Jack

From a recent interview of the MIT economist (discussing this article):

Though we're pretty sure that time travelers don't exist, people were working on hypertext -- used by web browsers to retrieve connected information -- long before computers. It even predates the ideas of a certain Vannevar Bush, the man generally...

Posters of this comic (and most every other comic on my site) can be ordered at my shop.

Could this be the most meta thing on the entire internet? Just so we’re clear, the title isn’t a typo. This really is a GIF of a Vine of a video of a flipbook of a GIF of a video of a roller coaster. Created yesterday by Televandalist using a handy Flipbookit.

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By Xavier Jackson,Dennis Fulton,Carmen Burana  Published: May 22nd, 2014  Everyone wants superpowers. When we're not sitting around daydreaming about ungodly supernatural abilities that can bend the world to our will, we're sitting around lamenting that it's just never going to happen, no matter how many spiders we microwa

So, I think the net neutrality issue is very difficult. I think it’s a lose-lose. It’s a good idea in theory because it basically appeals to this very powerful idea of permissionless innovation. But at the same time, I think that a pure net neutrality view is difficult to sustain if you also want to have continued investment in broadband networks. If you’re a large telco right now, you spend on the order of $20 billion a year on capex. You need to know how you’re going to get a return on that investment. If you have these pure net neutrality rules where you can never charge a company like Netflix anything, you’re not ever going to get a return on continued network investment — which means you’ll stop investing in the network. And I would not want to be sitting here 10 or 20 years from now with the same broadband speeds we’re getting today. So the challenge, I think, is to accommodate both of those goals, which is a very difficult thing to do. And I don’t envy the FCC and the complexity of what they’re trying to do.

The ultimate answer would be if you had three or four or five broadband providers to every house. And I think you actually have the potential for that depending on how things play out from here. You’ve got the cable companies; you’ve got the telcos. Google Fiber is expanding very fast, and I think it’s going to be a very serious nationwide and maybe ultimately worldwide effort. I think that’s going to be a much bigger scale in five years.

So, you can imagine a world in which there are five competitors to every home for broadband: telcos, cable, Google Fiber, mobile carriers and unlicensed spectrum. In that world, net neutrality is a much less central issue, because if you’ve got competition, if one of your providers started to screw with you, you’d just switch to another one of your providers.

The entire interview is interesting, including his discussion of the Obama administration and the possibility of a fragmented internet.  By the way here is Marc on EconTalk with Russ Roberts.

At a Tuesday event in New York City, Microsoft introduced the latest version of its Surface tablet. The Surface Pro 3 has a larger screen, more computing power, and an updated cover that provides more stability when the tablet is used with a keyboard.

Microsoft's Panos Panay, the creator of the Surface, laid out a clear vision for the future of tablet computing. "You've been told to buy a tablet, but you know you need a laptop," Panay said. "Today we're going to focus on taking that conflict away."

While the Surface Pro 3 is new, this vision of the tablet market isn't. Microsoft desperately wants tablets to be another kind of PC, and it has been trying to make that vision a reality since it started pushing the concept of tablet computing 13 years ago.

But Microsoft's vision is wrong. Tablets aren't PCs. Indeed, iPads and Android-based tablets have succeeded precisely because they ditched the complexity of traditional PCs. Microsoft's determination to make "tablet PCs" is a sign that the company doesn't understand the economic forces behind the mobile computing revolution.

Steve Jobs demonstrating the capabilities of the new iPad in 2010.  (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Less is more

Smartphones and tablets are a good example of what business guru Clay Christensen called a disruptive innovation: a technology that's simpler and cheaper than the technology it replaces. The PC disrupted older mainframe computers. Digital cameras (and then cell phone cameras) disrupted film photography. And as I wrote about on Monday, internet-based news is disrupting the newspaper business.

The iPad was a hit because it didn't have all the features of a full-blown MacBook

The key thing to understand about disruptive innovations is that their simplicity initially makes them worse at serving the traditional customers of the product they're disrupting. Buzzfeed's early journalism wasn't nearly as good as the reporting of the New York Times. Early PCs were toys compared to the much bigger computers that were already on the market. But the simplicity and low cost of these products allows for rapid innovation. They gradually improve until they're good enough to undercut the market for the older technology.

The mobile computing revolution is a textbook example of this phenomenon. When the iPad arrived in 2010 it looked to a lot of experienced technologists (including me!) like a step backwards. It didn't have a keyboard, wasn't good for word processing, and didn't even have a USB port. Many people were also annoyed that the iPad forced people to buy apps from Apple's proprietary app store. People like me didn't understand why anyone would want an iPad when they could get a full-fledged laptop for a little bit more.

But the market proved us wrong. The iPad was a huge hit. And those iPad limitations that looked like disadvantages at the outset have turned out to be strengths. Apple ditched the window-icon-menu desktop interface Apple itself had pioneered a quarter-century earlier in favor of a user interface custom-built for a touchscreen. With no keyboard and mouse, developers were forced to create apps that used the new iPhone-derived visual language.

The iPad aped the iPhone in other important ways too. Since the 1980s, PCs have been based on a hierarchical, folder-based file system. The iPhone abandoned that metaphor, which many users found too confusing anyway, in favor of having each app manage its own data. Requiring users to purchase apps through Apple's app store greatly simplified the process of obtaining software and keeping it updated. These changes, in turn, helped to reduce the amount of storage required for the iPad's software, allowing them to use cheap, lower-power flash storage chips instead of bulkier hard drives.

Anyone who needs THE power of a PC can and should just buy a PC

In short, the iPad was a hit because it didn't have all the features of a full-blown MacBook. That allowed the iPad to be smaller, lighter, and cheaper than Apple's PCs. But more importantly, it actually created a better user experience for people who are not power users. If someone just wants to watch movies or check their email, the keyboard, windows, file system, and other features of a traditional PC is overkill.

Of course, the iPad was a poor choice if you wanted to do serious word-processing, number-crunching, or image editing. For those tasks, a traditional PC was clearly superior. But most people don't spend very much time doing those things, especially at home. They spend a lot more time watching videos, reading books, checking email, and catching up with friends on Facebook. And for those casual computing tasks, a tablet is a better choice.

Google took the same approach with Android. Android tablets have no keyboard, no windows, and no user-accessible file system. That made Android tablets a lousy choice for the office, but they're cheap, simple, and work fine for casual web browsing and watching videos on the go.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

What Microsoft doesn't get

Microsoft absolutely hates this vision of tablet computing. Microsoft has always been first and foremost a PC company, and approaches every problem with a PC mindset. The company has made billions of dollars selling PC applications such as Microsoft Office, and it desperately wants that bonanza to continue in the mobile computing era. So the firm is highly motivated to create a tablet that doubles as a PC.

But this makes as much sense as selling a digital camera that also takes film photographs. Anyone who needs the power of a PC can and should just buy a PC. The point of buying a tablet is that it's cheaper, smaller, lighter, simpler, and more power-efficient than a traditional PC. Those advantages are only possible because tablets don't try to be all things to all people.

A tablet that does everything a PC can do is just a laptop. And we already know how to build a great laptop — Apple and other PC makers have been refining the design of laptops for a generation. A great laptop looks like a Macbook Air.

Microsoft's Surface tablets have a funny shape and muddled user interface that make them a poor alternative to a full-fledged PC. And they're too complex and expensive to be a serious alternative to an iPad or Android tablet. In its attempt to create a product that does everything well, it's wound up with a product that's not that good at anything. And its tablets are going to continue failing as long as Microsoft is convinced that it needs to create a tablet that's also a PC.

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REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) has reportedly cut the amount of shale oil gas expected to be retrieved from the Monterey reserves in California, saying that earlier estimates overshot by quite a bit — about 96 percent. There goes our energy independence plan. 

The Los Angeles Times reports that the EIA has revised downwards the amount of estimated possible oil extraction from 13.7 billion barrels to 600 million barrels. Oil taken from the Monterey Shale deposits was expected to boost the local economy by $24.6 billion each year and inject 2.8 million new jobs into the California market. 

The problem with the much-higher earlier estimate is mostly technological. It was based on findings by an independent firm hired by the government, Intek Inc., which assumed that the process for recovering gas from the Monterey deposits would be comparable to that used in other shale-rich regions. This, explains the Times, is not the case: 

The problem lies with the geology of the Monterey Shale, a 1,750-mile formation running down the center of California roughly from Sacramento to the Los Angeles basin and including some coastal regions. Unlike heavily fracked shale deposits in North Dakota and Texas, which are relatively even and layered like a cake, Monterey Shale has been folded and shattered by seismic activity, with the oil found at deeper strata.

The findings serve a major blow to U.S. energy policy, which considered the deposit a "black gold mine." But they shouldn't come as a surprise – the LA Times published an opinion piece back in December that pointed to earlier reports doubting the estimated output: 

A study by Canadian geoscientist J. David Hughes questioned assumptions made in the 2011 energy agency study and this year's USC report. The Hughes report, "Drilling California: A Reality Check on the Monterey Shale," analyzed current production data and concluded that the estimates were likely "overstated … wishful thinking" and that only a small percentage of the shale oil believed to be trapped in the formation will ever be produced.

The findings are a relief for some anti-fracking activists, who see this is an opportunity to get the government to back off plans to frack in the region. Clean Water Action California Director Miriam Gordon issued a statement in response to the news, saying: 

The downgrade of production ability of the Monterey Shale really negates the Governor's claim that we need to develop Monterey Shale resources to transition California away from foreign oil. Now it's even more imperative for the state to press pause on the fracking button and support a moraotrium as proposed by SB 1132 (Mitchell), especially since fracking causes huge methane releases and uses significant quantities of freshwater. 

Still, some are convinced that new technologies will be developed to access the elusive shale gas. Western States Petroleum Association spokesperson Tupper Hull told the Times that "We have a lot of confidence in the intelligence and skill of our engineers and geologists to find ways to adapt... as the technologies change, the production rates could also change dramatically."

When poor teenagers arrive at their appointments with Alan Meyers, a pediatrician at Boston Medical Center, he performs a standard examination and prescribes whatever medication they need. But if the patient is struggling with transportation or weight issues, he asks an unorthodox question:

“Do you have a bicycle?”

Often, the answer is “no” or “it’s broken” or “it got stolen.”

In those cases, Meyers does something even more unusual: He prescribes them year-long memberships to Hubway, Boston’s bike sharing program, for just $5 per year—a steep discount from the regular $85 price.

“What we know is that if we are trying to get some sort of exercise incorporated into their daily routine, [the bike] works better than saying, ‘Take x time every day and go do this,’” Meyers told me.

The bike-prescribing program is paid for by the city. For patients without bank accounts, Boston even puts up its own city credit card. Meyers thinks the two-wheeled solution tackles several problems at once.

“Boston is pretty compact, parking is always a problem, and getting around on a bicycle makes all the sense in the world,” he said. Plus, doctors at Boston Medical Center use their electronic medical records to prescribe the bikes, and they plan to measure how patients’ use of the bikes tracks with their weight and health over time.

Meyers realizes that sedentariness is one of the many ills that afflict the poor to a greater degree than the rich. People earning less than $36,000 are far less likely to exercise than those earning $80,000 or more. Low-income people may live in dangerous areas, have little free time, lack access to parks, or some combination.

The bike program is one example of the various ways physicians are attacking a vexing problem that’s not in any medical handbook: Poor patients are sicker, and their poverty actually makes them sick.

How ‘Toxic Stress’ Damages the Brain

One in every six Americans lives in poverty–for an individual, that means earning less than $11,670 per year. The immediate lifestyle implications of such an income are clear: It’s not enough to buy a decent one-bedroom apartment in most cities, let alone a gym membership, fresh produce, or access to high-end medical care. A healthy diet, as one study determined last year, costs $1.50 more per day than an unhealthy one.

And it’s well known that low-income people aren’t as healthy. People of a lower socioeconomic status have a 50 percent higher risk of developing heart disease, for example. Writing in the New York Times, Annie Lowrey found that though Virginia’s Fairfax County and West Virginia’s McDowell County are separated by just 350 miles, men in the richer Fairfax County have “a life expectancy of 82 years and women, 85, about the same as in Sweden. In McDowell, the averages are 64 and 73, about the same as in Iraq.”

But a growing body of evidence suggests that the very condition of living with no money, in a tumultuous environment, and amid stark inequality can alter individuals’ gene expression. What’s more, the pressure of being poor sometimes weighs so heavily that the body pumps out more stress hormones, which ravage the immune system over time.

Poor nutrition, trying times, and environmental toxins in childhood can turn certain genes “on” or “off.” Even poor children who seemingly overcome the hardships of poverty—by making good grades and adapting socially—tend to have higher levels of stress hormones, blood pressure, and body mass index than their wealthier peers.

"Exposure to stress over time gets under the skin of children and adolescents, which makes them more vulnerable to disease later in life," says Gene Brody, founder and director of the University of Georgia Center for Family Research.

Child-rearing problems that are more prevalent among poor households, such as chronic neglect or a parent's incarceration, compound on money woes and congeal into something known as “toxic stress.” These “adverse childhood experiences” jab at the brain at critical moments in its development, changing the architecture of key brain structures and setting the stage for long-term anxiety and mood-control issues.

“If you have a whole bunch of bad experiences growing up, you set up your brain in such a way that it’s your expectation that that’s what life is about,” James Perrin, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me.

In a groundbreaking study in Science last year, people who were primed to think about financial problems did worse on a series of tests that involved decision-making—a sign that physical scarcity can make it difficult for our brains to free up enough space for long-term planning.

One study found that the anxiety of living in poverty is a stronger predictor of mental health problems than going to war. Food-stamp recipients cannot use their benefits to buy diapers, and last year, a team of researchers at Yale University’s School of Medicine found that mothers who couldn’t afford diapers for their babies were more likely to feel depressed and anxious.

These worries can leave their mark on children, both in the form of a more volatile childhood environment and, potentially, through the mother’s own genetic makeup: Animal studies have shown that anxieties about certain stimuli can be hereditary.

Poverty can also deplete self-control. Smoking and unhealthy eating habits are more prevalent among the poor. A just-published study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that girls who were repeatedly exposed to poverty growing up were more likely to be overweight or obese as young women.

“Habits form early,” Daphne Hernandez, the study author and health policy professor at the University of Houston, told me. “You begin to crave those [inexpensive] foods, and making the transition to healthier foods is difficult. Even when you’re not living in poverty anymore, you may still be buying the cheaper foods.”

Hernandez found that for boys, childhood poverty wasn’t linked to adult weight problems—but that isn’t necessarily anything to celebrate. Hernandez thinks it's heavy childhood manual labor that’s protecting the boys from obesity. “If you live in poverty, you’ll enter the labor market earlier,” she said. “For girls, it’s babysitting, but for boys in impoverished communities, they’ll more than likely engage in construction work.”

All of these factors combined mean that when doctors treat poor patients, they’re facing not just one ailment, but two: the illness itself, and the economic fragility that underlies it.

“Our society in general has looked at the issue of poverty in two ways: either a social problem, or a mental-health problem,” said Nadine Burke Harris, a San Francisco pediatrician. “But it's also a serious medical problem.”

A Patchwork of Programs

Some doctors are incorporating the treatment of poverty-related obstacles into their medical routines. In addition to its bicycle program, Boston Medical Center operates a food pantry for food-insecure families.

There are also groups like Health Leads, which was started by the lawyer Rebecca Onie at Boston Medical Center when she was a Harvard sophomore. Today, Health Leads allows doctors in 20 clinics across the country to “prescribe” services like healthy food or safe housing to their low-income patients. Health Leads volunteers (usually med students) set up card tables in clinic waiting areas and try to connect patients with prescribed services.

“A busy mom, a single mom who has two kids and doesn't have a car—when she walks out of the doctor’s office, she will never be more motivated than she is right there,” Health Leads’ marketing director, Connie French, told me. “If all of this can happen in one environment, it's more likely she'll have the time to do the things she needs to do to stay healthy.”

One D.C. woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, recently met with Health Leads in the lobby of the office where she takes her grandson, who lives with her, for asthma treatment. The group told her that the roaches in her mobile home might be exacerbating his asthma and taught her how to trap them with roach motels.

Roughly two-thirds of Health Leads patients secure at least one resource—receiving food, getting their heat turned back on, or finding a job—within 90 days of speaking to a volunteer, Onie told The Atlantic in 2011.

In San Francisco, Burke Harris launched the Center for Youth Wellness, where each child gets a universal screening for adverse childhood experiences as part of his or her first doctor's visit. Depending on the roots of the patient’s stress, the Center may provide counseling for both mother and child. Or it might refer them to a practitioner trained in biofeedback—a type of meditative training that aims to bring relaxation through greater awareness.

“[The biofeedback specialist] hooks the kid up to a bunch of electrodes that measure things like heart rate and breathing,” Burke Harris said. “It helps them to bring a cognitive awareness to kids of their internal states. One thing we know that happens is that kids with toxic stress have decreased engagement of prefrontal cortex. When you have strengthening of the prefrontal cortex circuit, it helps to physiologically and neurologically balance effects of chronic stress.”

Payment and Culture Obstacles

The rub is that Medicaid and other insurance don’t cover many of these services, so the groups are often left scrambling for funds. As Perrin puts it, the programs are “being paid for with a combination of bubble gum and rubber bands.”

French told me that Health Leads also saw that, in addition to the roaches, the D.C. woman’s mobile home had very old carpet that needed to be replaced—but the organization can't afford to buy her new carpet right now.

Meyers said that Boston’s city government, which picks up the tab for the discount bike program, would probably tolerate “two or three” bikes being stolen before they pulled out, but “there are many ways that this could cause a problem. The thing might just end.”

Another challenge is getting primary care physicians to screen for toxic stress and other poverty indicators in the first place.

“That's something the medical community has not responded to at all,” Burke Harris said. “Physicians say, ‘What do you want me to do? I have a 15-minute patient visit.’”

Perrin said the connections between destitution and illness have grown so strong that he’s been moved to push for poverty-combating legislation from a medical point of view.

“We have a role to argue that we need to do things better for America’s families, like the minimum wage, and the Earned Income Tax Credit,” he said. “Those aren’t things doctors have traditionally talked about, but we’re starting to. If patients get the resources they need, we’ll have healthier people.”

Forty years ago, there was exactly one way for humans to reproduce. A man’s sperm would combine with a woman’s egg, inside of her body. Together they would form a zygote, which would become an embryo, and then a fetus. With any luck, the woman would carry the fetus to term, and a baby would be born. The process had not changed since long before anyone could call us human. Until one day, after years of trial and error, Dr. Patrick Steptoe and Dr. Robert Edwards combined an egg from Lesley Brown with sperm from her husband, John, in a petri dish and implanted the resulting embryo in her uterus. On July 25, 1978, Louise Brown came squalling into the world, heralding a revolution not just in the mechanics of reproduction but in the surrounding culture.

At the time, James Watson, a co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helix structure, warned that if in vitro fertilization were allowed to proceed on a broader scale, “all hell will break loose, politically and morally, all over the world.” Since then, not only has reproductive technology gone ahead, it has headed in previously unthinkable directions, and with little public scrutiny. For example, over the past 20 years, a new procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection has allowed fertility clinicians to select an individual sperm and insert it into an egg. It is the only reliable option for men with very low sperm counts or low-quality sperm, and for the hundreds of thousands of men it’s enabled to have children, it’s been life-changing. Happily, the procedure appears to cause only a relatively minor increase in the risk of birth defects.

Future reproductive innovations are likely to develop in similar ways—led by practitioners, with little U.S.-government oversight. Few people, it seems, want to stand in the way of someone who desires a biological family. And so far, almost no one has. But some of the reproductive technologies on the horizon could test our flexibility. Here, drawn from interviews with scholars, doctors, and entrepreneurs, are a handful of guesses about how the future may change what’s involved in making a person—from the ease of getting pregnant, to the mechanics of procreation, to our very definition of family.

1. It Will Take a Village to Make a Child

Sperm and egg donation and surrogacy have already enabled unusual parental configurations. In some cases—say, a father contracting with an egg donor and a separate surrogate mother—a new baby could be said to have three biological parents. But this is only the beginning of what science may make possible in the near future. One new IVF procedure would combine the nucleus of a patient’s egg with mitochondrial DNA from a donor’s egg. The FDA is mulling approving the technique, which could prevent diseases that originate in mitochondrial DNA; it’s already been successfully tested in monkeys.

Or take uterus transplants, in which one woman’s healthy uterus is implanted in someone else’s abdomen. Since 2012, nine Swedish women have received a uterus donation from a relative—in most cases their own mother. They’re now undergoing IVF treatment, to see whether they can conceive and carry a baby. If successful, they’ll be the first women to bear a child with another person’s womb. Not only that: their children will in effect be sleeping in the same “room” that they once did. The implications are fascinating. As Charis Thompson, a sociologist at the London School of Economics who has written a book about IVF, observes, “Parenthood is multiplying.”

2. Your Biological Clock Will Be Personalized …

One of the key problems in fertility research is how to help women who wish to start families later in life. Many women in their late 30s and beyond turn to IVF, usually with little sense of whether the physically demanding and expensive treatments are likely to work. Services like Univfy are trying to help women understand their own fertility better. One of Univfy’s co-founders, the ob‑gyn and fertility researcher Mylene Yao, says that women are entitled to a better read on their chances of conceiving through IVF than the rough age-based estimates that most fertility clinics provide. “There is no such thing as an average 38-year-old woman,” Yao told me. Her company draws on detailed data from a five-year study of IVF patients and other predictive models to provide personalized information about an individual’s likelihood of conception. She compares the effort to those of Netflix and Amazon: “We’re all, as consumers, getting better predictive information with online shopping than with health care.”

3. … And Procreation Will Be Precisely Timed

Max Levchin is a co-founder of Glow, a fertility-tracking app that helps users time sex for the greatest chance of conception. This isn’t so revolutionary—solid knowledge of the menstrual cycle, a thermometer, a pen, and paper will let you do much the same thing—but by allowing users to pool data anonymously, it could lead to a better understanding of population-wide fertility patterns. There have been surprisingly few large-scale studies of couples’ efforts to conceive; Levchin hopes that data from Glow can help change that.

The problem is, the data that people record are not very reliable. For example, slight temperature variations are key to predicting ovulation, and deviations in exactly when a woman takes her temperature can add noise to a data set. Down the road, Levchin sees simple sensors having a big effect on a couple’s odds of conception and, ultimately, on our understanding of fertility patterns. He envisions a sticker-like thermometer that could “sit in some place, like the small of the back,” he says. “You’ll have a continuous feed of someone’s temperature.”

Such monitoring could be even more important for expectant mothers. Already, Taiwanese designers are working on an app called Fetus Care, which they say will use data from a sensor to detect worrisome uterine contractions or an abnormal fetal heart rate. Perhaps one day implantable sensors will track the interior state of the womb. After all, the FDA has approved ingestible data-logging sensors for use in other parts of the body.

4. Synthetic Sperm Will Save the Nuclear Family

As long as we’re entertaining far-out but technically feasible scenarios, the most radical revision in reproduction could be the creation of artificial gametes, a k a sperm and egg cells. Researchers may ultimately be able to take a cell from an adult man or woman, turn it into a stem cell, then change that stem cell into a sperm or an egg. Doctors have already succeeded in breeding same-sex laboratory animals in this way.

Timothy Murphy is a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago whose work focuses on the bioethical implications of reproductive technologies for gay, lesbian, and transgender people. He points out that creating artificial sperm and eggs could, rather than leading to radical social change, actually preserve a normative family structure. “For gay and lesbian couples, the synthetic gametes would eliminate the need for a third party,” Murphy notes. This kind of assisted reproductive technology—“unnatural” as it might be—would allow same-sex couples to keep reproduction solely within the family.

5. Genotyping Will Breed Conformity

Here’s a final paradox: even as reproductive freedom increases, enabling more types of parents to have children, these parents may choose children who fit a narrower and narrower notion of normal. Charis Thompson, the sociologist, told me about a conversation she recently had with a British infertility doctor, who gave a disturbing preview of where we might be headed.

“You start out offering these prenatal screenings for certain conditions that everybody agrees are very severe. It is not particularly eugenic, but about alleviating the suffering of the child and the parents. But there is slippage,” she said. “The more you can test for and screen out, the more people do. And the example this person gave was the high number of people who will abort a fetus that is found to have an extra digit.”

A mere 11 years after the completion of the Human Genome Project, it is technically possible to scan an embryo’s entire genome during the IVF process. If parents are already aborting pregnancies to avoid extra fingers, how many will resist the temptation to implant only the embryo with the “best” genome?

Which is to say, the future of reproduction might be increasingly diverse families making increasingly similar babies.

---

A Brief Chronicle of Assisted Reproduction

History

1677: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observes sperm under a microscope.

1784: First successful artificial insemination of a dog

1934: The German physician Herman Rohleder publishes Test Tube Babies, a book about assisted reproduction.

1978: Louise Brown, the first IVF baby, is born.

Predictions

2029: If current trends continue, the twin birth rate hits 4.3 percent, up from 1.9 percent in 1980.

2050: Age barriers to childbearing could be effectively eliminated through egg freezing, IVF, and artificial-womb technologies.

Is Herbalife, the global nutrition company, a pyramid scheme? Its shares have lost about a fifth of their value in recent months, as news has spread that regulators are investigating whether the company broke the law. But this question is surprisingly hard to answer. It is, ultimately, an inquiry not only about markets, but also about human psychology.

Herbalife is a direct-selling company. That means you cannot buy its protein shakes and nutritional supplements in stores. Instead, Herbalife distributes its products exclusively through a network of 3.7 million “members” in about 90 countries. Members buy Herbalife products in bulk, and can then either consume them or try to resell them. They are paid based on a “multilevel-marketing model,” meaning that their compensation comes not only from the products they sell, but also from bonuses related to sales by new members they recruit: the more Herbalife protein shakes that members you’ve signed up buy, the more money you make. There’s a catch, however: you and your recruits need to buy several thousand dollars’ worth of shakes and supplements before these bonuses kick in. The risk is that if you don’t drink or resell the shakes you buy, or return them within a specified window of time (90 days for the first purchase), you will be stuck with them. Herbalife’s net sales last year were $4.8 billion; its market capitalization is about $6 billion.

Fundamentally, Herbalife targets our cognitive weaknesses, though which weaknesses is a subject of debate. The company’s executives extol the benefits of bringing together members in groups called “nutrition clubs”—social gatherings encouraged by the company where shakes are consumed and healthy lifestyles discussed. They say that Herbalife serves people who otherwise would succumb to fast food or vending-machine candy, and that its member networks—in addition to acting as a distribution system—offer support and positive reinforcement for people trying to lose weight.

In contrast, Herbalife’s critics deride the company’s products as overpriced and say Herbalife is exploiting poor people, who are tricked into paying thousands of dollars for products they will not be able to sell or want to consume. They say Herbalife is targeting groups who are easily victimized by false promises of riches.

The Herbalife drama stars many of the world’s top investors, and they sharply disagree. The hedge-fund manager David Einhorn kicked off the argument on a conference call in May 2012, when he asked Herbalife’s president, Des Walsh, how many sales were made outside the company’s network, to nonmembers. Walsh’s unsatisfying response, as summarized later on the company’s Web site—“We don’t track this number and do not believe it is relevant”—drew fire from more hedge-fund managers. Bill Ackman, the head of the hedge fund Pershing Square, bet more than $1 billion against Herbalife by shorting its stock in late 2012.

Ackman has led the charge against the company, accusing it of deceiving recruits with wealth-soaked testimonials when in fact only a tiny fraction of members make money. “There is no profitable retail opportunity here,” Ackman told me. “In order to get people in, they have to mislead them.” Pershing Square’s investors will profit if Herbalife collapses, but Ackman has promised to donate his cut to charity.

Herbalife is fighting back. Its CEO, Michael Johnson, lambasted Ackman for “false and misleading statements.” Several prominent investors have supported the company, most notably Carl Icahn, who began buying Herbalife stock just hours after Ackman announced his huge short position and now owns a 17 percent stake. Icahn has called Ackman a “liar” and “the crybaby in the school yard,” and has labeled Ackman’s claims “complete bullshit.”

The biggest fireworks went off in March. First, a front-page story in The New York Times revealed that Ackman had lobbied public officials and contributed funds to anti-Herbalife advocacy groups, actions that Herbalife officials alleged were improper. Then, two days later, Herbalife publicly confirmed that it was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.

Both sides continue to smear each other and dig in their heels, as I learned from several recent conversations. Ackman told me, “I am 100 percent convinced that Herbalife is a global pyramid scheme. We think it is a criminal operation.” Herbalife’s chief financial officer, John DeSimone, told me in response, “I am 100 percent convinced Bill Ackman is wrong. I think he has gone beyond the legitimate role short sellers play and crossed an ethical boundary.” Both promised, “More evidence is coming.”

Plenty of pyramid cases are easy to resolve. A simple chain-letter-like arrangement, whereby new recruits pay cash upstream hoping to get more cash from their own downstream recruits, is manipulative and blatantly violates the law. The same is true of multilevel schemes that require large up-front payments for sham products. Conversely, Tupperware, which compensates its independent sales force based on carefully tracked retail sales, appears legitimate.

But what about cases in the middle, where people are motivated partially by wanting to consume a product and partially by the prospect of receiving money by building their own network? Regulators struggle with these grayer areas, where fraud can be camouflaged. The legal tests are confusing and inconsistent. Jeffrey Babener, a leading lawyer for multilevel-marketing firms, says they are like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s test for pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

Consider the so-called 70 percent rule, an industry standard based on a 1979 finding that Amway was not a pyramid scheme in part because it required distributors to sell at least that percentage of the products they received each month. Herbalife’s version is limited to products a member “holds for resale.” But how are regulators to determine how many of the shakes in various members’ basements are for resale versus personal use? Bill Keep, the dean of the College of New Jersey’s business school and a leading expert on pyramid schemes, is skeptical about Herbalife’s approach: “What does this mean? It could vary from 0 to 100 percent.”

Even one of the most obvious tests for an illegal pyramid scheme—whether a business is “unsustainable”—is problematic. Simple chain letters and the like inevitably fail when the pool of new recruits evaporates. But the risk with established companies is different: not so much that they will die, but that they will commit fraud while they are alive. Herbalife’s pyramid structure, whatever you might think of it, has been sustainable. The company has been in business for 34 years. Even though each year the company loses about half the people who have qualified for bonuses, it has so far been able to replace them. Ackman and Herbalife officials disagree about whether it can continue to do so.

Certainly, some Herbalife recruits have received unrealistic promotional materials from top distributors, such as the video of a member named Doran Andry driving a red Ferrari and talking about his nearly $100,000-a-month income. The company recently began disclosing financial information to prospective members; in 2013, only 704 U.S. members received more than $100,000 a year (not a month) from the company, and the vast majority received less than a few hundred dollars. But even now, Herbalife’s disclosures do not differentiate revenues from profits, or say how expensive it is to run a distributorship.

When I asked Walsh, Herbalife’s president, about member expenses, he was even more evasive than he had been in response to David Einhorn two years ago. He talked about which shakes he drinks (cookies ’n cream at breakfast, mint chocolate at lunch), how much he weighs, and what his marathon times have been. But here is what he said about expenses: “We don’t have visibility, but for a substantial part of our distributors there are only nominal expenses. These are independent businesspeople; their expenses are proprietary to them. We don’t have access to that information.”

The murkiest part of Herbalife’s distribution system, which accounts for much of the company’s growth, is the nutrition club. John DeSimone, the CFO, praised the clubs and told me he wished people would pay more attention to their advantages: “The clubs benefit the community. It’s a weight-loss regimen tied to a social dynamic.” Attendance can be expensive, but for some people, the psychological benefits of the meetings might make the cost worthwhile.

Ackman isn’t persuaded. He says, “Nutrition clubs are simply a recruiting venue for Herbalife to reach low-income distributors.” Pershing Square officials have also criticized nutrition clubs outside the United States, where Herbalife has reported substantial increases in sales. Last year, Herbalife members in Venezuela confronted currency restrictions and severe economic turmoil, yet Herbalife, citing the growth of nutrition clubs, reported that its sales in Venezuela shot up 87.6 percent. Some information suggests that in Mexico, the company’s second-biggest market—with an estimated 40,000 nutrition clubs—Herbalife accounts might have been used by drug leaders to launder money. (An Herbalife spokesman told me that in 2013 the company’s board of directors responded to allegations about money laundering in Mexico by hiring a third-party investigator, who found no support for the claims.)

Herbalife discloses little detail about its operations in Venezuela, Mexico, or elsewhere. In its financial filings, Herbalife warns that it gives “no assurance that our members will … comply with our member policies and procedures.” Company officials say they audit about 2 percent of Herbalife’s retail sales, focusing on what they call “high-risk transactions.” They could collect details about members’ expenses, as well as records of every sale, purchase price, name, and address. Currently, they do not.

The Herbalife saga illustrates another cognitive weakness: the bias against short sellers. People like Ackman who bet against companies have long been vilified because they seem to be trying to do harm. Yet short sellers play an important role in the markets. They can afford due diligence that regulators often cannot. Research suggests that short sellers help make markets fairer and more efficient by identifying fraud and introducing information that corporate executives otherwise would not disclose. If Pershing Square did not have a concentrated financial incentive to investigate Herbalife, we would know a lot less about the company today.

DeSimone, Herbalife’s CFO, told me he doesn’t oppose short sellers generally, but he thinks Ackman has gone too far. Des Walsh says Ackman has waged “an orchestrated campaign to demonstrate misinformation and lobby at all levels to present a biased and non-fact-based theory about a legitimate 34-year-old company. We believe this is fundamentally wrong.”

Certainly Pershing Square should not be permitted to violate lobbying or political-contribution rules, just as short sellers should not be allowed to sabotage a company’s products to drive down the stock. But Ackman has not been accused of breaking the law, and says Herbalife has outspent his fund eight to one on lobbying.

The Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United and subsequent rulings permit corporations to spend vast resources trying to influence the political process. If corporations can exercise such free-speech rights, why is it “fundamentally wrong” for the people who short corporations’ shares to do the same?

 

“Parents forced to eat sausage three times a week: Are they living in a child’s dictatorship?” the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan asked in September. The question was prompted by the Stockholm-based psychiatrist (and father of six) David Eberhard. In his recent book, Hur Barnen Tog Makten (“How Children Took Power”), Eberhard argues that by indulging their kids and refusing to discipline them, Swedish parents have spawned a generation of brats ill-prepared for the demands of adulthood—and infantilized themselves in the process. Swedish children, he told a reporter, “tend to decide everything” for their families, from dinner menus to vacation destinations. And they refuse to take no for an answer. As a remedy, Eberhard prescribes a more “authoritarian” approach to parenting: stricter bedtimes, harsher reprimands, and certainly less sausage.

Eberhard’s book has ignited an impassioned debate about parental control in Sweden‚ which has long prided itself on a progressive approach to child-rearing (in 1979, it became the first country to outlaw spanking, pinching, and other forms of corporal punishment). Many readers have shared stories of particularly indulgent parents they’ve encountered: One discussion-board commenter wrote incredulously of a friend who “rewarded her 4 year old with a trip to Seaworld for getting a blood test.” Another remembered a demand for milk that compelled a father to dash, midmeal, to the grocery store. But while some reviewers have called the book’s critique of Swedish child-rearing “refreshing” and “thought-provoking,” others fear that it will take Sweden backwards. One behavioral scientist wrote on her blog that Eberhard’s arguments make her “more upset than is healthy.”

As for Eberhard, he’s busy shopping an English translation of his book to U.S. publishers—his thinking being that Americans have their own difficulties putting children in their place. “If you have the feeling that kids are defenseless little creatures, porcelain dolls ... then you get a bad conscience if you say something negative to them,” he told me. “My book is trying to relieve the bad conscience of the parents.”

It's over.

---

Yesterday’s ruling striking down Oregon’s gay-marriage ban came from an Obama appointee. Today’s ruling striking down Pennsylvania’s ban comes from a Bush appointee, one whose confirmation was backed by Rick Santorum no less. Different judges, different political leanings, a slightly different legal posture (Oregon’s ban was part of the state constitution, Pennsylvania’s was merely a […]

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If you talk to smart conservatives these days, they are very excited about the future. A group of aspiring Republican policymakers—including Mike Lee, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio—are consulting with conservative scholars and proposing new ideas to redesign the federal government. This resurgence

This election year we can expect to hear a lot about Congressional district gerrymandering, which is when political parties redraw district boundaries to give themselves an electoral advantage.

Gerrymandering is at least partly to blame for the lopsided Republican representation in the House. According to an analysis I did last year, the Democrats are under-represented by about 18 seats in the House, relative to their vote share in the 2012 election. The way Republicans pulled that off was to draw some really, really funky-looking Congressional districts.

Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it's to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably. Considering this dynamic, John Sides of The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog has argued convincingly that gerrymandering is not what's behind the rising polarization in Congress.

The compactness of a district --  a measure of how irregular its shape is, as determined by the ratio of the area of the district to the area of a circle with the same perimeter --  can serve as a useful proxy for how gerrymandered the district is. Districts that follow a generally regular shape tend to be compact, while those that have a lot of squiggles and offshoots and tentacle-looking protuberances tend to score poorly on this measure.

Using district boundary files from the Census, I calculated compactness scores for each of the districts of the 113th Congress and mapped them so you can see where the least compact -- and likely most-gerrymandered --districts are. Click through for an interactive map, along with detailed methodological notes for the brave.

Click through for interactive map »

There's a lot to say about these districts, about who drew them, the factors that went into their creation and the electoral consequences. Here's a straightforward run-down of where the most- and least-gerrymandered districts are.

1. Democrats won in nine of the 10 most-gerrymandered districts. But eight out of 10 of those districts were drawn by Republicans.

This speaks to the notion that the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a safe seat but to put your opponents in safe seats by cramming all of their supporters into a small number of districts. This lets you spread your own supporters over a larger number of districts. And the way to do this is to draw outlandishly-shaped districts that bring far-flung geographic areas together. North Carolina's 12th district, which holds the title of the nation's most-gerrymandered, is a textbook example of this: It snakes from north of Greensboro, to Winston-Salem, and then all the way down to Charlotte, spanning most of the state in the process.

2. Three of the 10 most-gerrymandered districts are in North Carolina.

North Carolina Republicans really outdid themselves in 2012. In addition to the 12th district, there's the 4th, which covers Raleigh and Burlington and snakes a narrow tentacle all the way south to pick up parts of Fayetteville. And then there's the 1st District, which covers a sprawling arbitrarily shaped region in the northeastern part of the state. All three of these seats were won by Democrats in 2012.

Overall, the North Carolina GOP's efforts paid off handsomely. Based on their statewide vote share you'd expect North Carolina Democrats to hold about seven seats. But they won only four. This is because an outsized share of the state's Democratic voters were shunted off into the three highly-gerrymandered districts above.

3. Indiana and Nevada stand out as states with the least amount of gerrymandering.

In contrast to North Carolina's Republicans, Indiana's did a remarkably good job of drawing sensible district boundaries. The same holds true for Nevada's Democrats, although with only four districts, the district boundaries in Nevada are dictated to a large degree by the state's borders.

4. Maryland and North Carolina are essentially tied for the honor of most-gerrymandered state.

With average gerrymander scores of about 88 out of a possible 100, Maryland and North Carolina are home to some of the ugliest districts in the nation among states with at least three Congressional districts. In fact, North Carolina is home to three out of the top 10 most-gerrymandered districts in the country. Maryland is proof that gerrymandering isn't just a Republican pastime, as the state's Democrats redrew those boundaries in 2012. The standout in that state is the 3rd Congressional district, which is the nation's second-most gerrymandered and home to Democratic congressman John Sarbanes.

5. Republicans drew Congressional boundaries in six of the 10 most-gerrymandered states.

In addition to North Carolina, Republicans drew district boundaries in Louisiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Alabama. Democrats drew districts in West Virginia and Illinois, in addition to Maryland. Boundaries in Kentucky were drawn up by that state's mixed legislature.

Again, the payoff for Republicans is in the makeup of the state's delegations: In those six states, Republicans picked up about 11 more seats than you'd expect from simply looking at the parties' vote shares.

6. Gerrymandering is easier to get away with in more densely-populated areas.

You'll notice that many of the highly irregular districts are clustered around cities and metro areas. When there are more people in a given area, partisans have more leeway in how to draw their districts.

7. This is what the 10 most-gerrymandered districts look like.

For a sense of just how ridiculous gerrymandered districts look, nothing beats a visual. I've listed the 10 most gerrymandered districts below.

NORTH CAROLINA'S 12TH DISTRICT

Gerrymander index score: 97.09

MARYLAND'S 3RD DISTRICT ("The praying mantis")

Gerrymander index score: 96.79

FLORIDA'S 5TH DISTRICT

Gerrymander index score: 96.15

PENNSYLVANIA'S 7TH DISTRICT ("Goofy kicking Donald Duck")

Gerrymander index score: 96.05

NORTH CAROLINA'S 1ST DISTRICT

Gerrymander index score: 96.01

TEXAS'S 33RD DISTRICT

Gerrymander index score: 95.60

NORTH CAROLINA'S 4TH DISTRICT

Gerrymander index score: 95.16

ILLINOIS'S 4TH DISTRICT

Gerrymander index score: 94.96

TEXAS'S 35TH DISTRICT ("The upside-down elephant")

Gerrymander index score: 94.63

LOUISIANA'S 2ND DISTRICT

Gerrymander index score: 94.41

Want more on gerrymandering? Check out this excellent video produced by PostTV last year.

I still have daydreams of my Dance Like Nobody’s Watching jaunt in the laundromat.  I haven’t done it yet mostly because I’m scared and also… I’m not Beyonce.

The daydreams are still there.  They’ve transferred from my Venice Beach laundromat to the streets of the French Quarter.  In my daydreams I’m taking over the streets to The Naked and Famous song Girls Like You.  I’ve got all the jump moves and hip gyrating, spins and flips I need to look like… not an idiot.  It’s still just a daydream.  I know it’s been years and years of a daydream.  Your patience is appreciated.  Beyonce wasn’t built in a day.  (I just likened Beyonce with Rome AND I’VE NEVER BEEN SO RIGHT ABOUT ANYTHING EVER!).

While Rome (and dance videos) are built in daydreams… at least I’m in the kitchen cooking like nobody’s watching.

Except someone is watching…

And he’s really bossy about what happens to all of the bacon in the house.

What happened here is this:  I put bacon, lettuce, and tomato in between two cheesy waffles. Nothing but trouble.

I was cooking (and smashing food in my face) like no one was watching.  Well.  No one my height was watching.  No one with thumbs was watching.  Just me, and this, and three minutes later a dance party for one.

I am the picture of (really embarrassing) success!  Dance daydreams pending.

Let’s make these waffles!

This is just real life.  I gather all of my ingredients on my dining room table and try to will myself to remember to buy more baking powder to refill my baking jar.  The willing hasn’t worked in weeks.  You’d think I’d just write it down on a list.  Nope.

We’re adding both baking powder (the very last that I have) and baking soda in these waffles.  We want lots of fluff!

If you’re still curious about the difference between baking soda and baking powder, we can totally talk about it.

Flour is mixed with salt, sugar, and black pepper in addition to the leavening ingredients.  Commence with the usual fork whisking.

The eggs are cracked into a medium bowl to bring the wet ingredients together.

Buttermilk because… YES, ALWAYS!

Melted butter is always whisked into the eggs and milk.

We get to marry these two.

Sharp cheddar cheese, too!

We want to make these waffles all the way salty and savory.

The batter is cheesed and stirred and then left to rest for about 5 minutes while the waffle iron heats up. The batter will thicken as it rests.  Good news!

I don’t mind the rough edges of these cheese waffles.  This sort of imperfection is charming.

Now we’re in business!

The waffles are cooked and resting on a wire rack to prevent sogginess.  The bacon is baked up crisp.  The lettuce is clean, the tomatoes are sliced.  I mean… this feels really right.

Let’s just be mayonnaise people… just for this one recipe.  It’s perfect for these BLTs.  I mixed my mayonnaise with a big spoonful of whole grain mustard and a good dusting of coarsely ground black pepper.  Flava!

Schmears are generous.  Bacon is stacked!

Crisp lettuce is essential.  Walk away from the limp stuff.  I used a crisp romaine.  Tomatoes are getting real!  I sprinkled my tomato slices with a bit of sea salt to bring out the flavor.

Sandwiched.

Honestly speaking… this is the best thing ever!  It’s that simple.  There are bacon and cheese waffles.  Crisp vegetables are important elements.  Spiced up mayonnaise plays an important supporting role.  It’s breakfast.  It’s lunch.  It’s brunch.  It’s stand at the kitchen table and smash it into your face as quickly as you can.

Yes.

There is a growing recognition that stringent local land-use regulations are one of the main barriers to upward mobility for low- and middle-income Americans. In a new Democracy Journal review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Lawrence Summers, a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations and one of America's most influential economists, argues that "the two most important steps that public policy can take with respect to wealth inequality are the strengthening of financial regulation to more fully eliminate implicit and explicit subsidies to financial activity," a widely-held view, and, more surprisingly, "an easing of land-use restrictions
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Back in January, Sylvester Schieber and Andrew Biggs made the case that retirement incomes are in much better shape than is commonly understood. Because the Current Population Survey (CPS) fails to count the bulk of the income older Americans derive from 401(k) and IRA plans, observers relying on CPS data have concluded that the shift from defined-benefit pensions to defined-contribution savings plans has greatly reduced retirement incomes. And some of these observers have thus concluded that we ought to increase Social Security benefits to mitigate the effects of this decline. Schieber and Biggs use the incomes retirees report to the
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Vox, the media venture started this spring by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein to add context to news and explain breaking stories, hasn’t exactly been falling over itself to cover one of the major news events of the past couple weeks, the cascade of scandals from the Veterans Affairs administration. So far, they’ve run three posts: One reported the resignation of a VA undersecretary, which was only later updated to include context (the undersecretary was already scheduled to retire this year) that rendered it utterly meaningless and a face-saving gesture that deserved no attention. One featured a Jon Stewart clip
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California State Senator Ricardo Lara (D-Long Beach) has done us all a great service by introducing a new bill, the Health For All Act, that would commit California taxpayers to financing Medi-Cal coverage for low-income unauthorized immigrants. As a recent analysis from the Migration Policy Institute reveals, 44 percent of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. live in households earning less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, and the same is true of 63 percent of unauthorized immigrant children. Assuming California's unauthorized immigrant population follows this pattern in broad outline, Lara's proposal would represent a significant expansion of Medi-Cal.
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GOOD ADVICE: Be Skeptical of That Measles “Cure” for Cancers.

Last week Airbnb, the home rental service, caught a break when a judge tossed out a subpoena by the New York attorney general for

After months of rumors and speculation, and much fan debate, Channing Tatum is confirmed to play Gambit from the X-Men universe. Producer Lauren Shuler-Donner actually reached out to Tatum after he commented that he would like to play as the Ragin' Cajun in an interview back in September. According to the actor, if he did get the role, he would be using a real cajun accent.

So where does Gambit fit in the whole X-Men franchise now that the film's chronology will likely change dramatically due to the events in X-Men: Days Of Future Past? What does Shuler-Donner have to say about this? Hit the jump to learn more [...]

The post Confirmed: Channing Tatum Will Play Gambit appeared first on Geeks of Doom.

An official release date has been locked in for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the first installment in a planned trilogy of Harry Potter spinoff movies.

Warner Brothers has set a November 18, 2016 release date for the movie, which will be based on the book of the same name by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. Rowling will take on the task of adapting her book into a screenplay herself. [...]

The post ‘Harry Potter’ Spinoff Movie ‘Fantastic Beasts’ Gets A Release Date appeared first on Geeks of Doom.

Dan McCormack has created Lego versions of the Pokémon characters that look so good that they could be a real product. He was inspired to build them after revisiting Pokémon on his PC through an emulator. McCormack then dug out his old Lego bricks and got to work building these beauties. They’ve gone over so well that fans have even created a Lego Ideas Project page in hopes of making them official.

See more pictures after the break.

(via Mashable)