How human culture influences our genetics - BBC NEWS

How human culture influences our genetics

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140410-can-we-drive-our-own-evolution

 10 April 2014

How human culture influences our genetics

 Jason G Goldman

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The way we eat, cook, explore and interact with others can influence our genes, says Jason G Goldman. So how will modern culture shape our children?

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You shouldn't be able to drink milk. Your ancestors couldn't. It is only in the last 9,000 years that human adults have gained that ability without becoming ill. Children could manage it, but it was only when we turned to dairy farming that adults acquired the ability to properly digest milk.

It turns out that cultures with a history of dairy farming and milk drinking have a much higher frequency of lactose tolerance – and its associated gene – than those who don't.

Drinking milk is just one of example of the way that traditions and cultural practices can influence the path of our evolution. Culture and genetics are traditionally thought of as two separate processes, but researchers are increasingly realising that they are intimately connected, each influencing the natural progression of the other. Scientists call it "gene-culture co-evolution." Why does it matter? If we can pin down how culture influences our genetic makeup – and how the same processes apply to other creatures too – then we can be better understand how the way we act as a society today could influence our future.

Another example of how culture influences our genes is the relationship between yam farming and malaria resistance. Throughout much of Africa, people are in constant battle with malaria. According to the CDC, in 2010 there were some 219 million cases of malaria reported worldwide, and 660,000 were fatal. More than 90% of those who died lived in Africa.

Malaria-carrying mosquitoes are a killer in Africa - but some people have a different disease that gives them protection (SPL)

But there are some people who seem to have a natural defense force. Their red blood cells, normally shaped like flattened disks, are shaped instead like a crescent or sickle. Because of the odd shaped blood cells,sickle-cell disease can lead to blockages in blood vessels, which in turn cause pain and organ damage. Under normal circumstances, evolution keeps sickle-cell disease to a minimum because it can be so harmful and can reduce life expectancy. But because of a biological quirk, the sickle-cell gene can actually protect against malaria. So in parts of the world where malaria infection rates are extremely high, like Africa, natural selection may actually favour the sickle-shaped cells. In the gamble of life, protection against malaria may be preferable, even at the potential cost of suffering from sickle-cell disease.

Here's what's interesting: those communities that farm yams have much higher rates of the sickle-cell gene than nearby communities with different agricultural practices. In order to cultivate yams, trees had to be chopped down. "The removal of trees had the effect of inadvertently increasing the amount of standing water when it rained, which provided better breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes," writes biologist Kevin Laland of the University of St Andrews in Nature Reviews Genetics. More mosquitos mean more malaria, creating the conditions for sickle-shaped cells to become adaptive.

So while it's sickle-cell disease that's protective against malaria, it was a uniquely human behavior – yam farming – that allowed evolution to act.

Not all examples of gene-culture co-evolution are quite as beneficial. Polynesians, for example, have a uniquely high prevalence of type II diabetes. It's among the highest worldwide, and is higher even than among neighbouring human populations. One group of researchers has discovered that the Polynesians have a particularly high frequency of a variant of a gene called PPARGC1A, and that may be responsible for their high frequency of type II diabetes, at least in part.

Did a historical culture of exploration make Polynesian people more prone to obesity today? (SPL)

Why are they so uniquely afflicted by this disease? The researchers think it may have something to do with their ancestors' culture of exploration. As the Polynesians settled the islands of the Pacific, they endured long voyages across the open ocean, and faced the stresses of cold and starvation. Those conditions may have encouraged "thrifty metabolism", which allows people to build up fat deposits more quickly when food is available. Natural selection may have increased the frequency of associated gene variants among them. However the sort of metabolism that would have been useful to explorers can lead to obesity and type II diabetes for individuals in modern cultures with consistent sources of nourishment. So modern Polynesians may have inherited a susceptibility to type II diabetes not because they lead a sedentary lifestyle, but because their ancestors decided to climb into some canoes and explore their planet.

While these examples are perhaps the best understood examples of gene-culture co-evolution, researchers have identified scores of others. Our domestication of plants may have given a leg up to the genes that allow us to detoxify certain chemical compounds found in the plants we eat. Our history of exploring new territories and unfamiliar climates may have acted upon genes that allow us to tolerate more extreme heat or cold than our ancestors. The invention of cooking may have altered the evolution of our jaw muscles and our tooth enamel. The emergence of language and complex social cognition may have prompted natural selection to further guide the development of our brains and nervous systems.

Dolphin mothers teach their young a specialised 'culture' of feeding, called sponging (SPL)

It would be easy to assume that cultural influences are unique to humans. Yet some animal species have at least rudimentary cultures, and it would be silly to think that this couldn't influence their genetics just as ours does. It might be happening among the dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia.

A group of researchers led by University of New South Wales biologist Anna Kopps has been studying the bottlenose dolphins of the western part of the bay. A well known form of foraging among these dolphins is "sponging," a behavior that involves carrying a conical sponge to protect their faces as they root around the seafloor looking for food. It's not just an exciting example of tool use; it's also evidence of cultural transmission.

The behavior, as Kopps points out, is "almost exclusively transmitted from mothers to their offspring through social learning". That means there's a tight correlation between it and the parts of the young dolphins' genomes that are passed on from their mothers.

This link does not necessarily provide us with evidence that a cultural behavior has caused alterations in the genetic material, unlike the lactose tolerance, malaria resistance, and thrifty metabolism examples in humans. Still, it's a clue that there could be something more, a hint at a way in which cultural practices in dolphins might create an opportunity for natural selection to occur.

Could wearing robot prosthetics influence our future evolution? 

Cultural influence on our own evolution continues apace, but it is currently nearly impossible to predict just how it will happen. What sorts of genetic adaptations will we see as a result of our technological culture? Will those adaptations apply universally, or only among some of us? How will human-machine interfaces, such as robotic prostheses or neural implants, affect our gene pools? Will the propensity for violent sports in some cultures lead to adaptations to protect against head trauma? And what are the questions we don't even yet realise we should be asking?

It no longer makes sense to think of genetics and culture as two separate uninteracting monoliths. The difficulty is identifying how and if one is influencing the other. "This is the great challenge for the field of gene-culture co-evolution, and it is a formidable challenge," Laland writes. "Nonetheless, the best-researched examples, such as the lactose-tolerance case, not only show that gene-culture co-evolution occurs but also illustrate the means to establish this."

Heartbleed bug creates confusion on internet - BBC NEWS

Heartbleed bug creates confusion on internet

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26971363

10 April 2014 Last updated at 15:04

Heartbleed bug creates confusion on internet

By Mark WardTechnology correspondent, BBC News

Minecraft-maker Mojang shut down game servers for several hours while potentially vulnerable software was patched

Computers vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug are actively being targeted online, say security experts.

However, it is not yet clear whether the scanning efforts are benign or are the work of cyber-thieves keen to steal data, they say.

The news comes as some security professionals and developers advised people to change all their passwords.

But Google said that logins for its services did not need to be reset unless they were used on other sites.

That contradicted advice from Yahoo's blogging platform Tumblr and the developers of the app If This Then That who have told users they should change their passwords "everywhere".

The conflicting guidance is further complicated by the fact that experts say updating a password is useless unless a site has patched its servers - but it is not always obvious to the public when this is the case.

Attack pattern

News about the Heartbleed bug broke on 8 April and has kicked off a frenzy of activity as web companies check to see if their systems are vulnerable.

The bug emerged in software that should have kept data passing between sites and users safe from scrutiny. Instead the bug meant that attackers could use specially crafted queries to slowly steal data from servers.

Ars Technica reported that some sites had seen evidence that networks of bots were probing them for the Heartbleed weakness long before the bug was publicised.

Rory Cellan-Jones looks at ways to manage strong online passwords

Information about scans of vulnerable servers are also circulating among security researchers. One scan turned out to pose no threat as whoever was behind it simply told the gaming company who ran the computers that they were leaking data.

"It's difficult to detect an attack unless you are actively looking for it," said Ken Munro, an analyst at security company Pen Test Partners. He added that many intrusion detection systems had now added signatures that spot the subtle signs that a Heartbleed-inspired attack is under way.

In addition, organisations running "honeypots" that try to trick hackers into attacking bogus web servers have written code that generates nonsensical server data in response to Heartbleed requests.

About 500,000 servers are vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug, statistics from net monitoring company Netcraft suggest.

Many large sites that ran vulnerable servers have now patched their systems and many others are following suit. However, a huge number of sites still remain vulnerable. Websites have sprung up that let people check if a site they use is vulnerable.

Conflicting advice has been given to web users from different companies about about whether they should be updating their passwords. Google said users did not need to change credentials; Facebook advised users to make a change; and others, such as web service If This Then That, said users should change all passwords.

Users should first check to see if a site they were using was vulnerable to the bug and whether they had taken action to fix it, said James Lyne, global head of research at Sophos. Changing a password on an unprotected site could still leave people open to data theft, he said.

In addition, he added, the rush to change passwords was likely to encourage phishing gangs to start sending out bogus messages advising people to reset or change their passwords.

"This is not the first defect of its kind and it certainly won't be the last, but it is one of the more serious faults we've seen in recent internet history," said Mr Lyne.

NameVulnerable?Patched?Change password?

Amazon

No

No need

Only if shared with vulnerable service

Amazon Web Services

Yes

Yes

Yes

Apple

Not clear

Not clear

Not clear

Barclays

No

No

Only if shared with vulnerable service

eBay

No

No need

Only if shared with vulnerable service

Evernote

No

No need

Only if shared with vulnerable service

Facebook

Yes

Yes

Yes

Google/Gmail

Yes

Yes

Yes

HSBC

No

No need

Only if shared with vulnerable service

If This Then That

Yes

Yes

Will force users to log out and ask them to update

LinkedIn

No

No need

Only if shared with vulnerable service

Lloyds

No

No need

No

Microsoft/Hotmail/Outlook

No

No need

Only if shared with vulnerable service

PayPal

No

No need

Only if shared with vulnerable service

RBS/Natwest

No

No need

Only if shared with vulnerable service

Santander

No

No need

Only if shared with vulnerable service

Tumblr

Yes

Yes

Yes

Twitter

No

No need

Only if shared with vulnerable service

Yahoo/Yahoo Mail

Yes

Yes

Yes

More on This Story

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Appealing to a College for More Financial Aid - New York Times

Appealing to a College for More Financial Aid

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/05/your-money/paying-for-college/for-many-families-college-financial-aid-packages-are-worth-an-appeal.html?emc=edit_my_20140407&nl=your-money&nlid=56381892&ref=your-money-email&_r=0

The era of the financial aid appeal has arrived in full, and April is the month when much of the action happens.

For decades, in-the-know families have gone back to college financial aid officers to ask for a bit more grant money after the first offer arrived. But word has spread, and the combination of the economic collapse in 2008-9 and the ever-rising list price for tuition and expenses has led to a torrent of requests for reconsideration each spring.

• Financial Aid Questions Answered

Do not call it bargaining. Or negotiation. That makes financial aid officers mad, as they don’t like to think of themselves as presiding over an open-air bazaar. But that’s not to say that you shouldn’t ask. At many of the private colleges and universities that students insist on shooting for, half or more of families who appeal get more money. And this year, for the first time, the average household income of financial aid applicants will top $100,000 at the 163 private colleges and universities that the consulting firm Noel-Levitz tracks.

Photo

McGraw Tower and Uris Library at Cornell University. Cornell will match higher need-based aid offers from some high-end schools, no questions asked. CreditHeather Ainsworth for The New York Times

Whatever you call your request for reconsideration, keep this in mind: For all of the real, important work of forging minds that goes on behind the ivy-covered walls, this is also an industry. The people who work in it are obsessed with carefully managing enrollment and making sure that they don’t give away too much money. To accomplish these goals, Carnegie Mellon uses proprietary statistical modeling, while consultants like Noel-Levitz sell revenue management systems and blog about merit scholarships that can serve as decision triggers. The real sin in the financial aid world is something called overawarding, lest the discount rate outpace the growth of net tuition revenue per student.

All that business jargon is not to suggest that they aren’t discounting. It happens, a lot. Knowing a bit more about how the process works may help you get a lower price if you don’t like the figures on the award letter that your child has received.

In recent weeks, I sent notes to a few dozen of the most expensive colleges and universities in the country seeking answers to a few basic questions about appeals. Some declined to help or were nearly monosyllabic, perhaps reflecting either their distaste for appeals or their 100-hour workweeks at the moment. The initial response from the University of Chicago came with a claim that the answers to my questions were not public information. Then there was the heartfelt and intensely useful response from Maureen McRae Goldberg, the director of financial aid at Occidental College, which appears in full with the web version of this column.

The responses I did get led me to believe that there were two main kinds of appeals, and only the first had a reasonably high likelihood of success.

Financial Changes

Your best shot with an appeal will come from a change in your family’s financial circumstances since you applied for aid. Possibilities include job loss or other reduction in income, new health expenses, death of a parent, disability of a family member, nursing home costs, natural disasters or parental credit woes that make borrowing impossible.

When you make the appeal, Kelly O’Brien, the director of financial aid at Trinity College, suggests that it be written, quantified and documented. At Sarah Lawrence, the dean of enrollment, Kevin McKenna, adds that it’s easier to respond to changes that have already happened. Upon appeal, the school may wait to see what happens with changes families merely anticipate.

Here are some circumstances not to cite: Ms. McRae Goldberg of Occidental once heard from a family that wanted allowances for $3,000 in monthly groceries, including $1,000 for dairy products. Then there was another family with $30,000 in medical expenses after a cancer diagnosis. Documentation arrived, and it was for the family cat.

So what are your odds of success when you ask for more grant money that you don’t have to pay back? Some universities claim they don’t track the batting average of appealers, while others almost certainly do but didn’t want to tell me.

But a few institutions did give up some numbers. At Occidental, the financial aid office approved the appeals of one-third of the entire entering class (including those who did not apply for financial aid). Eugene Lang College at the New School reports a 57 percent success rate among all its students who have appealed. At Cornell and Sarah Lawrence, it’s about 50 percent.

Dartmouth would only say that it loosens the purse strings for a majority of the appeals, and it sympathized with those who curse the whole system, noting that the various formulas that most colleges use don’t fully recognize the true cost of living for most families.

Sometimes, misunderstandings occur. Most families are applying for financial aid for the first or second time, so they make mistakes. Financial aid officers aren’t infallible either. The rules around divorced parents, home equity and small-business revenue can throw people for a loop. If similar schools offer radically different amounts, it’s worth finding out if there was an error.

Cornell instantly corrects itself if you’ve got higher need-based aid offers from other Ivy League schools or M.I.T., Duke and Stanford; it will match that offer, no questions asked.

Carnegie Mellon appears to be acting similarly, noting on its site that the university has “been open about our willingness to review financial aid awards to compete with certain private institutions for students admitted under the regular decision plan.” Then it throws in this zinger: “Unlike most institutions, the university states these principles openly to those offered first-year admission under the regular decision plan.”

Merit and Matching

One of the key code words here is “need-based” offers, like the ones that Cornell offers to match. Many institutions also give away “merit” scholarships to students they want to attract, regardless of whether they can afford to pay the entire cost of attendance and have no financial need.

This is where things get tricky. Many families get merit scholarships but also have financial need. But it’s often hard to get one school that offers need-based aid but no merit aid to match the overall grant package of another school that offers both. It’s also challenging when the colleges are not of equal stature.

Moreover, the colleges are on to you. Enrollment specialists have gathered data and done the math, and people who appeal are more likely to attend than people with aid offers who do not appeal, regardless of whether the school gives the appealers more money. In fact, according to Jim Scannell, the co-founder of consulting firm Scannell & Kurz, sometimes the people with rejected appeals enroll at a higher rate than those with winning appeals. “You’re not going to appeal to a place that you’re not serious about,” he said.

People who try haggling around the merit money are the ones who inspired Kenyon’s vice president of enrollment, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, to describe this in a Washington Monthly story last year not as some golden age of banter and reconsideration but an “age of entitlement.”

Continue reading the main story

She’s not the only one who isn’t fond of the parents’ appeals. Here’s Victoria Romero, vice president for enrollment at Scripps College, on the subject: “It is important for families to understand that financial aid packages are not subject to negotiation.” She adds, seemingly for emphasis: “We award all merit aid at the time of admission and will not match another school’s merit award.”

Other schools may indeed match the overall offer, perhaps under the face-saving guise of checking the original application for supposed errors in calculating actual financial need. But even then, families need to be honest with themselves about the applicants. “Be realistic about how they will stack up,” said Kalman Chany, the author of “Paying for College Without Going Broke” and an aid consultant to families. “If you’re barely sneaking in, they don’t care if you come so much. But if they’re buying your SAT scores or grades to improve their rankings and convince other people to spend the money to go there, then they really have to have you.”

The worst that can happen is that the financial aid office says no, so many parents will be tempted to try get a better offer anyway. But Deborah Fox, a veteran family aid adviser, tries to talk them into putting the student at center stage. “I prefer the student appealing,” she said. “I want them to demonstrate taking control of their college education and being engaged in the financial aid process. Colleges have to deal with pushy parents all the time.” She claims a higher success rate with this approach.

Still, much will depend on the college. What is its endowment? How many students have said yes so far, and what sort of aid did they get? “We do our best to understand families’ resources from the information they provide,” said Mr. McKenna of Sarah Lawrence. “But at some point, we have offered as much we can to a student. If financial aid offices had enough resources to go around, no one would ever need to appeal.”

5 Mind-Blowing Revelations from Secret Apple Emails - TIME

5 Mind-Blowing Revelations from Secret Apple Emails

http://time.com/52126/apple-emails-steve-jobs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Sam Frizell @Sam_Frizell
 

April 7, 2014

    

For the past week, tech titans Apple and Samsung have been engaged in a high-stakes patent battle in a Silicon Valley courthouse. Apple claims Samsung sold productsthat violate its patented smartphone and tablet —and owes $2 billion for the transgression. Samsung is claiming Apple violated two of its patents and owes $6 million.

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Apple and Samsung’s tussles in the highly competitive smartphone/tablet market have led to some bad blood. In a biography of Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Jobs, who died in 2011, is quoted saying, “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this.” In the two companies’ last patent fight, Apple was awarded nearly $1 billion, though Samsung is appealing the verdict.

But just a week into the case, emails and memos released as evidence in the lawsuit deep the antagonism between Apple and Samsung really is. They also shed light on how each company reacted to the challenge posed by the other.

Here are some of the biggest surprises from emails released last week:

1. Steve Jobs believed he was in a “Holy War” with Google.

Google is a proxy in the Apple-Samsung feud, as Google created much of the technology that powers Samsung’s smartphones and tablets. If Apple wins, Google could have to make big changes in many of its features.

But Apple and Google have been at loggerheads for years. In an email revealed last week that Apple’s former chief executive circulated to top company employees in October 2010, Jobs outlined his plan for a meeting at an annual retreat. One of Jobs’ planned discussion points included Apple’s “Holy War with Google” and “all the ways we (Apple) will compete with them (Google).”

1. Apple’s marketing team thought Samsung was running circles around its ad campaign

Samsung stepped up its ad game in 2012 and 2013 with commercials targeted at Apple that made the iPhone’s technology appear antiquated and unattractive. After Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of global marketing, saw Samsung’s 2013 pre-Super Bowl commercials, he was dismayed enough to write an email to Apple’s outside ad producer, TBWA\Media Arts Lab, comparing Samsung to “an athlete who can’t miss because they are in the zone,” “while we struggle to nail a compelling brief on iPhone.”

“I can’t help but think ‘these guys are feeling it,’” Schiller wrote of Samsung.

1. Apple almost fired its top ad agency.

Apple’s disgruntlement with Samsung’s ad campaign pushed Apple to reconsider its relationship with its outside ad producer Media Lab. Apple “may need to start a search for a new agency,” Schiller wrote to Apple chief executive Tim Cook in early 2013. He added, “we are not getting what we need from them and haven’t been for a while.”

The email is all the more surprising considering Media Arts Lab had long been Apple’s go-to ad campaigner, and had created the famous “1984″ Super Bowl ad that introduced the Macintosh personal computer.

1. Steve Jobs was probably planning a “magic wand” for television

As part of Apple’s planned move into TV, Jobs was mulling options for the attack. “Apps, browser, magic wand?” he said in a 2010 email as part of potential strategies to bring Apple into television.

1. Samsung is obsessed with one-upping Apple

In a Samsung business forecast for 2012, the company made it clear that its top prerogative was its tussle with Apple. “Beating Apple is #1 Priority (everything must be in context of beating Apple).” The forecast anticipated the release of the iPhone 5 and said the “threat from Apple is extremely real and urgent.”

Want to Succeed? You Should Seriously Consider Doing Nothing - TIME

Want to Succeed? You Should Seriously Consider Doing Nothing

http://time.com/45995/want-to-succeed-you-should-seriously-consider-do-nothing/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• The Drucker Exchange @DruckerInst
 

April 2, 2014

    

If you want to motivate yourself to keep doing something, rather than getting lazy and copping out, here’s an idea: Make “do nothing” one of the choices you present yourself with.

The reason, according to a study by University of Pennsylvania marketing professor Rom Y. Schrift and Georgia State University marketing professor Jeffrey R. Parker, is that adding in the do-nothing choice makes us more likely to persevere in what we set out to do.

For instance, if you plan to start working out and join Gym A or Gym B, add in the option of not joining any gym at all.

“Whether it is workplace management, the health care arena or parenting, a subtle addition of a seemingly innocuous option can actually make someone want to do something even more,” an article in Knowledge@Wharton explains.

Puzzling? “It sounds counterintuitive because we assume that the option of doing nothing reduces persistence,” Schrift tellsKnowledge@Wharton. “However, if I choose something, I learn about my preferences. Just knowing that fact helps us persist longer when there’s adversity or hardship.”

Peter Drucker would surely have agreed that giving yourself the option of doing nothing can be clarifying. In particular, it can help you figure out what the decision is really about, a topic we’ve addressed before. Gym A or Gym B may really be a decision about how much to work out, for example.

But Drucker would also likely add that sometimes the option to “do nothing” is a good one to consider because sometimes it’s best to, well, do nothing. As Drucker pointed out in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices: “There is one question the effective decision-maker asks: ‘Is a decision really necessary?’ One alternative is always the alternative of doing nothing.”

And sometimes, in fact, “there are those conditions with respect to which one can, without being unduly optimistic, expect that they will take care of themselves even if nothing is done.” That’s why Drucker advised, “If the answer to the question ‘What will happen if we do nothing?’ is ‘It will take care of itself,’ one does not interfere.”

It’s a rule too often ignored by decision makers (not to mention gym rats).

Welcome to the Era of Politically Correct Web Browsing -TIME

Welcome to the Era of Politically Correct Web Browsing

http://time.com/49136/brendan-eich-mozilla-firing-firefox-gay-marriage/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Nick Gillespie @nickgillespie
 

April 3, 2014

    

Now, apparently, we’re boycotting free products and demanding companies dance to the tune called by socially conscious customers.

Just days after being named the new head of web-browser maker Mozilla, Brendan Eich has stepped down after being outed as an opponent of gay marriage. On Tuesday, dating site OK Cupid urged its members who use Mozilla Firefox to “consider using different software for accessing OK Cupid.” It turns out that Eich had given money to California’s Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage in the Golden State (last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Prop. 8 invalid and same-sex unions are once again legal in California).

Welcome to the brave new world of socially conscious… web-browsing. In the past, consumers might patronize certain businesses (Whole Foods, say, or Ben & Jerry’s) whose stated missions extended beyond increasing shareholder value and avoided others that might have politically objectionable CEOs or reputations for being anti-abortion (Domino’s Pizza, say) or public positions opposed to certain forms of birth control (Hobby Lobby, for instance). Now we’re boycotting free products such as Firefox and demanding companies dance to the tune called by customers. I think that’s a good thing overall — but it may end up being just as difficult for consumers to live with as it will be for corporations.

POPULAR AMONG SUBSCRIBERS

Whether you care about gay marriage or politically correct web experiences, Eich’s resignation shows how businesses respond to market signals. “Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech,” writes Mitchell Baker, the organization’s executive chairwoman, in announcing Eich’s stepping down. “And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.”

Just as the Internet has empowered consumers to find cheaper prices, more-extensive reviews, and a wider variety of goods than ever before, it’s also made it easier for them to call out companies for all sorts of dastardly actions, screw-ups, and problems. I like that OKCupid’s intervention wasn’t a call for government action to limit people’s choices or ban something. Indeed, OKCupid didn’t even block Firefox users from its site — rather, it politely asked them to consider getting to the site via a different browser.

But this sort of action complicates the simple act of shopping for both traditional conservatives and liberals in ways that are not yet fully clear. Conservatives should like the fact that this was done without calling for government action, even if they aren’t fans of gay marriage. For liberals, they surely like the outcome — a corporation pledges itself to supporting marriage equality — even as they will have to rethink the idea that corporations or businesses don’t have “personhood” or can’t take stances on issues (as liberals like to claim when it comes to campaign-finance questions). In fact, we ascribe intention to businesses all the time, based on their practices and leadership.

It wasn’t that long ago — in fact, it seems like just last week — that we accessed the web to hunt for the best deal on a new cell phone or a pair of shoes. Now we must be aware not simply of the deep politics of the companies we actually buy from, but even the company whose free downloads we use. Increasingly, we will be asking ourselves what sorts of non-business-related policies companies have and whether we want to associate with all that — even when we don’t pay a dime for a particular good or service.

That’s fine. After all, now that we’re well past a subsistence economy, we live in a world of largely symbolic exchange, where we don’t simply choose something because we’re hungry or naked but because we want to make a statement about what sort of person we are, what sort of taste we possess, and what sort of values we share.

But socially conscious web browsing will also be a time-consuming and hugely complicating activity too. One of the great promises of the Internet was that it would allow all of us to sift through vast amounts of information and arrive at the best answer in record time. We all know it hasn’t quite worked out that way. We spend more time than ever hunting for new things and then even more energy comparing this option to that option. And now, we have even more to consider every time we fire up our browser.

Climate Change Is a Game of Risk - TIME

Climate Change Is a Game of Risk

http://time.com/50148/climate-change-is-a-game-of-risk/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Bryan Walsh @bryanrwalsh
 

April 4, 2014

    

Climate change could increase the risk of catastrophic events like Hurricane Sandy.

Climate change is uncertain, which is why the best way to understand how warming will change the world is through the language of risk

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The Latest on Climate Change’s Impacts and Other Fascinating News on the Web

Warming World Threatens Us All, Warns U.N. Report

Human Evolution May Outrace Climate Change and Other Fascinating News on the Web

Every new chapter of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment is boiled down into what is known as a policymaker’s summary—a 40-page or so document that is meant to contain the essential conclusions of the panel’s work and be used to guide politicians and the business community as they respond to global warming. Or at least that’s the idea.

Though chapter 2 of the fifth assessment—which was released on Mar. 31 in Yokohama—had no shortage of dire warnings about global warming, including projections that food could become scarcer as temperatures increased, it doesn’t seem as if many policymakers read the policymaker’s summary—let alone the full report, which runs over 1,000 pages. Kate Gordon, the director of the think tank Next Generation’s energy and climate program, noted that no speaker at the Wall Street Journal‘s ECO:nomics conference—a conference devoted to the intersection between the environment and business—actually brought up the issue of global warming until well into the afternoon of the summit’s second day. “Energy prices, energy volatility, future of utilities? Yes,” she wrote. “Climate change? No.”

If climate change is going to matter as a political and economic issue, it needs to be translated into political and economic terms. Out in San Francisco the hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer is trying to makeclimate matter for politics, promising to spend tens of millions of dollars in 2014 on attack ads targeting politicians who oppose action on global warming. And Steyer is also involved in an effort to make climate change matter for the business community, teaming up with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson on the Risky Business initiative, a wide-ranging project that will eventually produce a major report about the likely economic impact of climate change on U.S. business. “We came to this thinking how do we get to a place and a way of talking about climate change that is comfortable for the business community,” says Gordon, who also serves as the executive director of Risky Business. “And that’s the language of risk.”

Risk—you’ll be hearing that word a lot in the context of climate change. That’s because the best way of thinking about the impact of global warming—and especially the economic impact—is as a risk factor. As the climate warms, sea level will rise, which puts coastal communities—from tens of millions of poor people in Bangladesh to ultra-wealthy Manhattanites—at greater risk of flooding. Warming may also intensify tropical weather, potentially increasing the risk of catastrophic storms like Katrina. If climate change cuts into the yield of crops like wheat or corn—as the latest IPCC report predicts—that could raise the risk of violent conflict in already impoverished countries. Climate change is a risk multiplier.

Putting climate change in the context of risk also gets around the uncertainty inherent in trying to predict the effects of something as fiendishly complex as global warming. Read the IPCC report closely, and you’ll see that there’s a lot of hedging, especially when it comes to the impact that warming temperatures will have on extreme weather. That’s not evidence that global warming doesn’t exists; rather, it’s evidence that climate scientists are honest about what they know and what they don’t know. And it doesn’t give us a free pass—it’s possible that hurricanes might not be responsive to warming, and it’s also possible that warming could supercharge storms. “The very fact of uncertainty—that’s what we mean by risk,” says Hemant Shah, the CEO of Risk Management Solutions (RMS), a catastrophe risk modeling firm that is taking part in the Risky Business initiative.

And this is what’s really important: businesses already know how to deal with risk. They’re accustomed to operating in an uncertain world, and hedging that risk appropriately, whether it’s the threat of natural disaster, war or regulation. By making CEOs see that climate change is just another form of risk—albeit one that’s potentially on a scale larger than any we’ve faced before—the Risky Business initiative will hopefully nudge them towards taking some steps to mitigate that risk. “The question is, what decisions can we make to manage that risk appropriately,” says Shah. “We think this is incredibly important work.”

RMS, which uses complex analytics to model natural catastrophe risk in real time, will provide much of the science behind Risky Business. The company’s analysts will use climate data and models to map out how rising seas, warming temperatures and changing atmospheric patterns could alter the natural disasters that already cost the global economy tens of billions of dollars each year. The result won’t be a single figure—a dollar cost that we can hang on climate change—but it will help us understand the danger we face. The question then is whether we’ll finally listen.

Ruling’s Breadth Hints That More Campaign Finance Dominoes May Fall - New York Times

Ruling’s Breadth Hints That More Campaign Finance Dominoes May Fall

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/us/politics/ruling-hints-more-campaign-finance-dominoes-may-fall.html?emc=edit_cn_20140403&nl=us&nlid=56381892&_r=2

By ADAM LIPTAKAPRIL 3, 2014

James Bopp Jr. is challenging an Iowa law that bans political contributions from corporations but allows them from unions. CreditDrew Angerer/Getty Images

Continue reading the main story

WASHINGTON — The sweeping language and logic of Wednesday’sSupreme Court decision on campaign finance may imperil other legal restrictions on money in politics.

The 5-to-4 decision, which struck down overall limits on contributions by individuals to candidates and parties, was the latest in a series of campaign finance decisions from the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that took an expansive view of First Amendment rights and a narrow one of political corruption. According to experts in election law, there is no reason to think that the march toward deregulating election spending will stop with the ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.

“Those who support limits see the court right now as the T. rex from ‘Jurassic Park,’ ” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “What’s next? ‘Just don’t move. He can’t see us if we don’t move.’ ”

For now, federal law bars corporations from making contributions to candidates, though they can spend what they like independently to support or oppose candidates. Contributions from individuals to candidates are capped at $2,600 per election. Individual contributions to political parties are capped, too. Public financing of elections is allowed.

All of those limits may be vulnerable under the reasoning of the McCutcheon and Citizens United decisions, as well as the “soft money” ban, which limits individual contributions to political parties even if the money is to be spent on activities unrelated to federal elections.

The next case may arrive soon. At their private conference on Friday, the justices are scheduled to consider whether to hear Iowa Right to Life Committee v. Tooker, No. 13-407, a petition from James Bopp Jr., one of the lawyers on the winning side in the McCutcheon case. It challenges an Iowa law that bans contributions from corporations but allows them from unions.

Mr. Bopp said he had scoured Chief Justice Roberts’s controlling opinion in the McCutcheon case for hints and clues. “I didn’t see any real blatant signals about what they would entertain in the future,” he said. “On the other side, this is the latest in a series of cases from a five-member majority that is very friendly to the First Amendment.”

Mr. Bopp made both narrow and broad arguments in the Iowa case. The distinction the law makes between corporations and unions violates equal protection principles, he told the justices. In any event, he added, “banning corporate political contributions violates the First Amendment.”

The Supreme Court may announce on Monday whether it will hear the case.

“The real question after McCutcheon,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, “is whether the ban on corporation and union contributions or the limits on individual contributions are vulnerable.”

“I think that a majority on the court would like to strike both down, but that the backlash from Citizens United may prevent Roberts from moving too quickly on this,” he said. “The corporate ban is more likely to fall sooner, in part because it is hard to justify a complete ban, rather than limits, following Citizens United.”

In his dissent in the McCutcheon case, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the majority had left the campaign finance system in tatters.

“Taken together with Citizens United,” he wrote, “today’s decision eviscerates our nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.”

On the issue of soft money, the Supreme Court upheld the ban in 2003, inMcConnell v. F.E.C., reasoning that large contributions to parties “are likely to create actual or apparent indebtedness on the part of federal officeholders” and “are likely to buy donors preferential access to federal officeholders.”

On Wednesday, Chief Justice Roberts seemed to reject that thinking. “Government regulation,” he wrote, “may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford.”

In 2010, the Supreme Court affirmed without comment a ruling upholding the soft money ban, which was challenged by the Republican National Committee. Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas voted to hear the case.

The lower court had seemed to issue its ruling reluctantly. The argument in favor of allowing soft money contributions “carries considerable logic and force,” Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for a three-judge panel of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia.

“Under current law, outside groups — unlike candidates and political parties — may receive unlimited donations both to advocate in favor of federal candidates and to sponsor issue ads,” Judge Kavanaugh wrote. But he added that the arguments about a disparity that “discriminates against the national political parties in political and legislative debates” should be directed to the Supreme Court.

Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University, said the logic of the McCutcheon decision may cause the court to return to the question, adding that a larger role for political parties would be a welcome development.

“Particularly with the court’s greater recognition, expressed in the McCutcheon oral arguments, that its own law has weakened the parties and encouraged the rise of outside groups,” he said, “McCutcheon could pave the path for the fourth vote needed for the court to reconsider this issue.”

Heather Gerken, a law professor at Yale, said she feared that the court would build on its 2011 decision in Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett, which struck down an Arizona law that provided escalating matching funds to candidates who accepted public financing. But it left more straightforward systems intact.

“My fear is that the court’s next target is the most revered pillar of campaign finance: public financing,” Professor Gerken said. “The lines are in the water, and we’ll see if the Roberts court bites.”

She added that the court sometimes seemed blind to the real-world consequences of its rulings. “We want judges to be shielded from politics,” she said, “but we don’t want them to be naïve about politics.”

IMF boss Lagarde warns economy 'too weak for comfort' - BBC NEWS

IMF boss Lagarde warns economy 'too weak for comfort'

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26861903

3 April 2014

Christine Lagarde warned that without "brave action" the world could fall into a "low growth trap".

She said the global economy would grow by more than 3% this year and next, but that market volatility and tensions in Ukraine posed risks.

Ms Lagarde also urged more action to tackle low inflation in the eurozone.

'Unconventional measures'

Low inflation in the eurozone has been caused by the presence of a greater level of spare capacity in the economy, meaning it is not growing to its full potential due to underinvestment, compared to the US or UK.

The Bank of England believes the amount of spare capacity in the UK is equal to about 1% to 1.5% of overall GDP.

The strength of the euro relative to the pound and the dollar since 2012 has also lowered the cost of imports, forcing the price of goods to come down.

That has meant inflation in the eurozone is currently running at 0.5%, compared to 1.7% in the UK and 1.1% in the US.

The fear attached to lower inflation is it could harm the eurozone's nascent economic recovery, weakening consumer demand for goods and services as household's put off spending believing prices will continue to fall.

Low inflation also means that governments and businesses find it more difficult to repay their debts.

Ms Lagarde called on the European Central Bank (ECB) to pursue "more monetary easing, including through unconventional measures".

Eurozone warning

"There is the emerging risk of what I call 'low-flation', particularly in the euro area," she added.

"A potentially prolonged period of low inflation can suppress demand and output, and suppress growth and jobs."

Her advice to the ECB, in a speech on Wednesday, came the day before a meeting of the central bank's policymakers.

Economists do not expect them to announce any measures to reverse a drop in the region's rate of inflation, which fell to 0.5% in March, its lowest since 2009.

It was also the 6th month in what ECB President Mario Draghi has called "the danger zone" below 1%.

'Low growth trap'

The IMF's managing director said that global economic signs were positive overall, but that "without sufficient policy ambition, the world could fall into a medium-term low-growth trap".

She called for governments to reform labour markets to encourage job creation, and for more public investment such as transport and communications networks in rich and emerging countries.

In a speech seen as a precursor to the IMF's spring meetings in Washington next week, Ms Lagarde specifically referred to the US Federal Reserve's gradual winding down of monetary stimulus.

The US central bank is slowly reducing the rate at which it buys bonds, which has been pumping money into the country's economy.

But it has had a damaging impact on emerging markets, as investors withdrew money back to the US in the hope of achieving higher interest rates.

Ms Lagarde said there needed to be greater cooperation among policymakers to limit the impact of the Fed's tapering, and warned the problem could also "spill back" to the US.

She also warned the situation in Ukraine could have "broader spillover implications" if not well managed.

The IMF last week announced financial support of $14-18bn (£8.5-£11bn) for Kiev in exchange for tough economic reforms.

Bitcoin set for fresh Chinese regulatory attack - Financial Times

Bitcoin set for fresh Chinese regulatory attack

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ed3ee914-ba4f-11e3-aeb0-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2xjEVG4Dh

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April 2, 2014 11:39 am

Bitcoin set for fresh Chinese regulatory attack

By Simon Rabinovitch in Shanghai

©Reuters

Already reeling from a regulatory onslaught, Bitcoin exchanges in China are braced for yet another blow from the central bank that would imperil their survival.

The People’s Bank of China is considering whether to order the country’s banks to close Bitcoin trading accounts, according to people familiar with the matter. If that order goes through, it would eliminate the last major remaining channel by which people in China can buy the virtual currency.

Caixin, a local financial magazine, first reported the ban last week, saying it would come into effect by April 15. But the country’s Bitcoin exchanges say they have not yet received notices from their banks and that business continues as usual, for now.

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“This would be a bad thing for the exchanges. But it is certainly within the realm of what the government is allowed to do. We are taking things one day at a time,” said Bobby Lee, chief executive of BTC China, one of the country’s top exchanges.

The price of Bitcoin in China has fallen to Rmb2,950 ($475), down 17 per cent since Thursday when the Caixin report was published. Bitcoin has fallen nearly 60 per cent from its peak in November, shortly before the Chinese authorities announced the first of their measures to rein in the virtual currency’s then-explosive growth in China.

Beijing ruled in December that individuals were free to buy and sell Bitcoin at their own risk. But after deeming it to be an online product rather than a currency, the government prohibited all Chinese financial institutions from conducting any Bitcoin transactions. It also barred third-party payment providers from serving Bitcoin exchanges.

China’s plucky Bitcoin exchanges – many of which are run by tech entrepreneurs who chafe against government regulations – thought they had found a way around the ban on payment providers. By accepting payment from customers directly in their corporate accounts, the exchanges themselves filled the gap left by payment providers and allowed people to continue buying Bitcoins.

The new central bank document threatens to end that, by preventing China’s Bitcoin exchanges from even holding corporate bank accounts.

Nevertheless, an executive with one of China’s leading Bitcoin exchanges, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he believed the new regulations were in draft stage and that they would not be as harsh as feared. He also said exchanges would still have workarounds if corporate accounts are closed

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“Our core concern is whether Bitcoin is legal. The PBoC notice, if it comes, might increase transaction fees and reduce trading volume, but Bitcoin would still be legal,” he said.

The regulations to date have already undercut the Bitcoin market in China, with daily transaction volumes down by as much as 80 per cent from their peak last year, according to industry estimates.

Bitcoin offered people an easy route around China’s tight capital controls, and many observes believe the central bank’s crackdown was aimed at reinforcing the country’s defences against cross-border capital flows.