Viewpoint: Apple's iPhone launches no longer excite

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By Dan Lyons Creator of the 'Fake Steve' blog

Apple unveils the latest version of its iPhone this Wednesday. It will be the first since the death of Steve Jobs.

To mark the occasion the BBC asked Dan Lyons, Newsweek magazine's technology editor and creator of the satirical blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, to pen an article about the firm's progress over past year.
This is his provocative view.

Somewhere up there, I can hear Steve screaming

Back in 2006 I launched a blog where I pretended to be Apple CEO Steve Jobs. My alter ego, "Fake Steve," had a good run, but I shut it down in January 2011 when it became apparent that Jobs was in poor health. Nevertheless, even now, I'm constantly wondering what Steve would think about whatever Apple is doing.
This week it's the the iPhone 5. Everyone pretty much accepts that Apple will introduce it, and there have been so many leaks that everybody pretty much seems to know what it's going to be. Word is it will look a lot like the last two versions of the iPhone, except a bit thinner and a bit taller, with upgraded guts and a refreshed operating system.

Samsung's Galaxy S3 is outselling the iPhone 4S in some countries

If that's correct, I imagine Steve is not happy. First of all, he'd be furious about the leaks. Steve liked surprising people.
More important, is this really the best we can expect from an outfit that claims to be the most innovative company in the world? This is the sixth version of the iPhone, and the user interface still looks almost exactly like the original iPhone in 2007.
The hardware on the iPhone has been the same for two years, since the iPhone 4 and 4S were virtually identical.
Now, having had two years to plot and scheme, Apple's renowned designer Jonathan Ive has replaced the tiny 3.5in (8.9cm) screen with a slightly-less-tiny 4in (10.2cm) screen? Wow. Knock me over with a feather. What do you do with the rest of your time, Jony?
This is what happens when a company is too cheap to invest in research and development. Did you know that Apple spends far less on R&D than any of its rivals - a paltry 2% of revenues, versus 14% for Google and Microsoft?
No wonder the Android platform, where new models appear every week, now represents 68% of the smartphone market, up from 47% a year ago, while Apple slid to 17% over the same period.
In case you're bad at math, let me work that out for you: Android's market share is now four times that of Apple. Four times!
Worse, despite all its bluster about innovation, Apple has become a copycat, and not even a good one. Why is Apple making the iPhone bigger? To keep up with the top Android phones.

Apple's stock has hit new heights under chief executive Tim Cook

(Phones that, mind you, Apple fanboys ridiculed at first.)
The problem is that the new iPhone won't really give you much more screen real estate than the old one. Worse, it looks ridiculous.
Apple also has become a copycat in tablets. Jobs once said the iPad's 9.7in screen was the perfect size, and smaller tablets made no sense. Then the Android camp had success with 7in tablets like Amazon's Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7, and now Apple supposedly will announce its own smaller iPad in October. Talk about thinking different!
What else is there to complain about?
Um, Siri still doesn't work. The oft-rumoured Apple TV doesn't exist yet, presumably because media companies won't let Apple take over their business.
The latest batch of Apple ads were such embarrassing garbage that Apple to take them down from YouTube. Apple's new guy in charge of retail launched a plan to lay off workers and boost profits, then had to walk it back when people pointed out that this was stupid.
The big $1bn (£650m) patent "victory" over Samsung made Apple look like a bully, and also raised awareness of how good Samsung's latest products are.
Last month, Samsung's Galaxy S3, with its huge 4.8in screen, outsold the iPhone 4S in the United States, the first time any smartphone has outsold the iPhone in the States.
Apple got where it was by taking bold risks. Now it has become a company that copies others and plays it safe.
A company that once was run by a product visionary now is run by a number-cruncher - chief executive Tim Cook, whose claim to fame involves running an efficient supply chain and beating ever lower prices out of Asian subcontractors and component suppliers.
To use a car analogy, six years ago the iPhone was like a sexy new flagship model from BMW or Porsche. Today it's a Toyota Camry. Safe, reliable, boring. The car your mom drives. The car that's so popular that its maker doesn't dare mess with the formula.

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976. He stepped down as chief executive in August, 2011.

Apple seems less interested in blowing people away than it is in milking profit out of the existing lineup. At this Cook is doing marvellously well.
Sales are booming and will top $150bn this year, with net profit margins of nearly 30%. That's incredible in any business, but qualifies as a miracle when you're selling consumer electronics hardware.
Apple has more than $100bn in cash. Its market value of $632bn makes it the biggest company in the world, bigger than any company in US history.
That's great for Apple's shareholders. But for customers, who cares? In terms of products, Apple has become the one thing it should never be. Apple has become boring.
Somewhere up there, I can hear Steve screaming.

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Time for a Time Out: Why Are 40,000 Children So Harshly Disciplined in Public Schools?

If psychiatric facilities can eliminate the traumatic punishment techniques of isolation and restraint, why can't public schools?

By Maia Szalavitz | @maiasz

Locked in cramped, windowless rooms, tied in body-restricting bags, denied food, water and bathroom access: all of this is happening not to patients in the overlooked back wards of state mental hospitals, but to children as young as 5 in American public schools.
In the 2009-10 school year, some 40,000 children were restrained or isolated as discipline for bad behavior — most of these students had physical, developmental or learning and behavioral needs — according to Department of Education data. That research was cited in a revealing op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times written by a father whose daughter was deeply traumatized by such treatment. A 2009 Government Accountability Office report also found “hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of these methods on school children during the past two decades,” in both public and private schools.
Practices of restraint and isolation were long used to control resistant patients in psychiatric facilities. But following decades of tragedy and trauma — including hundreds of deaths of patients who were subjected to such treatment — these tactics are now heavily regulated. Federal law requires that the least restrictive measures always be deployed and bans the use of isolation and restraint outright in cases where the patient poses no danger to his or herself or others.  In psychiatric centers, using seclusion or restraint for punishment or discipline is illegal.
In fact, in much of Europe and in some U.S. psychiatric centers, restraints and isolation rooms have been eliminated entirely.
(MORE: How Childhood Trauma May Make the Brain Vulnerable to Addiction, Depression)
Yet there is no federal regulation, let alone an outright ban, of the disciplinary use of these tactics in U.S. public schools. Nor is there any requirement that educators be trained in the use of positive techniques; in many states, teachers may even add corporal punishment like beatings and paddling on top of restraint and isolation. These methods fail to change student behavior, and the result is a horrifyingly similar pattern of trauma, abuse and death among students that ultimately led psychiatry to strictly limit physical seclusion.
Investigative reporter Bill Lichtenstein described in the Times how he discovered the maltreatment of his 5-year-old daughter, Rose, who suffered from speech and language delays, but was otherwise characterized as a “model of age-appropriate behavior” by her preschool. In 2006, Rose’s kindergarten called her parents to come pick her up because she had taken off her clothing:

At school, her mother and I found Rose standing alone on the cement floor of a basement mop closet, illuminated by a single light bulb. There was nothing in the closet for a child — no chair, no books, no crayons, nothing but our daughter standing naked in a pool of urine, looking frightened as she tried to cover herself with her hands. On the floor lay her favorite purple-striped Hanna Andersson outfit and panties.
Rose got dressed and we removed her from the school. We later learned that Rose had been locked in the closet five times that morning. She said that during the last confinement, she needed to use the restroom but didn’t want to wet her outfit. So she disrobed. Rather than help her, the school called us and then covered the narrow door’s small window with a file folder, on which someone had written “Don’t touch!”
We were told that Rose had been in the closet almost daily for three months, for up to an hour at a time. At first, it was for behavior issues, but later for not following directions. Once in the closet, Rose would pound on the door, or scream for help, staff members said, and once her hand was slammed in the doorjamb while being locked inside.

(MORE: Human Rights Watch: Hundreds of Thousands Still Tortured in the Name of Drug Treatment)
Not only is there no government regulation of the use of isolation and restraint in schools, but there is also no requirement that parents be informed when it occurs. The use of these tactics has risen in public schools as children with developmental and learning disabilities have been increasingly included in mainstream classrooms. But sadly, their teachers are often not given enough training and support to use safer and more effective, positive disciplinary approaches.
These harsh methods have already resulted in death. In one case, described in testimony [PDF] given at Congressional hearings on the issue in 2009, foster mother Toni Price recounted the last day in the life of 14-year-old Cedric Napoleon. On the morning of March 7, 2002, as Cedric left for school, she said, her foster son had beamed, “You know I love you, Ma.”
Cedric had been abused and neglected from the beginning of his life: as a little child, he’d resorted to rummaging through the garbage to feed himself. And like many neglected children, he was slight and small for his age. Despite his size and history of starvation, however, his 8th-grade teacher found it acceptable to use food deprivation as a disciplinary tactic.  He had never been aggressive or violent.
(MORE: Increasingly, Internet Activism Helps Shutter Abusive ‘Troubled Teen’ Boot Camps)
By 2:30 p.m., on the day Cedric died, he had been denied his lunch for more than two hours because he stopped working on his assignments. The boy stood up and tried to walk out of class, but his 230-lb. teacher threw him on the floor and sat on him when he resisted being forced back into his chair.
Panicked, Cedric said he couldn’t breathe. Price testified that the teacher “snapped, ‘If you can speak, you can breathe.’” Soon, the boy could do neither. By the time an ambulance was called, the Cedric was dead.
Over the centuries, psychiatrists learned that restraint and isolation are harmful and rarely necessary — and that simply allowing their widespread use is what what actually made these practices seem essential and important for discipline. But by prioritizing the effort to do away with them, facilities can often eliminate seclusion and restraint completely; many psychiatric institutions in the U.S. have now moved from restraining patients multiple times a week to using the tactic only once or twice a year. All such facilities report improvements in the health and morale of both patients and staff as a result: restraint and seclusion tend to traumatize not only the victims, but also those who must impose the punishment, as well as those who witness the related violence.
(MORE: Treating Addiction: A Top Doc Explains Why Kind Love Beats Tough Love)
If psychiatric centers can do without restraint or isolation, there’s no reason schools should need them. Congress should ban isolation rooms and the use of restraint tactics in all schools, public and private, including “troubled teen” boot camps and wilderness programs, whose disciplinary tactics are also unregulated and have caused children’s deaths. Corporal punishment is banned in institutions housing the elderly, criminals and psychiatric patients, so it should be banned in schools as well.
Moreover, all teachers should be trained in positive behavioral techniques that have been shown to improve behavior in students with or without special needs, and reduce the need for extreme measures. If children display ongoing behavior problems that are so severe that they don’t respond to positive approaches, they need to be helped by specialists, not secretly subjected to repeated and potentially traumatic punishment.
As your elementary school history teacher probably taught you, if you don’t learn from your past, you are condemned to repeat it. We can’t continue to allow schools to resurrect the torturous history of maltreatment in the mentally ill in our most vulnerable children.
MORE: ‘Shock’ School Trial: Where Is the Evidence that Abuse Helps Treat Autism?
Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

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The Strange Allure of the Gold Standard

By David Futrelle | August 29, 2012 | 143

Getty Images

Stacks of gold bars.

Some Republicans want to take the country forward by taking us back — way back – to the gold standard. The Republican party platform, approved on Tuesday, warns against the evils of “easy money and loose credit” and calls for a commission to ”investigate possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar.” This proposal is clearly a sop to Ron Paul, who made “sound money” one of his big issues during his failed campaign, and has about as much chance of being enacted as Romney has of winning the African-American vote. But the mere fact of its existence is significant.

Almost everyone who is not Ron Paul, or at the very least a Ron Paul fan, thinks the idea of returning to the gold standard is daft. A recent University of Chicago poll of top academic economists found precisely zero who thought that was a good idea. Liberal commenters are aghast that the issue is even being raised. Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has described the gold standard as  “an almost comically (and cosmically) bad idea.” On The Atlantic, Matthew O’Brien called the gold standard “the world’s worst economic idea.” He conceded that “[t]here might be worse ideas than this, but they generally involve jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge because everybody else is doing it.”
But aversion for the gold standard is hardly confined to the left. Economist Milton Friedman, the late king of the monetarists, argued that the idea was fundamentally “anti-libertarian because what they mean by a gold standard is a governmentally fixed price for gold.”
(MORE: Is the U.S. Headed for a Double-Dip Recession?)
Yet the gold standard still has its fans. What’s the appeal? True goldbugs have an almost religious faith in the power of the precious metal, and a deep distrust of government. To some, what they call “sound money” is the only moral solution. At a conference organized by the libertarian Cato Institute last fall, speakers denounced our current policy of “fiat money” with the fervor of preachers. As George Melloan observed in the American Spectator,

“the consensus view [as the conference] seemed to be that in these parlous times a return to the gold standard might very well be the only way to restore order in the bawdy house Washington has become.”

What worries the goldbug the most is the specter of inflation, which some at the conference referred to as not only harmful but “immoral.” When the government can print money on demand — without having to back up its bucks with real gold — goldbugs warn, the end result can be hyperinflation and economic chaos.
And, as Joe Weisenthal points out on Business Insider, “the ability to create fiat money out of thin air is a stealth form of taxation, because the creation of more dollars diminishes the value of those already in existence.” This makes the gold standard especially enticing to tax-hating conservatives.
(MORE: 10 Questions for Dan Quayle)
The trouble is that the idea of gold as a bulwark against economic chaos is based on illusions. Going on the gold standard would essentially require an instant end to deficits, robbing to government of its ability to fight recessions (and possible depressions) with stimulus money. Moreover, it would link the value of the dollar to the gold supply, leaving our economic future in the hands of gold miners. If miners were to strike, as Noam Scheiber notes in The New Republic,

there [would] be too few dollars relative to the amount of buying and selling going on in the economy. When there are too few dollars, each dollar becomes more valuable, and people start to hoard them. Spending slows and the economy collapses.

We all saw what happened when banks started hoarding their dollars during the financial crisis; imagine what might have happened if the rest of us had done the same.
Anyone who thinks the gold standard means stability needs only look at American history to see that theory rebutted, again and again, by the crashes and “panics” of the gilded age and afterwards. As Krugman sardonically notes, “under the gold standard America had no major financial panics other than in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1907, 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1933.”
Given all this, it seems likely that any commission tasked with examining the gold standard would return with a conclusion similar to that reached by the Reagan Gold Commission back in 1982, the last time such an exercise was conducted: that a return to the gold standard “does not appear to be a fruitful method for dealing with the continuing problem of inflation.” That’s putting it mildly.

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Organic food 'not any healthier'

 

  Food labelled as organic must meet certain standards

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Eating organic food will not make you healthier, according to researchers at Stanford University, although it could cut your exposure to pesticides.

They looked at more than 200 studies of the content and associated health gains of organic and non-organic foods.
Overall, there was no discernable difference between the nutritional content, although the organic food was 30% less likely to contain pesticides.
Critics say the work is inconclusive and call for more studies.
The research, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, looked at 17 studies comparing people who ate organic with those who did not and 223 studies that compared the levels of nutrients, bacteria, fungus or pesticides in various foods - including fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, milk and eggs.

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There isn't much difference between organic and conventional foods, if you're an adult and making a decision based solely on your health”

Dr Cyrstal Smith-Spangler Lead researcher

None of the human studies ran for longer than two years, making conclusions about long-term outcomes impossible. And all of the available evidence was relatively weak and highly variable - which the authors say is unsurprising because of all the different variables, like weather and soil type, involved.

Fruit and vegetables contained similar amounts of vitamins, and milk the same amount of protein and fat - although a few studies suggested organic milk contained more omega-3.
Organic foods did contain more nitrogen, but the researchers say this is probably due to differences in fertiliser use and ripeness at harvest and is unlikely to provide any health benefit.
Their findings support those of the UK's Food Standards Agency, which commissioned a review a few years ago into organic food claims.

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Organic

• Organic food is produced to standards designed to keep the production more "natural", using environmentally and animal-friendly farming methods
• Fewer, if any, chemicals are used and most pesticides are banned or very carefully controlled
• Various bodies in the UK, including the Soil Association, certify food and producers as organic
• Food certified as organic is not allowed to contain genetically modified ingredients

Prof Alan Dangour, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who carried out that work, said: "Consumers select organic foods for a variety of reasons, however this latest review identifies that at present there are no convincing differences between organic and conventional foods in nutrient content or health benefits.

"Hopefully this evidence will be useful to consumers."
Dr Crystal Smith-Spangler, the lead author of the latest review, said there were many reasons why people chose to eat organic, including animal welfare or environmental concerns.
"Some believe that organic food is always healthier and more nutritious. We were a little surprised that we didn't find that.
"There isn't much difference between organic and conventional foods, if you're an adult and making a decision based solely on your health."
But the Soil Association said the study was flawed.
"Studies that treat crop trials as if they were clinical trials of medicines, like this one, exaggerate the variation between studies, and drown out the real differences.
"A UK review paper, using the correct statistical analysis, has found that most of the differences in nutrient levels between organic and non-organic fruit and vegetables seen in this US study are actually highly significant."

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Puppet experiment suggests humans are born to be fair

By Victoria Gill BBC reporter

Using puppets allows scientists to test how much children would really share with their peers

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It looks like a fairground game: a little girl and a puppet play together, using miniature fishing rods to hook tiny buckets of coins.

But this is actually a psychological experiment. Its aim is to measure a very complex human concept - fairness.
The game works like this: the puppet (with the aid of an adult puppeteer) and a three-year-old participant gather their hauls of little buckets. Then the child/puppet team is rewarded with stickers - one for each coin they have collected.

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“Start Quote

We were very surprised to find sophisticated sharing behaviour already present in three-year-olds”

Patricia Kanngiesser University of Bristol

• Today Programme: What is fairness?
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At this point the child has to decide how to share his or her prized stickers with their puppet partner.

This simple game revealed that, by the age of just three, children choose to reward their peers based on merit. The children gave the puppet more stickers if it had "worked harder" - gathering more coins.
Patricia Kanngiesser from the University of Bristol led the study, which was published in the journal PLoS One. She said she was amazed by the result.
"We were very surprised to find this sophisticated sharing behaviour already present in three-year-olds," said Ms Kanngiesser.
"Previous research has found that children don't really begin to share according to merit until they are six years of age and older."
Using puppets allowed the experimenters to carry out a controlled experiment whilst still revealing exactly how the children would behave towards peers in a real world situation.
Innate justice So, if young toddlers with almost no social experience give up more of their stickers to a deserving peer, does this mean that humans are hard-wired to treat others fairly?

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“Start Quote

Co-operation and fairness are fundamental aspects of human behaviour”

Susanne Shultz University of Manchester

Prof Felix Warneken from Harvard University, a co-author of this study, has been studying cooperative behaviour in children and in chimpanzees for almost a decade.

He said knowing where our concept of fairness comes from - whether it is learned or innate - is "the toughest question".
"We can only rule things out with our experiments," he explained. "So we can rule out that it needs formal education, or that it requires sophisticated reasoning about incentives.
"[Fairness] is something that emerges with children's earliest forms of working and interacting with peers."
Ms Kanngiesser said there was a "natural human predisposition" towards treating others fairly.
"It seems to be intuitive," she said. "People have found that even by 18 months of age, children have expectations about how things should be shared fairly."
And there are logical, human reasons for this natural bias towards fair play.
Dr Susanne Shultz, a researcher from the University of Manchester who specialises in social behaviour in primates, pointed out that fairness was central in long-term stable human relationships.
This and other similar studies, Dr Shultz said, demonstrated that "co-operation and fairness are fundamental aspects of human behaviour".
"[This study] also reframes social intelligence in terms of cooperation rather than deception," she added. "I think that's really nice."
Deception has played a large part in the scientific study of fairness. While this experiment asked children to share the rewards with a partner after completing a shared task, many studies focus on whether humans, and other primates, choose to cheat a partner or to punish others for treating them unfairly.
A classic example of this type of test is known as the ultimatum game.
This is where one participant is tasked with making an offer to share something of value - for example, an amount of money - with a partner.
The partner then has the opportunity to either accept or reject this offer. And this is where the punishment comes in.
If the recipient decides to reject an apparently unfair offer, both participants receive nothing.
"[This new study] is a nice change from looking at social intelligence from a purely Machiavellian perspective," Dr Shultz said.
Uniquely human?

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How do we differ from our primate cousins?

• Many scientists believed they would find merit-based sharing among our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees. But, in a 2007 study published in the journal Science, researchers using the ultimatum game found that chimps would take any reward - no matter what share they were offered
• While children appear to be prepared to share with a new playmate, non-human primates seem to limit their altruism to close kin and mates. But it is not simply the case that the more intelligent the species the more altruistic they are. Recent research on sharing published in PNAS in social primates revealed that capuchins and marmosets were some of the most "giving" primates - commonly offering food rewards to other group members
• Before we feel too superior to our primate cousins, our capacity to be spiteful appears to be ours alone. A 2007 published in PNAS study found chimpanzees, unlike humans, do not retaliate against personally harmful actions. Being spiteful is a human trait

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• Discover how Chimpanzees' communicate
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In recent years there has been increased scientific interest in whether non-human primates are able to understand the concept of fair play.

As well as gaining an understanding of the complexities of animal behaviour, these studies are trying to unpick its evolutionary origins.
The first of these was published in Nature in 2003. Sarah Brosnan, currently at Georgia State University, found that capuchin monkeys reacted dramatically to being treated unfairly.
Dr Brosnan trained wild monkeys to work with human handlers on a simple task; the monkey would hand over a piece of rock and, in return, receive a food reward.
In the experiment, two monkeys sat side by side. The handlers either gave both monkeys an identical reward (a slice of cucumber) or gave just one of the monkeys the much preferred reward of a grape for completing exactly the same task.
As it was reported at the time by National Geographic: "Capuchins who witnessed unfair treatment and failed to benefit from it often refused to conduct future exchanges with human researchers, would not eat the cucumbers they received for their labours, and in some cases, hurled food rewards at human researchers."
Since then, several groups have tried to test fairness in our closer and apparently more intelligent cousins - the great apes.
But, Dr Shultz said, overall, "non-human primates, apes included, are not very good at solving fairness problems".
In one study published recently in Biology Letters, chimps and bonobos presented with a food-based ultimatum game would accept any food reward on offer - no matter how meagre their share was in comparison to their partner's.
The apes would also consistently steal food from one another during the task.
So is a sense of fairness; of treating others justly at our own expense, a uniquely human characteristic?
Dr Warneken explained that the scientific evidence pointed to a human-ape divide when it came to "recognising inequity".
"There's evidence that some non-human primates are averse to others receiving more than they receive," he said.
But, he added, there was very little evidence that they were averse to offers that were the other way around - where they received more than their fair share.
"That [latter scenario] is a more solid argument for a true understanding of fairness," he explained. "And it's currently something that has no equivalent in non-human primates."
Dr Kanngiessen concluded: "There is a huge debate about what makes us human: is it language, our ability to care about others."
"But even though animals show so many of these complex behaviours, when it comes to helping others and not receiving anything in return, that seems so far to be something [that's] unique to us."

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Gaza 'will not be liveable by 2020' - UN report

 

Tunnels under the Egyptian border have been a lifeline for Gaza in recent years.

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The Gaza Strip will not be "a liveable place" by 2020 unless action is taken to improve basic services in the territory, according to a UN report.

Basic infrastructure in water, health, education and sanitation "is struggling to keep pace with a growing population", according to the report.
It estimates Gaza's population will rise from 1.6m to 2.1m by 2020.
Israel tightened a blockade on Gaza after the Islamist movement Hamas came to power in the territory in 2007.
Israel says the blockade, which is policed with Egyptian co-operation and has never been fully lifted, is necessary to prevent weapons reaching Hamas.
The UN report estimates Gaza will need double the number of schools and 800 more hospital beds by 2020, and says the territory is already suffering from a housing shortage.
The report also says the coastal aquifer, the territory's only natural source of fresh water, may become unusable by 2016.
Disconnected territory UN officials point to the difficulty of improving the situation given "the closure of the Gaza Strip, violent conflict, and the pressing need for Palestinian reconciliation".
"An urban area cannot survive without being connected," said Maxwell Gaylard, the UN's humanitarian chief in Gaza.
Gaza has no air or sea ports, and the economy is heavily dependent on outside funding and smuggling through tunnels under the Egyptian border.
Even though Gaza has experienced some economic growth in recent years, the report says it "does not seem to be sustainable" and finds that Gazans are worse off now than in the 1990s.
Unemployment was at 29% in 2011 and has risen since then, particularly affecting women and young people.
Traffic through the cross-border tunnels was hit in recent weeks by violence between Egyptian security forces and militants in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, which borders Israel and Gaza.

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Young cannabis smokers run risk of lower IQ, report claims

By Dominic Hughes Health correspondent, BBC News
 

 

 Cannabis is the most widely used illegal drug in the world

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Young people who smoke cannabis run the risk of a significant and irreversible reduction in their IQ, research suggests.

The findings come from a study of around 1,000 people in New Zealand.
An international team found those who started using cannabis below the age of 18 - while their brains were still developing - suffered a drop in IQ.
A UK expert said the research might explain why people who use the drug often seem to under-achieve.
For more than 20 years researchers have followed the lives of a group of people from Dunedin in New Zealand.
They assessed them as children - before any of them had started using cannabis - and then re-interviewed them repeatedly, up to the age of 38.
Having taken into account other factors such as alcohol or tobacco dependency or other drug use, as well the number of years spent in education, they found that those who persistently used cannabis suffered a decline in their IQ.
The more that people smoked, the greater the loss in IQ.

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“Start Quote

It is such a special study that I'm fairly confident that cannabis is safe for over-18 brains, but risky for under-18 brains”

Professor Terrie Moffitt Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London

The effect was most marked in those who started smoking cannabis as adolescents.

For example, researchers found that individuals who started using cannabis in adolescence and then carried on using it for years showed an average eight-point IQ decline.
Stopping or reducing cannabis use failed to fully restore the lost IQ.
The researchers, writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that: "Persistent cannabis use over 20 years was associated with neuropsychological decline, and greater decline was evident for more persistent users."
"Collectively, these findings are consistent with speculation that cannabis use in adolescence, when the brain is undergoing critical development, may have neurotoxic effects."
One member of the team, Prof Terrie Moffitt of King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, said this study could have a significant impact on our understanding of the dangers posed by cannabis use.
"This work took an amazing scientific effort. We followed almost 1,000 participants, we tested their mental abilities as kids before they ever tried cannabis, and we tested them again 25 years later after some participants became chronic users.

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“Start Quote

There are a lot of clinical and educational anecdotal reports that cannabis users tend to be less successful in their educational achievement, marriages and occupations”

Professor Robin Murray Instuitute of Psychiatry, King's College London

"Participants were frank about their substance abuse habits because they trust our confidentiality guarantee, and 96% of the original participants stuck with the study from 1972 to today.

"It is such a special study that I'm fairly confident that cannabis is safe for over-18 brains, but risky for under-18 brains."
Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research, also at the King's College London Institute of Psychiatry but not involved in the study, said this was an impressive piece of research.
"The Dunedin sample is probably the most intensively studied cohort in the world and therefore the data are very good.
"Although one should never be convinced by a single study, I take the findings very seriously.
"There are a lot of clinical and educational anecdotal reports that cannabis users tend to be less successful in their educational achievement, marriages and occupations.
"It is of course part of folk-lore among young people that some heavy users of cannabis - my daughter callers them stoners - seem to gradually lose their abilities and end up achieving much less than one would have anticipated. This study provides one explanation as to why this might be the case.
"I suspect that the findings are true. If and when they are replicated then it will be very important and public education campaigns should be initiated to let people know the risks."

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Marty Nemko's Career Tips: Surviving Today's Job Market

Marty Nemko's Career Tips: Surviving Today's Job Market from Commonwealth Club and Commonwealth Club on FORA.tv

Family trees: Tracing the world's ancestor

By Dr Yan Wong Evolutionary biologist

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A question one Radio 4 listener asked about the bloodline between Jesus and King David raised a wider genealogical issue. How many generations does it take before someone alive today is the ancestor of everyone on the planet?

Listeners to the More or Less programme on Radio 4 have been challenging me to answer any fiendish question they can throw at me.
A question about Jesus's genealogy was rather interesting and the answer has astounding ramifications.
The Bible says Jesus was a descendant of King David. But with 1,000 years between them, and since King David's son Solomon was said to have had about 1,000 wives and mistresses, couldn't many of Jesus's peers in Holy Land have claimed the same royal ancestor?
Theory tells us that not only would all of Jesus's contemporaries be descended from King David, but that this would probably be the case even if Solomon had been into monogamy.
We can make this sort of prediction because over the past 15 years or so, these ideas have been studied as part of the research into understanding patterns in our own genome.

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Who is Yan Wong?

Yan Wong is an evolutionary biologist specialising in computer and mathematical modelling of evolutionary genetics.
He is a presenter of the BBC One science programme Bang Goes The Theory and a contributor to More or Less.

• Bang Goes the Theory

The most successful approach has been to go backwards in time, taking a sample of people and imagining the patterns of inheritance in their ancestral family tree.

When applied to the question of who is descended from whom, the results can surprise even the professionals.
That's because geneticists normally study biological information - DNA - that people inherit from just one of their parents.
Just like a surname, or the male lines of descent quoted in the Bible, these generate lineages that shrink or expand rather slowly. That's why we expect the proportion of Smiths in the phone-book to fluctuate only a little from decade to decade.
The surprise comes if we look at inheritance from both parents. Here, the numbers change drastically as the generations go by. For instance, we have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on.
Each generation back, we multiply the number by two. This leads to what is called an exponential increase: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 and so on.
It's not long before we hit huge numbers. Take the specific case of Jesus and King David.
The number of generations between them is at least 35. Luke lists 42 generations down the male line, and Matthew gives an incomplete list of 27.

Jesus Christ would have had more than 34 billion potential ancestors

These numbers agree reasonably well with an average time between generations of 25 or 30 years - an estimate taken from documented historical records from Iceland and Canada.
So back in the time of David, Jesus would have had at least 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 (35 times); in other words 2^35 - or more than 34 billion potential ancestors. That's far more than the total population of the world, of course.
This is a good illustration of what's been called the "genealogical paradox".

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What about isolated communities?

"The one thing that stands a chance of scuppering our calculations is if the population is split into isolated groups," says Yan Wong.
"However, to be considered separate, these groups need to basically never interbreed with each other.
"To quote one of the papers on this subject, 'substantial forms of population subdivision can still be compatible with very recent common ancestors'. (Rohde et al., 2004).
"In fact, even using current DNA studies, you can almost always detect distant shared relatives between distinct human populations (Henn et al., 2012)."

In short, we seem to have too many ancestors. The solution is that we have to take inbreeding into account. Many of these ancestors are duplicates; the same person can found through multiple routes in the family tree.

You are unlikely to be the product of inbreeding between recent ancestors. So initially, your increase in ancestors will indeed be almost exponential.
But as your family tree increases to thousands upon thousands, you will inevitably find many obscure branches that have interbred. That's when the numbers start tailing off.
Even so, by that time, you will have collected a large number of people in your ancestry. So it's not surprising that any two people in any one country probably won't need to go back many generations before finding a common ancestor.
More specifically, imagine the simplest case of a population of a constant size - say a million (the approximate size of the Holy Land at the time of Jesus).
If people in this population meet and breed at random, it turns out that you only need to go back an average of 20 generations before you find an individual who is a common ancestor of everyone in the population.
If you go back on average 1.77 times further again (35 generations) everyone in the population will have exactly the same set of common ancestors (although they will be related, of course, through different routes in all the different family trees).

Advances in DNA allow us to detect shared genetic ancestry

In fact about 80% of the people at that time in the past will be the ancestors of everyone in the present. The remaining 20% are those who have had no children, or whose children have had no children, and so on - in other words, people who were genetic dead-ends.
Apply that to the case of King David. According to this model, he would be a common ancestor of the whole population of the Holy Land somewhere between 20 and 35 generations after his life. That's even without Solomon sowing his seed so widely.
That's why everyone alive in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus would have been able to claim David for an ancestor.
Reductions in population caused by events such as the Assyrian invasions will have produced more inbred family trees, and shortened the number of generations needed to reach a common ancestry.

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More or Less: Behind the stats

Listen to More or Less on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, or download the free podcast

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What about the wider ramifications? A single immigrant who breeds into a population has roughly 80% chance of becoming a common ancestor. A single interbreeding event in the distant past will probably, therefore, graft the immigrant's family tree onto that of the native population. That makes it very likely that King David is the direct ancestor of the populations of many other countries too.

How far do we have to go back to find the most recent common ancestor of all humans alive today? Again, estimates are remarkably short. Even taking account of distant isolation and local inbreeding, the quoted figures are 100 or so generations in the past: a mere 3,000 years ago.
And one can, of course, project this model into the future, too. The maths tells us that in 3,000 years someone alive today will be the common ancestor of all humanity.
A few thousand years after that, 80% of us (those who leave children who in turn leave children, and so on) will be ancestors of all humanity. What an inheritance!

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How Americans view wealth and inequality

Viewpoint by Dan Ariely Professor of behavioural economics, Duke University, USA

 

  Americans do not understand how wealth is distributed in their society

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There have been lots of questions and discussions recently about inequality and economists often argue about what is the right level of inequality to have in society.

But Mike Norton, professor at Harvard Business School, and I decided to take a different path and we decided to ask people what inequality they would want.
Now, there are lots of ways to ask this question and we used the philosopher John Rawls.
Rawls said that "a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you'd be willing to enter it in a random place". And it's really a beautiful definition.
He called it a veil of ignorance, because if you're very wealthy, you might want the wealthy people to have lots of money and the poor to have very little; and if you are very poor, you might want the poor to have more money and the wealthy to have less.
But in Rawls' definition, you don't know where you'll end up, you have to consider all the different options and therefore you have to think about what is good for society as a whole.
Incomprehension So, we took the American society and we asked people to imagine it divided into five buckets, the wealthiest 20%, the next 20%, the next, the next and the poorest 20%.
First of all, we asked people: how much wealth do you think is concentrated in each of those buckets?
It turns out people get it very wrong.

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Even Americans understand that inequality is not a good idea and principle”

The reality is that the bottom two buckets together, the bottom 40% of Americans, own 0.3% of the wealth; 0.3%, almost nothing, whereas the top 20% own about 84% of the wealth.

And people don't understand it. They don't understand how much wealth the top have and in particular, they don't understand how little the bottom has.
But then we described to people Rawls' definition, the veil of ignorance, and the idea they could end up anywhere. And we said: What society would you like to create? How much wealth? How would you like to distribute the wealth?
And it turns out people created a society that is much more equal than any society on Earth. It was much more equal than Sweden.
Blind tasting In fact, when we did this experiment another way and we showed people two distributions of wealth, one based on the wealth distribution in the US and the other based on the wealth distribution that is more equal than Sweden, 92% of Americans picked the improved Swedish distribution.
So this suggests to me that when people take a step away from their own position and their own current state, and when people look at society in general terms, in abstract terms, Americans want a much more equal society.

 

  How would you judge a wine if you didn't know where it came from or how much it cost?

There is one more interesting thing to this: 93% of Democrats picked the improved Swedish model, compared with 90.5% of Republicans. Different, but not very different.
And all this makes me wonder, how can it be that in our studies people seem to want such equal society but when you look at the political ideology, people don't seem to want that?
And I think it is a little bit like blind tasting of wine.
When you taste wine and you know the label and you know the price, you are going to be influenced by that. And when you are tasting wine in a blind way, now you don't have anything to base it on and you have to really use your senses.
I think the same thing happens with thoughts about just societies. When we are in the regular world, we are using our current position, our ideology and the labels that politicians give us, and they obscure reality and obscure what we really want.
But Rawls' definition really lets us strip all this away, lets us focus on what is really important and how people actually want something very different from what we have.
The question, of course, is how do we get people to think about this to a higher degree and how do we get them to act on that for a better future?
Dan Ariely is the James B Duke professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University in North Carolina.

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