Nautilus Magazine: When Climate Change Starts Wars

This has been the situation in this borderland since March, when Uzbek troops cut off the road to the town of Ala-Buka, near the reservoir. This move was sparked after Kyrgyz authorities denied an Uzbek request to repair the reservoir in Kyrgyz territory using Uzbek engineers. The security situation escalated from there and culminated in August with the seizure of a Kyrgyz communications relay tower on a disputed mountaintop by helicopter-borne Uzbek police, who detained a number of Kyrgyz technicians.  [...]

But this is all in flux. Climate change will continue to increase the area’s “environmental insecurity,” with the densely populated Fergana Valley being the most vulnerable, reads a 2014 report by the World Bank, which is funding economic research into how climate change will alter how people live around the world. Some 22 million people in the valley depend on irrigation for their livelihoods, and shortfalls in water—due to increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures and because glaciers are disappearing—are predicted to become a bigger problem. [...]

“We keep telling these guys about climate change,” Kadyrov, the USAID agricultural specialist, said. “There are some good farmers who understand they need to worry about it, but they do nothing.” Because their plots are small, most farmers in the Fergana do not have the money to invest in new equipment or infrastructure, and they are not trained in water conservation. [...]

Besides ethnicity, evaporation, misuse, population, and poverty, the issue of water is further complicated by the borders in the region. Before the Soviet Union’s breakup, water ran through a united country. Now the water courses through independent countries, crossing disputed borders. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan control most of the sources, while Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have to either accept what their upstream neighbors give them, pay, negotiate, or try to take it.

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The Guardian: Boris Johnson is auditioning to lead a grim, insular Britain | Martin Kettle

That’s because Johnson’s decision tells us – if we needed reminding of it after his resignation as foreign secretary last month – that he is positioning himself for the next Conservative leadership contest. He is doing so, what’s more, as the candidate of the populist right rather than the liberal centrist guise he adopted when running to be London mayor. Johnson has moved to the right since then: over Europe, over Trump and now over pluralism and tolerance. He is positioning himself to be the leader of a more insular, less moderate and harder-faced Conservative party and a more insular, less moderate and harder-faced Britain. [...]

There are many in the Tory party who still think Johnson is the answer to the party’s problems – in spite of having been a third-rate foreign secretary (second-rate is too generous), of bottling out of the Heathrow vote, of dismissing Theresa May’s negotiating tactics by praising Trump’s, and of many other offences. Just before he resigned, Johnson trailed fourth behind Sajid Javid, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg in the ConservativeHome website’s regular “best next leader” surveys. Now he’s back on top of the pile for the first time since 2016. [...]

It nevertheless raises a larger and deeper question, which lurks behind all attempts to understand the place of leadership in modern politics. No leader is ever perfect. Yet all leaders in modern western democracies seem to be struggling more than in the past to maintain the levels of political support, respect and effectiveness that would enable them to carry out their projects. This is true of May and Brexit. It would probably be true of Corbyn and his economic rebalancing project. And it would also apply to Johnson and his reawakening of lost English greatness.  

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BBC4 Analysis: What's Fair?

As well as marking the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service, this year marks a similar milestone in adult social care. But whereas our notions of fairness in treating those who fall ill are simple and straightforward - free to those who require care at the point of delivery in the NHS - with social care it is different: means testing remains the device by which assistance with care is decided. When it comes to helping the aged and the infirm, then, we struggle with decidedly different ideas of fairness - and have done so since the advent of National Assistance - the forerunner of today's social care - in 1948.

What should the individual contribute and how much should the state provide? What ideas of fairness properly apply in providing social care? And how can agreement on them be reached?

Paul Johnson - the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the respected economic research body - asks why politicians should find it so difficult to agree on simple ideas of equity and fairness in this area. From Labour's so-called "death tax" in 2010 to the Conservatives' alleged "dementia tax" last year, attempts to come up with ways to reform a system that is widely considered to have broken down, have collapsed in failure and left both main parties reluctant to get their fingers burnt again with proposals for change.

So with the pressures on available services continuing to grow as the proportion of the population that is elderly rises and its needs become more specialised and as numbers of working age adults with social care needs increase, Paul Johnson considers what principles a fair social care system should enshrine and what likelihood there is that policies to give effect to them will be implemented.

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SciShow Psych: How Auditory Illusions Trick Your Brain into Hearing Things

Your brain relies a lot on context to tell you what sounds are bouncing around in your ears, and without enough of that context it can get a little confused.

Vox: How reliable is fingerprint analysis?

Fingerprinting is used by law enforcement all over the world, but it may not be as reliable as you think. 

Fingerprinting has been a vital tool in forensic science since 1911 when the first conviction was handed out based on fingerprint evidence. It’s been used in countless investigations to help convict or rule out suspects, but is it as reliable as we think?

According to one study, researchers found that fingerprint analysts had a false positive rate (i.e. when they incorrectly conclude two prints are a match) of 0.1%. That may seem low, but that percentage reveals that innocent people are still being implicated in crimes.

Brandon Mayfield is one of the most famous examples of a false positive identification. The FBI arrested him for the 2004 Madrid train bombing based on a wrongful fingerprint match.

Most people agree that it’s a useful tool, but we might want to exercise a bit more skepticism when it comes to trusting fingerprints.

Vox: The decline of Hong Kong's iconic neon glow

Master Wu started making neon signs in the ’80s and has been filling Hong Kong’s streets with bright neon signs ever since. But recently, Master Wu has seen his business slow down as brighter-burning and more energy-efficient LED signs emerge. In addition to getting fewer requests, Hong Kong’s iconic neon landscape is also losing thousands of signs per year, ushering in the end of the city’s neon era.

As Hong Kong’s neon lights start to fade, I spent some time with Master Wu at his neon shop, where he showed me how he makes neon signs, and took a look at Hong Kong’s changing cityscape.

The Guardian: Mexico's failing war on drugs: after 200,000 dead, Amlo pledges to end the violence

In few places can the ferocity and futility of Mexico’s war on drugs be felt more than Tecomán, a once tranquil coastal community. Last year its murder rate of a reported 172.51 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants resembled that of a war zone.

Experts blame Mexico’s militarized assault on the drug cartels – launched by former president Felipe Calderón in 2006 – for fragmenting them into smaller, warring factions and sparking a turf war that has turned Tecomán and neighboring municipalities along its strategic west coast into some of the country’s deadliest. [...]

Indira Vizcaíno, Amlo’s point-person in Colima state, where Tecomán is located, said security policy would no longer “just be a matter of fighting fire with fire”. “Crime rates aren’t going up because the people feel like being bad. Crime rates are going up because people need to eat.” [...]

Instead, Lessing said he believed Amlo should adopt a “violence minimisation” strategy designed to slash Mexico’s homicide rate by targeting cartels that insisted in perpetrating acts of deadly violence such as those ravaging Tecomán.

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JSTOR Daily: Crows Are Even Smarter Than We Thought

There is tool use and there is tool use. To pick up a stick to help remove objects from a small hole is tool use. New Caledonian Crows go much further than that, and actually modify existing objects to create tools. The crows use some simple manufacturing techniques, folding the edged pieces of screw pine leaves into a bent shape to access grubs in holes. But they have also been observed to follow very complicated procedures. To make twig hooks, the crows first select a twig, trim the edges then bend it into a hook shape. Finally, and most remarkably, the crows shape and sharpen the point of the hook using their beaks.

Further evidence of the crows’ acute intelligence comes from complicated tests administered to captive crows. Some crows were able to solve a complicated treasure hunt involving a task where they needed to use find one tool, use that tool to obtain another tool, and then use that second tool to extract food from a box. Most of the crows required several tries, but at least one was able to solve the problem first try. The exact reasoning behind the task is subject to interpretation; it’s possible that they simply eventually figured out the task through conditioning after receiving the reward for successful completion. But the researchers believe that this may be evidence of complicated thought and innovation, especially because they persisted through the first stages of the test without an immediate reward.

 Why did crows develop these incredible abilities? To evolve a brain capable of such tasks carries a cost in terms of the energy needed to run it. But nothing happens without an evolutionary reason. It turns out that larvae found burrowed inside wood are some of the most nutritious prey available, and only sophisticated tools can fish these morsels easily out of their holes. To capitalize on this food source, crows first had to develop new abilities.

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Haaretz: Results Are In: The Nation-state Law Is Self-defeating and anti-Zionist

The Knesset’s passage of the nation-state bill last month surely ranks as one the most self-defeating moves in Israel’s history. Its passage was unnecessary, but the damage it has wrought, one can safely say now, is incalculable. The law is anti-Zionist in its essence: It has sowed division, spread venom, tainted Israel’s image and weakened its national resolve. If the Knesset’s intent was to bolster the ties between the Jewish nation and its land, the results have been exactly the opposite: The Zionist hold on the State of Israel has never seemed more dubious. [...]

And even that wasn’t enough for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: To justify his pre-planned ambush of the Druze leadership in their meeting last week, the Prime Minister’s Office falsely disseminated the claim that retired Israeli General Amal Assad had described Israel as an apartheid state, so that the whole world, and not just his followers on Facebook, would know about the comparison. Coming from a retired Druze combat brigadier-general, a supposed symbol of equality and integration, the apartheid analogy sounded like reliable testimony from an expert witness.[...]

The law has cast a dark shadow over Israel’s attitude, not only for the future but in the present and past as well. It revealed that even today, Israeli Arabs are cast to the sidelines, that the Druze suffer discrimination, despite their loyalty, and that the sentiments and sensibilities of non-Jews as a whole are bypassed and ignored. The new law has shown that it’s not enough for the Jews to be lords of the land. They insist on flaunting their superiority, for the entire world to see. If minorities don’t like it, the Knesset said, they can lump it.

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