Letters Remain

  • Seven Threats to a Sustainable ‘Food Future’

    In a hugely captivating and comprehensive look at the food supply chain in Britain, Jeremy Harding provides a look at “the future of food and its supply”–including food ethics, food security and the dire need for a sustainable future.

    Harding’s case is the most cogent I’ve read and it offers much more than a condemnation of our current, unsustainable habits: the article focuses on what Harding dubs the “seven big stories”–the seven fundamental “looming threats” we must keep in mind when planning for a sustainable, efficient and secure ‘food future’.

    1. Population growth: The expected large-scale urbanisation of the future “poses big questions about land use (housing v. farming) and the production of food by a minority for a majority as the gap between the two gets wider”.
    2. ‘The nutrition transition’: As we move further away from a diet based on grains, pulses and legumes and toward one of meat and dairy (the transition from maize feeding us to maize feeding the animals) means that “global production of food – all food – will have to increase by 50 per cent over the next 20 years to cater for two billion extra people and cope with the rising demand for meat”.
    3. Energy: “The industrial production of food is sure to become more expensive as fuel costs rise. It takes 160 litres of oil to produce a tonne of maize in the US; natural gas accounts for at least three-quarters of the cost of making nitrogen fertiliser; freight, too, depends on fuel”.
    4. Land: “The amount of the world’s land given over to agriculture continues to grow, but in per capita terms it’s shrinking. As with oil, it’s possible to envisage ‘peak food’ (the point of maximum production, followed by decline), ‘peak phosphorus’ [and] ‘peak land’: the point at which the total area of the world’s most productive land begins to diminish (soil exhaustion, climate change) and marginal land comes up for reassessment”.
    5. Water: “Worldwide, one in three people face water shortages and by 2030 the ratio will have narrowed. […] Much of our fruit and veg comes from water-scarce countries and […] lack of water closes down food production and livelihoods”.
    6. Climate change: “Extreme weather events will […] jeopardise agriculture and the movement of food from one place to another”.
    7. Agricultural workers: More than half of the world’s 1.1 billion agricultural workers” own neither land nor machinery and live in a state of semi-slavery. The conditions of this new global underclass are at last a matter of concern: worldwide food production is set on a downturn as their wretchedness weakens their capacity to produce and earn, driving more people inexorably towards the cities.

    I suppose you could call these the food equivalent of Jared Diamond’s twelve problems of societal sustainability.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • India and the Definition of Middle Class

    A newly proposed international definition of the middle class for developing countries, produced by the Center for Global Development for the World Bank, has some surprising conclusions for India.

    The report, produced by the president of the Center for Global Development, Nancy Birdsall, suggests that “middle class” is defined as everyone with an income above $10 a day, excluding those in the top 5% of earners in the country… meaning India has no middle class.

    This is a combination both of the depth of India’s poverty and its inequality. China had no middle class in 1990, but by 2005, had a small urban middle class (3% of the population). South Africa (7%), Russia (30%) and Brazil (19%) all had sizable middle classes in 2005. […]

    In socio-political terms, the middle class is traditionally that segment of society with a degree of economic security that allows it to uphold the rule of law, invest and desire stability. They do not, unlike those defined as rich, depend on inheritances or other non-productive sources of income. […]

    OECD countries define their poverty lines as 50% of median income which works out […] to about $30 day. In the US the poverty line for a single individual in 2008 was $29 per day and for each individual in a four-person household was about $14 per day.

    However, people in developing countries living on even $10 a day still have extremely low social indicators. Economist Lant Pritchett has shown that infant mortality of households in the richest quintile in Bolivia was 32 and Ghana 58 per 1,000. Fewer than 25% of people in the richest quintile in India complete 9 grades of school, Pritchett showed. “An upper limit of the 95th percentile, while on the high side, is just about sufficient to exclude the countrys richest,” Birdsall adds.

    via The Browser

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • In Praise of Self-Tracking: The Data-Driven Life

    It is a natural desire to strive for self-improvement and seek knowledge about oneself, but until recently it has been difficult or impossible to do so objectively and quantitatively.

    Now, through self-tracking systems and applications that are becoming prevalent in many of our lives thanks to a number of technological advances and sociological changes, we can, at last, find the answers to questions that were once beyond us.

    That is the essence of Gary Wolf’s comprehensive study of the self-tracking phenomenon, looking at how we are heading toward ‘the quantified self’ and a ‘data-driven life’… and what this means.

    When the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Automated sensors do more than give us facts; they also remind us that our ordinary behavior contains obscure quantitative signals that can be used to inform our behavior, once we learn to read them. […]

    The goal isn’t to figure out something about human beings generally but to discover something about yourself. Their validity may be narrow, but it is beautifully relevant. Generally, when we try to change, we simply thrash about: we improvise, guess, forget our results or change the conditions without even noticing the results. Errors are possible in self-tracking and self-experiment, of course. It is easy to mistake a transient effect for a permanent one, or miss some hidden factor that is influencing your data and confounding your conclusions. But once you start gathering data, recording the dates, toggling the conditions back and forth while keeping careful records of the outcome, you gain a tremendous advantage over the normal human practice of making no valid effort whatsoever.

    via @vaughanbell

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Religiosity-Racism Link

    Admitting that there are “so many, many positive aspects and benefits to religiosity”, the authors of a meta-analysis on the subject have shown a positive correlation between religious affiliation and racism.

    Organized religion […], by its very nature, encourages people to accept one fundamental belief system as superior to all others. The required value judgment creates a kind of us-versus-them conflict, in which members of a religious group develop ethnocentric attitudes toward anyone perceived as different. […]

    Studies have shown that religious adherents are more likely than agnostics and atheists to rate conservative “life values” as the most important principles underlying their belief systems.

    Those specific values — social conformity and respect for tradition — also most closely correlate with racism. In short, people are attracted to organized religion for the same reason some people are inclined toward racist thinking: a belief in the sanctity of established divisions in society.

    Of course there are numerous caveats. The most important of which is that the correlation is strongest with religious fundamentalists and is “unclear” with those who are attracted to religion as a spiritual pursuit (as opposed to those who attend church as an obligation).

    The researchers also note that the link is particularly strong with highly educated seminary students, that the correlation seems to have been decreasing in recent decades, and that there is no link between “intrinsic religiosity” and racist attitudes (although there is also no link between this “intrinsic religiosity” and racial tolerance).

    via Intelligent Life

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • After Procrastination, Self-Forgiveness Limits Further Procrastination

    In a short article summarising six “surprising insights from the social sciences” we are told how those in powerful positions show little restraint when presented with food and are informed that the perceived “attractiveness advantage” of more sociable people is there simply because they groom themselves better.

    However I feel that the only constructive insight is to be found from the short look at how we can stop procrastinating by forgiving ourselves for previous transgressions (the lack of guilt limits any further procrastination):

    Recent research has suggested that forgiveness is good for your health. But it may also be good for your study habits. Students who procrastinated in studying for an exam — but forgave themselves for doing so — procrastinated less and got a higher grade on a subsequent exam. One might normally expect such a self-forgiving student to keep on procrastinating. However, self-forgiveness mitigated the guilt and rumination — and desire to procrastinate further to avoid these negative feelings — that resulted from the initial bout of procrastination, making it easier to study for the next exam.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Why Preserve Endangered Languages?

    With his book on “the politics of language” due to be published next year, international correspondent for The Economist, Robert Lane Green, is interviewed in More Intelligent Life.

    The discussion I find most intriguing is this on the saving of threatened world languages:

    Half of today’s languages may be gone in a century. Is there a book that explains why we should care?

    Unfortunately, I’ve tried and failed to find a utilitarian argument for preserving tiny languages. Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine failed to convince me with “Vanishing Voices”, which tied biodiversity to the preservation of endangered languages. They’re right in that small groups that speak threatened languages often know things about plant and animal species that are lost when their lands are “developed” and they are absorbed into the larger community. But that knowledge isn’t lost because the language is lost. It’s lost because the way of life is lost. If a modest tribe moved to the city and took urban jobs, their knowledge of rare plants and so on would disappear even if they kept their language. By contrast, if their traditional way of life were preserved, they could start speaking the bigger metropolitan language and keep their knowledge. (Contrary to a common belief, most things are perfectly translatable.)

    So the reason to keep languages alive is really just because they are an irreplaceable part of our common human heritage. […] The thought of a planet a thousand years from now where everyone speaks just a few languages, or just one, depresses me

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Relationship Between Police and Crime

    Does an increased police presence decrease crime? That’s the seemingly simple and obvious question that Mark Easton poses on his BBC blog before explaining the difficulty in attempting to discern if a greater number of police helps to reduce crime.

    To set the scene, Easton quotes from a Steven Levitt study (pdf) that attempted to answer this question by analysing crime fluctuations around electoral cycles (because, equally interestingly, the number of police increases around elections).

    One of the most surprising empirical results in this literature is the repeated failure to uncover evidence that an increase in the number of police reduces the crime rate. Of the 22 studies surveyed by Samuel Cameron (1988) that attempt to estimate a direct relationship between police and crime using variation across cities, 18 find either no relationship or a positive (ie incorrectly signed) relationship between the two.

    Easton does conclude, however, by saying that it “would be almost perverse to argue that more police has no effect on crime. But we don’t know how much impact they have or how long that impact lasts”.

    via @vaughanbell

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Cognitive Impact of Evaluative ‘Grade’ Letters

    Priming students with “evaluative letters” (i.e. letters used to grade papers, such as A and F) has a significant influence on their performance on cognitive tests. As you can imagine, primed with an A their performance on the cognitive tests improve, while those primed with an F displayed degraded performance.

    That’s what researchers found when conducting a simple test while investigating the unconscious effect of primed letters on academic performance.

    It has been proposed that motivational responses outside people’s conscious awareness can be primed to affect academic performance. The current research focused on the relationship between primed evaluative letters (A and F), explicit and implicit achievement motivation, and cognitive performance. […]

    Our findings suggest that students are vulnerable to evaluative letters presented before a task, and support years of research highlighting the significant role that nonconscious processes play in achievement settings.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Faith in Probability

    Following the publishing of his first book–Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives—David Eagleman is interviewed about religion and his beliefs, providing a refreshingly new and… empirical… take on religious faith, atheism and agnosticism.

    Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty – you find the atheist and you find the religious and everybody is acting like they know the answer. I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance. We don’t really understand most of what’s happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows. We don’t have any evidence for it. We don’t have any evidence against it. The thing that has always surprised me is that people are always acting as though they know the answer. […] As Voltaire said, “uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position”. […]

    I call myself a possibilian. The idea with possibilianism is to explore new ideas and to shine a flashlight around the possibility space to really understand what the size of that space is. The idea is not to commit to any particular story, it’s not the end goal to say “OK, we’re going to figure it out and commit to it” because it’s simply past the toolbox of science. The best we can do, and I find it a wonderful pursuit, is to just try and understand what the possibilities are. […]

    I don’t have a belief system, I only have a possibility system!

    Sum is the first work of ‘speculative fiction’ by Eagleman, a neuroscientist specialising in the study of time perception and synesthesia.

    via @mocost

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Happy Citizens are Good Citizens

    By fostering happiness in our cities, towns and villages we are simultaneously cultivating inhabitants that will give more blood, donate more to charity, and generally be better citizens.

    That’s the conclusion from a study looking at how happy people become better citizens as a result of being happy.

    Happier people trust others more, and importantly, help create more social capital. Specifically, they have a higher desire to vote, perform more volunteer work, and more frequently participate in public activities [i.e. community activities, religious events, cultural events and social gatherings]. They also have a higher respect for law and order, hold more association memberships, are more attached to their neighborhood, and extend more help to others.

    No doubt, there’s a positive feedback loop here (e.g. happiness increases participation in social gatherings, social gatherings vastly increase one’s happiness).

    The researchers go to great lengths to show causality from happiness to social capital and trust but I’m still not completely won over. Check the paper and see what you think.

    via Barking Up the Wrong Tree

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    Lloyd Morgan