March 2014 – Page 71

How To Spot A Winner

It’s all in the body language. Christian Jarrett surveys a study that explored whether people pick up on losing athletes’ submissive body language without knowing the score (the above clip is a sample from the study):

The researchers showed adult and child participants dozens of silent, three-second clips of winning and losing athletes in table tennis, basketball and handball, and tested whether the observers could tell, based purely on “thin slices” of non-verbal body language, whether each athlete was winning or losing, and by how much (from “far behind” to “high lead”). The clips were taken from the breaks between play. Scores were concealed. And any clips containing explicit emotion, such as shame or pride, were omitted. … The researchers found high levels of accuracy, among young children (aged 4 to 8), older children (age 9 to 12), and adults. That is, the participants’ estimates of whether an athlete was losing or winning, and by how much, tended to correlate with the actual situation, as measured by the (hidden) score at that stage in the contest.

Jarrett considers the implications:

Assuming the main finding is accurate – that athlete’s express clear submissive signals when they’re losing – this will surely be of interest to sports psychologists and athletes looking for a competitive edge. Exhibiting submissive non-verbal behaviours could be “highly dysfunctional”, the researchers said, encouraging an opponent to increase pressure. “What makes sense for a primate losing a fight may lead to exacerbating the downward spiral for athletes on the losing side.” This suggests learning to mask submissive body language could be highly advantageous, something Roger Federer and other cool champions appear to have mastered already.

Shell-Shocked In Suburbia

Harvard epidemiologist Ronald Kessler studied the effects of moving low-income families with children into better neighborhoods and found that these moves led to poor mental health outcomes in boys:

Kessler’s study was conducted using data from Moving to Opportunity (MTO), a decades-spanning housing mobility experiment financed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Within this project, 4,604 volunteer families with 3,689 children were randomly divided into three groups. Two of them received different versions of rent-subsidy vouchers that enabled them to move into a better neighborhood. A control group did not move.

In follow-up interviews conducted 10 to 15 years later, boys reported higher proportions of major depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and conduct disorder than boys within the control group—rates of PTSD comparable to those of combat soldiers. The opposite occurred with girls, who reported mental health that was substantially better than the girls who stayed in high-poverty neighborhoods.

The results represent something of a conundrum. Over the past few decades, urban policy has focused on breaking up clusters of poverty, planning cities so that poor residents could live in areas that also had middle-class people. Does this new research mean projects like MTO are actually a bad thing?

Getty Gets The Internet

Megan Garber explains the photo agency’s decision to make 35 million of its photos freely embeddable for non-commercial use:

It’s important to note that, while many millions of Getty images are now available for embed, not all Getty images are. And there seems to be a fairly significant split, from what I can tell, between stock images and photojournalism images when it comes to embeddability. So do a search for “Ukraine,” and you”ll get lots of photos … but that one of John Kerry shaking hands with Sergei Lavrov in Rome yesterday? Nope, not embeddable. …

That distinction is important; it emphasizes, among other things, the bet that Getty is making by opening this new revenue stream. News outlets, after all, will always need news photos. Keeping the newsy stuff out of the “free photo” pool allows Getty to preserve its value for its already-paying digital subscribers, while the embed system could be a way to capture some value from The Rogues. This is Getty attempting to have its cake, and eat it, too.

The Dish has paid for Getty images for many years now, both within larger media companies and into its independence, and we couldn’t be more satisfied with their service and quality. A special thanks to Stephen Hanley for shepherding our account through the stressful period of setting up our own site and company last year. Meanwhile, Pat David points to some downsides of Getty’s new feature:

First of all, the embed tool generates an <iframe> element to show the image. For anyone not in the know, it is basically creating a frame in the web page that will load whatever Getty wants inside of it, not just the image requested (more on that in a moment). While not necessarily a problem in and of itself, it does present a problem for possibilities of link-rot across the Internet. If for any reason Getty decides it no longer wants to serve its images in this way (and it’s absolutely within their right to do so), then every site that used these images will now have a dead space where the image used to be… or worse.

Some photographers are not happy about the change:

“It’s going to put people out of work, without the shadow of a doubt,” Jeff Moore, chairman of the British Press Photographers’ Association, told trade magazine BJP. “The first ones to fall will be small and independent freelancers and smaller agencies that are relying on small Internet sales.” [Picfair founder Benji] Lanyado agrees, and has written an open letter to photographers in the wake of the deal, warning them to be wary of middlemen like Getty.

“Getty was one of the big agencies that was helping the creative industry in trying to make the internet work, making it pay, and they decided to go into the opposite direction,” Moore continued. “This is a massively cynical move from Getty.”

And it’s not the only move the agency is making, either:

While Getty is opening up to small users, it is also escalating enforcement against commercial infringers. After years of not filing lawsuits against infringers in spite of blustery demand letters, Getty suddenly filed five suits this January. Where there is a carrot, there is often a stick. … I suspect these two policy changes are not concurrent by accident. Getty has the same frustratingly persistent infringement problems that plague all online content creators. By granting the little fish a pass, they free up resources to more effectively counter the rule-breaking sharks. I would not want to be one of Getty Image’s corporate infringers in 2014.

No, We Can’t Wreck Russia’s Economy, Ctd

Walter Russell Mead rejects the premise that the US or even the EU can pressure Putin economically:

Putin does not worry nearly as much about the Russian stock market as western leaders worry about financial markets in their own countries. Putin broke the oligarchs as a political force years ago; in Russia, corporations exist to serve the state and not the other way round. He is not worried that business leaders will lose confidence in him; in Putin’s Russia, it is business leaders who worry about losing the trust of the country’s political master.

As for banking crackdowns and visa limits, it will help Putin, not hurt him, if powerful Russians are unable to leave the country or move their money around in the West. One of his worries is that various oligarchs and power brokers can put enough money in the west to be able to get out from under his thumb. He would like all of his backers to be dependent on him for continued enjoyment of wealth and property. If the West wants to fence his backers in, so be it. (If the west goes after Putin’s own golden horde of ill-gotten simoleons, estimated by many to be north of $50 billion, the calculation might change.)

Daniel Berman notes that, for the governments of the UK and Germany, an economic war with Russia would be political suicide:

Both the UK Conservative Party of David Cameron and the German Christian Democrats under Angela Merkel have staked their political legitimacy on a particular vision of austerity and the belief that this austerity can bring economic growth, the former to Britain, the latter to the Eurozone as a whole. In particular Merkel has enforced her vision of belt-tightening not just on Germany, but on much of the EU including Greece and Italy. In return the results achieved by both governments have been mixed. The UK is growing again, but only at a rate of about 2.4%, with Germany a bit lower.

That number is critical. Sanctions would almost certainly hurt, likely to the tune of a. 8% haircut in GDP growth over the next year, especially without extensive stimulus spending. Critically however either option would destroy the legitimacy of the governments implementing them. A Keynesian approach would make a mockery of the policies followed hitherto and lead to resentment against Germany, while allowing that sort of haircut would eliminate the limited growth both economies have achieved. In the UK it would discredit Chancellor George Osborne, and almost certainly lead the Tories, already substantial underdogs for 2015, to their doom.

Jordan Weissmann investigates the idea of fighting Russia with natural gas exports:

“You hear these calls for us to ship gas to Europe,” [energy security expert Michael Levi] said. “We do not ship gas to anyone. Private companies ship gas. And Europe doesn’t buy gas. Private companies in Europe buy gas. The reality is that North American natural gas is not going to be attractively priced for most European companies. You can approve all the terminals you want. You still aren’t going to get any American companies to lose money pursuing geopolitical objectives.”

Danny Vinik calls out Republicans for blocking IMF reforms that would allow Ukraine to borrow the money it needs:

The reforms would allow Ukraine to borrow approximately 60 percent more (from $1 billion to $1.6 billion) from the IMF’s emergency fund. That’s money that Ukraine can use to pay off its debts and avoid a default. In certain scenarios, the IMF makes exceptions and allows countries to access additional funds, as it did with Greece and Ireland after the financial crisis. But there’s no guarantee it would do so with Ukraine. By blocking the passage of the IMF reforms, Republicans are actively making it harder for Ukraine to pay back its loans.

The U.S.’s refusal to pass the reforms—which 130 countries have already approved—only hurts our credibility. Given the broad constituency of nations that want to help Ukraine, this won’t stop the IMF from offering a loan. But it’s a bit rich for the U.S. to call for IMF help when it refuses to pass basic reforms that would have no material effect on the United States and that most of the world has already approved.

Previous Dish on sanctions here and here.

Mental Health Break

For when he just won’t get out of bed:

Does Vaping Lead To Smoking?

Meghan Neal flags a new study finding “that vaping makes adolescents more likely to start or continue smoking tobacco, and less likely to manage to quit”:

That’s after surveying 40,000 middle and high school students, first in 2011 and then again in 2012 to follow up. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco parsed the data and published their grim results in the journal JAMA Pediatrics [yesterday].

Highly publicized research claiming that e-smoking gets teenagers addicted to cigarettes deals a tough blow to e-cig advocates, who strongly believe that puffing on vaporized liquid is a healthier choice than inhaling burning tobacco, and that making the switch from analog to digital cigs can help wean smokers off the habit.

Sullum takes issue with the study:

Even if we knew that some people start with vaping and move on to smoking, that would not necessarily mean that e-cigarettes made them more likely to smoke. We still would not know what would have happened in the absence of e-cigarettes. Would those same people have started smoking anyway, or did the experience of vaping somehow prime them to like a habit that otherwise would not have attracted them? The same sort of question comes up in discussions of marijuana’s purported role as a “gateway” to other drugs. In both cases, symbolism and emotion seem to carry more weight than evidence and logic.

Has The World Never Changed?

I understand that’s a ridiculously broad question, but it arises from a ridiculously broad analysis:

Obama says Putin is on the wrong side of history and Secretary of State John Kerry says Putin’s is “really 19th-century behavior in the 21st century.” This must mean that seeking national power, territory, dominion — the driving impulse of nations since Thucydides — is obsolete. As if a calendar change caused a revolution in human nature that transformed the international arena from a Hobbesian struggle for power into a gentleman’s club where violations of territorial integrity just don’t happen.

Is it possible things are just a little bit more complicated than that? It could be that the impulse for national power, territory, dominion is now not obsolete, but simply much more attenuated now than it once was (and that argument is easily compatible with Kerry’s phrase). And the case for that is pretty strong. I mean: if nations have one driving impulse – “seeking national power, territory, dominion” – and if the record shows no change or evolution in this eternal truth, how do we explain huge tranches of recent history?

Why on earth, for example, would European countries pool sovereignty in the EU? How could they be deluded into thinking that giving up “national power” could be a good thing? And why, for that matter, would this arrangement remain attractive to other countries as well, not least of which Ukraine? Why on earth did the US invade and conquer Iraq only to leave it a decade later? Why did we not seize the oil-fields with our military might to fuel our economy? What was Krauthammer’s hero, George W Bush, doing – singing hymns to human freedom rather than American hegemony?

Why, for that matter, have military incursions into other countries become rarer over time? Why has the level of inter-state violence in human affairs declined to historically low levels?

The answers to that question are, of course, legion, and I’m not trying to settle the debate here. I’m just noting that if the classic aims of territory acquisition and dominion never change, Krauthammer has a lot of explaining to do.

Even with Putin, I think it’s worth noting that his current Tsarist mojo is not exactly triumphalist. Krauthammer concedes as much:

Crimea belonged to Moscow for 200 years. Russia conquered it 20 years before the U.S. acquired Louisiana. Lost it in the humiliation of the 1990s. Putin got it back in about three days without firing a shot.

So this is less like Hitlerian aggression and more like a sad attempt to re-seize one tiny portion that was part of Russia proper far longer than it was “lost”. More to the point, Putin “got it back” only in the wake of Ukraine deposing its democratically-elected, Russophile leader in a violent, popular putsch. Yes, if your contention is that the desire for territory/dominion/power is “obsolete,” you’re a fool. But if your contention is that this impulse plays a much less critical role in international affairs than in almost all previous periods in human history, you’d be merely making an empirical observation.

The truth is that global interdependence – the immensely complex and proliferating global economy that vastly expanded as communism collapsed under the weight of its own lies – clearly mitigates the classic impulse that Krauthammer approves of. It doesn’t abolish it – but it shapes it.

One reason we won’t see major armed conflict over Ukraine, for example, is because the Germans and Brits have too much to lose in terms of their economies – and Russia does too. In the end, economic power is the basis for military power. Economic power, in the global capitalist economy, is also related to soft power, to where human capital wants to go, and where money wants to flow. Becoming a global pariah is not good for that kind of thing – and it has a direct relationship to power as a whole. And one reason why Putin’s attempt to coerce Ukraine is not as win-win as Krauthammer suggests is that controlling and occupying countries by brute force is much more difficult than it used to be. The most advanced military machine in history occupied Iraq for a decade and lost. Ditto Afghanistan – for both the Soviets and the Americans. Ditto, for that matter, the Israelis on the West Bank. In each case, the occupying power’s cost-benefit analysis looks weaker than ever. And if Putin attempts to invade or annex Crimea, his headaches are sure to become even worse, as he manages Russia’s steep decline by beginning an armed conflict within what used to be the Soviet Union’s undisputed territory.

Then there is the simple matter of collective memory. For many Americans and for Krauthammer, the key referent is the Second World War which America won with almost none of the devastating trauma experienced by Germany, Britain or the Soviet Union. But in Germany and Britain right now, the collective memory is much more indelibly that of the Great War, where small matters of territory – like Crimea – metastasized through miscalculation into a generational catastrophe. Hence the resilience of the EU, even as it seems to cripple the economies of its weaker members through punishing austerity. Hence also, of course, the survival of the UN and the countless instruments of collective security we’ve built in its wake.

In other words, power rests on money; and money rests on the global economy. Russia is able right now to get away with its somewhat lame attempt to annex Crimea because its core economy is so primitive and petro-based. But even then, its potential vulnerability to economic retaliation – through global trade and travel and finance – makes this a mug’s game at some point.

Putin, of course, may not see it this way. And understanding that is critical to dealing with him. But that means, in Merkel’s alleged phrase, that he is in “another world.” That may be disastrous, of course, when you’re running an autocracy with nukes. But in the real world, he is misreading his country’s and his own actual interests. In the real world, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a huge defeat for the US. In the real world, permanently occupying the West Bank is national suicide. And in that sense, Putin is not a symbol of the world order reverting to its eternal nineteenth century dynamic. He is a symbol, in fact, of how that dynamic has ended, and how attempts to restart it are unlikely to result in the glorious military victories some still seem so eager to celebrate.

(Chart from systemicpeace.org. Photos from Getty)

The View From Your Window

Yosemite Valley, California, 6.22 am

Meanwhile, In Kiev …

John O’Sullivan is impressed at how the new Ukrainian government has pulled itself together amid Putin’s provocations:

[I]t has maintained a lively democratic unity; passed a series of reforms leading to a more liberal constitution, fresh elections and a new government; discussed these proposals with great transparency (its parliamentary proceedings are televised); won over the main oligarchs, who prefer even a Kiev regime hostile to corruption to a Putin-esque world in which the government is a rival oligarch; and responded firmly but not rashly to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and other provocations.

It has, accordingly, been accepted as legitimate throughout most of Ukraine even before the elections. Attacks on its supporters, attempts to seize official buildings, demonstrations by crowds calling for Russian intervention there have been seen in some eastern cities, but on a smaller scale than most experts predicted. Most Russophone Ukrainians seem to support Kiev — which suggests that a distinctly Ukrainian nationalism has spread eastwards in the past 20 years. And when they switched sides, the oligarchs ensured that much political and public opinion switched sides, too.

All of which means that there is simply not enough disorder and anarchy in Ukraine to provide [Putin] a pretext for any further incursion.

“Calm,” Massie adds, “even of a relative and tense kind, is Russia’s enemy”:

Perhaps Moscow will gain the Crimea but only, at least for now, at the expense of its own long-term ambitions in its near abroad. Indeed Moscow’s aggression may prove counter-productive, effectively ensuring Russia cannot achieve its own goals. Heckuva job, Vladimir.

If the east were to rise, best it rose quickly. But it has not risen and time is not on Russia’s side. Each day that passes without a fresh confrontation is time Moscow loses – time, too, that it can scarcely afford to lose. Time is Moscow’s enemy and Kiev’s friend. Even in the spring. If Russia was to bring Ukraine back into the fold it needed to do so quickly by winning a swift victory in decisive, indisputable, fashion.

Anna Nemtsova reports that the invasion is swelling the ranks of Ukraine’s nationalist militias:

[T]his week marked another transformation for the Maidan: Never before have they been as anti-Putin as they are now. From Monday night to Tuesday morning, after Russia’s threat, hundreds of volunteer recruits arrived on the Maidan and at other militia headquarters throughout Kiev, determined to join the impending fight against Russian forces. These well-organized and well-trained armies are independent from the new leadership. The nationalist armies, including Right Sector and White Hammer, are seen as the heroes of the Maidan — but they are critical of the new leadership. They told me they hate Yulia Tymoshenko and her allies who are now running the new government. But Putin’s threat of invasion brought these groups closer together again. On the Maidan, demonstrators chanted “Putin het! Putin het!” (or “Putin Out!” in Ukrainian) in the capital’s streets and squares. Signs reading “Putin, calm down!” and caricatures casting the Russian president as Adolf Hitler appeared all over the square: tacked onto piles of tires, on soot-covered barricades, on the nylon tents that have housed protesters for months.

Beneath It All, The Desire For Oblivion Runs

Olga Khazan has a breezy, smart review of what we know (and mostly don’t know) about the effects of marijuana on the body:

It’s not good for your memory, at least if you start smoking as a teenager. In one study published in December, researchers examined teens who smoked marijuana daily for three years and found that the memory-related structures in their brains appeared to “shrink and collapse inward,” and that they performed worse on memory tasks. The troubling thing? This was two years after the subjects stopped smoking. And the younger the teens were when they started lighting up, the worse the impairment seemed to be.

An earlier study in rats found that THC, the active ingredient in pot, weakened the connections between neurons in the hippocampus, the brain structure critical for memory formation. But an other study on human subjects found that the “skunk” strains of pot, which have a greater ratio of THC to cannabidiol, are worse for memory than hashish or herbal strains. And researchers who followed nearly 2,000 young Australian adults for eight years found that any differences in memory and intelligence between those who smoked pot and those who didn’t could also be attributed to gender or education, and the differences disappeared after the individuals stopped smoking.

There is evidence, though, that for older people, THC helps prevent against the brain inflammation that leads to Alzheimer’s disease.

My own take-away from this is that the first priority in dealing with marijuana is to prevent its use by teens. Prohibition has clearly failed to do that. And any new legal regime has to pass that test. My other conclusion is simply that we need much, much more research and that that research can only be done properly if the drug is re-classified. And yes, the idea that pot doesn’t affect memory is stupid. Of course it does. It’s not a panacea. And some memory loss is part of why it’s so attractive to human beings. Forgetting is a huge part of our survival as humans. Our brains could not function if they retained everything they absorb. What cannabis has done for humans for millennia is to ease the pain of memory, and liberate us ever so slightly from the past. That’s why it can be so helpful for some people with PTSD. A little oblivion is a far too under-rated thing.