Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 214

Bringing women together to fight climate change

(Credit: Lauryn Higgins)

“We’ve come a long way, baby,” Marjorie McGuirk, the president of CASE Consultants International, tells me. It’s a Friday morning in Asheville, North Carolina, and McGuirk is mingling among other professionals at The Collider’s monthly coffee hour.  

The Collider, a non-profit organization founded in March of 2016, is one of the first of its kind. A self-proclaimed innovation center that offers co-working, event space, monthly mixers and networking opportunities, all for companies focused on creating climate change solutions, it’s located in the heart of Climate City. Its tagline, “Where business and science collide,” might sum it up best.

For business owners like McGuirk, The Collider provides opportunities not only for business ventures, but for a dialogue to be had. “There’s no denying climate change is real. That conversation is over, and now we must direct it towards creating solutions.”

While the discussion surrounding climate change has come a long way, McGuirk’s earlier remarks refer to another issue that has plagued the field of science and business for far too long — the lack of women at the table.

Eileen Shea, the current Pacific Islands Regional Coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, recounts her early career days of being the only woman in the room. “Back before cellphones were a thing, if someone would call the front desk of an office and ask to speak with me, the receptionist would ask how to identify me. The person calling would always say, ‘Eileen’s the only woman in the room or the meeting, you can’t miss her.'” Shea’s extensive education and career in weather and climate related science make her an anomaly amongst her peers, but one could argue the city that houses The Collider and women like Shea and McGuirk is also an exception to the rule.

The youngest staff member, 17-year-old Molly Pruett, found The Collider through a summer space camp. When she heard about an opening for an events assistant, she submitted her application the same day. She recounts, “Asheville is certainly an outlier, especially in regard to gender roles. There’s been a lack of female representation in science for a long time, but I’m seeing the shift and I’m excited to be a part of it.” Pruett attends the Nesbitt Discover Academy, a highly selective and application for entry public STEM high school in Buncombe County that gives students college credit for coursework as early as their freshmen year. Pruett’s inspired by the all-female in-house staff at The Collider and the women who have paved the way, but she notes, “When using your voice, regardless of what you are speaking for, you should do so eloquently and do it well. I think that applies to everything in life, but it’s definitely something I’m taking with me in my career.”

The Collider’s executive director, Megan Robinson, notes that women are not only a necessity to providing climate change solutions in the field of science, but in every field. “Providing basic education for women and girls everywhere can be the way we change the trajectory of climate change and climate science.” A recent study by Project Drawdown cited that educating women is “one of the most powerful levers available for avoiding emissions by curbing population growth. Women with more years of education have fewer and healthier children, and actively manage their reproductive health.” Robinson adds, “It’s encouraging to see women in all fields of climate science emerging into leadership roles and it’s changing the course for what is to come.”

Shea wraps up the coffee hour by finishing her story about the days as the only woman in the room. She finishes with, “We’re not alone anymore, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop taking care of one another. We’re an asset to our communities and that in and of itself is empowering. Science is simply the common denominator. “

Nikki Haley breaks with White House: Trump accusers “should be heard”

FILE - In a Monday, March 27, 2017 file photo, United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley speaks to reporters outside the General Assembly at U.N. headquarters. Haley said Sunday, April 2, 2017, in an interview aired Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” there’s no question Russia was involved in the U.S. presidential election and that the actions of the Kremlin will be addressed after the investigations are completed. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) (Credit: AP)

The White House has continued to defend President Donald Trump from 16 allegations of sexual harassment and assault by pointing to his election as the final word on the matter. Diverging from the administration line on Sunday, Trump’s own ambassador to the United Nations said that the women who accuse the president of sexual misconduct “should be heard.”

“They should be heard, and they should be dealt with,” Nikki Haley told CBS’ John Dickerson. “And I think we heard from them prior to the election. And I think any woman who has felt violated or felt mistreated in any way, they have every right to speak up.”

White Press Secretary Sarah Sanders has denied all of the dozen-plus claims against Trump and said Thursday that “the people of this country addressed” the allegations when they elected him.

“I know that he was elected, but women should always feel comfortable coming forward. And we should all be willing to listen to them,” Haley responded on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Haley, who was the first female governor of South Carolina, applauded women who have already come forward.

“I’m proud of their strength. I’m proud of their courage. And I think that the idea that this is happening, I think it will start to bring a conscience to the situation, not just in politics, but in, you know, we’ve seen in Hollywood and in every industry,” Haley said. “And I think the time has come.”

UN Amb. @nikkihaley on cultural shift and what it means for the @POTUS accusers: Women who accuse anyone should be heard and dealt with pic.twitter.com/HLCUpfVNnO

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) December 10, 2017

A wave of allegations of sexual harassment have brought down powerful politicians this week, including the resignations of Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., and Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn.

Last October, Trump said all his accusers would be sued after the presidential election.  He’s recently dismissed the allegations as “totally fake news” and “made-up stuff.” Now one of his accusers, Summer Zervos, is pursuing a defamation lawsuit against him. 

“Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas” is the best holiday album ever

Ella Fitzgerald (Credit: Getty Images)

Even as someone who views himself as a kind of Grinch-in-reverse — that is, come the beginning of September I start to be sad that Christmas will soon be over — I reluctantly grant that a lot of the art surrounding the holiday is decidedly deciduous. It belongs in that season, and you’re forcing things a bit if you try and do what I do, on occasion, and cue up “The Year without a Santa Claus” or the Supremes’ Christmas recordings in April.

Of course, if you’re that person, the neighbors are apt to walk past your door, hear whatever sounds are leaking out, and think you’re mad. Never ideal. But I have found that there is some Christmas art that is robustly, proudly evergreen, in large measure because of how deeply shot through it is with brilliance, even genius, the latter being akin to Father Time, who always manages to outlast Father Christmas on any stroll the two set out on together.

We all know, naturally, of classical works written for the holiday that fit this bill, with some surprises cropping up, too, like Beethoven’s penultimate piano sonata, completed on Christmas day, 1821, with an interpolation of bell-like sounds to mark the fact. In the land of film, there’s 1951’s “Scrooge,” a mash-up of noir, horror, Gothic, comedy, and deep focus photography that travels well throughout any season. M.R. James wrote most of his best ghost stories — among the finest we have — for Christmas, to amuse his fellow university colleagues and some favorite students, but they rarely have anything explicit about the holiday in them, fun though they are to read during the shortened days of December. But Christmas popular music, largely, is confined to the space between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Unless we are talking about the greatest album of popular Christmas music we have.

That would be Ella Fitzgerald’s “Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas,” from 1960, and you would have to pinion me down in April not to have me cranking this regardless of the absence of wreaths on doors.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Fitzgerald’s birth. My introduction to the great jazz singers came with Billie Holiday. You get caught up in the story of her life, that notion of strength and skill triumphing over hardship and setback, talent rising above pain, and that becomes an aspect of how you hear her music when you’re first starting out in your jazz listening career.

So it went for fourteen-year-old me. I was a moody little fellow, so when I heard Fitzgerald, whose voice had more range, more shades of sun contrasted with Holiday’s languid, late-night confessionals, I thought this was the less legit dope. It didn’t knock you for the same loop. Holden Caulfield, whom I probably thought highly of at the time, would have found it less significant.

Well, we are often idiots in this life, and so I was an idiot then, as I will be at some point going forward. I don’t think you can sing jazz much better than Fitzgerald did, anymore so than you can be much better at hockey than Wayne Gretzky or turn a couplet better than Shakespeare. In the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, she sang as well as anyone in the medium had. Now, what someone else might have done, with the contractual obligation to cut a Christmas album — that being a tacky, seasonal stop-gap type of deal — was mail in their performance like some half-sincere letter to Santa when you’ve already stopped believing and you know what your parents are getting you anyway.

But not Fitzgerald. She goes for it. She is going to help fashion an album that can stand with anything in her catalogue. Is she going to swing? She is going to swing your elfin bells off. And she’s assisted by the arrangements of Frank DeVol, who conducts Russ Garcia’s orchestra. The latter provide just the right measure of shimmering spectacle, the string articulation resembling nothing so much as hoarfrost on sun-yellowed rush-grass that our imaginations so readily picture sleighs and carriages speeding over.

That orchestra twinkles often, and I don’t think I’m off in suggesting that the Rankin-Bass crew picked up on what was happening with some of these arrangements and their timbre when they turned to soundtracking their early Animagic efforts a few years later. And then there is Fitzgerald.

Listen to how deeply committed she is on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” This is a musical Evite to the soul so in need of connection at the holiday. I think that is the reality for many people. You can put on your ridiculous sweater that generates the yucks, you can have that extra eggnog because you tell yourself you deserve it, you can rub your partner’s back as you watch your swiftly-growing-up children and inwardly declare that “this is what it’s all about,” but I think a lot of us, everyday, but at Christmas even more, yearn for a more exacting, deeper level of connection.

Or I do, anyway, and maybe I’m a Grinch-in-reverse doing a little projecting when I hear this song, but it makes me wish to meet the love of my life so I could say these things to her, privately, which I’ve just said to a lot of strangers publicly. Do you know how much Christmas popular music makes me feel that way? Not a lot. But Fitzgerald’s always does.

For technique, we are talking flat out virtuosity. “Frosty the Snowman,” which is scarcely some gnomic Modernist masterpiece of songwriting, sounds not far off from one with the way Fitzgerald holds and stretches notes, turning single syllables into extended paths that take us far beyond the village world of some portly ice dude who owed his life to a magic hat. Well, a magic hat and a little faith.

And while I won’t say that her version of “White Christmas” is better than Bing Crosby’s — for the latter had it going on at his absolute peak the day he cut his version — I will contend that it’s a close battle, like one you might expect the Miser brothers from “The Year Without a Santa Claus” to have waged, with one of them narrowly prevailing. But Crosby never cut a Christmas album like this, and he never cut an album like this, period.

It is also impossible for me not to do my “It’s a Wonderful Life”-sourced version of the Charleston in my nighttime uniform of Aquaman tee shirt and Red Sox shorts when I hear this version of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” That video would go viral. But something far more important is doing an emotional version of going viral, within you, with with “Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas.” Your heart goes viral, your sense of what a Christmas album can be goes viral. Something happens between your ears, your heart, your soul, and the people you share this record with. These days I am not sure what a wonderful life is, but I know what a wonderful record is. And there’s life in that, too.

Fox mimics its irresponsible reporting on Steinle case in coverage of Border Patrol agent’s death

(Credit: Rainmaker Photo/mediapunch/mediapunch/ipx)

Fox News’ reporting on undocumented immigrants was discredited not once, but twice this week. On Wednesday, new reporting suggested that the death of Border Patrol agent Rogelio Martinez — which Fox had immediately declared “a vicious attack” by undocumented immigrants before any investigation had taken place — may have been the result of a traffic accident. And on Thursday, a jury found Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an undocumented immigrant who Fox had dedicated significant airtime to accusing of cold-blooded murder, not guilty of the murder charge. The revelations demonstrate Fox’s habit of jumping to conclusions and distorting facts in order to hype crime committed by undocumented immigrants for political purposes.

On November 18, Martinez and another Border Patrol agent were discovered badly injured in a ravine area along the southern border, where they were responding to a sensor that had been triggered that signaled movement along the border. Border Patrol union officials claimed the agents were attacked with rocks by a group of undocumented immigrants. However, a local sheriff told “Dallas Morning News” that “the evidence is not obvious as to what happened out there” and that “the injuries to [Martinez], after talking to his doctors, were consistent with a fall.” On November 29, “Dallas Morning News” reported more updates, writing, “Evidence gathered at the scene does not suggest an assault, multiple sources with direct knowledge of the investigation say. The possibility that Rogelio Martinez and his partner were sideswiped by a tractor trailer’s side mirror on a moonless night is growing theory, they said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.”

Nonetheless, Fox was quick to report the union officials’ account as fact. Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed that Martinez was “attacked at the border in the most gruesome possible way,” asking, “Will this change any minds about addressing illegal immigration and securing the border once and for all?” Host Laura Ingraham described the incident as “a vicious attack” and used it to justify Trump’s call for a border wall. Sandra Smith reported it as an “apparent ambush.” Even after Fox finally acknowledged Tuesday morning that “investigators also say they have not ruled out an accident” and that the sheriff was “cautioning people not to jump to conclusions just yet” because “there is some discussion that these agents fell . . . by accident,”  Fox anchor Julie Banderas used the incident as a way to misleadingly sow fears about immigration and sanctuary cities:

Fox’s coverage of Martinez’s death is reminiscent of how the network covered the death of Kate Steinle, who was accidentally shot by an undocumented immigrant in 2015. For years, Fox has pointed to Steinle as justification for cracking down on so-called sanctuary cities, exploited her death to paint immigrants as criminals, and even proposed anti-immigrant legislation based on a distorted view of the case. As it turned out, the defendant in the Steinle case was acquitted on charges of murder, manslaughter, and assault with a deadly weapon, and was convicted only of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Similary, Tucker Carlson repeatedly had touted a case out of Rockville, MD, in which two undocumented immigrants were accused of raping a 14-year-old girl. As The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wrote, “Carlson demagogued a rape case involving immigrants. Then they were cleared.”

It may turn out, once the investigation has been completed and the facts established, that Martinez was in fact murdered. Fatal on-duty attacks on Border Patrol agents are extremely rare, but they happen. But as the investigation continues and the evidence points toward an accident, it is eminently clear that Fox has little interest in waiting for the facts of the case and instead prefers to once again exploit a tragedy to criminalize all immigrants and push for their anti-immigrant policy agenda.

 

 

Is it possible to boost your intelligence by training?

(Credit: Albert Einstein, 1921 Ferdinand Schmutzer via Wikimedia Commons)

Scientists achieved astonishing results when training a student with a memory training program in a landmark experiment in 1982. After 44 weeks of practice, the student, dubbed SF, expanded his ability to remember digits from seven numbers to 82. However, this remarkable ability did not extend beyond digits – they also tried with consonants.

The study can be considered the beginning of cognitive training research, investigating how practice in areas ranging from music to chess and puzzles impacts our intelligence. So what’s the state of this research 35 years later – have scientists discovered any foolproof ways to make us smarter? We reviewed the evidence to find out.

The topic of cognitive training is still very controversial, with scientists expressing opposing views about its effectiveness. Enthusiastic claims about the effects of cognitive training programs usually follow the publication of a single experiment reporting positive findings.

Much less attention is paid when a study reports negative results. This phenomenon is quite common in many areas of social and life sciences and often provides a biased view of a particular research field. That is why systematic reviews such as ours are essential to rule out the risk of such bias.

Making sense of conflicting evidence

In a new paper, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, we synthesize what the reviews say about several cognitive training programs. Our main method was meta-analysis – that is, a set of statistical techniques for estimating the true overall effect of a treatment.

To begin with, music expertise has been associated with superior memory for music material (notes on a stave). Remarkably, music experts exhibit a superior memory even when the musical material is meaningless (random notes). In the same vein, musical aptitude predicts music skills such as pitch and chord discrimination.

However, music instruction does not seem to exert any true effect on skills outside of music. Indeed, our meta-analysis shows that engaging in music has no impact on general measures of intelligence, when placebo effects are controlled for with active control groups. Music training does not affect either cognitive skills – fluid intelligence, memory, phonological processing, spatial ability and cognitive control – or academic achievement. These outcomes have been recently confirmed by other independent labs.

The field of chess presents an analogous pattern of findings. Chess masters’ exceptional memory for chess positions is renowned. However, to date, chess training appears to exert only a small effect on cognitive and academic skills. What’s more, almost none of the studies reporting such effects actually used a control group – suggesting that the results were mainly due to placebos (such as being excited about a new activity).

Similar results have been observed in the field of working memory training. Working memory is a cognitive system, related to short-term memory, that stores and manipulates the information necessary to solve complex cognitive tasks. Participants undergoing working memory training programs systematically improve their performance in several working memory tasks. However, experimental groups consistently fail to show any improvement over active controls in other skills such as fluid intelligence, cognitive control or academic achievement. These findings were confirmed in three independent meta-analyses about children, adults, and the general population.

Video game training also fails to enhance cognitive function. In another recent meta-analysis, to be published in Psychological Bulletin, we show that video game players outperform non-gamers on a variety of cognitive tasks. However, when non-players take part in video game training experiments, no appreciable effect is observed in any of the outcome measures. This suggests the video game players may just have been better at those tasks to start with.

Korean brain training exercise.

wikipedia, CC BY-SA

Another group of scientists also recently carried out a systematic review on general brain training programs (often including puzzles, tasks and drills). While the researchers reported some effects, they found an inverse relationship between the size of the effects and the quality of experimental designs of training programs. Put simply, when the experiment includes essential features such as active control groups and large samples, the benefits are very modest at best.

The problem with misinterpretation

A pervasive problem with cognitive training studies is that improved performance in isolated cognitive tasks is often seen as a proof for cognitive enhancement. This is a common misinterpretation. To provide solid evidence, it is necessary to investigate the effects of training programs on “latent cognitive constructs” – the variables underlying the performance in a set of cognitive tasks.

For example, working memory skill is a cognitive construct and can be measured by collecting data such as digit span. But if the training exerts an actual effect on the cognitive skill (construct) you should see the effects on many different tasks and latent factors – multiple measures of the same cognitive skill. And it is rare that these training programs are set up to do that.

That means that, to date, cognitive training programs do not even necessarily boost those cognitive functions that the trained tasks are supposed to involve. What is enhanced is just the ability to perform the trained task and similar tasks.

Researchers and the general public should be fully aware of the limits of benefits from training the brain. However, these negative findings shouldn’t discourage us from searching for ways to boost intelligence and other skills. We do know that our cognition is extraordinarily malleable to training. What we need now is more promising pathways to general cognitive enhancement rather than domain-specific enhancement. Our best bet for achieving that is probably by carrying out research on genetics and neuroscience.

Giovanni Sala, PhD – Cognitive Psychology, University of Liverpool and Fernand Gobet, Professor of Decision Making and Expertise, University of Liverpool

 

What will NASA’s biggest-ever space telescope study first?

The immense Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31

Astronomers are scrambling to keep a rapidly approaching date with destiny — a chance to gaze farther than ever before into the universe’s hidden depths.

After decades of development, the nearly $9-billion James Webb Space Telescope is set for launch from French Guiana in spring 2019. Built in cooperation with the European and Canadian space agencies, Webb is NASA’s biggest, costliest and most powerful observatory yet, boasting a 6.5-meter primary mirror that will be the largest ever flown in space.

Unlike its famous predecessor the Hubble Space Telescope, which mostly was set up to gather visible and ultraviolet light, Webb is optimized to view the cosmos in infrared. At some wavelengths, infrared light can pass through dust almost unscathed, like a sunbeam through a windowpane; at others, it mingles with matter to carry away imprints of its atomic and molecular structure. It is also the brightest light we have from the most distant (and oldest) stars because their otherwise-visible light arrives stretched out to longer, redder wavelengths by more than 13 billion years of the universe’s expansion. Webb’s infrared eyes make it equal parts x-ray scanner, mass spectrometer and time machine. With them it will peer through the creaking, dusty cosmic eons to study much that astronomers using Hubble and other telescopes have barely begun to glimpse: the universe’s very first galaxies, nascent stars and planets in mid-creation in nebulous wombs, the atmospheres of worlds both within and beyond our solar system.

Longevity is an even greater difference between Hubble and Webb. Thanks to a series of refurbishing missions to its post in low Earth orbit, Hubble is approaching its fourth decade of operations, a life span that has helped make it arguably the most productive and revolutionary scientific instrument in human history. Webb, however, will be stationed in deep space, past the orbit of the moon, out of reach of easy servicing. It is intended to last at minimum five years — perhaps even 10, if all goes according to plan. For astronomers hoping to squeeze Hubble-like levels of discovery out of Webb’s limited life, every moment of the telescope’s time will be precious.

Climbing Webb’s Learning Curve

“Webb has a finite lifetime, and represents huge intellectual, financial and technological investments, so we need to hit the ground running to get its science flowing,” says Ken Sembach, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). “But there will be a steep learning curve. We want to make that curve as quick and easy to climb as possible.”

The hundreds of researchers who have spent decades developing the telescope’s hardware, software and core scientific objectives will be among the first to scale that learning curve. Each member of this elite cadre is guaranteed a small but significant portion of Webb’s total time, and much of the telescope’s first year of observations (called “Cycle 1”) is dedicated to fulfilling that obligation. Already intimate with what the telescope can do and given first picks of where to point it, these research teams are expected to generate some of Webb’s most transformative discoveries. Those initial results could then guide the rest of the world’s astronomers as they clamor to use Webb before it is gone. Except, that is, for rules hammered out early in the telescope’s development, which allow the researchers performing these “Guaranteed Time Observations” to keep their results to themselves for a one-year period.

This delay “is an incredibly anachronistic concept, in the days of ‘big data,’ for an $8-billion mission funded with public resources with a five-year life,” says Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who also chaired an influential advisory committee for Webb. “The one-year proprietary period effectively means this hidden, unavailable data cannot be seen in time for follow-up by the community of astronomers until more than three years into [Webb’s] mission.” After unsuccessfully lobbying to change those rules, Illingworth instead helped create a new “Early Release Science” (ERS) program to circumvent them — up to 500 hours of diverse observations front-loaded to Cycle 1 for immediate release to the public, giving all astronomers a chance to absorb the results and apply lessons learned to Webb proposals of their own.

The precious hours for ERS would come directly from Sembach. As STScI’s director, he commands 10 percent of Webb’s available time, and on November 13 he announced the final selections of 13 ERS proposals out of more than 100 from large research teams around the world. Each successful proposal will not only pursue novel science with Webb but also develop new tools and techniques for using the telescope that all astronomers can subsequently employ. “Getting these substantial programs in the public domain puts everyone on a more level playing field,” Sembach says. “Good ideas are what should dictate [Webb’s] observations going forward, not the past successes anyone happens to have.”

Illuminating the Cosmic Dark Age

Astronomers have already begun leveraging Hubble and other space telescopes to create a preview of what Webb may reveal, staring at some of the largest galaxy clusters in a project called “Frontier Fields.” These clusters are so massive they warp the surrounding space, forming gigantic “gravitational lenses” that amplify the faint light from galaxies even farther away, ones born less than a billion years after the big bang. Such galaxies are thought to be almost as old as any can be; for most of the universe’s first half-billion years it languished in a cosmic “Dark Age,” too hot and dense for stars to form. But even through the galaxy cluster–size magnifying glass of a gravitational lens, Hubble can only see these early galaxies as dim smudges reddened by cosmic expansion. Webb — custom-built to study these murky epochs — could use gravitational lensing to unveil these and even older galaxies in sufficient detail and number to pin down exactly how these ancient objects arose and first brought light into the universe.

One ERS program led by University of California, Los Angeles, astronomer Tommaso Treu will do just that, pointing Webb at a Frontier Fields cluster called Abell 2744 to see what lies beyond the limits of Hubble’s view. “With these observations we can look at everything from the very first galaxies to what we call the peak of star formation, a few billion years after the big bang, when galaxies are churning out stars and heavy elements at a crazy rate,” Treu says. “We’ll get the timeline exact for how this all happened — how it proceeds, what its sources are and what those sources are like — big or small, rich or poor in heavy elements.”

Whereas Treu’s program will use gravitational lensing to go deep, others will go wide, simply tiling a celestial region with Webb’s infrared view. The ERS observations helmed by The University of Texas at Austin astronomer Steve Finkelstein will use Webb to image a strip of sky about an eighth the size of the full moon. Somewhere in that region, Finkelstein says, Webb might spy anywhere between a few to perhaps 50 extremely ancient galaxies. The number will help reveal the efficiency of star formation in the early universe, and could forecast exactly how far back in cosmic time Webb will be able to see.

“At some point, far enough back, the galaxies will cease to exist,” Finkelstein says. “Maybe even just beyond the limits of the Frontier Fields. And that would mean you might not want to spend a lot of time looking for them, because they aren’t there to be found . . . It may be we won’t see anything fainter with Webb – or maybe we will.”

Making Maps, Picturing Planets

Despite its origins as a workhorse for studying faraway galaxies, Webb will also make breakthroughs nearer to home. One ERS program will stare into the hearts of neighboring nascent star systems to watch ices, organic molecules and other planetary building blocks dance around coalescing suns. Another will seek out plumes of water vapor that may erupt from subsurface oceans on Jupiter’s icy moons. But for many astronomers Webb’s most anticipated work involves exoplanets — worlds orbiting other stars.

No exoplanets had been discovered when Webb was first conceived; now multitudes fill astronomers’ catalogues. Most come from a single NASA mission, the Kepler space telescope, which found thousands of worlds by watching for their shadowy “transits” as they periodically flit across the faces of their stars. Whereas these discoveries have offered broad information about planets in the Milky Way — sizes, masses and orbital periods — they have told us far less about climate, weather and habitability. Webb will not be able to snap actual pictures of alien Earths to see such details, but its exquisite optics could still help astronomers scan for Earth-like conditions on a handful of planets orbiting nearby stars.

Unlike Kepler, which simply surveyed a single star-packed field of view for transits, Webb can zoom in on individual transiting worlds for deeper study. Astronomers should be able to use it to detect water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide and other gases in some silhouetted planets’ upper atmospheres by monitoring the starlight streaming through. They could also record a planet’s passage in front of and then behind its star, using the difference between the two observations to crudely measure a world’s temperature, weather patterns and clouds. “Webb is going to be great for exoplanets,” says Kepler project scientist Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center who leads the most time-intensive ERS program, which will use nearly 80 hours of Webb’s time to study transiting worlds. “It’s just that this is a difficult game to play, because the signals we’re looking for are really tiny. Seen [in transit] from another star, Venus blocks one part per ten-thousandth of the sun’s light, and its atmosphere intercepts one two-hundredth of that. It’s tough to see — you need a big mirror and great instrumentation to do it.”

For their observations, Batalha and her team have more modest goals. They plan to test-drive the telescope’s instruments on two transiting Jupiter-size worlds, WASP-39 b and WASP-43 b, gleaning as much data as possible from the shifting patterns of starlight and planetary shadow. What they learn may help plan observations of smaller, potentially rocky and more Earth-like worlds that would require heftier investments of Webb’s limited time. And ultimately it could point the way toward what many planet hunters consider their holy grail: obtaining actual images of an Earth-like planet orbiting another star.

Taking a picture of a planet outside our solar system is a tall order; even the largest, brightest world would be almost imperceptibly faint in the glare of its parent star. Webb’s large mirror and optimization for infrared light, which is most favorable for planet–star contrasts, make it a formidable albeit imperfect tool for the task. Lacking a high-performance coronagraph — an instrument that blocks most of a star’s light — Webb will probably struggle to take pictures of planets smaller than Saturn in even the best of circumstances. It will, however, help pave the way for far more capable future planet-imaging observatories.

“If you polled my community about what we’d wish for our ideal observatory, it wouldn’t be Webb—it would be something else,” says Sasha Hinkley, an astronomer at the University of Exeter in England leading an ERS program to directly image giant planets. “Webb doesn’t have the resolution that we’d like — we would like something with a much bigger mirror to look at smaller planets closer to their stars. But Webb does have this incredible [infrared] wavelength coverage and sensitivity. We’ll be trying to milk it for everything it can offer.” Hinkley’s team will point Webb at three stars thought to harbor planets, looking for new worlds and capturing images of at least one already known — a young “super-Jupiter” called HIP 65426 b that is still aglow with the leftover heat of its birth. Measuring the planet’s brightness and color will allow Hinkley’s team to better estimate its composition and age—two crucial data points for determining how exactly it formed, which could shed light on how Jupiter formed, too.

“We’ve never looked at these systems before with the sensitivity of Webb, so it’s not unlikely that we could discover lower-mass planets that we weren’t sensitive to in previous ground-based observations of these stars,” Hinkley says. “But to do that we’ll need to rapidly develop our understanding of this incredible observatory, the most complicated space telescope that humankind has ever built.”

Writing a Holocaust novel without writing about the Holocaust

(Credit: Salon/Ilana Lidagoster)

Growing up in Brooklyn in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Holocaust felt distant somehow, even when bringing my great-grandmother’s yellow star to fourth grade show-and-tell, even as it dangled from my Hebrew teacher’s fingertips as she said, “I can’t believe I’m holding this.” My great-grandparents and grandparents survived the Shoah in Romania and Hungary, where it seemed locals were particularly eager to be rid of their Jewish neighbors. Nazi officials complained their Romanian counterparts were barbaric, lacking order. My family didn’t leave Romania until the 1970s, when it was clear there was no future for Jews. But I felt protected. We were far away from all that, in geographic distance and time.

But something shifted after 9/11, then shifted again with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

I was in college. I’d just learned about Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983) — not in a history class but obliquely, in Anne Carson’s novel-in-verse “Autobiography of Red.” I dove into independent research, trying to understand. The recent history shocked me: up to 30,000 people were “disappeared” by the right-wing military dictatorship for even the slightest suspicion of dissent. It sounded too much like the Holocaust: Jews disproportionately targeted, arrests, detention camps, mass murders and many looking away or welcoming “order,” trying to justify atrocity with the phrase, it must be for something.

Overlaid with this new understanding of history repeating itself was the dread-inducing rhetoric of the War on Terror. I wondered how far our government would go in the name of this nebulous crusade. How many civil rights would be trampled? I didn’t think I’d be looping back upon these thoughts in 2017 with greater urgency. I didn’t think George W. Bush would be thought of with nostalgia for gentler times.

Seedlings for my first novel began sprouting between 2001 and 2003. The Argentinean family which emerged in “Daughters of the Air” resembled my own in one regard: Jew-ish. Not particularly observant. If you looked, maybe you wouldn’t necessarily know. The father in my novel is a sociology professor at a public university, a prime leftist target for the right-wing junta, alongside journalists, lawyers and students. It doesn’t help that he’s Jewish. Observance and assimilation have nothing to do with it. It’s not about faith, it’s about blood. The Nazis didn’t care. Nor did the junta. And the connection between the two is fairly clear: prisoners were forced to listen to recordings of Hitler’s speeches at a high volume. This on top of the beatings, rapes, electrocutions, mutilations, lying in your own filth with a sack on your head. Sacks on heads sound familiar.

Whatever we “learned” about the Holocaust we hadn’t learned enough, apparently. We seemed to be forgetting. So the novel evolved into a Holocaust novel without reference to the Holocaust. Perhaps it’s just as well, if readers have been dulled by “Holocaust fatigue.” Indeed, in 2010, a writer at a conference told me she wished people would just stop writing about the Holocaust because it was “overdone.”

Earlier that year in a workshop, Jonathan Raban pointed out an image in a chapter draft which showed the mother and daughter in my novel perched on suitcases, waiting to change planes in Belém. They’d fled Buenos Aires early in the morning. The image of refugees in transit perched on suitcases brought to mind the Holocaust, but he thought it wise not to explicitly mention the Holocaust. Even though I agreed with him, I wish I’d asked him why. But I made an assumption. Being explicit seemed ham-handed. When I heard the overdone comment at the conference, I thought: Well, maybe that’s what I’m doing, then. I’m sneaking it in.

I thought about the difficulty of escape. The difficulty in trusting others not to turn you in. The bureaucratic nightmare that shielded systematic torture and murder. I thought about the horrific mystery of disappearance.

In Romania, in World War II, my grandfather, 17 years old at the time, was imprisoned for distributing anti-fascist pamphlets on a street corner. His older brother died when he “fell” from a moving train. Emotionally, there was a doubling for me, trying to understand the pain of not knowing what really happened, trying to understand the terror of being thrown. In the instance of the Dirty War, being thrown from a plane. For having a political view different from the one in power? Or even just the mere suspicion of difference? For being Jewish? No trial. No process. We see the threat of gross violations of human rights in many countries; it’s an exhausting vigil; no wonder people look away. The threat, increasingly, includes our own.

The novel became, for me, a hypersensitive instrument, an alarm bell to remain vigilant, a tool for active memory.

Have you ever played the Anne Frank game? The one where you decide which non-Jewish friends to trust in the event of a second Holocaust? That’s the premise of Nathan Englander’s 2012 story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” set in contemporary South Florida, in which two married couples get high and ponder their options. When Donald Trump won the Electoral College, my husband and I couldn’t help but have that discussion.

The GOP tax plan, state and local taxes deductions and you

(Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

While Washington is claiming victory, states are crying foul.

Late last week, the U.S. Senate passed its version of the tax reform package that cleared the House a few weeks earlier. Within the hundreds of pages of legislative language in each bill lay a number of provisions that have significant impact on state governments, including modifications to the state and local tax deduction.

Under current tax law, individuals who choose to itemize and deduct eligible expenses on their federal tax return are able to deduct state and local income, sales and property taxes. Both the House and Senate bills eliminate the so-called “SALT deduction” for state and local taxes while capping the property tax deduction at US$10,000.

As a former Ohio state senator, I served on the Senate Ways and Means Committee for a number of years. I also went through five state budget cycles over 10 years. Because of that experience, I believe the federal changes to the SALT deductions will be detrimental to American families and have long-term negative impacts on balancing state budgets.

An uncertain future

I am not alone in my concern.

The bipartisan National Conference of State Legislators issued a scathing statement on the proposed changes to the SALT deduction. The organization’s president, South Dakota State Senator Deb Peters, a Republican, expressed her opposition by saying, “SALT is one of the six original federal tax deductions and has been a staple of the federal tax code and the state-federal fiscal relationship for over 100 years. We will continue to fight for the more than 43 million Americans who claim this deduction every year.”

Page 3 of the 1913 1040 form, showing a deduction for state and local taxes.

State lawmakers have reason to be worried, as most state budgets rely on state income and sales tax as primary revenue streams for their operating budgets. According to the center left think tank Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, eliminating the SALT deduction could place strain on funding needed for critical programs and services provided at the state level such as education and infrastructure. Cities and towns usually benefit from property taxes. So the fact that the tax plan caps – rather than eliminates – the property tax deduction could help insulate local governments for now.

However, it has been my experience in Ohio that when the state cuts funds for essential services, the funding burden gets dropped to the local communities. During my time in the Ohio Senate, state government cut allocations to local governments. This caused local communities across my home state to cut safety forces and scale back infrastructure repairs. This is why the SALT deduction is so important. It essentially protects against double taxation and serves a bit like a subsidy to the state and local governments. If the SALT deduction goes away, state and local governments may try to lower taxes to offset the cost of higher federal taxes. What does this mean in real terms? According to modeling done by the Government Finance Officers Association, budget cuts caused by revenue shortfalls could result in cities and towns losing five police officers, 10 teachers and five public works employees.

The changes to the SALT deduction could hit Americans in two significant ways. First, citizens often carry the burden when states scale back their services. For example, when police and fire forces get cut, response time gets longer and community safety is jeopardized.

Second, individual Americans would also shoulder increased tax burdens should the proposed SALT deduction changes be signed into law. Elimination of the state and local income and sales tax deductions would result in a tax increase for those who itemize their deductions and deduct SALT. A report recently issued by the Government Finance Officers Association in partnership with seven other nonpartisan state and local government associations stated 30 percent of all taxpayers across all income levels use the SALT deductions, and 50 percent of those choosing to use SALT make under $200,000 per year. This means the SALT deduction is widely used by middle-income Americans. While the amount would vary by income, the Urban-Brookings Microsimulation Model estimates a roughly $2,000 increase in taxes on those taking the deduction.

Capping the property tax deduction at $10,000, while better than a full elimination, still falls short for a number of communities. California, Illinois, Texas, New York, New Jersey and most of the Northeast have the majority of property owners nationally that would exceed the $10,000 threshold. For example, in New Jersey the average property tax deduction is $9,500, meaning a fair number of property owners in the Garden State would fall above the $10,000 cap. In states with high numbers of properties that are above the $10,000 deduction, the cap threshold is not sufficient to offset the costs associated with the SALT deduction change.

The data suggest that changes to the SALT deduction would result in higher taxes and fewer local services for a large number of middle-income Americans. Changes to SALT have passed both the House and the Senate. The bills must now come together in conference where the differences between the two versions are negotiated. While it is possible that changes could still be made, both versions of the bill have the same language. That makes it less likely to be modified. States and individuals alike will need to start planning for the changes on the horizon.

Capri Cafaro, Executive in Residence, American University

How much do offended people really love the national anthem?

Members of the Houston Texans kneel during the national anthem on October 29, 2017 (Credit: Getty/Jonathan Ferrey)

I ate dinner with some white people in Baltimore the other day.

I have to say white people, because Baltimore is 67 percent black, and I never really even met any white people until college, other than housing police and some teachers. Greg, an aspiring novelist I know from Philly who is new to Baltimore had invited me over to meet some of his friends, a trendy looking group of writers and visual artists, most of whom are not from Baltimore.

“D., you have to try my chili,” Julie, Greg’s girlfriend, said. “It’s kick ass, it’s vegan, it’s amazing!”

“No sweetie,” Greg interrupted. “D. doesn’t really eat home cooked meals!”

“Then why come to a dinner party?” Julie replied.

We all laughed.

“Sorry, my apologies,” one of Julie’s friends said. “I always thought home cooked meals were a big black tradition. The black people I worked with always talked about how great their family meals are. I so wanted to attend one!”

“Now you have me looking like a creep!” I said.

I don’t hate home cooked meals. I just think that people oversell them, always talking about how their mom has the best chicken, and it’s never actually true. I also hate doing dishes, waiting for people to do dishes, loading dishes into dishwashers and hanging around after I eat.

“I like to leave as soon as my food is finished,” I said. “You can’t eat a home cooked meal and walk away after the food is gone. It’s disrespectful to the chef. But I’m ordering take out, so I can leave when I want! Anybody like pho? I’m ordering pho!”

My food came as the rest of the party started eating. We sipped wine and they enjoyed their vegan chili. They laughed as I explained to them that black people don’t really know what casserole is, and I laughed when they said the same thing that white people always say when I ask about casserole: “You just put a bunch of stuff in a pot, throw cheese on top and bake it!”

“You guys see Beyoncé hand Kaepernick his award the other night?” Julie said, flashing her phone and passing it around the table. “My heart melted!”

Julie was talking about former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick receiving Sports Illustrated’s Muhammad Ali Legacy Award, for the movement he started around taking a knee during the national anthem, in addition to his work as an activist on and off the field. iPhones are definitely contagious, because everyone else pulled theirs out after Julie did. I saw the image of Beyoncé in her beautiful dress presenting the award and hit play on a clip of Kap’s speech where he said, “I accept this award not for myself, but on behalf of the people. Because if it were not for my love of the people, I would not have protested. And if it was not for the support from the people, I would not be on this stage today. With or without the NFL’s platform, I will continue to work for the people, because my platform is the people.”

The table was 200 percent liberal, so everyone agreed with Kap’s stance, as most rational people do. This country is supposed to offer us a right to protest peacefully in any way we want and he’s obviously being penalized for that in a way that proves it’s clearly a black and white issue.

“This is racism at its finest. Let me ask y’all a question, and I’m not being funny,” I said to the group, standing up, tapping a bowl with a spoon. “Do white people really love the anthem like that? I mean, do white people sing it in the shower? Y’all didn’t sing it before we ate dinner. Will you sing it when I leave?”

Everyone laughed, even me.

“Seriously!” I continued. “I don’t get the hype with this song! Seems like I only hear it at sporting events and it’s really not that big of a deal to most Americans. All of these people walking around pretending to be offended. Am I crazy? I really need answers.”

Just like the white people I posed this question to at work, the bulk of the room said they didn’t really think about the song until Kap’s silent protest.  One guy said, “It’s important because my grandpop served our country, but I never sing or really get choked up when I hear it. I actually don’t know all of the words.”

“My point exactly!” I yelled. “These fake-mad people complaining about a song that will never make their playlist are just annoying.”

Dinner was fun. I said my goodbyes and jumped in my Lyft. While thumbing through my Twitter feed I came across a post from Tomi Lahren. Remember her? The Ann Coulter wannabe who hates anything and everything progressive? She tweeted: “Police-hating Beyoncé presents police and America-hating Kappy with a ‘legacy’ award. This is how far we’ve fallen. Wow.”

I’m sure many people agreed with her, as she received thousands of retweets and endorsements, which goes to show that it doesn’t matter if you pick a real cause or not, there’s still so many people in this country who are just racist. Lahren is supposed to be a journalist, and tweeting that Kap hates America is just a flat-out lie — as big of a lie as saying Beyoncé, who employees dozens of cops, hates cops. Neither Kap or Beyoncé use hateful language when talking about our country, they only acknowledge what really happens and then also offer real solutions, which isn’t that popular these days.

Instead of Lahren tweeting “This is how far we have fallen,” she should’ve posted look how little we’ve grown since 1814. Because her barbaric mentality, just like that of the people who pretend to be mad about athletes kneeling during the anthem, is what’s keeping us divided, hindering any growth dealing with social relations and allowing thousands of people to mask their racism through fake patriotism. I’m glad I’m lucky enough to break bread with groups of people who are capable of seeing through that BS.

Want to fight America’s racist mass-incarceration system? There’s an app for that

(Credit: Shutterstock)

As a social engineer, Kortney Ziegler is always thinking of new ideas and posting them to his Twitter. “An app that converts your daily change into bail money to free black people,” he tweeted in July.

Like many of his brainstorms, it was a one-off gesture thrown into the digital ether. But something was different about this one. It quickly got hundreds of retweets and affirmations. “I’d sign up!” many users wrote back.

Impressed and inspired by the response, Ziegler decided to make the app a reality.

The result is the web-based service “Appolition,” which officially came to life on Nov. 14. Ziegler, along with his co-founders in Atlanta, hoped to reach 200 users by mid-December. As of today, Appolition has close to 6,000. And its current, web-based form is just the beginning. Ziegler says mobile apps for iPhone and Android users are in the works.

Here’s how it works: Appolition connects to your bank account and rounds up each purchase you make to the nearest dollar. The spare change is then donated automatically once it accrues to at least 50 cents. By signing in to the website, it takes you to a personal secure dashboard where you can track your contributions to bail relief as you spend. It’s both passive — you don’t even notice you’re using it — and surprisingly effective.

In just three weeks of operation, Appolition has already raised $12,000 to free incarcerated black people who can’t afford bail. Ziegler says the app currently generates $1,000 per day through spare change and that it’s gotten  so much traction that he’s had to implement a credit-card feature, after hearing from people without bank accounts who wanted to contribute.

When it comes to actually bailing out individuals, Appolition partners with National Bail Out, a coalition of over 25 national organizations that wants to end money bail and schedules national bailouts of black people. Ziegler was most inspired by their national effort to bail out black mothers on Mother’s Day this year and thought, as someone embedded in the Silicon Valley innovation world, he could elevate their work through technology.

Ziegler also sees bailing out black people as a way to effect immediate change in someone’s life. Even a short stay in jail can result in loss of employment, housing or the custody of one’s children. Plus, Ziegler says, black people deserve to be granted the same presumption of innocence “just like everybody else who has money in the country.”

Twelve million people are processed in jails annually and 60 percent of them have not been convicted of a crime, Shaka Senghor, formerly incarcerated activist and Director of Strategy and Innovation at the criminal-justice reform initiative Cut 50, told Salon. For the most part, those forced to languish in cells awaiting trial are the ones who can’t afford bail, not the most violent.

Sometimes, as Senghor notes, the cost differential between making bail and waiting months or more in a cell for a trial can be staggeringly low, often just a few hundred dollars. “But,” she says, “if you come from an impoverished community, $200 may as well be $2 million.”

Senghor added that often the conditions for those merely accused at county jails can actually be worse than those for the convicted at prisons. They’re overcrowded, unclean, sometimes violent, and the food is abhorrent.

As if simply living with such things isn’t enough, it can be nearly impossible for an accused person to build an adequate defense while incarcerated. Often, Senghor says, people will take plea deals just to free themselves from these conditions. Considering all that, raising bail funds — a few dollars here, a few dollars there — can be a critical step forward toward disrupting America’s mass incarceration epidemic.

In this, Senghor and Ziegler both see the app as a newer, more tech-savvy approach to activism. “I love to see people from marginalized communities taking advantage of the opportunities that tech allows for us to solve problems,” Senghor said. “I think that we need to have contemporary tools to solve contemporary problems.”

Ziegler says that the app “says a lot about what crowdfunding can do, what tech can do,” as well as how tech can be a real tool “to bolster the activism work that we do.”

“Our current justice system is really like this very complex maze, with so many entry points, but sadly, far too few exit points,” Senghor said. “That’s one of the things we need to change, and I think this app will help to do that.”