2,300 years ago, Euclid of Alexandria sat with a reed pen–a humble, sliced stalk of grass–and wrote down the foundational laws that we’ve come to call geometry. Now his beautiful work is available for the first time as an interactive website.
Euclid’s Elements was first published in 300 B.C. as a compilation of the foundational geometrical proofs established by the ancient Greek. It became the world’s oldest, continuously used mathematical textbook. Then in 1847, mathematician Oliver Byrne rereleased the text with a new, watershed use of graphics. While Euclid’s version had basic sketches, Byrne reimagined the proofs in a modernist, graphic language based upon the three primary colors to keep it all straight. Byrne’s use of color made his book expensive to reproduce and therefore scarce, but Byrne’s edition has been recognized as an important piece of data visualization history all the same.
[Image: courtesy Nicholas Rougeux]Last year, the historically minded designer Nicholas Rougeux was planning his next project, to follow his resurrection of the color tome Nomenclature of Colours. While there was already a reprint of Byrne’s text available from Taschen, Rougeux imagined it as a digital resource. So he spent two months turning Euclid’s 13-book collection into an interactive website, compete with diagrams that you can hover over and click for clear citation.
[Image: courtesy Nicholas Rougeux]
“The hardest thing was creating a design that I was happy with that stayed true to the original (typography, illustrations, colors, etc.) while embracing modern conveniences that come with a website (scrolling, navigation, interacting with diagrams, device compatibility, etc.),” writes Rougeux over email. “From a technical standpoint, the trickiest part was making sure all the shapes and equations were formatted correctly and consistently.”
[Image: courtesy Nicholas Rougeux]
The font was the easy part. The original books were printed in Caslon, which is part of Adobe’s products to this day. The woodcut stamped letters that begin various sections were digitally traced and re-created. And as for the equations and their diagrams–that’s the subject of Rougeux’s very deep and technical how-to. Suffice it to say, this part was a pain.
[Image: courtesy Nicholas Rougeux]
But the effort was worth it, because the experience of reading Byrne’s Euclid online is pleasingly anachronistic. Your brain recognizes this old text, yet the first time you click on an angle in the text–to see every other bit of the diagram melt away for optimal clarity–you realizes that dang, thisstill works. And yes, it’s hard to believe that the foundational visual logic was developed over 150 years ago, even if Rougeux is the first to admit it’s been improved upon since.
“My hope is that this site exposes more people to the beauty of Byrne’s design. I know he didn’t intend the work to be viewed as a work of art (he says so in the introduction) but it truly is–even if some of his interpretations aren’t entirely correct or there are better ways to achieve them,” says Rougeux. “It can be used as a reference in a way but there are much better alternatives available for learning Euclidean geometry, like videos on YouTube or textbooks that are easier to understand. I just hope people enjoy the idea of exploring something old in a new way.”
You can try the site here, or buy prints starting at $27 here.
What: An illuminating Twitter thread that starts with a fun anecdote but goes much deeper.
Who:American Dad! writer and producer Kirk Rudell.
Why we care: Earlier this week, we learned that Saudi Arabia requested that Netflix remove an episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj from streaming in that country because the episode was critical of the Saudi government. Netflix complied. If this incident illuminated the Saudi response to critics outside of its borders, a heartbreaking new Twitter thread reveals how the company handles its critics from within.
Kirk Rudell, a writer for Seth MacFarlane’s long-running American Dad!, starts off his story pleasantly enough, describing how he came to meet popular Saudi comedian Fahad Albutairi and his wife Loujain Hathloul.
I looked him up. He was the first Saudi stand-up comedian to appear on stage professionally in the Kingdom, the “Jerry Seinfeld of Saudi Arabia.” He had a couple million Twitter followers. (He has none now; I’ll get to that.) He was, frankly, more interesting than the part.
Loujain didn’t know anyone in LA, so she was tagging along with Fahad for the day. They were young, cool, cosmopolitan, and incredibly nice. I liked them right away. We chatted.
Rudell recounts getting to know the popular Saudi comedian better–and realizing how much of a miracle it is that Albutairi managed to become a popular Saudi comedian in the first place.
…growing up without hearing other stand-ups and being unfamiliar with the standard rhythms. So Trevor had to create his own. Fahad was fascinated. Yes, he had had a similar experience. But his voice was also shaped by the fact that comedy in the Kingdom was…dangerous.
They were hopeful but warned there was still a long way to go on human rights. Which is why they’d moved to the UAE.
“Huh. At least you’re safe,” I said. With millions of fans, he was too high profile to mess with. I looked at Loujain. “And his fame covers both of you, right?”
If Rudell was surprised to learn how difficult comedians have it in the Middle East, he was floored to learn what activists in the region can expect to go through. Rudell didn’t realize at first that Hathloul is a women’s rights activist who has been arrested for driving.
I felt like an idiot. I had assumed she was the sidekick when she had already, by her mid-20s, done more for human rights than I ever will. https://t.co/CBGPYzdJJT
They were a window into a world I only knew through small articles in the Times, and I could’ve talked to them all afternoon, but we had to do the record and get on with our days.
We exchanged info. We made plans to have dinner while they were in town.
The devastating part of the Twitter thread arrives when Rudell skips ahead a couple years and reveals that neither Albutairi nor Hathloul were as free from danger as they may have hoped at the time they met the American Dad! writer. Rudell compounds the impact of his revelations by reminding readers of the current state of the U.S.’s relationship with Saudi Arabia.
While Jared Kushner’s buddy MbS was planning to murder Khashoggi, he was also imprisoning many others, including Fahad and Loujain.
The Twitter thread ends on an especially sad note, with Rudell learning that Hathloul’s father recently confirmed that Hathloul has been sexually harassed, tortured, and threatened with rape inside the Saudi government prison where she is kept–and that the father was suspended from Twitter after tweeting about it.
Apparently Loujain’s father’s Twitter was suspended last week after he tweeted about the torture she has suffered in a Saudi government prison. The story below is awful – any comment from @jack or @TwitterSupport?
As certain Americans complain about the supposed scourge of PC culture, it’s important to remember the freedom of speech we too often take for granted. You might get “canceled” in the U.S. for saying the wrong thing, but you probably won’t get tortured in a government jail.
If you’re taking Amlodipine Valsartan Tablets, Valsartan HCTZ Tablets, or Valsartan Tablets to treat your blood pressure, don’t let this news raise your blood pressure. Aurobindo Pharma USA is voluntarily recalling 80 lots of the blood pressure medications because they may contain N-nitrosodiethylamine (NDEA), which is probably a carcinogen. In other words, your blood pressure medicine could give you cancer.
The FDA describes NDEA as a “substance that occurs naturally in certain foods, drinking water, air pollution, and industrial processes, and has been classified as a probable human carcinogen.” While the company says it has not received any reports of patients suffering adverse effects related to the recall, it still wants the drugs back.
A full list of the recalled products is posted on the FDA’s website. Products can be identified by checking the product name, manufacturer details, and batch or lot number on the pill bottles. Expiration dates range from May 2019 to March 2021.
It’s important to note that the FDA is advising patients to continue taking these medications for now, because a heart attack is a more immediate risk than cancer. They recommend that patients consult with their doctor or friendly neighborhood pharmacist to discuss their options for treatment alternatives.
If you think you’ve experienced adverse reactions, you can report them at the FDA’s MedWatch website.
In 2018, the top 10 largest charitable gifts from ultra-rich donors added up to $5.8 billion. That’s far less than what was given by the same set in 2017, when the top contributions totaled $10.2 billion, according to a new report from The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
This year’s class even had a beneficial statistical asterisk: The Chronicle counted contributions from 12 people, not 10, because two amounts tied. “One of the things that stood out was just the drop [in value] of single hit gifts from individuals,” says Chronicle staff writer Maria Di Mento, who researched the report.
In 2018, Jeff Bezos spent $2 billion on his Day One Fund to fight family homelessness and build nonprofit preschools, and Michael Bloomberg gave $1.8 billion to support a financial aid program for low-income students at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. “Big wealthy donors just like everyone else are taking an approach these days that is much more cautious,” Di Mento adds, noting the shifting political climate. “I think there is uncertainty about what the next two years will hold.”
Bloomberg actually shows up twice in the list: He gave a separate $375 million donation to two educational programs (American Talent Initiative and College Point), echoing at least one major theme among other donors: bolstering the quality and increased access to higher education. “A lot of people are giving to education programs at large institutions and universities to ensure that our education system is giving students–and a lot of different types of students–what they need to excel so that, by extension, the country will remain strong,” Di Mento says.
[Source Image: PGMart/iStock]Artificial intelligence research also received a fairly large share of the top funding. That includes $350 million to support AI studies at MIT from Blackstone Group cofounder Stephen Schwarzman, and $125 million for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence from the now late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. It echoes a larger trend of a wide array of donors funneling money toward artificial intelligence causes in recent years.
The 2018 totals are more in line with how giving was happening in 2016, when the U.S.’s top 10 donations totaled $4.3 billion in individual gifts. Part of what made 2017 so outstanding was the sheer size of one particular gift. Bill and Melinda Gates contributed $4.6 billion in Microsoft stock to the already $40 billion Gates Foundation. There were 3 billion-plus givers, compared to just two last year. Givers also made a wide distribution of mid-range contributions–above $5 million but below $1 billion (three in 2017 compared to zero in 2018). And Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan funneled billions to build out their own eponymous philanthropy effort, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. That’s not necessarily a repeatable proposition.
Major givers in 2018 also contracted the range of where that money is going. In 2017, for instance, the Gateses, Zuckerberg and Chan, and Michael and Susan Dell all gave billion-dollar sums to their own foundations or limited liability companies to work on improving global health and development, a broad slate of educational, health, housing and criminal justice reforms, and economic mobility, respectively.
Di Mento points out that the dip in public giving might not be as alarming at it seems because this total only counted publicly disclosed gifts. Some donors may have chosen to keep their support of various topics private. But giving openly in especially large amounts has a secondary value. “Donors at this level give money to help causes, but also to show their peers, ‘Hey, look, I’m willing to put tens of millions of dollars toward this cause or organization. You should too,'” Di Mento adds. In 2017, more of that money was earmarked in ways that seemingly opposed the federal government’s isolationist agenda and encouraged more global aid. Now it seems to be going toward growing a next generation of leaders and thinkers, and illuminating future threats.
The U.S. government is awash with corporate money. Businesses bankroll political campaigns in hopes that legislation will be passed in their favor. Lobbying is little more than corruption with a fancy name.
[Image: Hello Velocity]
Now you can send your politicians the Constitution they deserve. Called the Corporate Constitution, the pocket copy of our country’s founding document is written entirely in corporate logos. Just the words “We the People” includes the emblems of Wilson Sporting Goods, ESPN, Twitter, Honda, and more. From the Bill of Rights, the words “freedom of expression” include the logos of Disney, McDonald’s, Facebook, Xbox, PayPal, IBM, and Netflix.
The project is the brainchild of design studio Hello Velocity, which created this font of corporate logos, dubbed Brand New Roman, in the summer of 2018. Along with its use in the pocket Constitution, Brand New Roman has also been used to create new versions of the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto.
You can buy a copy of the Corporate Constitution online for $30, but you get far more than a single copy. “We’ve set up the constitution to work on a Buy One Give One model, where each purchase also sends a copy to your representative in Congress,” Hello Velocity’s creative director Lukas Bentel tells Fast Company via email. “We get the sense that many congresspeople don’t get a chance to read this document, so we’ve put it in the language they understand best: capitalism!”
Luckily for those of us who are assured of the integrity of our congressperson, you can also specify another, less scrupulous politician at checkout. God Ble$$ America.
One of your coworkers brings you a completed project for a once-over. You give it a quick glance, and your stomach immediately plummets into your shoes. This is wrong. Not an “oopsies, you’re missing a comma” sort of wrong, more of a “whoa, you need to re-do this” type of situation.
Now what? You know that you definitely can’t just let that mistake slide by. “If you ignore it, it’s likely to continue,” says Janel Anderson, a leadership and communication expert who earned her PhD in organizational communication from Purdue University. “I always encourage people to have these tough conversations in service of the great work their organization or team is doing.”
So, how do you do this? How exactly can you break the news and tell your colleague, “You screwed up!” in a way that’s direct, but not condescending?
Whether you’re interacting with a brand-new hire, a peer, a direct report, or even your boss, needing to tell someone they messed up is always awkward. Fortunately, there are a few phrases you can lean on to lead them in the right direction–without being totally brutal.
1. “Could you take another look at [thing]?”
Despite the fact that your insides are screaming, Wrong, wrong, wrong!, you know that a harsh correction probably won’t be well-received.
That’s the great thing about starting with a question. It immediately puts you and that other person in a more collaborative frame of mind, while gently guiding them to the area (or areas) where they’ve made some mistakes.
Plus, having that person turn their attention to the specific spots where they’ve messed up gives them a chance to recognize (and address) their own errors–without you just wildly redlining everything. That opportunity to be a little more hands-on with their fixes means they’re more likely to actually retain that information for next time.
One important thing to note about this approach: You need to be specific about exactly what they need to address. “It’s obviously something they missed the first time,” says Anderson. “So, say something like, ‘Could you take another look at paragraph three or slide seven?'” That way, you can direct them to the exact places that require their attention.
What this looks like:“Could you take another look at the calculation for the percent change column in this month’s website traffic spreadsheet?”
2. “Whoops, I’ve screwed [thing] up before too!”
No matter how kind someone is with their delivery, being on the receiving end of negative feedback or required revisions can still feel like an attack on you and your work. You’ve been there, right?
One way to soften the blow of your criticism is by grouping yourself in with that person. That’s exactly what a statement like this one does (even if it is a white lie). Your correction will feel way more supportive and less domineering–while still directly calling their attention to the spots that need improvement.
“This helps put that person in a less vulnerable position, because you’re making yourself a little vulnerable too,” Anderson explains. “You’re saying, ‘Let me help you learn from my mistakes.'”
One way to take this response to the next level? Offer any tips or resources you used to correct your own blunder when you made it.
What this looks like:“Whoops, I’ve screwed the percent change column up before, too! It looks like all of these results need to be fixed, because you ran the calculation with the values in the wrong order. I’ll send you this handy online calculator I use to double-check my own math. Let me know if you have any questions.”
3. “[Thing] needs to be fixed. How can I help?”
By now you know that you want to be a few things when telling someone they messed up: direct, supportive, and non-accusatory. Well, this response is all of those things.
“When things get to a point where the person could get defensive really quickly, I recommend taking all personal pronouns out,” Anderson says. Removing the finger-pointing “you” language helps you to keep your correction focused on the work–as opposed to the perceived shortcomings of a specific person.
Follow that with a sincere question asking how you can assist them (you can add personal pronouns back in now!). Maybe they’ll take you up on your willingness to help, or maybe they’ll retreat to their desk to implement your feedback alone. Either way, just extending the offer goes a long way to show that you’re there to support them–and not just chastise them.
What this looks like:“The percent change column needs to be fixed. It looks like the values were in the wrong order for the calculations. How can I help you make this update?”
There’s one thing you’ll notice in each of these three responses: They’re all polite and friendly, but they’re still direct.
Traditional wisdom might tell you to sandwich your constructive feedback between two compliments. But, ultimately, that just adds confusion and sends that person on an emotional roller coaster–thinking they did great work only to find out later that they majorly bungled the project.
Lean on these three different responses to tell someone they screwed up and you’ll point them in the right direction, kindly. Because you can be straightforward without being completely brutal.
This article originally appeared on The Muse and is reprinted with permission.
After months of dread over the impending 15-month shutdown of a major subway tunnel, New Yorkers are now being told that the whole thing may be unnecessary.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, in a surprise press conference, said today that the L train that shuffles some 400,000 daily commuters can be spared the full shutdown of a tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan thanks to a revised design plan that takes advantage of new technology. Under the plan, some night and weekend closures would still be necessary, but only of one of the tubes within the tunnel, not both at a time.
The shutdown was slated to begin on April 27 to repair damage to a tunnel caused by Hurricane Sandy back in 2012. It was expected to cause huge disruptions to commuters in some of Brooklyn’s densest neighborhoods, along with those in much of Lower Manhattan, where the line traverses the island along 14th Street.
Indeed, the line is so vital to the daily comings and goings of New Yorkers and visitors that it’s hard to conceive of life in New York without it. According to the MTA–New York’s quasi-corporate transportation agency–if the L train were an independent transit operation, it would rank 11th among all North American rail systems.
Even without the L-train shutdown, New York’s 115-year-old subway system is facing an infrastructure crisis, plagued with frequent delays, mechanical breakdowns, and outdated signal technology. Cuomo has received fierce criticism for his handling of the subway crisis, sparking hashtags like #CuomosMTA, which routinely surface on Twitter when a breakdown occurs. Cynthia Nixon, Cuomo’s opponent during the state’s primary last year, capitalized on the backlash by making the subway crisis a centerpiece of her gubernatorial campaign.
Rumor’s of today’s announcement started circulating earlier today, with one eagle-eyed reporter spotting the new calendar item on Cuomo’s schedule.
Everything we sense in our external and internal worlds has a distinct subjective quality. A blasting outburst of rage feels different than a lover’s tender kiss on the cheek. Even routine acts such as reading a book or trying to recall a childhood friend’s name feel remarkably different. These and countless other feelings fill the wavelengths of our consciousness and drive our daily pursuits, helping us to navigate the world. We seek things that make us feel delight and enjoyment, and steer clear of things that cause stress or suffering, unless we expect pleasure to follow the pain. It is puzzling, however, how these external and internal pieces of information are organized into inner, subjective states.
There is a strong intuition that our conscious self resides inside the body, specifically in our head. This might be because several of our sensory organs–eyes, ears, nose, taste buds–are located in the head. The psychologists Christina Starmans, now at the University of Toronto, and Paul Bloom at Yale University in Connecticut found that, when prompted, both adults and children locate a human’s self inside the head, but when shown pictures of aliens whose eyes are elsewhere, such as on the stomach, people mostly point toward the eyes rather than the eyeless head as the location of the self. Body and mind are not separable. Rather, they operate in tandem, providing the building blocks of our mental lives. For example, even mild bodily infections make us feel confused and fatigued, whereas a good, exhausting bout of exercise can lift our mood and make us feel, at times, euphoric.
[Source Image: ArtyCool/iStock]
My colleagues and I recently took this idea of embodied consciousness further and looked into mapping the “cartography” of conscious feelings onto the body (building on our earlier work on the bodily basis of emotions). We first generated a list of 100 common feelings such as seeing, breathing, hunger, pleasure and so forth, and asked participants to locate these states on their bodies by coloring in the regions of a human shape where each sensation was felt. We also gathered basic information regarding each feeling, such as how pleasant these states were, how often they are experienced, and how similar different states feel when experienced.
We were struck by the consistent cartography of the feelings in the body. Different subjective states had discernible “fingerprints” of bodily feelings that were clearly distinct from each other. Anger was felt in the upper torso. Drunkenness was felt mostly in the legs. Pleasure and positive emotions were experienced vividly all over the body. Since these fingerprints were so consistent across the respondents, there is some evidence pointing toward a primarily biological–rather than a learned–origin of the bodily maps of feelings.
The bodily maps were indicative of the structure of the participants’ mindscapes. The more similar the bodily fingerprints of two states, the more similar these states were experienced in general–suggesting a direct link between body and conscious experience. Also, we found that most feelings were imbued with clear emotional tone. In addition to obvious cases such as love or winning, even seemingly innocuous acts such as remembering and speaking clearly felt pleasant.
[Source Image: ArtyCool/iStock]
Crucially, participants reported feeling emotionally pleasant states such as thankfulness and relaxation much more often than negative ones. This suggests that, in general, our emotional disposition is chiefly positive and pleasant, even though we are often tempted to think the opposite. This might stem from the controllability of different feelings. Our data revealed that emotionally negative feelings were more difficult to control than positive feelings. Unpleasant emotions triggered during major life events might simply feel more salient to us because we have little control over them. We tend to forget that, for the most part, life is actually quite pleasant, though these emotions could be simply less salient than unpleasant emotions.
These results provide compelling evidence for the centrality of bodily feedback in organizing our conscious feelings. Although consciousness emerges from brain function, and we oftentimes experience consciousness to be located in the brain, bodily feedback clearly contributes to a wide variety of subjective feelings. But of course, it is not all in our bodies either. Patients whose bodily states are not conveyed to their brain due to, for example, spinal-cord injury or autonomic nervous-system dysfunction are, of course, not void of the feelings of mental life. This would not be possible if the body was the sole source of our feelings. Rather, it is the whole constellation of the brain and body, with its viscera, muscles, and organs, that give color to our inner lives, and simply knocking out one part of the system is not enough to cause its total malfunction. Sensations, percepts, and memories are important parts of the puzzle of consciousness too.
Why did the feelings crawl into our consciousness in the first place? The neurologist Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California has proposed that emotion-related inputs from the body to the brain could have generated the first traces of consciousness in our early ancestors. Pain triggered by tissue damage is among the most important warning signals to an individual. The organisms that began to be able to feel such dysfunctions in their bodies would have had a huge advantage, as they could have withdrawn from dangers and rested to promote recovery when injured or ill. This centrality of pain and bad feelings to our mental workspaces is still evident–even today, the most common reason for visiting a doctor is simply not feeling well.
[Source Image: ArtyCool/iStock]
The development of awareness of body-related harms might have ultimately paved the road for the emergence of more advanced forms of conscious thought and processes, such as language, thinking, and reasoning. And many of our feelings are not private at all. Knowing what is going on in our own bodies is useful, but tracking others’ inner states and goals might be even more so. Similarly, as our bodies signal our internal states to us, they also often communicate our internal states to others too. Humans and many animals are adept at reading each other’s intentions, feelings, and goals from their behavior such as facial and bodily expressions. Such capability to promote social cohesion by exchanging emotions and other mental states has likely yielded significant evolutionary advantages already to our ancestors, and it could even be argued that a purely private consciousness would be of limited use. It is thus not so surprising that one of our most common social questions is “How do you feel?”–enquiring information to construct models of others’ minds and bodies.
Consciousness is one of the biggest enigmas for neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers alike, and even our recent findings cannot tell how the brain and body jointly generate our inner mental world from the various inputs. However, they show that we need to begin unravelling the interactions between the brain and the body if we want to understand how the human mind works.
Lauri Nummenmaa is an associate professor in psychology at the University of Turku in Finland, where he leads the Human Emotion Systems laboratory at Turku PET Centre and Department of Psychology.
This article was originally published at Aeonand has been republished under Creative Commons.
In her new book Merchants of Truth, former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson claims that the news outlet’s publisher drafted a letter “all but apologizing” to the Chinese government for a tough investigative story about corruption in the country. The story went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. She claims that the publisher’s letter was drafted “with input from the Chinese embassy.”
When she first read a draft of the letter that had been leaked to her, “my blood pressure rose,” she writes, and she confronted publisher Arthur Sulzberger, who she claims eventually agreed to reword it with input from her and then managing editor Dean Baquet. But for Abramson, the letter was “still objectionable,” since it included language about being sorry for the “perception” the story created, and the episode “strained” her relationship with Sulzberger. Two years later, she was fired.
Merchants of Truth by Jill Abramson
According to Abramson, Sulzberger was eager to appease the Chinese government because its operation in China was at stake. The paper had just launched a Chinese-language news site that included original reporting by a staff of 30 Chinese journalists, as well as translations of Times stories. But when reporter David Barboza, who was working on a deeply reported story about how family members of China’s ruling elite had accumulated vast wealth, contacted government officials for comment, they were enraged. The Chinese ambassador requested to meet with Sulzberger to “stop its publication.” Though he offered no evidence to rebut the claims in the story, the ambassador threatened “serious consequences” if the story ran, Abramson writes.
Sulzberger bucked the pressure and decided to let the story run. The publisher later told the paper’s then public editor, Margaret Sullivan, “I’m very proud of this work.” He added: “Our business is to publish great journalism. Does this have a business impact? Of course.”
Within an hour of publication, the story was pulled offline in China. In addition, the website was blocked, no new visas were issued to Times reporters, and some of their Chinese staffers were detained. To this day, the New York Times remains blocked in China.
Sulzberger eventually traveled to China to urge government officials to reopen the site, but to no avail. And Abramson claims that Times vice chairman Michael Golden “wanted to close the Chinese site altogether.” When she objected, arguing that it would look like “we were bowing to the censors,” she was ordered to cut in half the losses incurred by keeping the Chinese journalists employed while the sites were blocked, she writes. But on a trip to China to meet the staff, she claims she changed tack and decided to find the savings elsewhere.
Then Abramson claims that, “without her knowledge,” the publisher drafted a letter with input from the Chinese embassy “all but apologizing” for the original story. She brought the draft to a tense meeting with Sulzberger at a nearby Starbucks. When she showed him the letter, he “seemed startled that I had it and he kept saying, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’ He tried to slip the letter into his folder, but I snatched it back,” she writes.
Merchants of Truth, which goes on sale next month from Simon & Schuster, made waves earlier this week over a line in which Abramson called the New York Times“unmistakably anti-Trump.”
A spokesperson for the Times disputed the accuracy of Abramson’s account without going into detail, writing in an email to Fast Company:
No, the account isn’t accurate and the publication of this 2012 story is a powerful example of the Times‘s deep commitment to publishing stories in the public interest without regard to potential financial impact. We published this story knowing in advance that our Chinese-language website, which had launched just months before, would be shut down–it remains shut down today. We’ve vigorously protested the shutdown and continue to fund the website to send a clear signal that our journalists cannot be silenced in retaliation for their coverage.
Astronaut André Kuipers called 911 from the International Space Station, and it wasn’t to report an alien invasion, a George Clooney sighting, or even a fellow astronaut spoiling book endings. In fact, it was an accident—and it’s surprising that it doesn’t happen more often.
According to Newsweek, the Dutch astronaut explained to the Netherlands public broadcaster Nederlandse Omroep Stichting how he accidentally contacted emergency services in the United States while floating some 254 miles above the Earth.
“If you’re in space, it’s like you’re making a call via Houston. First you dial the 9 for an outside line, and then 011 for an international line,” he said, according to science and technology website Futurism. However, Kuipers forgot to dial the 0—setting off an alarm at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “I made a mistake. The next day I received an email message: Did you call 911?” Kuipers said, before joking that he was “a little disappointed that they had not come up.”
Bet they would have come up if he saw George Clooney.
The meme-ification of Bird Box may have finally gone too far.
Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller finds Sandra Bullock and a ragtag group of survivors attempting to ward off impending doom by wearing blindfolds nearly all the time. (What does the ridge at the top of Bullock’s nose look like in this film? I could scarcely say with any accuracy.) The streaming service dropped Bird Box on December 13, only to find users happily doing their marketing work for them: Spreading blindfold-related memes throughout all corners of the internet. Fun stuff! The this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things moment arrived, however, when fans began to post videos of themselves trying to do ordinary tasks while blindfolded.
While the worst that could happen in most cases is that the person attempting to traverse the world blindfolded will end up with a stubbed toe and a greater appreciation for visually impaired people, there’s an obvious danger involved. The attention economy tends to reward people for more outlandish behavior, and a competitive drive to be the one with the most outlandish behavior could lead some to attempt to ford a river Sandy Bullock-style, or worse.
Netflix appears to be aware of this problem, but the company’s tweet urging fans not to attempt the challenge was too cute by half. If anything, it reads like a winking request for more people to attempt a Bird Box simulation.
Can’t believe I have to say this, but: PLEASE DO NOT HURT YOURSELVES WITH THIS BIRD BOX CHALLENGE. We don’t know how this started, and we appreciate the love, but Boy and Girl have just one wish for 2019 and it is that you not end up in the hospital due to memes.
In early 2018, YouTube stepped in and removed “Tide Pod Challenge” videos to discourage the curious from participating in the extremely dangerous, misguided phenomenon. So far, however, YouTube appears to only be removing “Bird Box Challenge” videos in which blindfolded parents lead blindfolded children around. (An awful and now defunct video, in which a blindfolded toddler smacks into a wall, was still playing as recently as Thursday afternoon.) YouTube appears to have some internal calculus by which they determine what constitutes a dangerous environment for a Bird Box Challenge challenge, and are flagging and removing on a case-by-case basis.
Fast Company has reached out to YouTube for comment on whether the company will consider removing more “Bird Box Challenge” videos, and we will update further with their response.
UPDATE: Here’s a statement from a YouTube spokesperson: “YouTube’s Community Guidelines have long prohibited content intended to encourage dangerous activities that have an inherent risk of physical harm. Our policies are especially strict when it comes to content featuring minors and we work to quickly remove flagged videos that violate these policies.”
Early this morning, Apple’s stock took its biggest one-day drop in five years after being the world’s first trillion-dollar company last August. But stock value is the least of Apple’s problems. What the hell happened in the last six months?
Let’s review:
August 2, 2018.Apple’s valuation hits $1 trillion after years of ever-increasing record revenues and profit, which began when Steve Jobs returned to the company to save it from oblivion.
November 23, 2018.Apple cuts iPhone XR prices in Japan amid reported poor sales in the country. The Wall Street Journal report says that Apple will resume production of the iPhone X to meet contractual obligations to its OLED screen provider, Samsung.
January 2, 2019.Tim Cook announces a revised guidance for Apple’s fiscal first quarter 2019: $84 billion revenue versus its previous $93 billion forecast, confirming worse-than-expected iPhone sales. That’s $6 billion and change less than first quarter 2018. Cook cited a lot of reasons, like iPhone sales, a strong U.S. dollar, too many new products, and bad economy in emerging markets. He also said that Apple’s $29 battery upgrade program–which the company introduced to avoid a scandal for its rogue speed throttling of old phones–hurt the upgrade cycle, further confirming that Apple depends on people feeling their current phones are too slow in order for them to upgrade. It also confirms that its new phones do not offer any compelling feature for most consumers.
EXCLUSIVE: After cutting Q1 expectations, Apple CEO Tim Cook tells CNBC that the shortfall is primarily in Greater China as trade tensions put pressure on the Chinese economy https://t.co/iOf79ebo17pic.twitter.com/Lm7Wyp1VOX
Artificial intelligence could one day change the lives of people facing an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, according to a new study by researchers at UC, San Francisco.
“One of the difficulties with Alzheimer’s disease is that by the time all the clinical symptoms manifest and we can make a definitive diagnosis, too many neurons have died, making it essentially irreversible,” said Jae Ho Sohn, a resident in the school’s Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging and the study’s lead researcher, in a statement.
For the study, published in Radiology, Sohn and his team fed a common type of brain scans to a machine-learning algorithm, and it learned to diagnose early-stage Alzheimer’s disease about six years before a clinical diagnosis could be made. The AI’s diagnostic skills could give doctors a much-needed headstart on treating the degenerative disease.
Sohn and his team focused on PET scans that monitored glucose levels across the brain, because glucose is the primary source of fuel for brain cells. Once the cells become diseased, they eventually stop using glucose, making it an important level to track. However, the changes are subtle—at least to the human eye. “Human radiologists are really strong at identifying tiny focal finding like a brain tumor, but we struggle at detecting more slow, global changes,” Sohn said. “Given the strength of deep learning in this type of application, especially compared to humans, it seemed like a natural application.”
Sohn and his team trained the algorithm on PET scans from patients who were eventually diagnosed with either Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, or no disorder. The algorithm began to figure out how to predict Alzheimer’s disease. Eventually, it was able to correctly identify 92% of patients who developed Alzheimer’s disease in the first test set and 98% in the second test set, making correct predictions on average 75.8 months (for the math-impaired, that’s almost six years) before the patient received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
While the algorithm isn’t quite ready for clinical use, it could eventually help doctors start treating patients much earlier.
Here are two facts that should concern you: By 2050, the planet is expected to house 10 billion humans, and humans–if current trends hold–really like eating meat.
While we can’t do much about the first, the second is within our power to change. If we cut back on meat in favor of alternative, plant-based proteins, a new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) finds that we might make a significant impact on overall human health and mortality, and the well-being of the planet.
[Image: courtesy World Economic Forum]The point of the Alternative Proteins report, says Dominic Waughray, WEF managing director, is not to call for an all-out halt to eating meat, but to make the case for increasing the availability of other, more sustainable proteins. “It can be possible to produce enough nutrition for 10 billion people and improve people’s health without necessarily giving up meat–even red meat–altogether, through innovation in products, improvements in how we produce beef, pork, and chicken, and an effort on the part of the consumer to embrace a more diverse diet,” Waughray says.
Tempering beef consumption with plant-based proteins like beans, nuts, or jackfruit, the WEF finds, could end up saving peoples’ lives. Red meat correlates with higher cholesterol levels and blood pressure, both of which can lead to heart disease and stroke, and delivers few benefits in the way of fiber and potassium. The WEF found that adding more red meat to one’s diet increases the likelihood of diet-related mortality by 1.5%, mostly due to greater heme iron intake, which is associated with heart problems. Incorporating more fiber-rich proteins, like beans and peas, could reduce mortality rates by over 5%.
The WEF team nods to the growing research into lab-grown beef, but from a human-health perspective, there’s little difference between eating meat from a cow and meat produced synthetically. Also, while the popular plant-based substitute, the Impossible Burger, differs from beef in composition, it relies on heme (the iron associated with health risks) to deliver its signature “bloody” look. The WEF says more research is needed to understand how the Impossible burger stacks up against beef, health-wise.
What’s for certain, though, is that both lab-grown meat and the plant-based alternatives WEF studies–including algae, nuts, insects, tofu, jackfruit, and beans–cause considerably less environmental damage than beef. Beef requires 23.9 kilograms of CO2 to produce 200 kcal of food, but plant-based alternatives like beans, insects, and nuts emit only 1 kilogram or less of CO2 for the same amount of nutrition. Overall, beef production accounts for around 25% of total food-related greenhouse gas emissions, and swapping out red meat for plant-based alternatives could conversely reduce emissions from food by nearly 25%. This is an instance in which the report authors feel lab-grown beef has real potential. While current production methods are still fairly energy-intensive, as the process scales and becomes more efficient, energy savings will also increase.
[Image: courtesy World Economic Forum]Of course, advocating that people change their diets on the basis of personal health and energy savings leaves out an important factor in how people decide what they eat: cost. Ground beef is relatively inexpensive and accessible, particularly when compared to lab-grown alternatives and some rarer plant-based options, like jackfruit. The WEF suggests that the plant-based protein industry could benefit from public-sector investment, in the same way the renewable energy industry has done, to help bring prices down. And on top of that, the agriculture industry has something to learn from the energy sector in how to manage the transition from factory-farmed meat to more plant-based alternatives. Governments could fund farmers to switch to growing protein-rich plants, or help them transition to other jobs in sustainable agriculture.
With this new report, the WEF wants to demonstrate the potential of wide-scale adoption of plant-based alternatives to beef–something that startups like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat frequently point to as their goal. But what the report makes clear is that the private sector alone can’t bring it about. It will take wide-scale collaboration between companies and governments, and a comprehensive to ensure the livelihoods of agricultural producers remain intact as this massive–and necessary–shift happens in their industry.
A government figure is raising eyebrows because of their behavior back in high school. No, it’s not Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who weathered a credible accusation about sexual assault last fall, but rather Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who faces a credible accusation of canned heat in her heels.
As the freshman representative from New York’s 14th congressional district was sworn in on Thursday afternoon, a video of her re-enacting a dance from The Breakfast Club went viral. The video, which stems from the politician’s college days, was meant to either shame her or make her appear as an unserious person. Conservatives have been tweeting it as an “Is this your king?”-level mic drop, the final evidence that she’s a secret elite who has been lying about her past.
That is not the way the video has been received.
Well, @AOC is officially done. She’ll never recover from the world seeing her…
The video is just the latest feeble attempt by conservatives to make a gotcha moment stick to Ocasio-Cortez. She misspoke a couple times last fall. She got elected despite the fact that she’s perceived as lacking traditional political experience. She has portrayed herself as being from the Bronx, even though she didn’t live in the Bronx for the absolute entirety of her childhood. These tend to be the knocks against her: gaffes, inexperience, and supposed inauthenticity. And the people who are most mad about these infractions somehow find room in their hearts to adore Donald Trump, a fading con artist game-show host who speaks exclusively in gibberish.
Some of the dirt the right wing has on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so far: – She lived in a house – She wears clothes – She attended high school – She danced with her friends in a video once pic.twitter.com/MVCmxB9BFf
Ocasio-Cortez has been too busy getting sworn into Congress today to personally clap back at those circulating her dance video, but we’ll update here when the famously social media-savvy politician does.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story stated that the video was from Ocasio-Cortez’s high school days. We have corrected the error.
The question was posted in March on an Instagram account shared by a young couple named Vishnu and Meenakshi Moorthy, two software engineers and travel bloggers from India who had been living and working in Silicon Valley.
This Instagram post showing a picture of Meenakshi Moorthy, taken by her husband Vishnu, asked: “Is our life just worth one photo?” Months later, they would both be dead.
The post showed Meenakshi sitting on the edge of a rock over the Grand Canyon with the caption, in part: “A lot of us including yours truly is a fan of daredevilry attempts of standing at the edge of cliffs and skyscrapers . . . Is our life just worth one photo?”
In October, they were killed by an 800-foot fall at Yosemite National Park, an accident that occurred while they were on the edge of a cliff and probably taking pictures for Instagram.
The Moorthys’ fairy-tale life ended tragically. But their story is part of a growing and dangerous trend in the global contest for social media fame.
A subculture has emerged in the past eight years of people who seek out death-defying situations–and they do it for the likes, followers, and adulation of fans on social media
How it all began
In 2011, a Canadian named Tom Ryaboi dangled his feet over the edge of a tall building in Toronto and took a picture straight down. He posted it on Flickr, Reddit, and 500px. The picture was a viral hit.
Ryaboi titled his image, “I’ll make you famous.” But the picture made him famous–and also helped to spread the phenomenon of “rooftopping,” in which people climb as high as they can on a building or tower.
Rooftopping had existed for years as an obscure branch of urban hacking. But the social internet transformed these pursuits from private thrill seeking into a genre of public photography and video. The adrenaline rush was still part of the idea. But so were the clicks, likes, subscribers, and even income.
With “I’ll make you famous,” a new kind of social media star was born: the social media daredevil. In 2014, Vitaliy Raskalov and Vadim Makhorov climbed the Shanghai Tower. Their GoPro video of the stunt now has more than 73 million views.
After that event, a new generation of Instagrammers, YouTubers, and members of other social networks began to cultivate the craft of risking life and limb to post heart-pounding pictures and videos of dangerous stunts. Risk-taking social media photography deaths and injuries roughly tripled in number from the beginning of 2014 to the end of 2015, according to media analysis conducted by researchers in Turkey.
The stunts take many forms: posing on tall buildings or high cliffs; reckless activity on, in, near, or under trains, cars, or motorcycles; interaction with wild animals; all manner of dangerous jackassery (you know, for the LOLs); extreme eating; and more.
It’s easy to dismiss the trend as the folly of reckless youth. But some of the images are breathtakingly beautiful. The photographs and videos on Russian model Angela Nikolau’s Instagram feed, for example are stunning in part because of the danger.
Like Nikolau, many of these social media risk-takers are practiced and skillful.
Some of their imitators–not so much.
Rising fatalities
A study published in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care found that some 259 people died taking selfies between October 2011 and November 2017.
Journalists have covered this report extensively. But the number can mislead.
As psychologist and author Tracy P. Alloway told me, many of those included in that figure weren’t habitual social media risk takers or rising social media stars, but regular people who happened to be killed while taking selfies during unusual circumstances.
Wikipedia actually keeps a list of people killed or nearly killed while trying to take selfies. Most of these deaths were not habitual social media risk takers.
For example, a man named Prabhu Bhatara was returning home from a wedding in the Indian state of Odisha when he spotted a bear. Against the advice of his friends, he decided to take a selfie with the animal in the background. Tragically, he was mauled to death by the bear, which added a number to the statics around “selfie deaths.” But Bhatara was not a social media thrill seeker, just an ordinary person who made an unfortunate choice.
It’s also true that many people who do engage in frequent risk taking for social media aren’t taking selfies–they’re the models if you will, photographed by others–and as such, fatalities in this category aren’t counted as “selfie deaths.”
And finally, the number counted in the death-by-selfie study was based on media reports. Some selfie-related deaths go unreported.
The bottom line is that we don’t really know how many people have died in recent years due to the risk-taking social trend, just that fatalities and injuries are on the rise. Still, the selfie-death studies are a reasonable proxy for the trend and our best source of hard data.
The leading cause of death while taking selfies is drowning, followed by transportation (trains and cars), and then falling from high places.
Social media risk-taking culture varies by nation. More than half of all global selfie deaths happen in India. (The top four nations for selfie deaths, according to the report are, in order: India, Russia, the United States, and Pakistan.) The majority of Indians who die while trying to capture photos for social do so by falling off high places. Many other such deaths involve “train surfing” (a phenomenon so big in India that National Geographiccovered it).
In the U.S., as one might predict, the majority of such deaths are by firearms. A video news report posted on YouTube recently showed a man at a gun range pointing his gun at a friend for a selfie before a range safety officer skillfully intervened.
YouTube and some other social sites have witnessed wave after wave of dangerous “challenges” since 2014, including the “Fire Challenge” (where people set themselves on fire), the “Tide Pod Challenge,” and others. These “challenges” are clearly driven by social media imitation and competition.
Other social media-driven stunts include dangerous driving or riding a bike or motorcycle; climbing on or touching power lines; posing on railroad tracks; posing with guns, grenades, or other weapons; and posing on beaches or on rocks with large waves.
Some of those killed had large social followings: Popular rooftoppers Wu Yongning and Andrey Retrovsky, for example, all had big followings and died in the pursuit of risk taking for social fame. So did YouTube stars Ryker Gamble, Alexey Lyakh, and Megan Scraper, who were participants in a popular gonzo travel YouTube channel and Instagram account called High On Life.
The channel features a lot of relatively safe leisure activities in exotic locations, but also risky stunts such as diving off rooftops into swimming pools, kayaking down sewage drains, and alligator wrestling. The trio was killed after Scraper slipped off a waterfall and fell into a dangerous pool below in British Columbia. Gamble and Lyakh died trying to save her.
Canadian rapper Jon James, who performed risky stunts in his music videos–essentially integrating the social media risk-taker subculture into his performances–fell to his death in October during a video shoot on an airplane wing.
While social media stars sometimes die in the act, it’s possible that the larger problem is the audience that copies what they see on social networks.
George Kourounis, an extreme weather “chaser” and presenter on the TV series Angry Planet, knows a thing or two about risking life and limb for video. His Twitter profile picture is a selfie he took in front of some extremely dangerous lava.
The selfie was shot inside Marum Crater on Ambrym Island in Vanuatu. The spot was so hot that without his protective suit, he would have survived there only a few seconds. And it partly melted the outside of his video camera. Kourounis told me that fans try to copy some of his exploits. He says he can’t stop people from doing that, but hopes they take safety as seriously as he does.
Life-threatening stunts are obviously reckless and dangerous. But there’s another big problem.
Danger works
A British YouTuber named Jay Swingler performed a dangerous stunt about a year ago. He placed a plastic bag with a breathing tube over his head, then “glued” his head to the inside of a microwave oven with expanding plaster. The plaster set, and Swingler couldn’t get his head out of the microwave. It took a team of paramedics to set him free.
Dumb, right? But Swingler was rewarded with 70,000 new subscribers over the next three days after posting. Today, the video has more than 5.7 million views, and Swingler’s channel “TGFbro” enjoys 4.5 million subscribers. He now monetizes his YouTube channel in part with merchandise, including hats and hoodies that say “Childish.”
Some do it for the thrills or art, and some do it for the LOLs. YouTuber Jay Swingler plastered his head into a microwave, after which his subscriber count increased by 70,000 in three days. [Screenshot: TGFbro]Others are cashing in on the aesthetic of risk-taking social influencers. A clothing company called Breach Apparel calls their products “functional garms for the movers, adventurers, and explorers,” and their models appear in rooftopping and parkour situations.
Ricky D. Crano, a lecturer in the department of English at Tufts University, told me that dangerous images posted on social media represent “a clear-cut case of market forces driving high-risk selfie publicity, a quintessential model of personhood for the digital age: the individual as entrepreneur of one’s self.”
Risk taking becomes part of one’s personal brand. “We must compete with others just to be seen–that is, for the algorithm to favor our post,” says Crano.
But the rewards are also internal. Psychologist Alloway told me that the driving forces for the posting of images showing the self in danger may be identical to other social media actions, such as addictive posting, constant selfie taking, and others. People post danger images because of narcissism and identity. Narcissists, for example, may feel “immune to the laws of nature,” according to Alloway.
Danger posts offer a double dose of dopamine–a reward for the risk taking, then another reward for the social rewards of likes, clicks, subscriptions, and followers.
Steve Stewart-Williams, author of the book The Ape That Understood the Universe, agrees that the motivations are pretty banal. People like to show off and fit in, and some crave an adrenaline rush.
Deliberate risk taking for an audience may be rooted in our evolutionary past, according to Stewart-Williams. “On average, men engage in more risky behavior–more showing off–than women, especially in early adulthood,” he says. “This is common in species where the maximum number of offspring for males is higher than that for females.” In prehistoric human societies, “The men who had the most offspring were those who took greater risks in the pursuit of status and prestige”–the Paleolithic equivalent of followers and likes.
The backlash arrives
Police in some locations are cracking down on risky photography for public safety. Ryaboi told me that Hong Kong in particular has become more strict.
Ryaboi himself was arrested in 2015 during a rooftopping jaunt in Toronto. He said that police tried to make an example of him by publicizing his arrest, but that it only made rooftopping more popular in Canada. Police dropped the charges.
The Indian state of Goa and other locations are establishing signed “no selfie zones,” but their effectiveness is questionable. And the Russian Interior Ministry has even produced a leaflet and PSA video and website warning about the danger of risky social media photography and videography. “A cool selfie could cost you your life,” it says, along with a host of stick-figure examples of how someone might die while trying to capture a thrilling selfie.
Some thrill-seeking social starts have been jailed or fined. One Russian Instagrammer and YouTuber uses the nom de stuntKobzarro and wears a mask to conceal her identity. She says she started train surfing at the age of 15.
Is social networking to blame?
Stewart-Williams says that social media amplifies ordinary social competition, which can drive people to extremes. “Instead of just competing with the people around you, you’re potentially competing with anyone anywhere in the world,” he says. Worse, “the videos that go viral are the ones that are most extreme, so you’re competing with the most extreme risk takers on the planet.”
Crano says that “these incentives to ‘win’ at social media are a product of design and not an accident of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.” The incentives are “baked right in” and “essential to their corporate revenue generation.”
“The case for corporate responsibility here is a strong one,” he adds. “But it’s “easy to refute such claims with counterclaims prioritizing shareholder responsibility.”
A Google spokesperson who works on YouTube policy told me that YouTube maintains policies against the depiction of harmful activities on the site. Google considers whether the people taking risks are trained or professional and are taking precautions, whether the act can be easily copied by minors, and whether the videos are educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic in nature.
For example, YouTube might delete content showing someone pointing a loaded gun at someone else while taking a selfie. But it would allow a TV news report that included the same video (as per my example above).
Google develops its policies in consultation with psychologists, pediatricians, emergency room doctors, and others.
Similarly, Twitter prohibits self-harm or encouraging others to hurt themselves. Dangerous “challenges” such as the “Tide Pod Challenge” are against Twitter’s rules. The company requires such tweets to be deleted; after repeated violations, it will suspend accounts. A Twitter spokesperson told me that Twitter’s policies are constantly changing as user behavior change and trends emerge.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, did not respond to my requests for an interview.
Hemank Lamba, one of the researchers on a project involving one American and two Indian universities, called, “From Camera to Deathbed: Understanding Dangerous Selfies on Social Media,” told me that the best solution is to increase awareness about the risks.
Technology can help. “We are experimenting with technology-based interventions” that use a camera feed to identify when the user is in danger, such as at a higher elevation or close to an approaching vehicle,” he says. The technology uses deep learning to identify pictures that depict life-threatening situations.
It’s easy to imagine that social sites like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram might some day use technology like this to flag photos and videos that are taken in life-threatening situations. In the meantime, risk taking for social media fame is getting more extreme, and the number of fatalities seem to be on the rise. As the public slowly begins to understand the potential harm of social media–the addiction, the loss of time, the risk of depression–our best hope is that it also takes notice of the physical danger it can engender.
The immediate and most visible impact of a shutdown is in the government’s day-to-day operations. Some departments and offices, like the Internal Revenue Service, would be closed, and nonessential federal employees across the government would stay home.
But beyond the individual workers and families affected, could a short or lengthy shutdown affect the broader U.S. economy as well?
While a shutdown affects the economy in a number of ways–from delaying business permits and visas to reducing service hours at innumerable agencies–a primary channel through which a shutdown affects the economy is through withheld or foregone pay from federal employees who don’t receive their paychecks.
Since consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of economic activity in the United States, withholding pay from even some government workers could introduce a significant economic speed bump in the short run.
And that’s exactly what we saw in 2013.
Similar to the situation today, a partisan standoff in Congress led to a partial shutdown of the government that lasted a little over two weeks beginning on Oct. 1 of that year.
Well over a million federal employees were affected and didn’t receive a paycheck during the shutdown. Some were furloughed–sent home and told not to do anything related to their job. Those deemed “essential” or “exempted”–such as security personnel screening passengers at airports or border patrol agents–were required to continue working at their jobs, although they were not receiving paychecks. The government eventually paid both groups the money owed them, regardless of whether they worked, after Democrats and Republicans reached an agreement on Oct. 16.
My colleague Yannelis and I sought to understand how households responded by tracking how they behaved in the days leading up to, during, and following the shutdown using detailed financial data.
We obtained this anonymized data from a personal finance website where people track their income, expenses, savings, and debt. Using the paycheck transaction descriptions, we identified over 60,000 households that contained employees of federal agencies affected by the shutdown. These affected employees included both those who were asked to work without pay and those who were furloughed.
As a comparison group, we also identified over 90,000 households with a member who worked for a state government. That would likely mean they have fairly similar levels of education, experience, and financial security, yet their paychecks were unaffected by the shutdown.
Short-term impact on spending
Our study led to two primary findings.
First, we found that the shutdown led to an immediate decline in average household spending of almost 10 percent. Surprisingly, despite the fact that most federal workers have stable jobs and income sources, they were quick to cut spending on pretty much everything, from restaurants to clothing to electronics, just days after their pay was delayed.
While households with less money in the bank cut their spending by larger amounts, even those with significant resources and easy access to credit reduced their expenditures.
Second, households with a member who was furloughed and required to stay home from work slashed their spending more dramatically–by 15 percent to 20 percent, or almost twice as much as the average of those affected. This larger decline reflected the fact that these households suddenly had a lot more time on their hands. Rather than going out to eat or paying for childcare for example, they were able to spend more time cooking and watching their own children.
This behavior is what tends to spread the economic effects of a shutdown that affects a slice of the population to a wider group of businesses and individuals behind Washington, D.C. And in regions with substantial numbers of federal workers, these declines in spending can greatly hurt the health of the local economy in the short run.
Long-term impact?
Whether or not a shutdown has a longer-term economic impact depends on whether employees are paid their foregone wages after its conclusion–and how long the shutdown lasts.
In 2013, the government repaid even furloughed workers what they would have earned had the shutdown not happened.
This repayment, essentially increasing the size of their first post-shutdown paychecks, had significant and immediate effects on household spending. A sudden spike in spending occurred in the days after the paychecks were disbursed, largely erasing some of the most dramatic declines in spending during the previous two weeks.
The government has usually paid all its employees, “essential” or not, back pay after other past shutdowns, such as those in the 1990s. While Congress is legally required to pay federal employees who worked during the shutdown, there’s no law requiring the same treatment for nonessential workers.
In addition, the longer the shutdown lasts, the worse its impact. Households might deplete savings or hit their credit card limits as the impasse stretches day after day, giving them additional time to adjust their spending in ways that they could not do with only a few days’ notice. For instance, in 2013, bills for health insurance or tuition payments were largely unaffected. Had that shutdown persisted, households may have started to cut back here as well.
So if Congress refuses to offer furloughed workers back pay and the shutdown lasts weeks rather than days, the economic impact could be severe.
However, if a shutdown is resolved in a relatively short amount of time, with workers being paid back their regular income, the damage would likely be fairly contained.
Stephanie Linnartz started at Marriott in 1997 as a financial analyst. She worked her way up the company and now serves as the company’s global chief commercial officer, overseeing a portfolio of some one million rooms at 6,700 properties spread across 130 countries. Working in the hotel industry means that Linnartz, a mother of two, is on the road a lot. Even when she’s not traveling she’s hitting the pavement–running near her home in Washington, D.C.
Here the executive reveals her tips and tools for getting the most out of every day.
What’s your Off Switch?
Before bed, I enjoy a warm shower followed by a few minutes of meditation using the Headspace app, which I love. Also, a cup of Sakara Life Sleep tea normally does the trick to help me fall asleep.
What’s your On Switch?
My most productive days also start with Headspace meditation to clear my brain, followed by a morning run outdoors and my one–and only–coffee of the day, an Illy cappuccino.
Where do you go to recharge and refresh?
The Maldives is the most amazing and serene place I have ever visited. You can sail, swim and scuba–and all of our Marriott International resorts there have fantastic gyms and spas. The natural beauty and clear blue water immediately relaxes you. It’s truly a special place!
What classic product has never been improved on?
L.L. Bean boots! I still wear them and always will. Also, 60 Minutes, no other news program has quite replicated what they’ve accomplished.
[Photo: courtesy of Sakara]What travel tips do you swear by?
Pack your workout clothes and try to exercise outside. It’s a great way to see a new city!
Bring some of you favorite healthy snacks, especially if you’re going to a foreign country where you can’t get what you love. I always pack a few RX Bars and individual packets of Sakara Life Life Source protein powder.
Get Clear and Global Entry. You can even also use Clear to get into the short lines at some sports venues, like Yankee Stadium.
Mobility is at the center of an exciting Venn diagram. The work of designing the present and near future of how we get around—on the ground, in the air, and even in outer space—now exists at the nexus of everything from smart cities and artificial intelligence to robotics, 5G connectivity, and big data. It’s not a coincidence that carmakers like Ford and GM are remaking themselves as mobility providers at the same time that technology companies like Google, Intel, and IBM are busy working on autonomous vehicles and even urban planning. The future of mobility is being prototyped across all sorts of industries. So, what can we expect from these extraordinary interrelationships in 2019? What can we reasonably expect to start happening in a single calendar year? And what big to-dos will follow from those developments?
[Illustration: David Smith/courtesy Teague]
Here are seven breakthroughs–from AI-powered airports and grocery-delivering robots to traffic drones–that will become mainstream realities sooner than you think.
The curb will get a revamp
Ride-hailing is projected to keep getting bigger year-over-year. But our streets were not designed for these services, something that’s becoming more evident as we watch those vehicles block lanes of traffic while on- or offloading passengers. This won’t be sustainable; our downtown cores won’t work if every block becomes a miniature version of an airport’s arrivals and departures lanes. The year 2019 will be the year in which both ride-hailing operators and city transportation managers start seriously rethinking the curb.
What will this look like? The likes of Uber and Lyft will ramp up their collaborations with public transit agencies to help solve for last-mile problems, connecting transportation hubs with passengers’ specific destinations. In doing so, watch for ride-hailing apps to actively position passengers toward pickup and drop-off zones that are friendlier to transit and traffic in general. These increasingly collaborative partnerships will also foster the earliest prototyping of next-generation curbs that see all kinds of vehicles as nodes on a network.
The implications of these developments will be straightforward for city residents, who will notice their favorite ride-hailing apps nudging them toward light rail and subway stations and their local public transit providers offering more door-to-door services through a mixture of buses, vans, cars, bikes, and scooters.
The airport will feel more human, thanks to artificial intelligence
Yes, it’s ironic that artificial intelligence will help combat the sense of alienation and dehumanization that’s so pervasive within the current airport experience (see: intrusive security screening, luggage-fee traps, broken boarding processes, and more). But that’s exactly what artificial intelligence will do, especially in our busiest airports. Already, these hubs are being outfitted with more and more sensors, with Delta now operating the first biometric terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
The next step is for airports and airlines to use artificial intelligence to stitch together data from all those sensors and clearly establish that you are who you say you are. That trusted source of identity will help solve for the inefficiencies and inhumanities of existing airport processes. This work won’t just be nice-to-have; it’ll be critical to the future competitiveness of air travel. Airports will need to be line-free environments that anticipate the movements and motivations of travelers from garage to gate. In 2019, we’ll start seeing the first steps of artificial intelligence making sense of more data to create service superpowers for staff, and hyper-personalized travel experiences for flyers.
For passengers, this will mean smoother transitions through increasingly paperless security checkpoints, in-terminal dining experiences that keep you abreast of what’s happening at the gate (without having to be there), and conversations with gate agents and flight attendants who are far more informed about where you’re headed, where you’ve been, who you’re with, and even your go-to drink.
Drones will become a part of public life
Drones will be a major player in the city of the future. These rotored, winged, wheeled, and submersible robots will do everything from clean our sidewalks and gutters to lifeguard our beaches. The benefits are obvious: Drones can be deployed precisely when and where they’re needed, and they don’t require significant infrastructure. At the same time, they will need to be incorporated into public life in an ethical way.
In 2019, watch for the era of civic drones to get underway. The Ohio Department of Transportation has already announced a pilot program in collaboration with Ohio State University to deploy drones to monitor congestion and road conditions along a 35-mile stretch of highway. While this is a small step, it’s likely the beginning of the end for traffic-monitoring helicopters, which are expensive to operate, and potentially even traffic cameras, which have a very limited line of sight. The data shared from traffic-monitoring drones could eventually put navigation apps like Waze on steroids.
For citizens, civic drones will usher in a whole new era of city services. This era will start with the unique vantage point of traffic-monitoring drones, helping us avoid traffic before we become traffic. Eventually, it will include a menagerie of on-the-job robots sprinkled throughout our communities.
The scooter fiasco will (start to) get sorted out
Scooters are everywhere in cities, and there are many good reasons why they’re there. For one, scooters–along with bicycles–offer inexpensive, last-mile transportation, which is why tech companies, ride-hailing operators, and carmakers have been busy investing in and acquiring scooter-sharing startups. By addressing the underserved last-mile market, scooters also challenge the need of cars for short-haul trips, which could help ease street congestion. But there are problems. Some cities are so worried about the safety of riders and pedestrians, they’ve banned scooters. And since scooters are relatively new to cities, there are all sorts of unanswered questions about how to use them. A scooter rider is supposed to use a bike lane, but what if there isn’t a bike lane? Riders should use helmets, too, but they’re not provided.
In 2019 watch for cities and scooter operators to work toward solving tricky policy, use-case, and public perception issues. What’s the etiquette for riders sharing sidewalks with pedestrians and roads with vehicles? Will a 200-pound man in a business suit feel comfortable in his skin zipping around on a two-wheeler? Watch for some high-profile marketing campaigns, likely involving local celebrity endorsers who can influence the public on both the usefulness and coolness of riding around on what was previously considered a toy.
For urbanites, scooters have a lot to offer–including reduced traffic and cheap (and fun!) short trips. But we’ll need to definitively sort out how to safely use them in socially acceptable ways or we’ll risk losing out on a promising service.
Delivery robots will help us trust autonomous vehicles
Delivery robots are here. Starship Technologies announced the launch of the world’s first fully autonomous robotic delivery service late last year, and is currently serving the town of Milton Keynes in the U.K. That was quickly followed by Nuro, another robotics startup in the last-mile delivery space, debuting their fully autonomous grocery delivery service with Kroger, which is limited for now to orders from a single store in Scottsdale, Arizona. While these launches are restricted in their scope at the moment, they’re a valuable preview of our autonomous futures.
Delivery robots’ greatest contribution in 2019 is likely more transformative than eliminating an errand. Instead, these driverless pods and rovers will help condition consumers to trust autonomous vehicles. That’s an important job, because consumers are deeply skeptical of autonomous vehicles, with roughly three quarters of Americans reporting that they don’t trust the technology. In 2019, watch for firsthand experiences with autonomous delivery vehicles–featuring, hopefully, uncracked eggs and undamaged electronics–to help reverse this trend. It might even be the year of the #robotcarselfie.
Exposing consumers to low-risk autonomous technologies will be an important step toward helping them embrace robot cars. Today, groceries. Tomorrow, our kids.
Virtual assistants will connect the smart home to smart mobility
Many consumers have smart speakers from Amazon, Apple, Google, and others in their home. And yet, they must maneuver the contemporary airport gate, where the centerpiece technology–the public address system–is more than 100 years old. Meanwhile, many carmakers are developing their own brand-specific virtual assistants. So you might talk to one virtual assistant at home and another at work and still another one in the car. This is a lost opportunity. We should be able to connect our smart homes with smart mobility, especially as we prepare for an autonomous future in which wherewe work, entertain ourselves, and even sleep becomes blurry. In 2019, watch for the powers that be behind Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana to make earnest efforts to connect people in the home and people on the move through a more unified virtual assistant experience.
The benefit to consumers is clear: Imagine a single virtual assistant helping you lock up the house on the way out the door, managing the in-car navigation to the airport, guiding you through the airport pre-flight, and then ushering you to your ride-share after the flight. One well-connected assistant for one well-traveled life.
Seamless travel is a fantasy. It’s time to design better seams
There have been extraordinary advances across all sorts of modalities, but the promise of easy and efficient intermodality remains elusive. Multi-modality–in which people use different ways of getting around-is one thing; intermodality–in which those modalities are deliberately connected together in sequence so that, for example, your bus trip delivers you to a waiting scooter–is something else entirely.
That said, the “seamless” travel so often touted to describe intermodality is a design fantasy–and always will be, with the exception of cryosleep from our favorite science fiction films, something NASA is currently developing for its astronauts. (That technology is based on the medical practice of “therapeutic hypothermia.” Sounds fun!) Instead of seamlessness, we need better seams, the in-between moments that exist in the gaps between one modality and another. However, delivering better seams will increasingly require transportation service providers to make sense of big data while co-making experiences with other service providers. Think: Starbucks shuttles providing personalized TSA screening en route to the airport, or Delta prompting you in-flight toward an arranged Lyft pool with other passengers headed in the same direction. Those scenarios may be a few years away, but in the near-term, we’ll need to address the everyday challenges of in-city intermodality.
In 2019, consumers should keep an eye out for one app that enables integrated reservations, dispatches, and payments across all modalities (e.g., using the Lyft app to book and pay for a bus trip and then a ride share, or a city transit app to reserve and pay for a light rail trip and then a bike share). At the very least, we can expect some well-designed and data-driven user-experience handshakes between transportation partners.
China’s biggest smartphone maker, which is already embroiled in several geopolitical rows, so far isn’t doing itself any favors when it comes to optics in the new year. Just before midnight on December 31, 2018, two Huawei employees sent a tweet from the company’s official account wishing a “Happy #2019 from all of us at Huawei.” It was a nice enough tweet–but the problem was the employees sent it from an iPhone–an embarrassing faux pas. The tweet was quickly removed, but not before being screen-capped and widely shared on Twitter.
But that minor embarrassment has now turned into a bigger PR nightmare for the company. In a memo sent to employees and leaked to Bloomberg, Huawei has decided to punish the two employees involved in the tweet by docking their monthly salaries by 5,000 yuan (about $730 a month) as well as demoting them a level in the company’s hierarchy. One of the workers punished for the mixup was a head of Huawei’s digital marketing team. Besides shaming the two employees involved, the memo also said Huawei departments must now “tighten management of suppliers and partners” after “the incident exposed flaws in our processes and management.”
