14 February 2017
The Atlantic: What Mirrors Tell Us About Animal Minds
Psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. came up with a way, over a century later. In 1970, he got four captive chimps accustomed to a mirror, and anesthetized them. While they were out, he dabbed red dye on their eyebrows. When they came to and caught sight of their reflections, they did exactly what humans would do—they stared at their faces and touched their own eyebrows. Monkeys, by contrast, made no moves to examine their own red-marked faces. They couldn’t recognize themselves in the mirror, Gallup concluded. But chimps could. [...]
Gallup wasn’t convinced. He argued that even when monkeys fail the mark tests, they can use mirrors to locate hidden objects. They understand reflections, even if they can’t recognize themselves. So given that they had an implant stuck to their heads, they may just have been trying to examine the strange heavy thing that they could feel but not see. As ever, interpreting the mirror test isn’t easy. [...]
Among these failures from the intelligentsia of the animal kingdom, perhaps none have been more surprising than humans. Many psychologists had assumed that the vast majority of children pass the mirror test between 18 and 24 months of age. But as with most such studies, people had only worked in Western countries. When Tanya Broesch from Simon Fraser University went further afield, she found that only 2 out of 82 Kenyan children passed the mirror test. Mirrors aren’t as omnipresent a feature in Kenyan homes as they are in American ones, but they still exist, and they’re used regularly. And yet, most of the children—even some as old as 6—just stared “at their image in the mirror, without any attempt at either touching or removing the mark on their forehead.” [...]
The binary nature of the mirror test—you pass or fail—is also a problem, because it “presupposes self-recognition exists in entirety or not at all,” wrote Debbie Kelly. It’s possible for a species to sort-of-pass. Take Clark’s nutcrackers—a kind of small, black-and-white corvid. In the wild, these birds bury nuts, but they’ll restrain themselves if they know they’re watched by another nutcracker. That’s what happened last year, when Kelly placed them in front of a clear mirror: they treated the reflection as an onlooker and potential thief, and refrained from burying.
Politico: Juncker moves to stop countries from hiding behind Brussels
The first idea is to end the current system whereby abstaining member countries are given weight when calculating a qualified majority — equivalent to 55 percent of countries representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population. Such a move would help save the Commission from having to make a final decision in case of abstentions. [...]
Juncker’s proposal will also focus on a so-called “second referral” to the appeal committee. In other words, if there is no qualified majority during an initial appeal, EU states will be made to vote again with the idea of reaching a consensus. Finally, the Commission will propose forcing countries to reveal their voting positions.
This part of the proposal is far from guaranteed success. “Will it go anywhere is a big question,” said one source who had seen the proposal. “Responsibility is a heavy matter.”
Quartz: Squid speak a unique, undeciphered language using their skin
We know squid brains are big. And disarmingly effective. But it turns out they’re even more dazzlingly complex than we’d realized. The latest surprise comes from a squid’s skin. Or, more specifically, the dizzying combinations of speckles, stripes, and colors that a squid can cycle through in mere seconds—a phenomenon Wired explores in details. [...]
These changes of decor can get incredibly complex, with one body part going polka-dotted at the same time as another is lined with stripes—and still another turned solid black. This lets squid send mixed messages (literally). For instance, while a squid might threaten a male competitor on its right side, its left side might be sweet-talking a potential mate. [...]
Based on our knowledge of our own brains, you’d expect a certain location within the optic lobe to control the color and pattern of a specific body part. However, Chuan-Chin Chiao, a neuroscientist at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University, experimented on the brain of an oval squid—and found that it didn’t operate that way at all, as Wired details. Instead of corresponding to body parts, different regions of the optic lobe, when stimulated, generated different combinations of the 14 skin patterns lighting up various squid body parts. If Chiao’s hypothesis is right, it would explain how squids can flash through one patchwork of colors and patterns to another, and another, and another—all within seconds.
The New York Times: Broad Strokes Propel Emmanuel Macron in French Presidential Race, for Now
If any surer sign was needed that Emmanuel Macron, the 39-year-old former minister of the economy, is the new front-runner in France’s presidential race, look no further than the concentrated volley of wild attacks against him. Even the Russians, via pro-Kremlin websites, are piling on.
France’s two major parties, on the right and the left, are in self-inflicted ruin, the first downed by the corruption scandal surrounding François Fillon, and the second by a utopian dreamer, Benoît Hamon. [...]
Yet Mr. Macron has never been elected to anything. He served two largely unsuccessful years directing France’s vast but sluggish economy, with scant accomplishment in his wake. He is not a member of either major party, or of any party, and is disliked by many of the Socialists in whose government he served. He claims to transcend the parties. [...]
He spoke of lowering taxes on companies, restraining capitalism, swiped at the “obscurantism” of Trump’s America and denounced the National Front for “betraying fraternity because it detests those faces that don’t resemble it.”
Mostly, it wasn’t concise or specific, but the crowd had not come for that.
FiveThirtyEight: Will Trump’s Approval Rating Be A Problem For Republicans In 2018?
Trump’s historic unpopularity provides a glimmer of hope to Democrats, who are currently shut out of power in every elected division of the federal government. “Maybe, just maybe,” the thinking goes, “a backlash to Trump’s policies could jump-start a Democratic wave that could flip control of Congress in 2018.” But can poor approval ratings today really help predict an election that’s 21 months away? The answer is a big fat “maybe.” If Trump is this unpopular when the midterms come around, Democrats could be in for a good night. But Trump has already broken the traditional mold of presidential approval, making it hard to say where his popularity will go from here. [...]
Right now, with a Gallup net approval rating of -15 percentage points (40 percent approval, 55 percent disapproval), Trump looks like he could slot in right alongside these underachievers. But there’s a huge caveat: Approval ratings can change a lot in 21 months. Trump could have a successful and productive first two years that win over the support of the country; outside events could cause Americans to rally around their leader as they did in 1962 and 2002. However, Trump is fighting history here, too: Presidents’ net approval ratings almost always go downhill from this point in their terms. [...]
Moreover, the relationship between net approval and midterm losses is far from perfect. Other factors clearly play into midterm election results as well, and in 2018, those factors will work against Democrats: They face a Senate map with few opportunities for gains and a House map skewed red by urban packing and gerrymandering. Although history implies that the Democrats should make gains, these structural barriers could hand that advantage right back to the GOP.
Vox: What Donald Trump’s rhetoric borrows from the Tea Party
Behind the scenes of these high-profile national events, Tea Party activists across the country organized in local chapters. They mobilized in elections. They ran candidates for county and state offices. They contacted their representatives. They challenged establishment candidates in the Republicans primaries. And they used blogs and social media sites to disseminate information to their followers. Sometimes they posted about upcoming events, but just as frequently they posted about policy. From these communications, the contours of a different rhetoric of conservatism emerged, emphasizing threats to America’s greatness, security, and Constitution. [...]
Using automated content analysis techniques, I asked a computer algorithm to search for the 100 most frequently occurring groups of words. We could think of these groups of words as themes or topics. It was entirely possible that given how geographically diffuse the Tea Party groups were, this algorithm would return nonsense instead of coherent topics. Instead, it produced some surprisingly cohesive themes. A little over half of Tea Party communications were about activism: challenging Republicans in primaries, contacting their representatives, attending meetings, sharing information, and so forth. Although this focus holds some insights about the Tea Party, the more relevant issue here is the way they discussed policy. [...]
Parallels are apparent between these themes and anti-media, make-America-great-again, threat-centric rhetoric of Trump, during and after his presidential campaign. This is not to say that Trump consciously borrows from the rhetoric of the Tea Party, but his rhetoric did not originate in a vacuum. Trump draws heavily from the advice of former Breitbart chair Steve Bannon, whose blog was the ninth-most-cited source by Tea Party websites between 2009 and 2015 (right after major Tea Party groups, the Constitution, and Glenn Beck himself), as can be seen in the figure below.
The Guardian: The Observer view on Britain’s shameful role in the arms trade
As if this sequence of events were not disheartening enough, how dismaying it is to learn that Britain, which continues, against much contrary evidence, to preen itself as a shining beacon of representative governance and liberal values, has profited greatly, and continues to profit, from this dashing of democratic aspirations. As Jamie Doward reports today, the impact of the Arab spring produced a bonanza for UK arms manufacturers and exporters. In the years preceding 2011, Britain, on average, sold £41.3m worth of small arms, £7m worth of ammunition and £34.3m worth of armoured vehicles to Middle East and North African governments. In the five years that followed, annual sales rose to an average of £58.9m, £14m and £59.6m respectively. [...]
Among all these eager, weapons-hungry regimes, anxious to shore up their often illegitimate and undemocratic grip on power, Saudi Arabia is the jewel in the crown for Britain’s arms merchants. Official HMRC figures, analysed by the Greenpeace EnergyDesk, show that in 2015, 83% of UK arms exports – almost £900m worth – went to Saudi Arabia. Even more significantly perhaps, given the furious controversy over the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen, ministers have granted export licences for more than £3.3bn worth of aircraft, munitions and other equipment to Riyadh since 2015, when the Saudi intervention began. [...]
Yemen, always poor and unstable, has become, as a result of this myopic neglect and shaming self-interest, a disaster zone where the UN estimates 12 million people are on the brink of famine. Roughly two-thirds of the population is now in need of humanitarian assistance, yet global appeals are persistently underfunded. In Yemen, the terrorist groups feared by Britain and its allies, such as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, feed on the injustices engendered by the Saudi campaign. In Yemen, Donald Trump orders a specious special operations raid that goes predictably and disastrously wrong. In Yemen, one child is dying every 10 minutes. Nearly half a million suffer acute malnutrition.
The Atlantic: The Link Between Neanderthal DNA and Depression Risk
We know about these prehistoric liaisons because they left permanent marks on our genome. Even though Neanderthals are now extinct, every living person outside of Africa can trace between 1 and 5 percent of our DNA back to them. (I am 2.6 percent Neanderthal, if you were wondering, which pales in comparison to my colleague James Fallows at 5 percent.) [...]
Some teams showed that Neanderthal DNA made its way into specific genes of interest, particularly those involved in the immune system. Others looked across the whole genome and showed that Neanderthal sequences cluster around genes that affect skin, hair, fat metabolism, and the risk of type 2 diabetes, cirrhosis, Crohn’s disease, and—bizarrely—smoking addiction (more on that later). [...]
Capra and his colleagues found significant associations between Neanderthal variants and a dozen phenotypes, including actinic kerastoses (patches of dry, scaly skin caused by sun exposure) and a hypercoagulable state (where blood clots form too readily in the body). [...]
More surprisingly, though, Capra’s team also found that Neanderthal DNA affects the risk of psychiatric disorders, including mood disorders and depression (which are new and unexpected). And 29 specific Neanderthal variants seem to influence when and where genes are turned on in different parts of the brain.
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