue to kill a lot of people. And the rich are getting richer. But I don’t think these really qualify as “breaking news” for those who have been paying attention.

Trump and the next pandemic

Add to the stupidity of the Trump administration slashing funding to prepare for and respond to the next deadly pandemic outbreak. These are the unwanted border crossings we should actually be worried about, and by helping people in countries where diseases are breaking out we could also be protecting ourselves.

The investments made after the 2014 Ebola crisis have been slashed in recent proposed federal budgets from the Centers for Disease Control, the agency that works to stop deadly diseases in their tracks, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which responds to international disasters, including the Ebola outbreak. Moreover, Timothy Ziemer, the top White House official in charge of pandemic preparedness, has left his job, and the biosecurity office he ran was summarily disbanded…

Perhaps most terrifying, difficult to treat and highly fatal strains of H7N9 avian influenza are spreading throughout China.

This strain of bird flu causes rapid respiratory illness with associated multiorgan dysfunction that’s easily spread by a small droplet. That’s why it’s so difficult to control and why recurrent epidemics continue to crop up: There have been five epidemics of H7N9 since 2013 in China alone, the most recent between the fall of 2016 and fall of 2017. Across these epidemics, among the 1,565 confirmed cases, about 40 percent of infected individuals died.

artificial spider silk

Artificial spider silk is an alternative to carbon fiber.

Amsilk is located in Martinsried, Germany, and owned by twins Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann. The Strüngmann brothers made their fortunes with Hexal, a generic drugmaker, and the company’s fibers came from research by Thomas Scheibel, a biomaterials professor at the University of Bayreuth.

The fibers are made by genetically modifying E.coli bacteria to produce spider silk proteins. These purified proteins are then dried into a silk powder, which can be put into textiles, cosmetics or used as the basis for lightweight composites.

Amsilk calls it “Biosteel” and says synthetic silk is resistant, flexible and soft, giving it an advantage over carbon fiber for use in implants and prosthetics, or even aviation. “The disadvantage of carbon is that aircraft are often grounded after a bump because parts have to be replaced,” said Amsilk boss Jens Klein. Minor damage to carbon fiber can be a big problem whereas Biosteel may be able to take the knock and remain in use.

 

the mini-recession of 2015-16

The New York Times has a nice piece of economics reporting on a downturn that affected the U.S. manufacturing, farming and energy industries in 2015 and 2016. I’ll see if I can summarize it, but really we have to admit to ourselves that spinning these narratives after the fact doesn’t mean we have the ability to predict the future.

  • China tried to slow down lending because it was worried about a bubble. The article doesn’t say how, but maybe they raised interest rates or put other requirements on banks.
  • This affected developing countries that export to China.
  • The U.S. Federal Reserve was also starting to raise interest rates because it thought growth and inflation were both starting to pick up.
  • Europe and Japan were decreasing interest rates due to low growth at time.
  • The disparity in interest rates caused a rise in the dollar, because investors pulled money out of other countries/currencies to invest in the U.S.
  • China’s currency is (partially?) pegged to the dollar, so this caused its currency to rise and hurt its exports.
  • China reduced its peg to the dollar in response to allow its currency to depreciate and help its exports. However, this caused more investors to shift money out of China and reduced growth even more.
  • Governments and companies in emerging markets had a lot of dollar-denominated debt, which was now more expensive to repay in their local currencies.
  • The slowdown in emerging markets reduced demand for oil, minerals and agricultural goods, which caused prices to drop and hurt those sectors in the U.S., along with manufacturing that serves those sectors. Some emerging countries are also active in energy, mining, and agriculture so they were also hurt.
  • This may have had political consequences both in terms of disgruntled voters in key states during the 2016 election, and the perception of increased growth following the election.

It’s pretty interesting how it is all connected, and even though it seems complex the reality is probably much more complex than the way I have tried to puzzle it out above. The lesson going forward seems to be that a slow down in China, coupled with a disparity in growth between the U.S., China, and other developed countries in Europe and Asia, can lead to recession conditions in the U.S., even if the U.S. economy is healthy at the beginning of the process. Put another way, global growth is clearly not a zero sum game as some politicians would like to try to convince us. The U.S. Federal Reserve is trying to gradually raise rates to give it some ability to respond to an event like this in the future, but it is clearly a balancing act.

this is your brain on music, but the kind matters

Here’s an interesting article on how jazz and classical music wire your brain differently.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences studied the brains of thirty pianists—half jazz players, half classical. They found, the Institute reports, that “different processes occur in jazz and classical pianists’ brains, even when performing the same piece…”

While jazz improvisation may better teach creativity, classical training, as neuroscientist Ardon Shorr argues in his TEDx talk above, may better train the brain in information processing. These studies show that the effect of music on the brain cannot be studied without regard for the differing neurological demands of different kinds of music, just as the study of language processing cannot be limited to just one language.

As a classically trained musician (okay, an out of practice, amateur one at best but I did put significant time and effort into it in my youth), I can vouch for taking a jazz improv class once and being completely out of my depth. But the other students were all jazz musicians and nobody was really interested in bringing me along as a beginner. I also took a class once called “far out improv” with other classical musicians and a teacher who was specifically interested in teaching classical musicians to improvise, and I remember that being very cool. I’ve never heard or experienced anything like that since so it must have been unusual.

what’s up with solar roadways

This article from “The Conversation” surveys a number of solar road installations around the world. It is pretty down on them, saying they are less efficient and less cost-effective than solar panels on solar farms or rooftops. Okay, but it never says they make bad roads. So where this has been tried, you have functioning roads that didn’t generate electricity before and now do. Most technologies have a tendency to improve and come down in cost over time, so the fact that these pilot projects are up and running and generating power without major mishap doesn’t seem to me like a reason to give up on the idea.

The exponential climate action roadmap

This report from the “Global Climate Action Summit” outlines a plan to actually meet the Paris agreement.

The Paris Agreement’s goal to reduce the risk of dangerous
climate change can be achieved if greenhouse gas emissions
peak by 2020, halve by 2030 and then halve again by 2040
and 2050. This is now technologically feasible and economically
attractive but the world is not on this path.

They identify actions in energy, industry, buildings, transport, food, agricultural, and forestry, as well as carbon capture and storage technology.

Here’s one more paragraph that caught my eye:

If current diffusion rates of renewable energy technology continue into the 2020s, the sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels before 2030 will create “stranded assets” – worthless pipelines, coal mines and oil wells – which could lead to losses on the scale of trillions of dollars by 2035. China and parts of Europe importing fossil fuels stand to benefit most from the bursting carbon bubble, while the US, Canada, Russia and others stand to lose an estimated $4 trillion if climate action falters now and so requiring stronger policies later to avoid catastrophes

The Economist on the next financial crisis

The Economist joins the chorus warning that another financial crisis could be in the cards. They offer three reasons:

  1. There is too much lending against real estate and not enough to businesses that generate real value.
  2. The U.S. dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, but political pressure may prevent the Federal Reserve from flooding the world with dollars in a future crisis like it has in the past.
  3. The Euro is still dangerously unstable.

the Cascadia subduction zone

A major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be really ugly, according to the New Yorker.

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater… The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable…

In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. fema projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.

…we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten.