Tab sweep numero uno

FRICTION

• A blog post about how Harry Potter sustained the author during America’s immediate post-911 mass-psychological dark mood titled The Importance of Fiction.

  A good read. My mind initially saw, instead, the title The Importance of Friction.

• On Hackaday, Jenny List asks Whatever Happened To The Paper Mobile Phone?

  A Lemelson-MIT Program profile of Randice-Lisa Altschul, the inventor of the paper phone (the Phone-Card-Phone®), makes the case that other companies, once Altschul had demonstrated the feasibility of wafer-thin phones, noticed the interest her work had drummed up, swooped in and beat her company to market.

  Sure enough, there are cheap, disposable-ish “card phones” for sale. The freewell M5mini card Cell Phone 1.0″ LCD Ultra Slim Student Version Android Smartphone Cellphone Partner, for example, is described as being 0.2 inches thick and sells for US $18.99. I’ve never actually spotted a “card phone” in the wild but these devices obviously aren’t made of recycled paper. Given that nearly fifteen years have passed since the announcement of the Phone-Card-Phone and that the freewell phone is billed as running Android, the innards of currently-available card phones may be quite different from the guts of Altschul’s prototype.

• A February 2016 longread about the refugee/migrant influx into Sweden: The Death of the Most Generous Nation on Earth.

  Some concerning bits:

  • The Migration Agency accepts applications from thousands of people from Eritrea, a nation that is autocratic but currently peaceful. When I asked Pierre Karatzian, a spokesman for the Migration Agency, why Eritreans qualified, he said that many Eritreans flee the country rather than face the draft; if Sweden returns them, they will face arrest. This, however, permits the authoritarian Eritrean government to play a cynical game in which they let citizens flee and then demand that they pay a tax on their relatively lavish earnings abroad — a kind of involuntary remittance. (I was told that Eritrean embassies track down citizens abroad and demand payment.) The system guarantees a perpetual flow of Eritreans.

  • Despite widespread reports that Syrian refugees are drawn largely from the educated middle class, statistics compiled by the Swedish Migration Agency show that half the new arrivals do not have a high-school degree, and one-third have not progressed beyond ninth grade. The figures are yet higher for the Afghan unaccompanied minors.

  • Legally, it didn’t matter, since Sweden provides asylum to virtually anyone who arrives as an unaccompanied minor. Some of them, however, were certainly not minors. Since they arrived without documents, officials simply accepted their word for their age. Denmark, among others, mandates age-testing, a somewhat rough-and-ready system using measurements of bone density. In Sweden, however, doctors have largely refused to apply the test, arguing that it is inexact and that, in any case, such tests constitute an invasion of privacy. Andersson said to me that a “minor” who looks to be 30 or so will be told, “You cannot share a room with the boys. You have to go to the Migration Agency and find a [new] room with them.”

  Why did I read a nine-month-old story? According to FP, which linked it in a sidebar on the even older 2009 piece about the OLPC project (Why did One Laptop Per Child fail?) that lured me to foreignpolicy.com in the first place, it’s currently “trending”. A more recent (October 18th, 2016) story about the European migrant crisis by James Traub, the same writer who penned the February piece, is also trending: Europe Wishes to Inform You That the Refugee Crisis Is Over. Spoiler warning: judging by the text of the piece, a /s tag would not be out of place in the title.

• Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time? is a profile of a very interesting person and it is worth reading, particularly if you’ve never heard of Robin Hanson.

  Fair warning: Parts of the article are a bit crummily written. E.g.:

  Like much of the George Mason economics department, Hanson leans libertarian, but he has also dreamed up his own form of government, called “futarchy.” An enthusiastic student describes his true political philosophy as “meta, meta-everything”: questioning how we arrive at political philosophies in the first place.

  So, what is futarchy? It’s mentioned a second time near the end of the piece but readers who don’t assume it’s a portmanteau of “futile” and “anarchy” and head to Wikipedia will discover that it’s a hypothetical democratic system in which prediction markets are used to evaluate proposed policies in terms of how well they’d move the needles on agreed-upon measures of how well society is doing. Wescott briefly describes the prediction market concept and we learn that Hanson was one of the brains behind a fledgeling DARPA project that was snuffed out before it had launched, a casualty of inter-party political skirmishing.

  A frenemy’s view of Hanson’s career:

  “Robin’s work would be much more accepted if he just did one weird thing and everything else was normal,” says Caplan. “If everything was normal but he did the future, that’d be OK. But he has seven or more weird things.”

• The criticisms levelled at BOINC by the author of The Strongest Supercomputer on Earth Still Needs Your Laptop to Cure Cancer (December 20, 2015) seem legitimate but profoundly miss the point. The question seems to be why BOINC-coordinated distributed computing projects aren’t being deluged with new colunteers.

  “We (BOINC or, prior to that, SETI@home) have never advertised; we have no budget for doing so,” Anderson told me. Mass media coverage in the early days of volunteer computing about 15 years ago stirred some 2 million people to join the efforts, he says. “After that it was harder to get media coverage; outlets don’t like to run stories that are similar to previous stories. Even for something like the release of BOINC for Android, which I think is big, we were able to get only a smattering of coverage.”

  I’ve screencapped an eight-year-old post on a SETI@home forum which I think gives much more actual insight into why the numbers of volunteers are dwindling:

  

  You can read the post in its original context, but the closing paragraph is the one I’ll quote:

  Of course I understand that SETI us long-term project. But even in long-term projects it is expected that intermediate results should be reported at regular schedule, for example annually. Especially if the project involves not only a few scientists but also a couple of millions people doing significant part of the job…

  How far out of your way would you go to (re)install software that is going to use your hardware and electricity indefinitely in furtherance of a noble-sounding project for which you will never ever receive any meaningful progress reports? One for which there are no defined goals, milestones, or deadlines? One for which you’ll never know the extent to which your own contribution of computing power made any difference at all?

  I was exposed to this and the preceding piece via Hacker News where, currently, the Robin Hanson profile has garnered 127 points and 93 comments whilst the article on BOINC has netted just 3 points and zero comments.