Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 62

Don’t call it food waste: Entrepreneurs turn surplus food into gold

Photo courtesy of Lazy Bear Tea/Civil Eats

This story first appeared on Civil Eats.

The idea began with a bin of discarded avocado pits. Where others would see waste, Drexel University Food Lab graduate students Sheetal Bahirat and Christa Kwaw-Yankson recognized an opportunity.

After some experimenting, they made an avocado-pit tea by blanching, grating, and then dehydrating the pit. The tea has a mild, slightly fruity taste and a pleasing, natural pink color.

“Everybody throws away their avocado pits—but we can make a tea out of the skins as well,” says Bahirat. “Which is great because this country is in love with avocado.”

Food waste is a hot topic, and startups are eager do something about it. But creating a viable food product company that relies on ingredients considered waste comes with many challenges.

The Food Lab, which is part of Drexel’s Center for Food and Hospitality Management and Department of Nutrition Sciences, has become the go-to R&D resource source for culinary innovators that aim to turn food waste — or “upcycled” food, as they prefer to call it — into consumer products. The lab recently received a two-year grant from the Claniel Foundation to help expand its upcycled food research and development.

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Launching a startup food brand is difficult enough, but one that sources waste ingredients faces extra difficulties, says professor Jonathan Deutsch, who founded Food Lab in 2014, which works with major consumer packaged goods companies and entrepreneurs. For instance, food safety is a big concern, he says. It would only take one big health scare involving a food waste-derived product to put consumers off. There are logistics and regulatory challenges as well.

“When you try and do surplus food work in a food system that’s not really designed to do that, you reach additional hurdles,” he says. “What we’re doing is helping our clients through those hurdles.”

The hurdles Deutsch notes are not insignificant: A recent report published by the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard University explores food-safety laws in all 50 states covering food donations—like foods that could be used for upcycled food products instead of becoming food waste. The results suggest that food producers across the country can be hesitant to donate food for fear that they could be liable for any food safety issues that arise.

Ingredients First

Like Bahirat and Kwaw-Yankson, many other upcycled food entrepreneurs first see waste, and then think of a way to use it.

Daniela Uribe grew up amongst the coffee farms of Colombia. She remembers piles of cascara — the husk of the coffee cherry — that would either be used as fertilizer or dumped in the river. Her idea lightbulb went off when she saw Starbucks offering a cascara latte, and together with her co-founders, Erik Ornitz and Drew Fink, started experimenting with cascara tea in her kitchen. Lazy Bear Tea — a translation from ozo perozoso, Spanish for sloth — sells a drink made from dried cascara, which when steeped in hot water tastes not like coffee but like a smooth black tea. Lazy Bear Tea launched in 2017 and is now sold in 30 stores in the greater Boston area, with plans for expansion.

Apart from removing cascara from the waste system, the company offers a potential revenue stream for coffee farmers, most of whom, despite all those expensive coffees crowding store shelves, live in poverty. “That highlights how broken the coffee supply chain is in our agriculture and the system in general,” she says. “We’re using our tea as a vehicle for addressing some of those inconsistencies.”

Similarly, San Francisco’s ReGrained uses flour made from spent brewer’s grain — the used grain that’s left over after brewing — to make snack bars. Spent brewer’s grain is nutritious, and there’s billions of pounds of it produced every year — every 6-pack uses 1 pound of grain. While it can be used as animal feed, much of it is dumped. It spoils quickly, so ReGrained invented and patented a processthat deals with the spoilage and transport. They collect the grains from mid-sized brewers, who welcome another source of revenue as well as the associated feel-goods.

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“We’re creating economic value out of none and it’s also great story for them to tell to their customers about sustainability,” says co-founder Daniel Kurzrock.

Kurzrock and co-founder Jordan Schwartz launched ReGrained in 2013, and settled on snack bars because they’re a relatively easy entry point into the market. The company plans to launch new products and expand nationally this year. “We want to get to point where we’re the solution for brewing industry to handle this stream,” says Kurzrock.

Food Lab connected Kriti Sehgal, founder of Philadelphia’s Pure Fare restaurant group, with a provider of rescued sweet potatoes that are dehydrated and powdered. It’s used to make a sweet potato custard, one of their most popular offerings. Upcycling is a founding principal of the company, Sehgal says. But she cautions that there’s no point in using a surplus product just for the sake of it — that could mean more ingredients used to save one. “If I have to add more to that, how pure is that to the upcycling piece?” she asks.

Food Banks as Upcycling Entrepreneurs

Not every food waste entrepreneur is a hopeful experimenting in her kitchen. Drexel’s Food Lab has partnered with Philadelphia’s Philabundance, the largest food bank in the Delaware Valley region, to create products from foods that might otherwise go to waste for both their clients and retail.

This is partly driven by necessity and partly because they’re moving away from the canned goods food pantry model, says Philabundance’s deputy director of sustainability Kait Bowdler. They often receive large shipments of fresh produce requiring quick action before it spoils. Last year, that included 10 million pounds of produce over 4 months from the Port of Philadelphia alone, most of it one or two items; 2017 was a big year for grapes and melons.

As milk sales are decreasing, dairy farms are being left in dire economic straits. To address this issue, one of Philabundance’s first partnerships was with three dairy farmers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Philabundance and other area food banks partnered with farmers who now make cheese under the group’s Abundantly Good brand. Local gourmet retailer Di Bruno Bros sells several varieties of the cheeses for $5.99 for 8 ounces; they pay a subsidy of one dollar per pound of cheese sold so that the farmers can continue providing free cheese to Philabundance—an arrangement that has supplied the food bank with 3,000 pounds of free cheddar to date. “It sort of uplifts the farmers and uplifts the clients as well,” says Bowdler.

The same farmers became upcycle fans and also now use the skim milk left over after butter production to make skim milk yogurt, which Philabundance buys at low cost for its clients. “It lowers his cost of production and allows us to get a product as every time he’s making the butter for sale he can make a skim milk yogurt for us,” Bowdler says.

Food Lab is also helping Philabundance use its own culinary job training program to teach the skills needed to use surplus food. The goal for both Philabundance and Food Lab is to go beyond raising awareness about food waste, says Deutsch. “I hope the students are proficient in this field so that we’ve sort of trained an army of food waste preventers.”

Upcycling to Market

Identifying an ingredient with high upcycle potential doesn’t mean getting it is particularly easy. Bahirat and Kwaw-Yankson say their requests for ingredients usually go unanswered. “We reach out to these companies and say, ‘Hey, we’re doing something with it, so can we collaborate?’ and we never hear back,” says Kwaw-Yankson.

That may be because there’s pervasive myth about liability, says Food Lab founder Deutsch. Restaurants, stores, and the like also don’t often have the resources to keep and package waste.

Uribe, of Lazy Bear Tea, knew that getting sufficient cascara wouldn’t be easy, simply because it’s not considered valuable by farmers. But by creating a product, she hopes they’ll be incentivized to process and sell it. Her company has worked on creating relationships with coffee farmers in the hopes of encouraging them to become suppliers.

Uribe says she and her co-founders also benefited from mentorships. They were accepted to entrepreneurship programs at the Harvard Innovation Lab and the Rock Accelerator at the Harvard Business School. They also joined Commonwealth Kitchen, a Boston organization that helps food entrepreneurs start and run their businesses.

ReGrained partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to get outside assurance that ReGrained’s process was operating safely and efficiently (the USDA co-invented the company’s grain-stabilization technology). Co-founder Kurzrock also advises asking for help. “Everyone in this industry was helped at some point and they’re willing to pay it forward.”

The Semantics of Waste

But simply labeling a product as upcycled isn’t enough to win long-term customers. ReGrained focuses on taste and nutritional benefits over waste messaging. “Some consumers will buy our products because they’re upcycled, but they’ll only come back if it tastes great,” Kurzrock says. “The mass market is not necessarily seeking something that’s upcycled.”

Lazy Bear Tea’s Uribe agrees — taste first, messaging second. “If you have something that tastes really good with a really compelling story, people will become really loyal,” she says. “Especially if the upcycled waste-to-food story is something that resonates with them.”

While all these food innovators champion using otherwise-unwanted ingredients, one thing you won’t find on their labels is the term “food waste.” Consumers want to feel that they’re helping solve a problem, but framing is important. “If you put ‘food waste’ on package they’ll feel like they’re getting trash,” says Kurzrock.

 

Research published in The Journal of Consumer Behavior found that study subjects were receptive to a new category of food—they call it Value-Added Surplus Products — if it’s framed as upcycled. And the assumption that food surplus is equivalent to trash is something that all these upcycling champions are eager to dispel.

For one thing, much of it is hardly trash. Some food is rejected because of a market glut, or because of small things like strict weight specs —Philabundance has received bags of grapes that were only 2 ounces short of store requirements.

Upcycling isn’t about foisting off garbage to low-income populations, says Deutsch, but about closing the holes in food supply chains and using what we have. “We have one planet, we have all this beautiful abundance of food, let’s celebrate it both for people who need good nutrition and need food and people who want to enjoy a quality food experience,” he says. “And those are all the same people.”

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Informants aren’t spies – they’re essential FBI tools

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

President Donald Trump tweeted this week that he would order the Department of Justice to investigate whether the FBI, under President Barack Obama, had “infiltrated or surveilled” his presidential campaign “for political purposes.”

Trump was referring to the FBI’s use of an informant to gather information in its probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The president described this informant as a “spy” who was “placed” in his campaign. Trump also framed the entire episode employing a Watergate suffix, calling it “spygate.” He has claimed it could be “one of the biggest political scandals in history.”

As an FBI historian, I believe an examination of how the FBI has handled and used informants in the past will shed light on this current controversy.

Informants get the information

Informants — an informal term for what the FBI really calls Confidential Human Sources — are, and always have been, one of the most basic sources of information in FBI and police investigations. As sources of information they are what counterintelligence professionals sometimes call “assets,” not spies.

The FBI does not “place” or insert informants, as it would do with undercover FBI agents. Informants are people who are already in a position to know or learn information and who willingly cooperate with the FBI. Most often, informants cooperate because they’re concerned with something they’ve seen or heard.

In writing my book “Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s "Sex Deviates” Program,“ I uncovered the identities of many FBI informants. Sometimes, they seek out the FBI and offer their services to an FBI agent handler out of concern for what they’ve seen. Such was the case with Dr. Alfred Gross, who had previously worked with the FBI and who in 1952 regarded a gay civil rights group he met as threatening because he viewed them as mentally ill.

Others became informants because they were strong anti-communists during the Cold War, like Warren Scarberry, an informant I uncovered who believed he saw in the Mattachine Society of Washington the work of Communists. He called and visited the FBI about this.

Still others acted out of a personal sense of patriotism or were criminal conspirators looking for a deal with prosecutors. Informants run the spectrum of motivations, from selfless to selfish.

A well-placed informant

In President Trump’s self-described "spygate,” the FBI’s informant was a retired international affairs professor at Cambridge University named Stefan Halper. Halper had established GOP connections. He worked variously for Republican presidents including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He was also a man who long served the U.S. intelligence community as a source.

It’s unsurprising, then, the FBI used Halper in its counterintelligence probe. Most significantly, he happened to have been in a unique position where he had connections to Trump campaign officials who all had different types of Russian contacts. These included Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis and Trump foreign policy advisers Michael Flynn, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

Today’s FBI does not practice political espionage at the behest of presidents or anyone else, and informants are not part of anything like that. There are investigative guidelines and congressional oversight mechanisms to prevent it. That was not always true: During the tenure of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (1924-1972), the FBI conducted unchecked political surveillance operations. The Hoover FBI also used informants in these efforts to monitor, for example, FDR’s foreign policy critics, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., student radicals and the anti-war movement, and to keep tabs on the LGBT community.

Hoover’s abuses forced reforms

Hoover’s actions were violations of Americans’ civil liberties and the trust placed in law enforcement. Precisely because of these Hoover-era abuses, special investigative regulations were put into place about the use of informants in the 1970s.

If an FBI probe is particularly sensitive and potentially involves “a greater risk to civil liberties,” then FBI agents are required to seek higher levels of authorization for their use. In the Hoover era, there was little to no oversight in the use of informants, let alone more intrusive investigative techniques. Today’s FBI is not the Hoover FBI.

Yet even during the Hoover years, informants were key to more standard FBI national security investigations.

The FBI captured Russian spy Rudolf Abel — who was portrayed in the 2015 Tom Hanks film “Bridge of Spies” — because an FBI informant within Abel’s circle, named Reino Haynaham, talked. In 1965, the FBI quickly apprehended the murderers of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo in Alabama because it had a paid informant within the Ku Klux Klan, Gary Thomas Rowe Jr.

It is no surprise, then, that FBI officials used a confidential human source in its counterintelligence probe about Russian election meddling.

The informant was in a position to gather information early in the FBI investigation. That basic information undoubtedly was then further developed and enhanced with more traditional documented sources, as is evidenced by the fact that both Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty and are now cooperating with the Mueller investigation.

What we see in today’s example is less about spying than a glimpse into how FBI national security investigations operate and unfold – and how they can sometimes be politicized.

Douglas M. Charles, Associate Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University

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Mixed reality market to grow to nearly $2.5 billon by 2023

AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, file

This article originally appeared on GearBrain.

The mixed reality space is just taking off — expected to grow globally from just north of $49 million in 2016 to nearly $2.5 billion by 2023, according to a new study from Stratistics MRC.

While virtual reality (VR) headsets, augmented reality (AR) apps and the like are certainly attributing to some of the adoption — growth is also coming from the business side. Entertainment devices like HTC Vive and even VR arcades are adding a fun factor to mixed-reality use. But companies too are interested in the way mixed-reality can improve the way they run their firms, with AR working its way into manufacturing on assembly lines, and even in their workers hands while on the road.

On the consumer side, apps that help people design their space are tapping into both VR and AR, helping people visualize a new renovation, or where holiday decorations or a table may look best in a living room.

There is still tremendous room for improvement to mixed reality devices, however. Anyone who has donned a VR headset has likely experienced VR sickness, similar to motion sickness, where what the eyes see does not correlate to the body. (It's not fun.)

Content quality can also vary. High-end VR devices like Oculus Rift produce immersive experiences but these are expensive, costing in the hundreds of dollars and out of reach for many consumers. Most people try VR for the first time through lower-end headsets, where their phone plays a game or short film watched through special glasses. In these cases, pictures can stall and break apart — leaving consumers unexcited.

VR arcades and amusement park rides that are tied to VR headsets are two ways the mixed reality industry is trying to create better, and more affordable, ways for people to try virtual reality, pushing them to spend more on mixed-reality devices and experiences themselves — and grow the market too.

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America’s graying population in 3 maps

Lisa F. Young

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The U.S. population has changed substantially in the last half century, growing by nearly 63 percent.

Perhaps the two most prominent demographic changes over the past 50 years relate to age. In 1968, the baby boom had just ended, and the oldest members of its cohort were only 22 years old.

As baby boomers age, the nation has substantially aged as well. In 1970, the median age in the U.S. was 28.1. In 2016, it was 37.9.

Demographers and geographers like myself have watched as this aging cohort transformed the U.S., from young children in the 1950s and 1960s to senior citizens today. This graying of America has left a distinctive geographical fingerprint.

Where older Americans live

Unsurprisingly, popular retirement states like Florida and Arizona have high concentrations of older Americans.

What may be more of a surprise is the broad swaths of elderly running through the Midwest and the Appalachians. These regions have aged significantly, as many younger residents headed toward the coasts.

Younger people have also moved out of New England, primarily in search of jobs. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut are among the seven states with a median age of over 40 in 2010; Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida are the others.

Not only is the U.S. aging, but the number of deaths is rising. This trend will accelerate over the next few decades.

Meanwhile, the number of births has declined since 2007. In fact, in 2013, over 30 percent of all U.S. counties experienced a phenomenon known as “natural decrease,” due the greater number of deaths than births. Natural decrease is now most prominent in Maine, the Appalachian region, the Great Plains and the Midwest.

Demographers expect this phenomenon to expand geographically over the coming years, as the general population continues to age.

Movement around the US

Over the last half century, Americans have steadily redistributed themselves, moving from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. From 1970 to 2010, the Northeast and Midwest grew 15.7 percent, while the South and West nearly doubled in population.

The country has also become more urban. The percentage of the population living in urban areas increased by about 7 percentage points between 1970 and 2010. Urbanization increased in all states except Oklahoma and Maine.

Despite this trend, many cities are now shrinking – particularly cities in the Northeast and Midwest. More people, particularly young adults, are leaving these places for economic opportunity than are coming in. The percentage of the population living in large cities has declined since 2013, while the percentage living in smaller cities increased from 17.9 to 20.1 percent.

Today, Americans are far less likely to move than they were 50 years ago. In 1968, 19 percent of the population changed their principal place of residence. This figure declined to just 11 percent in 2015.

In fact, despite a much larger population today, fewer total people are moving. In 1968, 37.3 million changed residence, while only 34.9 million did so in 2015. Indeed, the mobility rate in 2016 was the lowest it had been in decades.

Much of this change is attributable to age. People are less likely to move as they age. In 1968, parents of the baby boomers were in their highly mobile, young adult years, but today boomers are older and more apt to stay where they are.

Coast to coast

Migration over the last 50 years has led the population to become more bicoastal. In 2010, 46.2 percent of Americans lived in states bordering the ocean — up from 43.2 percent in 1970.

Baby boomers have contributed to this trend. Fifty years ago, this group was spread out evenly among the rest of the general population. By 1990, they had became more bicoastal and were concentrated in a small number of dynamic, growing metropolitan areas.

Between 1990 and 2000, a substantial number of boomers flocked from these metro areas to amenity-laden retirement and pre-retirement regions, like the Pacific Northwest, Florida, northern Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as some areas of the South, like the Ozark region and the Western Carolinas.

These areas have continued to grow, while baby boomers moved away in their greatest numbers from the southern Great Plains and the area along the Mississippi River Valley.

With the aging of the baby boomers, Generation X and millennials are now beginning to drive demographic change. With time, these groups will take an increasing role in determining the evolving geography of the U.S.

Peter Rogerson, Professor of Geography, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

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What “Roseanne” gets wrong about opioid addiction

ABC/Adam Rose

The new "Roseanne" series has been getting much acclaim, but the way the show addresses opioid addiction will not help the Connor family or any of the millions of families watching across the country. Roseanne’s use of painkillers to address her ongoing knee pain spirals out of control and results in the type of crisis facing many U.S. families today. The episodes (thankfully) do not attempt the stereotypical Hollywood-style resolution in 30 minutes, neither do they propose the type of approach that would allow the title character to get the help she needs.

What did the Connor family get wrong?

First, we see Roseanne’s husband Dan (John Goodman) respond emotionally (understandably) to his wife’s behavior. Driven by a physiological condition, an addicted person’s behavior often leads him or her to act in certain ways, causing friends and family members to behave in ways that are not only inconsistent with getting a person help, but also potentially harmful. The Conner family expends lots of energy in trying to figure out who has been using the missing opioid pills—when the answer is right in front of them all along. Rather than looking for a treatment option for his wife, Dan resorts to serving as a dispensary and doling out one pill every six to eight hours, not knowing that Roseanne has stashed a private supply of her own in her icepack. Dan’s well-meaning but misguided effort could easily have tragic results if the pills he provides to his wife are combined with those that she has hidden for herself. Obituaries and death certificates tragically contain the phrase “accidental overdose” due to situations just like this one.

Second, with this disease/disorder, people often try what has been referred to as "self-treatment," rather than seeking out appropriate care. We see things like parents grounding their kids, children flushing their parents’ cigarettes or alcohol (or other drugs), etc. The point here is that people need to seek help for a substance use disorder from professional providers—not try to handle the problem themselves through a show of force or discipline. Imagine if we tried that approach with diabetes or high cholesterol. For example, a parent I heard speak recently who had served on a non-profit board of an addiction treatment agency, shared that when he learned of his child’s heroin addiction his first step was not to help his child get help, but to purchase $1,000 worth of drug testing kits to try to impose abstinence.

Finally, there are major issues with a healthcare system when people have to figure out how to get the $3,000 deductible noted in the show that would have been required to allow Roseanne to have the knee operation she needs. One generation down, Roseanne’s daughter is pressured to take a less-than-desirable job to qualify for health insurance. Desperation may be a tremendous motivator, but should it be the driving force in an individual’s choice of employment simply because health benefits are offered?

What is needed to get an addicted person help?

The first thing is a complete revamping of how we view addiction. It is not a moral issue, although those who are addicted may indeed do “immoral” things. It is not a character flaw, although people in recovery do work on improving themselves. It is not something we can address solely through tougher laws, although appropriate laws are clearly needed.

It is a public health problem. We need accessible, affordable, evidence-based treatment for those with a substance use disorder. If each community in this country had treatment on demand, people like Roseanne’s character could access the care they need, when they need it. Instead, we are plagued with no bed availability, waiting lists, arbitrary and discriminatory policies against medication-assisted treatment, and other roadblocks to care that simply do not exist for more “mainstream” maladies.

There are two important components to address this critical problem: access to care and an adequate delivery system. Access is largely a financial issue, as the Roseanne episodes clearly show. Whether it be a single payer system, expanded Medicaid, or some other structure, people must be able to get the help they need without having to wait needlessly or figure out how to get the money to afford treatment. The current delivery system is flawed in that services at varied levels of care (outpatient, residential, medication-assisted) are not available in all communities. Enhanced access would drive the creation of more treatment options and provide the services that are so crucial to finding our way out of the current crisis.

Ironically, one of the ads aired during the final episode of "Roseanne" was a promo for an upcoming show titled The Last Days of Michael Jackson. Stigma around addiction is alive and well—preventing individuals and families from responding to a physiological problem (addiction) in the way they would for any other such issue. Who knows if the King of Pop would still be with us if we had a more enlightened view of addiction and its treatment?

As we wait for the next season of "Roseanne," let’s hope that the Conner family will consult with trained professionals to inform how they deal with their matriarch. What a great example it would be if she were to enter into a structured treatment regimen, manage her opioid withdrawal with appropriate oversight, and enter into recovery. America deserves that, and Roseanne would join the millions of people in successful, stable recovery.

Personality tests with deep-sounding questions provide shallow answers about the “true” you

Shutterstock/Getty/Salon

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Have you ever clicked on a link like “What does your favorite animal say about you?” wondering what your love of hedgehogs reveals about your psyche? Or filled out a personality assessment to gain new understanding into whether you’re an introverted or extroverted “type”? People love turning to these kinds of personality quizzes and tests on the hunt for deep insights into themselves. People tend to believe they have a “true” and revealing self hidden somewhere deep within, so it’s natural that assessments claiming to unveil it will be appealing.

As psychologists, we noticed something striking about assessments that claim to uncover people’s “true type.” Many of the questions are poorly constructed – their wording can be ambiguous and they often contain forced choices between options that are not opposites. This can be true of BuzzFeed-type quizzes as well as more seemingly sober assessments.

On the other hand, assessments created by trained personality psychologists use questions that are more straightforward to interpret. The most notable example is probably the well-respected Big Five Inventory. Rather than sorting people into “types,” it scores people on the established psychological dimensions of openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. This simplicity is by design; psychology researchers know that the more respondents struggle to understand the question, the worse the question is.

But the lack of rigor in “type” assessments turns out to be a feature, not a bug, for the general public. What makes tests less valid can ironically make them more interesting. Since most people aren’t trained to think about psychology in a scientifically rigorous way, it stands to reason they also won’t be great at evaluating those assessments. We recently conducted series of studies to investigate how consumers view these tests. When people try to answer these harder questions, do they think to themselves “This question is poorly written”? Or instead do they focus on its difficulty and think “This question’s deep”? Our results suggest that a desire for deep insight can lead to deep confusion.

Confusing difficult for deep

In our first study, we showed people items from both the Big Five and from the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS), a popular “type” assessment that contains many questions we suspected people find comparatively difficult. Our participants rated each item in two ways. First, they rated difficulty. That is, how confusing and ambiguous did they find it? Second, what was its perceived “depth”? In other words, to what extent did they feel the item seemed to be getting at something hidden deep in the unconscious?

Sure enough, not only were these perceptions correlated, the KTS was seen as both more difficult and deeper. In follow-up studies, we experimentally manipulated difficulty. In one study, we modified Big Five items to make them harder to answer like the KTS items, and again we found that participants rated the more difficult versions as “deeper.”

We also noticed that some personality assessments seem to derive their intrigue from having seemingly nothing to do with personality at all. Take one BuzzFeed quiz, for example, that asks about which colors people associate with abstract concepts like letters and days of the week and then outputs “the true age of your soul.” Even if people trust BuzzFeed more for entertainment than psychological truths, perhaps they are actually on board with the idea that these difficult, abstract decisions do reveal some deep insights. In fact, that is the entire idea behind classically problematic measures such as the Rorschach, or “ink blot,” test.

In two studies inspired by that BuzzFeed quiz, we found exactly that. We gave people items from purported “personality assessment” checklists. In one study, we assigned half the participants to the “difficult” condition, wherein the assessment items required them to choose which of two colors they associated with abstract concepts, like the letter “M.” In the “easier” condition, respondents were still required to rate colors on how much they associated them with those abstract concepts, but they more simply rated one color at a time instead of choosing between two.

Again, participants rated the difficult version as deeper. Seemingly, the sillier the assessment, the better people think it can read the hidden self.

Intuition may steer you wrong

One of the implications of this research is that people are going to have a hard time leaving behind the bad ideas baked into popular yet unscientific personality assessments. The most notable example is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which infamously remains quite popular while doing a fairly poor job of assessing personality, due to longstanding issues with the assessment itself and the long-discredited Jungian theory behind it. Our findings suggest that Myers-Briggs-like assessments that have largely been debunked by experts might persist in part because their formats overlap quite well with people’s intuitions about what will best access the “true self.”

People’s intuitions do them no favors here. Intuitions often undermine scientific thinking on topics like physics and biology. Psychology is no different. People arbitrarily divide parts of themselves into “true” and superficial components and seem all too willing to believe in tests that claim to definitively make those distinctions. But the idea of a “true self” doesn’t really work as a scientific concept.

Some people might be stuck in a self-reinforcing yet unproductive line of thought: Personality assessments can cause confusion. That confusion in turn overlaps with intuitions of how they think their deep psychology works, and then they tell themselves the confusion is profound. So intuitions about psychology might be especially pernicious. Following them too closely could lead you to know less about yourself, not more.

Randy Stein, Assistant Professor of Marketing, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and Alexander Swan, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Eureka College

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Outlier poll that showed GOP lead in the race for Congress abruptly shifts back to the Democrats

AP/J. Scott Applewhite

A poll that helps survey the generic Congressional ballot no longer shows a dramatic lead for the GOP, a drastic shift that will crush conservatives looking for evidence of a feeble blue wave this upcoming November.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll indicated last week that Republicans attained a five-point lead in the ballot, a drastic bump considering Democrats had a plus-three margin in the previous two polls. Right-wing pundits were absolutely giddy over the turn of events, as they shared the new poll on social media to their then-disheartened audience.

Blue wave crashing... https://t.co/4T9EBI3Lnw

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 22, 2018

That same poll Hannity was referencing released new numbers on Sunday, which now report a seven-point lead for Democrats.

Hannity was not alone in celebrating the previous shift in the generic Congressional ballot, which measures national support for either of the two major parties in the upcoming midterm elections. Supporters of the Republican Party have been whispering for months of a possible let down for Democrats this upcoming fall. They pointed to President Trump's tax cuts and his diplomacy abroad as victories for the administration and the party as a whole.

When the Reuters/Ipsos poll came out last Monday, Fox News pundits were whipped into a frenzy, relieved to see evidence of a GOP comeback.

Dems' generic ballot advantage keeps sliding amid increased economic satisfaction, for which most voters credit Trump somewhat or "a great deal:" https://t.co/pW617c3PWd

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) May 22, 2018

It turns out the supposed Republican resurgence was mostly due to the volatility of the Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Charles Franklin, a pollster for the Huffington Post and the director of the Marquette Law School poll, explained that the short-lived erosion of Democratic support could be attributed to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, which found a shift that no other poll had registered. Franklin wrote on Twitter that the Reuters/Ipsos poll's sampling had dramatically shifted beginning on May 1, as more Republicans were surveyed than usual. This shift accounted for the large bump reported on earlier this week.

Since the poll on Monday, however, the Reuters/Ipsos party identification sampling had moved to a plus-4.1 margin in favor of Democrats, Franklin reported, and the new generic ballot shifted accordingly.

Republicans who championed the previous Reuters/Ipsos poll seemed to have made the classic mistake of putting too much stock on a single survey. In his article for Townhall, Guy Benson did hedge his optimism.

"Color me a bit skeptical, and these numbers will bounce around regardless," he wrote of the shifting ballot.

At the same time, Benson could not hide his rejuvenated positivity.

"Republicans haven't led on this question in any major in roughly two years, so it's worth flagging," he added.

Benson proposed that the source of the GOP bump began and ended with the economy.

"What explains this see-saw back toward Republicans?" he asked rhetorically. "As someone once said, it's the economy, stupid."

Now that the Reuters/Ipsos poll has recalibrated, Republicans have to face the potential reality of a Democratic victory in November. National Journal editor and Fox News contributor Josh Kraushaar attempted to temper the right's confidence in a piece Sunday, titled, "Why Democrats are still favorites to win the House."

While Kraushaar failed to note the change in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, he did concede that a blue wave was likely approaching.

"Despite encouraging economic news for Republicans, and GOP gains in national polling, I’m not quite as confident about the prospects of a GOP comeback," he wrote.

"It’s impossible to ignore the consistently supercharged Democratic turnout in election after election, from swing districts to those fought on conservative turf," he added. "Even if you look to the larger contests (like last year’s governor’s races) as a stronger indicator, the results are highly encouraging for the Democratic Party. If in our polarized times, Democrats simply win most GOP-held Clinton seats and pick off competitive open-seat races where Republicans retired, they’re well on their way to a narrow majority."

Again, Kraushaar did conveniently ignore the shifting numbers of the generic Congressional ballot; nevertheless, even he realized that GOP chances are rather slim this November.

Don't expect Hannity to offer any insights on the Democratic uptick in the Reuters/Ipsos poll. He and Trump have the propensity to share polling numbers that reflect well on the administration and the Republican Party. But 95 percent of the time, when the polls show Trump at historic lows, the White House and his sycophants act as if polling numbers are an extension of fake news.

For Democrats to retake the House, the party needs a popular vote margin of between three and four points, according to Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist and contributor for the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

As it stands, Democrats maintain a six-point margin, according to a composition of polls made by FiveThirtyEight.

The stakes this November could not be any higher. Trump and his legal team clearly fear that the Robert Mueller investigation may yield evidence or information that might support impeachment. Because impeachment proceedings are entirely political, as opposed to legal, Democrats will need to retake the House if it hopes to hold Trump and his campaign accountable.

Memorial Day, tradition and potato salad

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There’s a picture of my Grandma Bev, her sister Julie, and their sister-in-law Vicki perched in lawn chairs at the annual family Memorial Day barbecue in North Wales, Pennsylvania. Their eyes crinkle in the sunshine. The suburbs unfurls vast green grass behind them. They look happy.

As Bev got older, her makeup got more and more orange, as if she had given up on the attempt to match the color to her face. In the photo, her foundation looks as if it has begun to melt in the beginning-of-summer heat. There’s a plastic fork in her hand and a plate of something in her lap. Potato salad?

It’s been several years (three? four?) since I’ve been to the family barbecue. Last week, my cousin Dan texted me: Your parents always come, why don’t you join them? And I texted back, suddenly inspired to remedy my absence: See you there!

Dan is my second cousin—Julie’s grandson. His mom hosts the event in her backyard, and has every year since before I can remember. When I was a kid, Dan and his two brothers played all sorts of games that I found exotic and thrilling. Like capture the flag, which I thought was only for gym class when the teacher didn’t know what to do with us, but took on a whole new allure with an eager gang of neighborhood kids and a gigantic red t-shirt as the designated flag. They let me join and didn’t even seem to mind that I needed a refresher on the rules.

Games with throngs of kids in big yards felt mystical, from another universe. Besides that day each year, they were not a part of my childhood. I grew up in a Baltimore rowhouse, an only child. Sometimes I drew with chalk on the sidewalk and practiced handclaps with my neighbor, but only if my mom was watching from the front porch. When she let me walk to the corner store across the street alone to buy a popsicle one sweltering summer afternoon, I felt like I had arrived in the world. Sure, I played soccer at Wyman Park on Saturday mornings and my dad coached a neighborhood girl’s basketball team where I was a clumsy but enthusiastic center. But I had never run through suburban streets unencumbered, one family’s backyard turning into another’s, sprinklers spraying at our shins. We ran and ran. The kids laughed and shrieked and raced; I was swept up in the buoyant energy of the group. I wondered if this was what it would be like to have brothers or a big family that I saw more than once a year. The day smelled of just cut grass and sweat and smoke rising from the grill.

Dan’s dad used to cook clams on the grill, dousing them with butter when their shells popped open. They were briny and wonderful. When I was a teenager, Dan’s parents split up and the clams became a thing of the past. But the rest of the menu remained unchanged: hot dogs, hamburgers, and grilled chicken. Fat slices of watermelon for dessert that dripped their sticky juice down my forearms. Classic, all-American, and perfect

My mom would worry about what to bring and ultimately decide on potato salad—one made with vinaigrette instead of mayonnaise so it wouldn’t get nasty sitting outside in the heat all afternoon, next to the bowls and Tupperware of sides the other family and neighbors brought all lined up on a checkered tablecloth. Our game of capture the flag would devolve into chaos and we’d get hungry for potato salad and hot dogs, grilled until the skin began to char and snap. There is nothing better.

This year will be the first time I bring my fiancé Anthony to the barbecue. What have we been doing with the three Memorial Days since we’ve been living together? I asked him in bed last night, trying to remember. I couldn’t sleep. Last year we rode Citi bikes to Brooklyn Crab with a bunch of Anthony’s British friends—Anthony is from England. We mangled snow crabs with our mallets, drank beer, and played cornhole, which I lost epically. The year before that? We both came up blank.

I’m excited to bring Anthony to the family festivities. He’s met some of the cousins, but not Dan. Dan has a girlfriend who I haven’t met yet. So does his brother. There will still be hot dogs, and I will still try to snag one that is well done/blistered. Kid me liked ketchup; grownup me prefers mustard.

Things are both different and the same. Grandma Bev died right before I met Anthony, and Julie passed years before that. I know they both would have loved Anthony. Bev would have kissed him and left lipstick smeared on his bearded cheek. Vicki is still healthy, laughing hard, casting knowing looks, and smoking cigarettes.

“The old lady generation is dwindling,” my mom tells me over the phone. “Now we’re the old generation.”

She’s right. We’re not the kids anymore, either. Two of my cousins have babies, one who I haven’t met yet. In the pictures, her smile fills the whole frame. I wonder if they’ll play capture the flag when they are older, or badminton at the nets that get set up on the side of the house, shuttlecocks swooping across the blue sky.

“What should we bring?” my mom asks me.

“Potato salad.” Obviously. Hers is the best.

“But it will have to be the kind without mayo, since it’s going to be outside in the sun.”

“No mayo and lots of herbs. Like always.”

Anthony has lived in the US for almost a decade now, but this will be his first family Memorial Day barbecue. He’s good at badminton, and grilling burgers, and hanging out in the sunshine. Everything will be just like always, and everything will be new.

Mayo-less Herby Potato Salad  

Serves: 6

Ingredients

2 pounds small potatoes

3 tablespoons white wine

3 tablespoons Champagne vinegar

1 teaspoon wholegrain mustard

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

2/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1/4 cup scallions, minced

2 tablespoons fresh dill, minced

2 tablespoons flat-leaf parsley, minced

Directions

Cook the potatoes in a large pot of salted boiling water under tender, about 30 minutes. Drain in a colander and let cool.
Combine the vinegar, mustard, salt, and pepper. Slowly whisk in the olive oil to make an emulsified vinaigrette.
When they are cool enough to handle, cut in quarters and place in a bowl. Toss with wine and vinaigrette. Add the scallions, dill and parsley, and more salt and pepper as needed and gently mix. Enjoy warm or at room temperature.



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What are these “levels” of autonomous vehicles?

AP Photo/Yong Teck Lim

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

As automated and autonomous vehicles become more common on U.S. roads, it’s worth a look at what these machines can — and can’t — do. At the University of Michigan’s Mcity, where I serve as director, we’re working to advance connected and automated vehicle technologies, to make cars safer, save energy, and make transportation more accessible to more people.

In 2014, the professional society SAE International, originally founded as the Society of Automotive Engineers, described six levels of autonomous vehicles, which it updated in 2016. Also in 2016, the U.S. Department of Transportation used that description as part of its official policy on automated vehicles on U.S. roads. What are those levels?

Level 0 is where most cars are right now, with a human driver responsible for every aspect of driving. The car may have some systems that notify the driver of certain hazards, like lane departure warnings, but the car does not do anything on its own.

Level 1 sees the beginning of automation, when the car’s computer and mechanical systems control one aspect of vehicle motion — such as its speed or steering. Cruise control is a type of Level 1 automation, in which onboard systems regulate speed, but traditional cruise control is far less safe because it only involves acceleration, not braking — and doesn’t involve any monitoring of surroundings. With adaptive cruise control, by contrast, on-board systems regulate both acceleration and braking to stay a safe distance behind a lead vehicle, and to react safely and smoothly when another vehicle merges in front or leaves the lane. All other aspects of driving, including steering and detecting and avoiding hazards, are still human-controlled. Another Level 1 technology is lane-keeping assistance, in which the car steers itself to stay in a particular lane on the roadway, while the human driver controls the speed and all other driving tasks.

A Level 2 autonomous vehicle can control both the steering and the speed at the same time, essentially offering partial automation. The human must remain ready to take full control in an emergency and is ultimately in charge of and responsible for whatever the vehicle does. GM’s Super Cruise and Tesla’s Autopilot are examples of Level 2 systems.

Level 3 automation is controversial. The car not only manages steering and speed, but is responsible for monitoring the environment around it and detecting challenges that require human intervention. In normal conditions, a human driver would not need to pay any attention at all, but if something went wrong with the system, the person would have to be ready to take over right away. Some industry experts think it’s possible for a disengaged driver to respond properly and quickly, but others don’t – and therefore skip right over this level in their technology development.

Level 4 and 5 automated vehicles are truly “driverless” — meaning a human driver is not needed at all. The car itself handles normal driving and is responsible for safe responses in difficult situations, such as pulling over when a sensor fails or a heavy snow blocks visibility. Level 4 vehicles are usually limited in some way, such as driving no faster than 25 mph, or not driving when it’s raining or snowing heavily, or driving only in a specific location, such as Mountain View, California, or Phoenix, Arizona, where many companies are testing autonomous vehicles.

When a self-driving car can operate safely and reliably anywhere, in any weather, at any speed, only then is it a Level 5 autonomous vehicle. This doesn’t exist – yet. In fact, some believe it will never be cost-effective to develop and test its safety enough, suggesting Level 5 autonomous vehicles may exist just on paper for a long time to come.

Huei Peng, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan

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Wall Street regulations need a facelift, not a minor Dodd-Frank makeover

AP

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Republicans finally managed to roll back some of the Wall Street regulations passed by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis after years of trying.

While it wasn’t a full repeal as some had hoped, it’s the first legislative overhaul since the Dodd-Frank Act became law in 2010.

This debate has primarily been framed as a fight over regulation. Democrats generally want more to protect taxpayers and investors from the next crisis; Republicans want less because they argue it stifles economic growth.

So who’s right?

Based on our combined 35 years of experience with securities markets and the research we’ve done for our book, “When the Levees Break: Re-visioning Regulation of the Securities Markets,” we think both sides are wrong. The issue isn’t about more or less regulation but about the need for a streamlined system that supports 21st-century investing.

If we had our way, the whole system of financial regulation would be burned to the ground and replaced with something entirely different.

Of bonds and banks

When we think of financial markets, we tend to jumble securities markets like stocks, bonds and commodities with conventional bank lending such as checking accounts and lines of credit.

Dodd-Frank, for example, was ostensibly focused on regulation of securities markets, but the rules that got the most attention were those that affect the “too big to fail” banks. That those banks straddled both worlds – securities trading and traditional banking – is what made the 2008 financial crisis life-threatening.

But only securities trading, and in particular derivatives, was at the root of the crisis. So for our purposes, when we talk about financial regulation, our focus is on the securities markets.

How did we get here?

The financial markets meltdown in the fall of 2008 devastated the U.S. economy, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the stock market rout that preceded the Great Depression in October 1929.

After the 1929 crash, lawmakers reacted by passing laws aimed at ensuring investor protection. Two groundbreaking pieces of legislation, passed in 1933 and 1934, required companies to submit quarterly and annual reports and established the Securities and Exchange Commission. These laws form the cornerstone of modern securities markets regulation.

But they were only the beginning. As markets expanded and changed, Congress continued to craft new laws that added more agencies to oversee Wall Street activities. As a result, we have more than two dozen agencies, self-regulatory organizations and exchanges – such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Treasury, the Department of Labor and the Justice Department – not to mention state securities agencies, all with overlapping regulatory jurisdictions.

Moreover, the laws have been reactionary – rather than visionary – resulting in competing concerns and duplicative audit and enforcement procedures. Not surprisingly, there is largely no coordination or communication between them.

Meanwhile, the SEC – as primary regulator – is bogged down with too many directives, many of which are under- or unfunded. For decades, whenever Congress passed a bill to “regulate” big changes in the markets – from market crashes to “advancements” such as mutual funds and investment advisers – the SEC has been required to add oversight of these new practices to their existing responsibilities. Dodd-Frank, for example, expanded the SEC’s role and called for additional internal audits of existing practices but – like past market-related legislation – failed to include funding for those activities.

Amid all the regulation, investor protection seems to have gotten lost.

Enter Dodd-Frank

The severity of the 2008 crash and its economic impact – including investment company failures and unprecedented government bailouts – goaded Congress into action.

In 2010 Democratic lawmakers passed the Dodd-Frank Act, the most extensive revision of securities regulation since the 1930s, with the hope that more regulation would prevent another crisis.

Republicans have argued for its repeal ever since, claiming the law and the regulations designed to implement it – some of which have yet to be implemented – inhibit prosperity.

Both parties are missing the point. The current system of financial regulation is built on how stocks were traded in the 1930s – when computers and algorithmic trading had yet to be a glimmer in a quant’s eye. To paraphrase an Oldsmobile commercial, it’s not your father’s stock market anymore.

My, how markets have changed

Financial markets have undergone a fundamental transformation over the past 80 years.

First of all, there are the investors themselves. The mom and pop investor who the SEC was created to protect has by and large been replaced by institutional investors, including quantitative analysts, or “quants,” that use complex algorithmic formulas to predict the best trading strategies. In fact, algorithmic trading makes up the majority of volume in today’s markets.

Then there’s the issue of disclosure. Since the dawn of federal securities regulation, lawmakers and regulators have relied on disclosure to protect investors. Public companies are required to disclose volumes of information, from financial information to dealings with Iran and even their code of ethics. As a result, a company can spend over a million dollars each year complying with disclosure regulations that few people actually read. Yet every time there’s a new disaster, Congress piles on the disclosure requirements, as happened with Dodd-Frank.

But for all the hundreds of pages of disclosure, at no time in the past 80 years has there been a mandate to review the actual securities products issued by public companies and investment banks. There are no “safety” standards for stocks, like there are for cars or toasters. The products that brought down the house in 2008 – mortgage-backed securities and products derived from them – continue to be offered to the public, including new ones backed by credit card debt and student loans.

Finally, the SEC and other regulators are unequipped to keep up with the breathtaking changes in technology, let alone anticipate potential advances and challenges. To understand why, one must only consider the breadth of organizations that have fallen victim to hackers, from Target and Yahoo to the Veterans Administration, and the Federal Reserve itself.

Unfortunately, however, Congress does not fund the SEC in a way that would allow it to pay for the skills or systems it needs to keep up with technological and other market advances. Following Dodd-Frank, for example, the SEC’s budget was actually reduced, even as its responsibilities multiplied.

In sum, what we have is a regulatory system that fails in its mission to protect investors. The structure used to oversee current investment practices, corporate disclosures, product development and technological advances is based on the market failures of 1929. It’s a bit like trying to surf the internet using a typewriter.

Preparing for the next crash

The next “big” crash will likely be bigger than the last one. So how do we prepare for it?

What we’ve done so far won’t protect us in the future. Dodd-Frank is largely an extension of the existing patchwork structure. While the new legislation won’t make things worse – as it’s targeting small and mid-sized banks – Republican hopes to repeal the rest of it and return banks to the pre-crisis period of self-regulation would. After the next crash, institutions will not be too big to fail, they’ll be too big to save.

The answer, in our view, is to move away from a fight about how much regulation toward a complete rethinking of how we regulate investing. Only then will the U.S. begin to prepare for the next big one.

This is an updated version of an article published on May 2, 2017.

Jena Martin, Professor of Law, West Virginia University and Karen Kunz, Associate Professor of Public Administration, West Virginia University

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