Category Archives: Web Article Review

Surveillance in western China

Der Spiegel describes the Chinese government’s surveillance of a minority population in the western part of the country.

Beijing is equipping the far-western province with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints — tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace — from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months. Zenz estimates the number to be closer to hundreds of thousands. More precise figures are difficult to obtain. Censorship in Xinjiang is the strictest in China and its authorities the most inscrutable.

Later the article talks about reeducation camps and a point system that rates how “trustworthy” families are.

best performing urban economies

Here are the world’s 10 best-performing urban economies according to Brookings.

  1. Dublin, Ireland
  2. San Jose, USA
  3. Chengdu, China
  4. San Francisco, USA
  5. Beijing, China
  6. Delhi, India
  7. Manila, Philippines
  8. Fuzhou, China
  9. Tianjin, China
  10. Xiamen, China

Here is a brief explanation of the methodology:

This Global Metro Monitor employs several key variables to assess the economic performance of metropolitan areas: gross domestic product (GDP), employment, population, and GDP per capita, all from 2000 to 2016. For static analysis and cross-border comparison, this study employs nominal GDP at purchasing power parity rates. For trends analysis, it uses GDP data at 2009 prices and expressed in U.S. dollars. Data availability and comparability at metropolitan level precluded expanding the economic analysis to other indicators of interest, such as housing prices, employment rates, unemployment rates, and income distributions.

Clearly, there is no consideration of health, ecosystem services, or sustainability here.

U.S. housing bubble starting to deflate?

This Reuters article suggests the current U.S. housing bubble may be starting to deflate, if not pop. I don’t quite follow the logic, because it seems to suggest at the same time that the rate of housing starts is not sufficient to meet demand, and that the cost of construction is rising due to rising material, land, and labor costs. In basic economics 101 class, if there is an unmet demand, prices are supposed to rise until supply equals demand. But maybe people are just not willing or able to buy houses they want at the current market prices. What do they do instead? Again in textbook economics land, they should move to less expensive locales, buy smaller houses, live with roommates, rent extra rooms on AirBnB, etc. I guess there are all sorts of legal and cultural reasons these things don’t happen enough or fast enough for the market to equilibrate. Still, even knowing that the real world is not the textbook economic world, it’s hard to buy the argument that developers aren’t building houses because there aren’t as many houses for sale as people who want to buy houses.

Simultaneous Policy

Simultaneous Policy is an idea where multiple legislatures around the world agree to a single policy on a fairly narrow issue (like climate change or arms reductions). It’s supposed to solve the prisoner’s dilemma problem. The policy doesn’t go into effect until all or a certain number of nations agree to it. I think it’s a good idea, but idealistic because people often perceive problems as zero sum when they are not, and politicians either have the same misconceptions or cynically exploit the misconceptions of voters. And in the U.S. of course, politicians are captive to industrial interests that profit from policies that result in a loss to everyone else, while using cynical propaganda to convince voters of the opposite.

Here’s a blog post with a little more detail on how it is supposed to work:

The Simultaneous Policy (SIMPOL) will consist of a series of multi-issue global problem-solving policy packages, each of which is to be implemented by all or sufficient nations simultaneously, on the same date, so that no nation loses out. Citizens who join the campaign can contribute to the design of those policies and to getting them implemented. But how?

By joining the campaign, citizens agree to ‘give strong voting preference in all future national elections to politicians or parties that have signed a pledge to implement Simpol simultaneously alongside other governments, to the probable exclusion of those who choose not to sign’. This pledge (the ‘Pledge’) commits a politician, party or government to implement SIMPOL’s policies alongside other governments, if and when sufficient other governments have also signed on.

In this simple way, politicians who sign enhance their electoral chances, while those who refuse risk losing our votes to politicians who signed instead. Thus, in tightly contested electoral areas, failing to sign could cost a politician their seat.

 

Google Glass is back

According to Wired:

Google relaunched the gadget as a tool for businesses called Google Glass Enterprise Edition. Pilot projects have involved Boeing workers using Glass on helicopter production lines, and doctors wearing it in the examining room.

Anat Karni, product lead at Plataine, slid on a black version of Glass Tuesday to demonstrate the app. She showed how the app could tell a worker clocking in for the day about production issues that require urgent attention, and show useful information for resolving problems on the device’s display.

A worker can also talk to Plataine’s app to get help. Karni demonstrated how a worker walking into a storeroom could say “Help me select materials.” The app would respond, verbally and on the display, with what materials would be needed and where they could be found. A worker’s actions could be instantly visible to factory bosses, synced into the software Plataine already provides customers, such as Airbus, to track production operations.

Happy Earth Overshoot Day!

Earth Overshoot Day falls on August 1 this year, which is two years earlier than last year. This is another way of communicating the ecological footprint concept, which stands at 1.7 Earths (ergo, we use the equivalent of 1.7 times the Earth’s annual production of ecosystem services, meaning we are withdrawing natural capital that we will eventually deplete if the trend continues.)

cosmogenesis

Here’s a fascinating article about the possibility of creating a new universe in a laboratory (or many of them). This is not about virtual reality or artificial intelligence, this is about creating a wormhole to an actual new physical baby universe. A number of physicists think it is theoretically possible and take it seriously. This has any number of mind-bending implications. First, our own universe could have come about this way, whether created by a deity as some of us imagine or by some intelligent but fallible mortal being out there. Second, and the article goes into this, the creator of such a universe might be able to observe it but would have no control over it (although at least in theory, they might be able to actually travel to it.) Third, and the article doesn’t mention this, let’s say humanity somehow manages to survive the billions or trillions of years it would take for our own universe to run its course and begin to collapse (assuming that is going to happen), maybe this creates the possibility that our species could exist forever. Well, we have a lot of things to figure out between now and then obviously. One final thing I learned from this article is that physicists also have a theory of how our universe could have arisen completely spontaneously from nothing at all and without intervention by any external intelligent being. Even that has implications – if it could happen once, does it just continue to happen every now and then somewhere in space and time? The interesting implication there could be that intelligent life has always existed somewhere out there and always will.

There is science fiction about this of course. Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon comes to mind, and of course The Matrix. And of course, Lisa Simpson. There must be others.

fish

Fishery policy might seem like a fringe issue, but it is another disturbing example of ignorant politicians disrupting science- and evidence-based policies. This is from Pew:

When a fish population falls below a certain level, it is classified as overfished, and the MSA requires regional managers to create a plan to rebuild the species with a date for meeting the recovery goal. That timeline is based on science and accounts for environmental conditions and biological factors that can influence rebuilding, such as how long it takes the fish to reach reproductive age.

Critics of the MSA claim that the law is rigid in requiring a short timeline, but the facts say otherwise: The average timeline for rebuilding plans is close to 20 years, and most plans have recovery timelines longer than 10 years. H.R. 200 would alter the law to allow exceptions to setting science-based rebuilding timelines. It would open the door for political and other considerations to influence a major element of recovery plans, allowing managers to set arbitrary timelines that could postpone the benefits of fully rebuilt stocks indefinitely. That’s why extending rebuilding timelines would be shortsighted and counterproductive…

To prevent overfishing, the MSA requires managers to set science-based annual catch limits. H.R. 200 would exempt more fish populations from the requirement to establish science-based catch limits—which would increase the risk of overfishing.

Fisheries are a poster child for introducing complex systems. They are a straightforward physical system that is just a little complex. And yet, it is easy for a normal intelligent person to have misconceptions about how they will change over time. This is because there are lags and non-linearities in the system. Fish take a while to grow to maturity and reproduce. You can fish a seemingly abundant fish population at a high rate for awhile, but then it will seem to crash without warning and take a long time to recover. This seems unpredictable to people uneducated in systems (who may be perfectly intelligent, literate, and numerate otherwise), but is fairly easy to grasp and predict once you understand the relatively simple theory and dynamics behind it. So the fact that politicians and the population at large aren’t able to grasp this is just a failure of our education system.

Real fisheries are just a bit more complex than what I described above. This podcast from Fresh Air describes how removing the small fish species that form the base of the food chain, rather than just overfishing of larger commercial species, may have led to the Cod collapse off New England in the 1980s.

Novichok

A toxicology expert at Michigan State University says Russia (or Russians) may have used a class of extremely deadly weaponized nerve agents called Novichok to kill people inside the UK.

Novichok has been implicated in the poisoning of two couples in Great Britain, causing the death of one woman. The chemical structures of Novichok agents are not known for sure, but they bind more tightly and rapidly to their enzyme target, called acetylcholinesterase, found in nerves and muscle cells than other nerve poisons such as sarin or tabun. This causes death within minutes by making normal nerve-muscle, nerve-gland, and nerve-heart function impossible.

The deaths have been attributed to Russia, either the country’s intelligence service or a rogue who obtained them illegally. Russia vehemently denies either involvement in the poisonings or development of the Novichok chemicals…

First, the chemicals are reported by Soviet chemists to be the most potent agents ever made, with potency between 6-10 times higher than VX, the chemical used to kill the half brother of Kim Jong-Un, or sarin, the prototypical poisonous nerve gas the Iraqi government allegedly used in 1989, and which was used Syria last April. Thus extremely low doses, powder or liquid, the exact concentration of which remains unknown, are lethal.