Elephants, Part 2

Not only do elephants know each other, even though they've been separated for years, they also can differentiate human languages and tell apart the voices of men, women, and children:

[Researchers] went to Amboseli National Park in Kenya, where hundreds of wild elephants live among humans, sometimes coming into conflict over scarce water. The scientists used voice recordings of Maasai men, who on occasion kill elephants in confrontations over grazing for cattle, and Kamba men, who are less of a threat to the elephants. The recordings contained the same phrase in two different languages: "Look over there. A group of elephants is coming."

By about a two-to-one margin, the elephants reacted defensively — retreating and gathering in a bunch — more to the Maasai language recording because it was associated with the more threatening human tribe, said study co-author Graeme Shannon of Colorado State University.

"They are making such a fine-level discrimination using human language skills," Shannon said. "They're able to acquire quite detailed knowledge. The only way of doing this is with an exceptionally large brain."

They repeated the experiment with recordings of Maasai men and women. Since women almost never spear elephants, the animals reacted less to the women's voices. The same thing happened when they substituted young boys' voices.

"Making this kind of fine distinctions in human voice patterns is quite remarkable," said Emory University animal cognition expert Frans de Waal, who was not part of the study.

While it shows quite a bit about elephant intelligence and adaptability, it also indicates a problem, said biologist Josh Plotnik, founder of Think Elephants International, a research and advocacy group.

"This is both fascinating in that it supports evidence we already have that these animals are behaviorally quite flexible, but also sad because it suggests that the conflict between humans and elephants is growing," Plotnik, who was not part of the study, wrote in an email.

In yet another experiment McComb and Shannon altered female and male voices, making female voices sound male by lowering their tone and resonance, and males sound female by raising their pitches. Those kinds of changes fool most humans, but the clever elephants weren't tricked, McComb said. They still moved away from the altered male voices and not the altered female voices.

 Could you tell apart recorded male and female voices that were raised or lowered in pitch? I don't think I could.

Odd Parking

As I write this, it's 54°F outside, so it appears winter has finally turned tail and is about to head for the hills. Although we're projected to have a high below freezing on Wednesday just so it can stick its tongue out at us once more before it goes.

For the past few weeks the city of St. Paul has been limiting parking to one side of residential streets because the snow has encroached to the point where the streets are not wide enough for emergency vehicles when cars are parked on both sides. Maybe because Minneapolis chose the odd side, St. Paul followed suit, so you have to be careful to check the house numbers before leaving your car somewhere.

But on the street near this building, it appears all you have to do is park at a weird angle or backwards or something:


I did hear that someone in Minneapolis parked one of the Car2Go Smart Cars perpendicular to the curb between two normally parked cars.

Maybe they misunderstood the odd parking decree as well?

The Dinosaurs Have It Right

Sorry for the small size here... click the image so you can read the text.

From qwantz.com

A Poster for Doug Champeau

I enjoyed Target cashier Doug Champeau's thoughts on the minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit in today's Star Tribune. He has a perspective I don't hear from enough. Plus, he's able to acknowledge both Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed with its portrayal of low-wage, exploitive work and his coworker who keeps her hours just low enough to make sure her government-funded income supports aren't cut. Both things are true.

I most appreciated his ending section, however:

There’s a motivational poster near the break room featuring the retail giant’s trademark dog and this aphorism: “Work can be fun or not fun — Choose Fun.” Every time I see this, I imagine it pinned up in the Roman slave galley where Ben Hur is rowing furiously to the beat of the drum and the lash of the whip. Only his hate kept him alive.

This is for Doug:


(As always, click to enlarge for full enjoyment.)

____

Champeau is a recurrent commenter in the Strib's pages. Some of his past op-eds:

• The working grunt feels your pain — about the Wisconsin union-busting protests in 2011.
• High-fat subsidies feed health costs — suggestions to change what foods can be purchased with SNAP benefits, based on his observations of food stamp use.
• And so we bleed (but at least there's money in it) — about working-poor people selling plasma to make ends meet.
• The view from behind the cash register — as far as I can tell, his first piece, and it's pretty much what it sounds like from the title.

Who Knew Bees Were So Fuzzy?

Okay, bumblebees are fuzzy, but this isn't a bumblebee. Up close other bees are too:


Amazing photos from the United States Geological Survey's Bee Monitoring and Inventory Lab via ensia.com.

Acronyms in Tandem

It strikes me a bit odd that psychiatry uses the term "intermittent explosive disorder" to describe people with "extreme expressions of anger, often to the point of uncontrollable rage, that are disproportionate to the situation at hand" (source).

This is a common disorder among soldiers and combat veterans, occurring at five times the rate of the population as a whole:


The condition, combined with other stresses from deployment, may be the cause of the increase in suicides among active-duty soldiers.

Did no one notice the acronym -- IED -- is shared with another killer of soldiers, the improvised explosive device? Or maybe they thought it was appropriate that IED results from exposure to IEDs.

Really, Just a Few Tabs

Before they pile up too far, let's clear 'em out now.

Mother Jones reports (with every bit of detail possible, it seemed) on how BPA-free plastics may have just as many estrogenic properties as the ones they were supposed to safely replace. And that the same scientists who fronted for the tobacco companies are now "researching" for the plastics industry. Gaaaahhhhh.

Researchers at the University of Delaware have developed a catalyst that can electrochemically convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide then can be used to develop useful chemicals.

My new crush Matt Bruenig shows how the class envy argument doesn't work, even for conservatives, who in the 1950s used to argue for relative income equality. "Referring to anger over distributive inequality as envy already implicitly assumes that such anger is wholly without merit and unjustified, but without actually making an argument to that effect. It takes the legitimately contested question of the justness of extreme inequality, assumes without any discussion that it is just, and then accuses those who think otherwise not only of being wrong but of actually being captured by vice and moral deficiencies."

Steve Novella, writing at Science-Based Medicine, examines the recent findings about the effects of pro-vaccination messages on anti-vaccination parents. Turns out, people are less than convinced, and in fact, become less likely to say they would vaccinate a hypothetical future child:

The situation reminds me of the parable of the sun and the wind who decided to compete to see who could get a man to remove his coat. The wind tried to blow the coat off, but the harder it blew the harder the man held onto his coat. The sun then had its turn – it simply shined down on the man until he became warm and took off the coat.

In public messaging, we have to be more like the sun than the wind. A successful campaign would get people to want to engage in the healthier behavior, and perhaps even think it was their idea all along. Yes, this is psychological manipulation (just like all politics, by the way). Rational people have a knee-jerk negative reaction to the notion of such manipulation. We want to live in a world where giving people information is enough for them to make rational decisions, but that is not the world in which we live.

One approach, therefore, is benign psychological manipulation – making the healthy choice seem more desirable. One such approach is called social norming. This approach essentially leverages peer-pressure by telling people that most people do not engage in unhealthy behaviors, or do engage in healthy behaviors. It would therefore have been interesting if the above survey had a fifth group who were simply told – “most parents protect their children from infectious diseases by vaccinating them.” This is not deceptive, it is entirely true, but it is selected to coerce with positive peer pressure.

I have a lot of warm thoughts about the so-called sharing economy, but I also believe that organizing is the only way workers get justice from most employers in a capitalist system. All those interns "sharing" their labor are getting screwed. This piece on how the sharing economy undermines workers makes a lot of good points, which I imagine I will want to return to again and again.

How to analyze false claims about charter schools, via Diane Ravitch.

What does a sustainable future actually look like? And how can we figure it out? With reference to a 2013 novel called The World We Made by Jonathan Porritt, in which the main character looks back from 2050 to describe how his sustainable world came about. Sounds like I have to get ahold of a copy of that! (From Ensia)

Wages, Then and Now

Minnesota's minimum wage is currently $6.15 an hour, while the federal minimum is $7.25.

Our legislature is in pretty serious discussion, finally, about raising the state wage to $9.50, which would make it one of the highest in the country.

It got me thinking back to what I made when I was just out of college and what it would equal in today's dollars.

My first job, post-degree (1981), was at the then-minimum of $3.35 (1982). This would be $8.33 in today's dollars, $2+ more than Minnesota's minimum wage and $1+ more than the federal wage. That was a half-time job, but I soon took another at the same rate that was also half-time. Both were actually full-time in terms of work requirements, though, so essentially I worked 80 hours a week for $1.57 an hour ($4.17 today).

That was a burnout pace, even for a 22-year-old, and I left after a year to work at a moderately large nonprofit group in Washington, D.C. (1982).

The group had just recently increased its entry-level salaries (and they were salaried, not hourly, positions) from $6,000 a year to $8,000 a year. At 40 hours a week, that was an increase from $2.88 an hour to $3.85 an hour. In today's dollars, those amounts become $6.74 an hour (still higher than Minnesota's minimum) rising to $9.02 an hour, or $14,051 a year rising to $18,735 a year.

(Those rates are based on the imaginary idea that you only worked 40 hours a week… such a limit was discouraged, with an unspoken rule that you should work at least 60.)

It was a bit hard to live on that amount in Washington, even for a single person sharing a house with six unrelated adults and riding the bus for transportation. (My rent was $150 a month, the equivalent of $350 today.) I remember one of my coworkers looked into food stamps under the old salary, but was told he made too much money. I didn't have tremendous difficulty, though, being just one person with no dependents and no cell phone or cable/internet bill to pay.

I lasted there six months before being hired away for my mad skills by another nonprofit (early 1983). That salary was $12,000 a year ($5.77 an hour for 40 hours), with hours that I had more control over. That wage in today's dollars would be $13.09 an hour, or $27,231 a year. I felt like I was finally in the money, I remember.

When I left the job to return to graduate school in 1986, we had to pay my replacement $15,000 a year ($7.21 an hour, or $14.86 an hour, $30,914 a year in today's dollars).

______

All inflation adjusted amounts are for 2012 and were generated using the westegg.com inflation calculator. So I guess it's not quite accurate to say "today's dollars," but it's close.

Here are my previous ruminations on what things like college cost back in the good-old early 1980s.

Education, the Great Equalizer (Right)

Who goes to college, and which kind of colleges do they go to? A fascinating graph, via Matt Bruenig writing for the Demos blog:


The green bars, representing kids from the bottom quartile, drop from left to right, while the purple bars (for kids from the top quartile) climb. And I'll bet if you added a top 1 percent bar to the graph it would be even more skewed, with almost no one in the first two columns.

Cornell University professor of government Suzanne Mettler provides more data on this divergence.

• "Three out of four adults who grow up in the top quarter of the income spectrum earn baccalaureate degrees by age 24, but it’s only one out of three in the next quarter down. In the bottom half of the economic distribution, it’s less than one out of five for those in the third bracket and fewer than one out of 10 in the poorest."
• "In the 1970s, the maximum Pell grants for low-income students covered nearly 80 percent of costs at the average four-year public university, but by 2013-14 they covered just 31 percent."
• For-profit colleges, "which enroll nearly a tenth of college students, use nearly a quarter of federal student aid dollars allocated through Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, and they account for nearly half of all student loan defaults."

And that's not even touching on the increasing likelihood that college attendance feeds class segregation, since many people meet their life partners during college or (post-college) from among young workers with similar college backgrounds.

Things have probably improved, educationally, in some ways since the mid-1940s when "Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, worried that [the GI Bill] would transform elite institutions into 'educational hobo jungles.' " But elitism based on nothing more than how much money is in your parents' bank account is alive and well.

Short (Month) and Tweet

Oh, groan, I know. But it's February and winter is never going to end, so that's what I've got. There's only a smattering of Olympics tweets here, but more on racial and economic justice.

Why do we sometimes call New Jersey "Jersey" but never call New York "York"?
By Josh Greenman

Government charging for #publictransit is like a department store charging people to use the escalator. It's rationing, not revenue.
By Free Public Transit

Obama to black boys: You're subject to poverty, discrimination, and mass incarceration because you didn't do your homework.
By Nikhil Goyal

"Who is the covetous man? One for whom plenty is not enough. Who is the defrauder? One who takes away what belongs to everyone."
By Matt Bruenig

This is the 2012 Electoral College map if only white men and white women could vote:


By Matthew Drake

It's a bit odd that when you ask certain conservatives to Love Thy Neighbor they feel their religious freedom is at risk.
By Frank Conniff

Many are favorited. Few are retweeted. -Jesus
By Chris Steller

Spoiler: libertarian arguments against democracy assume their preferred economic institutions are the default ones that happen ex nihilo.
By Matt Bruenig

If Shakespeare had lived today, the line would have been "kill all the SEO firms."
By Les Lim

Conjecture: In print, "Millenials" generally means young whites from the top third of families.
By Matt Bruenig

And for the third time in middle school, my kid learned what an idiom is...cuz that's really important.
By mpljr (Sisyphus38)

Capitalism squandered fossil fuels, and took credit for efficiency.
By Free Public Transit

The average Canadian is now richer (for the first time in history) than the average American.
By Men's Facts

In Democratic Republic of Congo, 6 births/woman, population 2012 = 65 million. 2041 = 130 millions. Today 25% of women want but do not have access to contraceptives.
By Hans Rosling

School is easy. Just suppress everything you want to do and focus on doing everything they tell you to do. Guaranteed "A" student.
By mpljr (Sisyphus38)

#DearHumanity Your achievements are nothing compared to what a wise civilization could have accomplished with half the resources. #PeakOil
By The Universe

Bear with a pacifier holding lightsabers:


By Halloween Costumes

How about “reduce inequality so more people can enjoy the benefits of survivable failure.”
By mattyglesias

Weight Watchers ad: "When you were a girl, 'anything is possible' meant 'you can be an astronaut'! NOW it means you can lose weight!"
By Margaret H. Willison

Weight Watchers, THIS MESSAGE IS NOT ENCOURAGING ME TO LOSE WEIGHT. IT IS ENCOURAGING ME TO DESTOOOOOYYYYY YOUUUUUUU.
By Margaret H. Willison

It's weird how views held for no reason -- i.e. "faith" -- get extra deference instead of reduced deference.
By Josh Barro

Worldwide, more than 270,000 pedestrians are killed by drivers every year -- more than malnutrition or violence in war.
By AlexSteffen

RT @anghelides: This documentation would benefit from end-user testing:


By Rob England

Think of the first computer you ever used, and how basic and primitive it would seem now. That's how a toddler will remember an iPad.
By Benedict Evans

It's unrealistic to blame people for not studying what's in demand when there's only a handful of jobs actually in demand.
By Sarcastica McSmarty

Humans must decarbonize at 5.1% for next 39 consecutive years to make 2°C target.
By Free Public Transit

I like people who read books.
By Nikhil Goyal

The most important prerequisite to winning international support for your revolution is hiring good photographers.
By Murtaza Hussain

Buses work 18 hours a day -- about the same amount of time cars sit idle.
By Free Public Transit

Wow. RT @iseff This is an incredible map. 50% of GDP comes from the orange areas, 50% from the blue:


By Ezra Klein

I don't see anybody talking about how Michael Dunn and George Zimmerman should've just made better choices. Been more personally responsible.
By Brittney Cooper

We don't have failed schools, we have a failed political system that has not tried to solve the problems of poverty & mental health.
By Kevin Kelly Ph.D.

Some people think climate change could be leading to extinction-level event, but man are we gonna have cool apps in the meantime.
By Tom Tomorrow

6-year-old: "Why is the Little House always smiling, no matter what happens to her?"


By Rainbow Rowell

"Living is learning and when kids are living fully and happily they are learning a lot, even if we don't know what it is. " --John Holt
By mpljr (Sisyphus38)

Cars use 90% of road space to move 10% of passenger load: Campaign to promote walking, cycling.
By Free Public Transit

Now this is a Winter Olympics event I could get behind: Men's Outdoor Kerning:


By Dudley Storey

Focus on lowering the achievement gap? Or focus on changing what we consider achievement?
By mpljr (Sisyphus38)

The burden of blackness is to prove one’s innocence, to justify one’s humanity. #JordanDavis #Dunntrial #Dunnverdict
By Khalil G. Muhammad

The privilege of whiteness is to take both for granted. #Dunnverdict #Dunntrial #JordanDavis
By Khalil G. Muhammad

Florida should open a Justice Theme Park so the state's black residents can live the fantasy they never experience in real life.
By Frank Conniff

"The 1.5 billion people living in fragile or failed states understand very well that what they need is a better state, not the absence of one."
By Jay Ulfelder

It is kind of humanizing that 1 percenters want not just to be rich but also to be loved and respected.
By Matt Bruenig

Hell is full of people who slow down when they merge.
By Daniel Miessler 

When I was 11, a friend designed and built an AMAZING tree house. Sans adults. He was a brilliant C- student. Lots of them running around.
By mpljr (Sisyphus38)

If you think a major problem in American education is the lack of student work ethic, you're deluded and dead wrong.
By Nikhil Goyal

Liberals: If you share "Natural News" articles, you don't get to laugh at Republicans who are creationists and global warming deniers.
By Ryan Grant Long

If we hate the tests we have to stop bragging about our test scores and stop talking about student growth/achievement based on test scores.
By mpljr (Sisyphus38)

Is there a worse government misnomer than the U.S. Department of the Interior? Hello...? Exterior?
By Chris Steller

General patriarchy check: Way too many men at my events telling me to stop excluding them by talking theory and feminism. Please don't.
By Suey Park

Idea: For students whose lunch-accounts are not current, offer Asian carp. #winwin
By Chris Steller 

School has a type of Munchausen by Proxy -- we give them the "illness" then we try to cure them. (Apathy, lack of curiosity, etc.)
By mpljr (Sisyphus38)

Hundreds of schools send 100% to college ... after booting 40%.
By Gary Rubinstein

Dear Capitalism, an entry level position doesn't require 3+ years of experiences. Stop saying entry level when you just mean low paying.
By Amy

Odd that we pathologize impostor syndrome. Seems like those afflicted are the correct ones and the non-afflicted merely self-delusional.
By Matt Bruenig

Today in Portland:


By Ben Matasar

Meritocracy: Work hard and you will be rewarded. Poverty, inequality, unemployment, institutionalized racism, mass incarceration be damned!
By Nikhil Goyal

UPS says it saved 10 million gallons of gas from 2004-2012 by eliminating left turns from delivery routes.
By Carlton Purvis

If organizations are worried about developing young people who then leave -- what if you DON'T develop them and they stay?
By Chris Oien

When can AOL get past this distraction and return to its core business of selling email to people who don't realize it's available for free?
By Josh Barro

Hey @nytimes: When you refer to us as "The Heartland," we know what you mean: Quaint. Ignorant. Inconsequential.
By Phil Brinkman

"No American should accept the idea that the POTUS has the power to order American citizens killed." —Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now
By Nikhil Goyal

It makes me so sad that entire charity organizations exist to buy supplies for underfunded schools, yet the pointless TSA is totally funded.
By Brian Vargas

Intelligent design in a nutshell: “Your theory isn’t complete, so here’s an alternative theory that’s orders of magnitude less complete.”
By Jack Scanlan

Almost all heroin users in US are white, but whites are never villainized in media as the cause of their addictions. Instead, focus on Mexico.
By Think Mexican

I love how diverse Fox News is:


By Calvin

If you have to smile while you're performing, it's not a real sport.
By Laura Helmuth

Capitalism never worked. It was just a drunken bully chugging cheap oil.
By Free Public Transit

“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war." —Chris Hedges
By Nikhil Goyal

Leaning in. But then I lost my balance & am stuck in this ravine.
By Janine Brito

The entire bi-partisan practice of giving ambassadorships to donors is corrupt and embarrassing. Get rid of it.
By Christopher Hayes

Happy boxes need to get a room:


By Halloween Costumes

Same sex marriage isn't gay privilege, it's equal rights. Privilege would be something like gay people not paying taxes. Like churches don't.
By Ricky Gervais

"Today I wouldn't get an academic job. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough." -- Almost anyone hired more than 20 years ago
By Shit Academics Say

Kids are so cool. They play & love & play & love & play & love. You can do this, too.
By worldsdaughter

"Women's tragic inability to grasp circular logic has long hindered their success in many creative fields."
By Monika Bauerlein

Are any of us THAT surprised Jerry Seinfeld has never read "A Room of One's Own"?
By Guy Branum

Someone needs to tell the whiny rich about the French Revolution. Seems more on point than the holocaust.
By Matt Bruenig

Mayor Hodges at [Minneapolis] Downtown Council: "People don't object to the density of people, they object to the density of cars."
By Sam Black

Magical realism is a lovely device for fiction, but makes for a pisspoor understanding of the world we actually live in.
By Tom Tomorrow

Never use "effect" as a verb. It is a verb, sure. But just, don't.
By Chris Steller

Twitter creates relationships with people you'll never meet. Facebook destroys relationships with people you've known for years.
By Chris Rock

The rule of design concepts: If you show one, they’ll hate it. If you show more than one, they’ll want to combine them.
By Dan Saffer

The difference between cult and religion: In a cult there's a person at the top who knows it's a scam. In a religion that person is dead.
By Atheist World

This entire time I thought you guys were making a joke about the 400 Bar in the Mall of America. Real life is why the Simpsons isn't funny anymore.
By Molly Priesmeyer

How sad for bathing suit designers that they have never ever seen or touched a breast. I mean, I'm assuming.
By Julieanne Smolinski

I bristle when romantic love is treated like a low or girlie thing. It's not lame and girlie to want love. IT'S LIFE.
By Rainbow Rowell

Putting in 100% of your effort into any task is scary because it "robs you of all your excuses" should it not succeed.
By Adam Holman

What if being productive is the least interesting goal we could ever imagine? What if being more interesting were our national ambition?
By Elissa Milne

School mobility (moving in or out of a district during the year) is highest for low-income, migrant & homeless kids. 38-40% in my Colorado county.
By Charlie Quimby

But when kids fail in school, it's on the teachers and the system.
By Charlie Quimby

Rigor and pre-k going together scares me.
By Peter DeWitt

Corporations are people. The kind who don't get arrested after poisoning your water, flooding a town with oil or blowing up a fertilizer plant.
By Everybody Needs It

Is there anything more tautological than tautology?
By Chris Steller

My brain is sports Teflon. There's no judgment attached either way. Just...nothing sports goes in. It's like showing a dog a card trick.
By maureenjohnson

California's in a drought. ~10% of our water is personal use; ~85% is agriculture. I'm supposed to shower less. 1 lb of beef = ~1800lbs of water...
By Bradley Voytek

There is a certain irony in the car with the "coexist" bumper sticker taking up two spots.
By Daniel Wolter

Am filled with a certain irony finding Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory on sale at Walmart.
By Josh Marshall

Low tide and a rake are all Andres Amador needs to create his works of art:


By Saatchi Gallery

Every essay starts with an elaborate magic trick intended to disguise the actual first sentence, which is "You know, I was just thinking..."
By John Dickerson

Making the Case for Government Programs

Late last October, I posted to my Facebook page something along these lines:

Food stamp cuts that begin November 1 are equal to the entire amount of food given out by all food shelves in the U.S.

Several liberal friends chimed in about how deplorable it was, and at least one disparaged "so-called Christians" who are in favor of the cuts.

Then one brave conservative guy, a friend from the early years of high school whose life path diverged greatly from mine, spoke up to say Christians like him believe private charities should help the poor and that government is not the way to handle it. If taxes were lower, he said, people would have more money to donate to the needy.

My liberal friends kept trying to say he was unChristian, and he insisted he was not. I wanted everyone to stop harping on the religion angle and for someone to come up with a good argument about why government does have a role, why private charity is not enough.

I made the argument about how all the cute kitties and lovable bears get funded while the homely starve. But here's a fact I wish I'd had ready:

Many activists say that if taxes are reduced, private giving will automatically increase. But history shows that's incorrect. For each of the last 40 years, Americans have given away the same proportion of money without change: roughly 2 percent of GDP. Even after the Bush tax cuts in the early part of the century, the rate of giving didn't rise, experts say.

That quote comes from a story on philly.com. It also tells us the U.S. government spends $105 billion a year on food programs; $80 billion of that is SNAP. In contrast, "Feeding America, the largest food charity in the United States (and one of the largest charities overall), moves $5 billion of food and funding to hungry people each year."

The total of U.S. philanthropy is currently $300 billion, according to Katherina Rosqueta, founding executive director of the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at Penn, a nonprofit focused on improving the impact of charity.

The amount represents all the money that people give away, most of it to churches and other religious institutions — 32 percent, or nearly $96 billion. A good deal of the rest goes to hospitals, universities, and cultural institutions such as museums, noted Daniel Borochoff, president of CharityWatch, an organization that helps donors make more informed charitable-giving decisions.

Just a small portion of those dollars goes to help the poor...

Another point raised by my conservative friend was that private charities are more efficient than government at delivering services. But as I suspected, that isn't true either, in part because the Wild West of charity organizations leaves donors at the mercy of scammers who only sound like good causes or who rip off the names of legitimate organizations.

As I've noted before, the fraud rate in the SNAP program is about 1 percent, and there are many more people eligible for SNAP than ever even apply for it, so that (in my mind) more than balances out the money lost to misuse.

You Saw It Here First (Probably)

Remember this name: pCell.

It's a replacement technology for our current cell-based phone and data service, though it works through the current LTE networks. From a comment written by the founder of the company:

pCell is indeed a much bigger deal than anyone has yet touched on. The "tubes to transistors" analogy is not just marketing speak: Compared to cellular, pCell is far more reliable, enables much smaller and lower power device and can be continually extended in density. Tubes had physical constraints that limited their reliability and scalability. Transistors did not. Cellular (and other interference avoidance protocols like Wi-Fi and cognitive radio) have a physical constraints that limit their reliability and scalability. pCell does not (as far as we know). Cellular has stalled in scalability. There is an entire era of innovation in front of us with pCell.

What does this mean? pCell would allow for much smaller devices because their batteries could be significantly smaller. That also means the batteries use fewer  materials, which are therefore cheaper and better for the planet.

The cell system could completely change because of this. The pCell antennas are very small and don't require line-of-sight, unlike current cell towers. Many more connections and amounts of data can be carried within the same bandwidth. So cities like New York and San Francisco -- where it can be impossible to get good coverage because too many people are using the bandwidth -- would have no problems.


pCell is the technology; Artemis is the company.

pCell would also make it much easier to extend the technology to rural areas because the cost is much lower, closing one part of the digital divide worldwide.

The one negative thing I had to say about pCell was a plaintive wish that people like this would apply themselves to technologies that could help solve climate change. The digital divide is important, but not compared to climate change. (Although you could make the argument that closing the digital divide may extend human potential broadly enough to find a solution to the larger problem.)

Well, it may be that pCell also has applications that are more directly related to energy use. A techie named Imran Akbar, a vice president at Motorola, has posted his thoughts on pCell's possible use as a wireless energy distribution system.

What could that mean? The first thing I thought about was the aging, vulnerable grid. About the huge amounts of energy lost in transmission through physical media. About all the power lines that fall from trees in the winter. And a pCell-based system would be more distributed, meaning power sources could be more distributed as well (which works better with renewable energy sources).

But it also could mean interstate highways studded with wireless power transmitters, with electric vehicles driving without the need for heavy, expensive batteries (that are made from rare earth metals). Therefore less carbon, of course.

Where will it go? It sounds like this innovaiton is going somewhere, and won't just be one of the tech blips you never hear about again. (Of course, it sounds like a tremendous threat to established corporate interests like Comcast and Time Warner. Let's see what happens.)

____

Here's a video of Perlman demoing pCell at Columbia University (Feb. 19, 2014).