“Reject the Dark Side: Free the Net!”

(p. C5) HEALY Matt, what’s a culture/politics tidbit most people don’t know?
FLEGENHEIMER Washington’s most prolific consumer of pop culture is very likely … Ted Cruz. Amateur “S.N.L.” historian, ’80s movie buff and instigator of a Twitter feud with Mark Hamill over net neutrality. He explained the meaning of “Star Wars” to Luke Skywalker. It was very Cruz: @HammillHimself Luke, I know Hollywood can be confusing, but it was Vader who supported govt power over everything said & done on the Internet. That’s why giant corps (Google, Facebook, Netflix) supported the FCC power grab of net neutrality. Reject the dark side: Free the net! Ted Cruz 12:25 PM – Dec 17, 2017
ROGERS ’80s movie buff?
FLEGENHEIMER “The Princess Bride”! Life on the campaign trail with Ted Cruz was basically months of “Princess Bride” imitations with an occasional discussion of Obamacare.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT FLEGENHEIMER and KATIE ROGERS. “‘S.N.L.’ Kimmel. Covfefe.” The New York Times (Weds., December 27, 2017): C1 & C5.
(Note: ellipsis, bold and caps, in original.).
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 26, 2017, and has the title “Kimmel, Covfefe, ‘Wonder Woman’: Washington on Pop Culture in 2017.” The commentary/discussion is credited to Flegenheimer and Rogers, but Patrick Healy also participated. There are a few minor differences in how the print and online versions present the Cruz tweet. The quote above, follows the print version.)

Why People Have Trouble Taking Global Warming Seriously

(p. A15) It was only getting worse here and all across the Northeast in the wake of a “bomb cyclone” that turned Boston streets into an Arctic sea and left three-foot snowdrifts across New England. Weather forecasters were predicting temperature lows that could shatter century-old records in Worcester, Mass., Hartford and elsewhere.
Millions of people from Florida to Maine were left shivering as schools closed and flights were canceled this week. Officials said that seven deaths appeared to be tied to the weather.
Windows splintered. Car batteries died. Along the Maine coastline, the flooding left icebergs in people’s yards. Ice fishermen had to keep their smelt bait close to them for fear it would freeze solid. Even snowmobiles coughed and sputtered and refused to start.
Across this American tundra, people called their heating-oil companies for emergency supplies and sat stranded on the sides of roads as tow-truck companies reported five-hour wait times to jump-start a dead battery or tow away a snowbound car. People slept in winter coats and debated whether wool, cotton or silk made for the best long underwear.

For the full story, see:
JESS BIDGOOD, KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JACK HEALY. “The Big Payoff At the Summit: Frozen Misery.” The New York Times (Sat., January 6, 2018): A1 & A15.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 5, 2018, and has the title “An Eyelash-Freezing ‘Icy Hell’: The One Spot That Could Feel Like Minus 100.”)

Badly Understood Starfish Causes Half of Great Barrier Reef Decline

(p. A9) BYRON BAY, Australia — The Great Barrier Reef is literally being eaten alive.
. . .
One study found that between 1985 and 2012, the reef lost an average of 50 percent of its coral cover. Starfish predation was responsible for almost half that decline, along with tropical cyclones and bleaching.
The cause of the outbreak is unknown. One hypothesis is that currents are bringing nutrient-rich water from the deep sea up into the shelf, which correlates with starfish larvae growth.
. . .
Coral reefs are constantly undergoing change, and they follow a cycle of death and renewal, said Hugh Sweatman, a scientist from the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences.

For the full story, see:
ISABELLA KWAI. “A Voracious Starfish Is Destroying the Great Barrier Reef.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 6, 2018): A9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 5, 2018.)

The academic study mentioned above, is:
De’ath, Glenn, Katharina E. Fabricius, Hugh Sweatman, and Marji Puotinen. “The 27-Year Decline of Coral Cover on the Great Barrier Reef and Its Causes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109, no. 44 (Oct. 30, 2012): 17995-99.

Revival of the Resilient Brer Rabbit

(p. C23) When Robert Weil, the editor in chief and publishing director of Liveright, approached Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar with the idea of putting together “The Annotated African American Folktales,” the two Harvard professors responded with a mix of excitement and trepidation.
. . .
“The Annotated African American Folktales,” which came out in November [2017], contains more than 100 African and African-American folk tales as well as introductory essays and commentary to provide historical context. It draws from the rich, undersung work of folklorists from West Africa to the Deep South.
. . .
Professors Gates and Tatar . . . tackle controversial parts of folklore history, dedicating a chapter to the work of Joel Chandler Harris.
. . .
The decision to include Harris’s work in this collection produced lively discussions between Mr. Gates and Ms. Tatar. “I felt uncomfortable with it,” Ms. Tatar said. But Mr. Gates disagreed. The exchange proved to be a key moment of collaboration.
“In my house, growing up in Piedmont, West Virginia, we collected Mother Goose and Joel Chandler Harris,” he said. “My father used to tell Brer Rabbit stories to my brother and me all the time.”
. . .
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, African-Americans debated whether these folk tales were worth preserving. Some people considered the stories remnants of slavery rather than evidence of ingenuity.
The novelist Toni Morrison, however, has played an important role in validating these stories by integrating them into her writing, Ms. Tatar said.
While Ms. Morrison’s novels contain traces of innovative uses of folklore, “Tar Baby” is the most obvious and the one Mr. Gates was particularly eager to include in this collection. Not only is it one of his favorite stories but he also finds the appearance of the tar baby in many cultures “haunting.” The original folk tale is the story of Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit. Angry that Brer Rabbit is always stealing from his garden, Brer Fox makes a tar baby. Brer Rabbit comes across the figure and tries to start a conversation. He grows frustrated by the lack of response and hits the tar baby, only to find his paw stuck in what is a doll made of tar and turpentine.
. . .
Folk tales give us “ancestral wisdom,” they teach children lessons about compassion, forgiveness and respect, said Ms. Tatar. They take us “back to the people who lived before us.” They help us “navigate the future.”
Mr. Gates couldn’t agree more. He has dedicated this labor of love to his 3-year-old granddaughter. He wants the book to be not just for her and black children of her generation, but for all American children.

For the full commentary, see:
LOVIA GYARKYE. “Folklore Reclaimed From History’s Dustbin.” The New York Times (Fri., DEC. 15, 2017): C23.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 14, 2017, and has the title “From Two Scholars, African-American Folk Tales for the Next Generation.”)

The book by Gates and Tatar, is:
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Maria ‎Tatar, eds. The Annotated African American Folktales. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2017.

The book by Joel Chandler Harris, is:
Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1895.

Tax Overhaul “Armageddon”

(p. A19) To travel the liberal byways of social media over recent weeks was to learn that Donald Trump was on the precipice of axing Robert Mueller and was likely to use the days just before Christmas, when we were distracted by eggnog and mistletoe, to lower the blade.
Christmas has come. Christmas has gone. Mueller has not.
To listen to Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, the tax overhaul that Trump just signed into law is no mere plutocratic folly. It’s “Armageddon” (Pelosi’s actual word). Their opposition is righteous, but how will millions of voters who notice smaller withholdings from their paychecks and more money in their pockets square that seemingly good fortune with such prophecies of doom on a biblical scale?
Some of these Americans may decide that the prophets aren’t to be trusted — and that the president isn’t quite the pestilence they make him out to be.

For the full commentary, see:
Bruni, Frank. “The Dangers Of Trump Delirium.” The New York Times (Weds., December 27, 2017): A19.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 26, 2017, and has the title “The End of Trump and the End of Days.”)

Some Elevator Operator Jobs Remain

(p. 10) There are 69,381 passenger elevators in this vertically obsessed city, and nearly all of them promise a journey about as exotic and exciting as making toast. You get in, you push a button, the doors open a few seconds later at your destination.
But there remain quite a few machines, manually controlled and chauffeur-driven, where climbing aboard is more like taking a short trip on the Orient Express.
. . .
Most of the elevators are in residential buildings, but a few war horses serve heavy duty in commercial complexes.
Collectively they form a hidden museum of obsolete technology and anachronistic employment, a network of cabinets of wonder staffed round the clock. No one knows how many there are, exactly. The city Department of Buildings offered a list of more than 600, but spot checks indicated that most had gone push-button long ago. On the other hand, officials at Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, to which most doormen and elevator operators belong, said they knew of only one or two.
A non-exhaustive field survey this fall turned up 53 buildings with manual passenger elevators. There are undoubtedly dozens more, but probably not hundreds.
Why they still exist in such relative profusion, when the city is down to its last few seltzer men and its final full-time typewriter repair shop, when replacement parts are no longer made and must be machined by hand, is a question with many answers. But sentiment plays a large part.
. . .
Push-button elevators had actually been around since the 1890s, but were not practical for larger buildings. They were slow. Initially they could make only one stop per trip. Later, they could make multiple stops, but only in the order the buttons were pressed.
It took until 1950 for Otis to perfect a push-button system smart enough to handle the traffic and shifting demands for service over the course of the day in a multi-elevator building. The company’s Autotronic system, Otis boasted in advertisements, “minimizes the human element” and “gives tenants a sprightly feeling of independence.”
The elevator man’s fate was sealed.
Almost.

For the full story, see:
ANDY NEWMAN. “Riding a Time Capsule to Apt. 8G.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., DEC. 17, 2017): 10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 15, 2017, and has the title “Riding a Time Capsule to Apartment 8G.”)

DeepMind Mastered “Go” Only After It Was Told the Score

(p. C3) To function well outside controlled settings, robots must be able to approximate such human capacities as social intelligence and hand-eye coordination. But how to distill them into code?
“It turns out those things are really hard,” said Cynthia Breazeal, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.
. . .
Even today’s state-of-the-art AI has serious practical limits. In a recent paper, for example, researchers at MIT described how their AI software misidentified a 3-D printed turtle as a rifle after the team subtly altered the coloring and lighting for the reptile. The experiment showed the ease of fooling AI and raised safety concerns over its use in real-world applications such as self-driving cars and facial-recognition software.
Current systems also aren’t great at applying what they have learned to new situations. A recent paper by the AI startup Vicarious showed that a proficient Atari-playing AI lost its prowess when researchers moved around familiar features of the game.
. . .
Google’s DeepMind subsidiary used a technique known as reinforcement learning to build software that has repeatedly beat the best human players in Go. While learning the classic Chinese game, the machine got positive feedback for making moves that increased the area it walled off from its competitor. Its quest for a higher score spurred the AI to develop territory-taking tactics until it mastered the game.
The problem is that “the real world doesn’t have a score,” said Brown University roboticist Stefanie Tellex. Engineers need to code into AI programs so-called “reward functions”–mathematical ways of telling a machine it has acted correctly. Beyond the finite scenario of a game, amid the complexity of real-life interactions, it’s difficult to determine what results to reinforce. How, and how often, should engineers reward machines to guide them to perform a certain task? “The reward signal is so important to making these algorithms work,” Dr. Tellex added.
. . .
If a robot needs thousands of examples to learn, “it’s not clear that’s particularly useful,” said Ingmar Posner, the deputy director of the Oxford Robotics Institute in the U.K. “You want that machine to pick up pretty quickly what it’s meant to do.”

For the full commentary, see:
Daniela Hernandez. “‘Can Robots Learn to Improvise?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 16, 2017): C3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 15, 2017.)

The paper by the researchers at Vicarious, is:
Kansky, Ken, Tom Silver, David A. Mely, Mohamed Eldawy, Miguel Lázaro-Gredilla, Xinghua Lou, Nimrod Dorfman, Szymon Sidor, Scott Phoenix, and Dileep George. “Schema Networks: Zero-Shot Transfer with a Generative Causal Model of Intuitive Physics.” Manuscript, 2017.

The paper, mentioned above, from the MIT Media Lab, is:
Athalye, Anish, Logan Engstrom, Andrew Ilyas, and Kevin Kwok. “Synthesizing Robust Adversarial Examples.” Working paper, Oct. 30, 2017.

Will Ending Firm Hierarchy Create “a Blissful Business Utopia”?

(p. 18) “The Kingdom of Happiness” doesn’t take place in Silicon Valley per se, but it is definitively about tech culture. Groth follows Tony Hsieh, the creator of Zappos, as he pours $350 million of his personal wealth into downtown Las Vegas with the goal of reinventing the area as . I won’t be giving away the story by pointing out that it doesn’t end well for Hsieh, . . .”
. . .
When she’s sober, Groth documents Hsieh’s attempt to integrate “holacracy” into his organizations, a term that rids a company of hierarchy and titles, and instead creates an all-for-one do-what-you-want mentality. (No, I’m not kidding.) It gave me a panic attack just thinking of working in a place like that.

For the full review, see:
NICK BILTON. “Denting the Universe.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, FEB. 19, 2017): 18.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date FEB. 14, 2017, and has the title “Pet Projects of the New Billionaires.”)

The book under review, is:
Groth, Aimee. The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia. New York: Touchstone, 2017.

Rise in Cobalt Price Will Increase Quantity Supplied, and Increase Search for Substitutes

(p. B14) . . . the dreaded shortage of cobalt, which is used in the cathode of the batteries, is a bit more complicated than industry projections would suggest.
. . .
Like cobalt, rare earths aren’t so rare. China’s move to restrict exports in 2010 exacerbated the perceived shortage, sending the prices of some varieties up 10-fold. Companies such as Molycorp, Rare Element Resources Ltd. and Quest Rare Mineral Ltd., which all had some connection to reserves, saw their shares surge based on supposedly rosy prospects. Since then, all have lost nearly all of their value.
Already, Mr. Heppel explains, other users of the metal, for example in the pigments industry, are searching for alternatives. Meanwhile, some batteries, such as a design by Tesla, use less of the metal. Lower-performing batteries use none at all, and those batteries’ capabilities may improve with technological tweaks.
Supply will react too. Companies that operate copper and nickel mines, where cobalt is co-produced, are targeting expansion, and there are some pure-play cobalt mines being planned that could start producing shortly after the projected shortage hits.
For electric vehicles, this looks more like a speed bump than a cliff.

For the full commentary, see:
Spencer Jakab. “Will a Shortage of Cobalt Kill Electric-Vehicle Makers?” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Nov. 30, 2017): B14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 28, 2017, and has the title “Will Tesla Die for Lack of Cobalt?.”)

Only 5% of Jobs at Risk of Total Automation

(p. B6) About 15% of all hours worked globally could be automated by 2030 using technology that is currently available, McKinsey estimates. The new report builds on McKinsey’s earlier research, published in January [2017], which found that 60% of all occupations could be at least partially automated with current tools, though fewer than 5% are at risk of total automation.
Like prior waves of technological change, the adoption of new tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence will likely create more jobs than it destroys, says the Institute, the think-tank arm of consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

For the full story, see:
Lauren Weber. “Forget Robots: Bad Public Policies Can Kill More Jobs.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Nov. 30, 2017): B6.
(Note: bracketed year added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 28, 2017, and has the title “Forget Robots: Bad Public Policies Could Be Bigger Job Killers.”)

Supersonic Technology Constrained by Regulators

(p. B5) Japan Airlines Co. 9201 -0.09% has become the first carrier to invest in Boom Technology Inc., a U.S. startup seeking to build a faster-than-sound airliner capable of flying more than four dozen premium passengers to Tokyo from the West Coast in roughly five hours.
. . .
With a one-third scale version now scheduled to start flight tests in late 2018–nearly a year later than initially planned–JAL’s involvement is expected to influence cabin design and various operational issues. Blake Scholl, Boom’s founder and chief executive, said such cooperation is intended “to determine whether airlines will really be happy to have this airliner in their fleets,” including from a maintenance perspective.
. . .
Boom’s project has initial support from several venture funds and is taking an unusual approach by adopting various technologies already certified by regulators.

For the full story, see:
Andy Pasztor. “Supersonic Jet Gets Boost.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Dec. 6, 2017): B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 5, 2017, and has the title “Japan Airlines Invests in Fledgling Supersonic Aircraft Company.” The online version differs significantly in wording from the print version. Where different, the passages quoted above, follow the online wording.)