Category Archives: Web Article Review

election hacking

Looking for the declassified report on Russian election hacking. Look no further. Here are a couple juicy phrases from the whopping 25 page report:

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence…

Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards. DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.

I agree with Trump on virtually nothing, but I agree with him on one thing. These are the same people who brought us weapons of mass destruction. Which will always undermine their credibility in my eyes, along with the President, the State Department, Congress and the New York Times. I was a naive, trusting, patriotic young adult when I figured out that I had been lied to by basically all the branches of government and the media I trusted to keep an eye on them. And that was long before I read Legacy of Ashes and realized just how pathetic the CIA is and just how good the KGB is and always has been. And of course, that is who we are dealing with here.

Meddling in another sovereign country’s elections is one the worst things a country could do, right? Certainly the greatest democracy in the world, let alone the greatest democracy in the history of the world, would never do that, right? Well, the CIA isn’t good at spying, which is why the U.S. lost the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War. They never really understood the motivations of the Soviet Union because they had no real intelligence on it whatsoever, whereas the KGB infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels all along. But the CIA was always actually pretty good at influencing elections and they have done it often, sometimes with and sometimes without the knowledge of the President and Congress.

Here’s an article about the U.S. and Russia meddling in elections around the world. So I don’t like the fact that the Russians meddled in our election, and I hate the outcome of the election, but there is some element of hypocrisy in our government expressing such moral outrage about it.

Partisan electoral interventions by the great powers: Introducing the PEIG Dataset

Six decades of rigorous scholarship have greatly increased our knowledge about the causes and effects of various military and non-military forms of foreign interventions.

One blind spot in the international relations (IR) literature on interventions has been interventions designed to affect election results in foreign countries; i.e. as most famously occurred in Italy’s 1948 parliamentary election and more recently in the 2009 Afghan presidential elections. Despite a few, very recent exceptions (Corstange and Marinov, 2012; Levin, 2016; Shulman and Bloom, 2012), such interventions have not been studied by quantitative IR scholars who have preferred to focus on more violent or usually more overt types of interventions.2

However by not studying partisan electoral interventions, quantitative IR scholars miss an important, common form of intervention. Between 1946 and 2000, the US and the Soviet Union/Russia have intervened in about one of every nine competitive national-level executive elections. Partisan electoral interventions have been found to have had significant effects on election results, frequently determining the identity of the winner (Levin, 2016). Overt interventions of this kind have also been found to have significant effects on the views of the target public toward the intervener (Corstange and Marinov, 2012). Some qualitative scholars who have studied particular cases of electoral interventions at times credit, or blame, them with playing an important role in the subsequent nature of the regime in the target country and influencing the direction of its domestic and foreign policies (Rabe, 2006: chap. 5; Trachtenberg, 1999: 128–132). With the growing realization among IR scholars of the importance of regime type (Huth and Allee, 2002; Park, 2013 Ray, 1995; Reiter and Stam, 1998; Russett, 1993) and, more recently, the nature of the leader in power (Chiozza and Choi, 2003; Colgan, 2013; Horowitz, 2014; Keller and Foster, 2010; Potter, 2007) for their countries’ foreign and domestic policies, electoral interventions are a factor that cannot be ignored.

EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2017

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has released its annual energy outlook 2017. In their economic modeling exercises, some of the interesting things that happen are that oil demand stays relatively flat, natural gas demand continues to grow, coal continues to fall, and renewables continue to grow through 2040 although they don’t reach a higher share of the total supply than natural gas or oil. Carbon emissions fall or stay relatively flat in most scenarios, which is interesting but remember that flat emissions that are still too high will cause atmospheric greenhouse gases to continue growing at a steady rate. Some of the most interesting graphs are emissions intensity per dollar of economic output and emissions per unit of energy used, which both fall over time but again this does not guarantee that the atmosphere is healing itself, only becoming sicker at a slower rate.

Thomas More’s utopia

Here’s an interesting article on Thomas More’s utopia from the 1500s. He envisioned a series of economically specialized medium-scale cities (a couple hundred thousand people, keeping in mind a million-person city was enormous at the time and there were only a few in the world) separated by farm and natural lands and connected by transportation links.

Dodd-Frank

After the risk of war, and the existential but somewhat abstract long-term catastrophe of climate change, the scariest risk we might face in the next 4-8 years is a roll-back of the limited protections put in place against a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis, or something worse. Trump is appointing people who are likely to make that happen. If the world is not in Great Depression 2.0 already, this could usher it in. I think it is entirely possible the world has entered a long-term economic downward spiral masked by the usual noise of ups and downs. This is from the blog Baseline Scenario:

The Wall Street Journal has a profile up on Mike Crapo and Jeb Hensarling, the key committee chairs (likely in Crapo’s case) who will repeal or rewrite the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It’s clear that both are planning to roll back or dilute many of the provisions of Dodd-Frank, particularly those that protect consumers from toxic financial products and those that impose restrictions on banks (which, together, make up most of the act)…

Introductory economics, and particularly the competitive market model, can be seductive that way. The models are so simple, logical, and compelling that they seem to unlock a whole new way of seeing the world. And, arguably, they do: there are real insights you can gain from a working understanding of supply and demand curves.

The problem, however, is that the people who are most captivated by the first theorem of welfare economics (the one that says that competitive markets produce optimal outcomes) are often the least good at remembering the assumptions that don’t apply and the caveats that do apply in the real world. They forget that the power of a theory in the abstract bears no relationship to its accuracy in practice.

Roomba vs. weeds

There’s a new robot that can weed your garden.

The Tertill was designed to survive outdoors. The latest prototype uses four-wheel drive to navigate a variety of terrains unsupervised and inward-tilting wheels so the robot can grip surfaces and extricate itself when it drives onto rocks and into holes. The Tertill also relies on capacitive sensors, which help it avoid obstructions and understand when to activate its weed-whacker.

The mechanism functions without machine-vision software, which Franklin Robotics says is not yet robust enough to distinguish weeds from plants, at least not at an affordable price. When the Tertill rolls over a plant that is shorter than its one-inch-high bumper, it assumes the plant is a weed, activates its trimmer, and cuts it. It turns away from plants that are taller than its bumper, and from metal collars that should be installed to protect seedlings.

By the time the Tertill goes on sale—likely via a crowdfunding campaign—the robot will have two more garden-related capabilities. It will wirelessly transmit data about plant and soil health to owners’ smartphones, so they can improve their gardens, and it will repel foraging animals such as rabbits and squirrels by moving and making noise when they approach.

cheetahs: going…going…gone?

In today’s depressing conservation news, cheetahs are in serious trouble.

Led by Zoological Society of London (ZSL), Panthera and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the study reveals that just 7,100 cheetahs remain globally, representing the best available estimate for the species to date. Furthermore, the cheetah has been driven out of 91% of its historic range. Asiatic cheetah populations have been hit hardest, with fewer than 50 individuals remaining in one isolated pocket of Iran…

To make matters worse, as one of the world’s most wide-ranging carnivores, 77% of the cheetah’s habitat falls outside of protected areas. Unrestricted by boundaries, the species’ wide-ranging movements weaken law enforcement protection and greatly amplify its vulnerability to human pressures. Indeed, largely due to pressures on wildlife and their habitat outside of protected areas, Zimbabwe’s cheetah population has plummeted from 1,200 to a maximum of 170 animals in just 16 years – representing an astonishing loss of 85% of the country’s cheetahs.

Scientists are now calling for an urgent paradigm shift in cheetah conservation, towards landscape-level efforts that transcend national borders and are coordinated by existing regional conservation strategies for the species. A holistic conservation approach, which incentivises protection of cheetahs by local communities and trans-national governments, alongside sustainable human-wildlife coexistence is paramount to the survival of the species.

So it’s habitat loss and the relentless expansion of the human footprint, again. Are Africans just particularly callous toward the loss of the natural world? No, Africa is just one of the last places a lot of the large, charismatic animals are left. We had them elsewhere, but we have long forgotten them. Solutions exist. But I am in a pessimistic mood right now so I don’t think this time will be different, the declines and collapses will just continue to come faster and be more obvious until maybe some things will be done, but most likely they will be too little, too late. Too little, too late, but better than nothing. How is that for a silver lining?

 

Yellowstone

David Quammen (author of one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction) has a long article in National Geographic about Yellowstone National Park which touches on some of the same things.

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is bigger than any other park complex in the lower 48 states. And size matters. A resonant study published in the journal Nature back in 1987, by a young ecologist named William Newmark, revealed that among 12 national parks and park complexes in the western United States, all except two had lost mammal species in the years since they had been established, but that Greater Yellowstone, as the largest, had lost fewer species than almost all others. Most of those local extinctions had resulted not from direct human persecution—as the wolves of Yellowstone had been persecuted to oblivion—but from the natural processes of extinction characteristic of islands: When habitat is constrained within a limited area, animal populations remain small, and small populations tend to wink out, over time, because of accidental factors such as disease, fire, hard weather, and bad luck. Greater Yellowstone had lost less of its mammal diversity by natural attrition than had small parks such as Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Mount Rainier. Its size, evidently, had served it well.

Newmark’s original work has been challenged in some particulars during the decades since, but its basic conclusion remains sound: Size matters. The size of the Yellowstone complex helped preserve big, fearsome, wide-ranging, combative animals such as the grizzly, each one of which demands a large territory. No other park in the lower 48, apart from Glacier National Park along Montana’s Canadian border, now supports robust populations of the three greatest living North American carnivores—the grizzly, the wolf, the mountain lion—as well as such other predaceous animals as the wolverine, the coyote, the bobcat, and the red fox. Yellowstone is our wildest park south of the border complex that includes Glacier, in part because it’s our biggest.

The other good thing about geographical bigness is that, besides giving space to large predators with broad territorial needs, it usually encompasses habitat diversity as well as sheer space, thereby sheltering a greater variety of creatures at all levels of size, living all modes of life.

Because I am interested in island biogeography and I like the idea of having seminal papers at my fingertips, I looked up the Newmark article mentioned above.

A land-bridge island perspective on mammalian extinctions in western North American parks
WILLIAM D. NEWMARK
Nature 325, 430 – 432 (29 January 1987); doi:10.1038/325430a0

In recent years, a number of authors have suggested several geometric principles for the design of nature reserves based upon the hypothesis that nature reserves are analogous to land-bridge islands. Land-bridge islands are islands that were formerly connected to the mainland and were created by a rise in the level of the ocean. Land-bridge islands are considered supersaturated with species in that the ratio of island to mainland species numbers is higher than expected from the area of the island. As a result, the rate of extinction should exceed the rate of colonization on a land-bridge island, resulting in a loss of species that is suggested to be related to the size and degree of isolation of the island. If nature reserves are considered to be similar to land-bridge islands, because most are slowly becoming isolated from their surroundings by habitat disturbance outside the reserves, several predictions follow. First, the total number of extinctions should exceed the total number of colonizations within a reserve; second, the number of extinctions should be inversely related to reserve size; and third, the number of extinctions should be directly related to reserve age. I report here that the natural post-establishment loss of mammalian species in 14 western North American national parks is consistent with these predictions of the land-bridge island hypothesis and that all but the largest western North American national parks are too small to retain an intact mammalian fauna.

It’s easy to get depressed. Even if we preserved a lot of big open spaces, left them completely alone, and there were no such thing as pollution or climate change, a smaller nature would still be a less healthy nature. The only silver lining is that if we had a really thorough knowledge of how the shapes of preserved lands and the connections between determine their ecosystem health, we could theoretically come up with land use policies and practices to produce the best possible ecosystem health in the remaining space available.

There is research going on in this area:

A simplified econet model for mapping and evaluating structural connectivity with particular attention of ecotones, small habitats, and barriers
Wei Houa, Marco Neubertb, Ulrich Walzc
Landscape and Urban Planning
Volume 160, April 2017, Pages 28–37

Small habitats and ecotones are recognized as key structures in preserving biodiversity and maintaining landscape connectivity. However, most analyses of landscape pattern have not fully accounted for these elements. This leads to an underestimation of the landscape heterogeneity, especially at the local scale. This research aims to evaluate the structural connectivity for a source habitat (i.e., forest) with particular consideration of the roles of ecotones, small habitats, and barriers. A multi-buffer mapping procedure based on vector data is applied on two comparative test sites for mapping ecological networks (econets) which are composed of forest patches, ecotones, corridors, small habitats, and barriers. On this basis, several indices are proposed for quantitative evaluation of structural connectivity of econets. The application of the indices show that our approach can be useful for analyzing econet connectivity and identifying the roles of critical landscape elements, for example the barriers’ effect on overall forest connectivity. Within an econet, ecotones function as extension of forest edges which can increase the intrapatch connectivity; small habitats play the role of stepping stones which can enhance interpatch connections among forest habitats. The proposed econet model provides a generalized illustration of landscape connectivity and can be used to compare and monitor forest pattern.

Katharine Hayhoe

Texas Monthly has an interesting profile of Katharine Hayhoe.

co-author of the last two National Climate Assessments and a reviewer on the Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Hayhoe—the daughter of missionaries and the wife of a pastor—is herself an evangelical Christian. In her talks, she uses the Bible to explain to Christians why they should care about climate change and how it affects other people, from a poor family on the island nation of Kiribati who will be displaced by rising sea levels to an elderly couple in Beaumont who can’t afford to pay for air-conditioning in Texas’s increasingly sweltering summers. As she puts it, “The poor, the disenfranchised, those already living on the edge, and those who contributed least to this problem are also those at greatest risk to be harmed by it. That’s not a scientific issue; that’s a moral issue…”

If she was going to leave astronomy behind, Hayhoe wanted to do policy-relevant climate science. When she was considering graduate programs, she was thrilled to learn that Don Wuebbles, who had been instrumental in addressing the chlorofluorocarbon problem in the eighties, was the new head of the department of atmospheric science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He would serve as her adviser for both her master’s degree and her doctorate. Under Wuebbles’s guidance, Hayhoe eventually began focusing on statistical downscaling, which was still a relatively new field when she started graduate school, in 1995. “There was very little of this being done at the time,” Wuebbles recalled recently, “and the methods were not capturing the full extent of the science, so she set about to develop a new technique and very successfully did so. She’s brilliant…”

Hayhoe’s first step is always to “genuinely bond over a shared value,” with an emphasis on that shared value’s being genuine. “The key is not to pretend; we can all smell someone who is not genuine a mile away,” she said. “If I’m talking to farmers or ranchers or water managers, I start off by talking about what we all care about, which is making sure we have water. And that, for many Texans, is almost as strong of a value as whatever it says in the Bible.” Her next step is to connect that issue to climate change. So when talking about water, she describes how climate change is changing rainfall patterns. “We’re getting these heavy downpours, and then we’re getting longer dry periods in between, and our droughts are getting stronger because the warmer it is, the more water evaporates out of our lakes and rivers and our soil,” she said. She tries to end her talks with solutions that inspire people, ranging from the personal (measuring your carbon footprint and installing energy-efficient light bulbs) to the large-scale (putting a tax on carbon). Hayhoe herself is most excited by the efforts of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and founder of SpaceX. “If I had to pick one person to save the world—and I don’t think any one person will but if I had to pick one—it would be him.” She is excited about the battery packs that Tesla is developing, declaring energy storage the “single technology that will make the most difference.”

Bradford Delong on…I’m not sure what

I have a sense that this long blog post by Bradford Delong contains some key insights or kernels of wisdom, but I just don’t quite have the language skills to translate from econospeak to English. I’ll give it a shot:

  • The human economy consists of two layers – the supply-and-demand market system governed by prices as envisioned in economics 101 textbooks, built on top of something more biological, our “propensity to be gift-exchange animals”.
  • Gift-exchange animals want to form relationships. We want wealth, but we want to feel like we have earned that wealth. We want to give, but we don’t want to feel like we are being taken advantage of.
  • What we are paid actually has a lot to do with what country, city and family we were born into, and all the knowledge and groundwork that was laid by the people who came before us in that location, and in the world/economy more generally.
  • Based on the above, he claims to be for some system of fair income or wealth allocation – “we need to do this via clever redistribution rather than via explicit wage supplements or basic incomes or social insurance that robs people of the illusion that what they receive is what they have earned and what they are worth through their work.”
  • He never quite explains what this would look like. He quotes another blogger, who suggests infrastructure, education, entrepreneurship, and something about removal of urban land use regulation that doesn’t quite make sense.

So I don’t quite know what my personal take-away from all this is but I feel like there is something there and if I ruminate on it for awhile it might come to me.