Friday, 29 January 2016

The Weekend Edition

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SPEED ROUND, THE WEEKEND EDITION

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The case against sleeping in on weekends: When you switch from an 12 pm to 7 am sleep schedule on the weekdays to a 3 am to 10 am sleep schedule on the weekends, you are effectively moving over three time zones. This circadian misalignment is referred to as “Social Jet Lag.” Bottom line: You’re eating when you should be fasting, and you’re trying to sleep when you should be awake. The burden on your body could, in theory, be making you sick, says Patricia Wong, a PhD candidate and sleep researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. Wong published results of a study that asked: Was the social jet lag caused by sleeping in on the weekends also associated with poor health? Her team tracked the sleep patterns of 490 people by sending them home with wrist sleep monitors that estimate time spent sleeping via movement. Most participants shifted their sleep schedules a least a little bit on the weekends — staying up later and sleeping in. The more dramatic the shift in weekend sleep, the more Wong found red flags for health. The people who demonstrated the biggest shifts in weekend sleep had showed more warning signs for obesity, heart disease and diabetes — even after adjusting for behaviors like exercise, smoking and alcohol use.

Hey, buysider: How does your pay stack up? Yeah, we know, to the nicest of questions given all that’s going on in markets at the moment. And the boss can always point to Deutsche Bank’s decision to scrap all bonus compensation for senior management after posting a EUR 6.8 bn loss in 2015. Into the breach steps SumZero, which bills itself as “the world’s largest community of hedge fund, mutual fund, and private equity professionals” and counts c. 10,000 analysts and PMs among its members. Its “Fund Compensation Report: 2016 Edition” is out, and among the findings of the annual survey of members’ compensation packages:

  • Funds with USD 10-15 bn pay the best (salary plus bonus compensation for analysts with five years of experience)
  • Private equity still tops to pay table, with funds of funds paying the worst.
  • Funds investing along distressed debt themes pay significantly better than do global macro, emerging markets and long-only funds.

Among the creepiest things we’ve heard of this week is Shodan, which bills itself as “the world’s first search engine for Internet-connected devices.” Sounds boring, we know, but as Canada’s CBC puts it: “A young child asleep on a couch in Israel. Mourners huddled together at a small funeral in Brazil. An elderly woman stretching in a fitness centre in Poland. All available for anyone to watch via the unsecured webcams overhead.” Once you get past the kludgy interface, Shodan provides access to thousands upon thousands of semi-categorized devices — including webcams, a great many of them unsecured or using default login / pass combinations. In five minutes of futzing around, we saw two convenience stores, an empty bedroom and city streets across the world. Then we disconnected and went on a hunt around the house to make sure that our devices are secure and that none have “admin / admin” as their login / pass combination. Welcome to the latest 21st century security nightmare.

The second creepiest: Maybe we’re showing our age, but the Singularity University’s “The World in 2025: 8 Predictions for the Next 10 Years” kind of made our skin crawl. Not a “Shodan” skin crawl (above), but a “love-hate” kind of skin crawl. But the same publication’s “How to Build a Starship — and Why We Should Start Thinking About It Now”? That’s kind of cool. Too short a read, but cool.

Trouble in paradise: Twitter has said goodbye to four of its top executives, according to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. In the announcement, Dorsey said VP of media Katie Stanton, VP of product Kevin Weil, VP of engineering Alex Roetter and VP of human resources Brian Schipper were all leaving the company. All four “chose to leave” he said. Vine, which Twitter owns, also saw general manager Jason Toff announcing his resignation to work with Google. Could the the trading 69% below its 52-week high and the company’s floundering earnings have something to do with the moves?

Speaking of Twitter, are you still seeing ads on the app? Hate to break it to you, but you aren’t one of Twitter’s “preferred” users. The social network is experimenting with showing less promotional content, but only with important users in what appears to be an effort to retain them. “Presumably it’s calculated that these key influencers, for want of a better term, are more important to the social network than the revenue they can generate by showing them ads,” writes Gizmodo.

Twitter #3, the guilty pleasure edition: The Darwin Awards.

Yo mamma jokes, if they were told by Carl Sagan: “Gravity can be understood as a curvature of space. Space is warped by mass. Imagine a sheet pulled taut, with several marbles on it. The sheet represents space. When I place a weight on the sheet, it puckers, and the marbles roll toward this more massive entity. Now imagine that your mother is a watermelon with an ugly wig on top. When I hurl the bewigged watermelon onto the sheet, it rips through and smashes on the ground. That’s right: your mother is so fat, she has ripped through the very fabric of time and space.”

Do the Oscars have a race problem? Jada Pinkett Smith certainly thinks so. Smith, along with husband Will Smith and director Spike Lee, are spearheading a campaign to boycott next month’s Oscar ceremony after nominees for high-profile categories went exclusively to white actors and actresses. The boycott has industry insiders divided over the issue of diversity, especially black actors (who according to this legendary Dave Chappelle sketch must always stick together). Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg derided the boycott, while Don Cheadle found it particularly insulting that comedian Chris Rock will be hosting the Oscars, which Rock has described as “The White BET Awards.” While the nominated roles are all critically acclaimed and impressive, notable snubs to Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation (available on Netflix in Egypt) and Michael B. Jordan (Creed) — both alumni of that crown jewel of television, The Wire — lends credence to the Smiths’ point.

Counterpoint: Boycott Will Smith, not the Oscars, until he does more for black actors. Luther Campbell at the Miami New Times runs with the idea that not only was the Oscars boycott movement started by Jada Pinkett Smith when her husband Will Smith failed to get a nomination for his role in the film Concussion, but that “they have enjoyed making mns of dollars in La-La Land by acquiescing to the lily-white film studios that produce their blockbuster movies. They hobnob with Scientologists and other Hollywood cults because they want to be part of the club.” Campbell goes on to argue that if the Smiths and Spike Lee are truly interested in helping out black Hollywood, it is easily within their means to establish an initiative similar to that of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Project Greenlight to help mentor and finance up and coming talent.

New all-female Ghostbusters movie this summer: While we’re on the topic of culture wars in the film industry, let’s just wade right into the controversy surrounding the new Ghostbusters movie, set for a July 2016 release and which has been filmed as a reboot with an all-female team of Ghostbusters, starring Kristen Wiig. Director Paul Feig (of Freaks and Geeks) as well as Wiig defended the movie from criticism, with Wiig saying “the fact there was so much controversy because we were women was surprising to me. Some people said some really not nice things about the fact that there were women. It didn’t make me mad, it just really bummed me out. We’re really honoring those movies.” This seems to be a slight misreading of some, not all, of the criticism the film is receiving: A sticking point for many of the fans of the 1984 original, as laid out in this brief piece by Deadline, is not that the movie has an all-women team, but rather that it is an unnecessary reboot when it could have simply been a sequel with very little tweaking to the story.

Six rules for a perfectly tailored suit. #2. Make sure your shoulders fit. “The shoulders of your suit jacket should feel like they’re hugging your own. If they’re noticeably tight, the jacket is too small. And if the shoulder seams are sagging past the natural line of your body, like they do for all too many workaday types, it’s too big. The shoulders are the one place that even expert tailors are hesitant to mess with.” Catch the rest of the rules at Esquire.

Heavy metal music is dying slowly, Bryan Reesman writes in Observer. “Many godfathers of the movement are in their 60s, some close to 70 years old … Several hard rock and metal luminaries … have passed away recently. Concert sales for some acts are still strong, others are waning.” Now, some heavy metal musicians see Eastern Europe and Asia as places where the genre could be revived. “If touring is where the money is at, then we need to expand into Russia, China, and Eastern Europe, which are starting to embrace metal … Some of our biggest recent shows weren’t in Germany or France or Scandinavia, they were in Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland. Places before that were a little bit starved for bands,” suggests the frontman of British extreme metal group Cradle of Filth.

Our heavy metal recommendation of the day is that you get yourself on Apple Music, which is available for both iOS and Android devices. The streaming music service is the quasi-AI (and entirely accessible) version of that guy in high school who used to introduce you to cool new acts, B-sides you didn’t know existed, and concern bootlegs. Apple Music’s AI-powered recommendation engine is solid, but their human-curated collections and recommendations are what will keep you coming back. Not convinced Apple Music is for you? The Verge’s What’s Tech podcast chews over Apple Music vs. Spotify and Tidal (listening time: 19:37).

Yes, Transparency International, we know we rank among the worst on your Corruption Perceptions Index. Enter Business Insider, with its refreshing “These are the 16 most corrupt countries in the Western world” as a reminder that we ain’t alone.

You’ve been told a mn times that the steel beasts of yesteryear are indestructible compared to the plastic toys of today, but you’ve never watched “2009 Chevy Malibu vs 1959 Bel Air Crash Test” from Consumer reports. (Run time: 1:57)

WATCH THIS

“What are some signs you’ve hit a career ceiling?” asks New York Times best-selling author Jon Acuff. Hitting a career ceiling can happen to an employee or to the company. The main problem, says Acuff, is getting stuck. For individuals, it’s a mixture of a sense of repetition and a feeling that your industry is leaving you behind. For companies, it’s usually when things go well, prompting a shift from “innovation mode” to “protection mode.” Neither Kodak nor Polaroid, for example, invented Instagram because they were too busy “protecting their legacy” instead of focusing on where the industry was going. The solution? Acuff says it’s working on your skill set, it’s impossible to get stuck somewhere old if you keep learning something new. (Watch. Run time: 5:47)

Scientists have created the most detailed map yet of our place in the universe. Watch: Run time: 1:43. Then consider reading “Ask Ethan: Is The Universe Itself Alive?

DID YOU MISS AN ISSUE THIS WEEK? Check out our archive on the website.

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Life in the Quiet Zone: “In Green Bank, you can’t make a call on your cell phone, and you can’t text on it, either. Wireless internet is outlawed, as is Bluetooth.” The only means of communication are landlines and DSL. Residents of this small town live in this enforced radio silence to accommodate the Green Bank Telescope, the largest radio telescope in the world. The town of Green Bank is in the middle of The Quiet Zone: a 13,000-square mile area roughly the size of Maryland.

The lack of electromagnetic radiation has, however, attracted a peculiar type of migrant: electrosensitives — individuals who say they suffer from “electromagnetic frequencies that radiate wirelessly from cell phones, wi-fi networks, radio waves, and virtually every other modern technology that the rest of society now thinks of as indispensable.” However, in a town with a population size of 143, the influx of approximately two-dozen (mostly) hippie electrosensitives resulted in some “rough spots in dealing with other members of the community,” according to the town’s sheriff. (Read The Town Without Wi-Fi, The Washingtonian, c.4,200 words)

Could gender-neutral bathrooms be coming to your office? Unlikely, but Jeannie Suk for the New Yorker made a case for them last week in “Who’s afraid of gender-neutral bathrooms?” Today’s arguments against the idea date back to Victorian notions that led to segregated bathrooms in the first place, Suk writes. In fact, the public restroom is the only everyday social institution remaining where gender separation is the norm, unless you live in Saudi Arabia, where every aspect of public life marks a separation of the genders except for supermarkets. “When the ideology of separate spheres for male and female, public and private, the market and the home reigned, the growth of women’s presence in public life led to the desire to protect women from the crude dangers of the male world,” she writes. “Today, men and women … are expected to function at work alongside one another, eat at adjacent seats in restaurants, sit cheek by jowl in buses and airplanes, take classes, study in libraries, and, with some exceptions, even pray together. Why is the multi-stall bathroom the last public vestige of gendered social separation?

ARE WE NOT IN YOUR INBOX EVERY MORNING BY 6:15am CLT? Check your “newsletter” or “promotions” tabs or your “junk” folder. Or head over to our website, where each day’s issue is only by the same time we dispatch the email edition.

LISTEN TO THIS

Venturing away from our neck of the woods: Life in a Pacific paradise is not without its hardships, as the BBC’s Business Daily’s review of Tonga’s economy. The beautiful turquoise waters and golden beaches aside, the Pacific island nation struggles to create enough jobs for its residents. Medically, Tongans suffer from high rates of obesity and near-epidemic rates of Type 2 diabetes. Socially, rates of domestic violence against women are also leaving some Tongans very worried. (Run time: 17:29)

You are part of a herd: It is hard to stay rational in an auction when the numbers keep going up and as auctioneers employ their tricks and tactics to push up the bidding. NPR’s Planet Money visited an auction site to show how hard it is to not get driven by a herd mentality in an auction and get “auction fever” there especially if you are trying to decide whether to spend tens of thousands of dollars or not. The episode also brushes on some concepts like rational herding, anchoring and the winner’s curse. (Run time: 14:57)

The best social welfare programme in the world is a job: Many countries have high youth unemployment rates, but employers continue to struggle to find qualified entry-level candidates. Around the world now, there are 75 mn young people who are unemployed and three times as many are underemployed. To make a solution happen for any particular young person, multiple parties have to succeed, starting from a proper K-12 school system, enough signaling by employers about what they require from their hires, and “there needs to be a funding system—be it public or private—that can enable all of these things to happen.” The McKinsey Podcast tackles the problem and outline McKinsey Social Initiative’s Generation programme, which aims to reduce youth unemployment. (Run time 25:15)

Take a hair-raising few minutes to listen to the soundtrack written for the 1973 The Exorcist that director William Friedkin literally threw out the window (run time 14:16). Composer Lalo Schifrin was commissioned to write the score, but when an advanced trailer (run time 1:14) was released, it was so terrifying it made audience members actually sick to their stomachs. “The trailer was terrific, but the mix of those frightening scenes and my music, which was also a very difficult and heavy score, scared the audiences away,” said Schifrin.

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SOMETHING THAT MADE US THINK

Science’s reproducibility crisis: In 2005, John O.A. Ioannidis, Stanford professor of medicine and statistics, lobbed a bomb at the scientific community that has left it in a quiet state of existential crisis ever since. His stunning accusation: Most published research findings are false. From the abstract of his now seminal paper: “A research finding is less likely to be true… where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes” and “when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice,” among other factors.

…The most recent chapter in this explosive saga began with the publication in August 2015 of a study four years in the making: ‘Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science’ (full study, pdf) by University of Virginia professor Brian Nosek. The study attempted to replicate 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals. The results sound grim. Out of 100 replication attempts, only 39 were successful.

Or are those results, actually grim? The entire debate has since spilled over from scientific journals to mainstream media, starting with the Atlantic covering Nosek’s study back in August, which gave space for dissenting scientists, such as Harvard University’s Jason Mitchell, to argue: “We can’t interpret whether 36 percent is good, bad, or right on the money.” Despite this, Mitchell concedes: “The work is heroic… The sheer number of people involved and the care with which it was carried out is just astonishing. This is an example of science working as it should in being very self-critical and questioning everything, especially its own assumptions, methods, and findings.”

The back-and-forth didn’t stop there, days later, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett penned an op-ed in The New York Times asserting ‘Psychology Is Not in Crisis,’ where she argued the inability to replicate is a normal part of the scientific process, and that all Nosek’s study points to is the possibility there were other factors which may not have been considered, giving examples from the hard sciences. This is one of those few articles where the comments section is wholly worth reading, as her op-ed generated a flurry of responses from a number of other scientists, many of whom vehemently disagreed with her.

Sean S., who identified himself as a bioscientist and chemist, refuted her analogies on research with fruit flies and physics, saying “The UVa tests [Nosek’s study] show that the results of 60% of psychology experiments cannot be verified. This is really bad. Period.” Another commenter, Gary McClelland, expands on this: “Her examples from physics, fruit flies, and fear induction are failures to generalize, not failures to replicate.”

Ed Yong, who had written on Nosek in the aforementioned Atlantic piece, also wasn’t having Barrett’s op-ed, and published his own response days later in Sweeping Psychology’s Problems Under the Rug.

Has your head exploded yet? Cleanse the palate with Scully Likes Science, a video we first noted nearly one year ago, and in light of the return of the X-Files’ return to television.


Feminists and English geeks rejoice: Oxford Dictionaries will review the example sentences it uses for the adjective “rabid” after being accused of gender bias, writes the Guardian. Anthropologist Michael Oman-Reagan noticed that the definition of the word “rabid” used the example “rabid feminist.” Other examples he noted in an article on Medium were: “’shrill’ – defined as ‘the rising shrill of women’s voices’– and ‘psyche’ – for which the example sentence is, ‘I will never really fathom the female psyche’. ‘Grating’, defined as ‘sounding harsh and unpleasant’, was illustrated with the phrase ‘her high, grating voice’, while the adjective ‘nagging’ used the example phrase ‘a nagging wife’.” And while we concede these and many words are unintentionally gendered in their usage, Oxford Dictionaries should probably let people learn their gender bias from abysmal parenting, as is tradition.

HEALTH

Turns out your mother was right all along: It seems the secret to weightloss is neither exercise nor starving yourself on a ridiculous gluten-free diet. The most recent research from the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics suggests that it’s actually not eating at restaurants. Tufts University researcher Lorien Urban and her co-authors examined the nutrition content of more than 360 dinner entrees at 123 non-chain restaurants in San Francisco, Boston and Little Rock between 2011 and 2014. What they found is restaurant dishes contained 1,200 calories, on average — about half of the 2,000 or 2,500 calories recommended for moderately active women and men in an entire day. What this means is “you should view the pasta dish at your local Italian restaurant with the same suspicion you reserve for a Big Mac,” writes Julia Belluz for Vox.

PERSONAL TECH

Apple is probably going to introduce a new 4-inch phone to replace the iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5se, as it’s reportedly going to be called, will be a godsend for those with tiny hands, small purses or — like us — no need to lug around a 6s Plus while out for a run or in the gym. Despite our preference for larger devices, the name alone makes at least the older among us nostalgic, harkening as it does back to the days of the Mac SE and SE/30. The new iPhone is probably going to be launched in March, along with an upgraded version of the iPad Air 3.

REAL ESTATE

What does EUR 2.5 mn get you in Croatia? A villa with sea views in Dubrovnik, the New York Times says, using a three-bedroom, two-bath property about a 30-minute walk from the Old Town as a jumping-off point for a discussion of Croatia’s bargain-priced market for luxury homes. The only problem: Sellers know they’re sitting on jewels — and that while prices have “stabilized” after tumbling 30% during the global financial crisis, they certainly haven’t recovered. Check out “House Hunting in … Croatia” (one of our favourite nations on the planet, for what it’s worth) or ogle the photo gallery (21 images) of this weirdly charming (or maybe “charmingly weird”?) 1910 home that’s been in the same family for four generations.

TECH

Consensus at the World Economic Forum in Davos seemed to be: Tech is contributing nothing at all — right up until AI kills us all. Here’s one more thing to bolster that view: A new AI can come up with pretty solid political speeches. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, created AI they’ve trained using 4,000 speech segments from 53 floor debates to come up with software that can churn out political speeches. Gizmodo has an example of what it can do so far, and while it probably won’t be replacing political speech writers anytime soon, we’d be willing to listen to it over a Trump speech any day.

Speaking of AI: An AI machine from Google is conquering the ancient Chinese game of Go. The software, AlphaGo, “achieved a 99.8% winning rate against other Go programs, and defeated the human European Go champion by 5 games to 0. This is the first time that a computer program has defeated a human professional player in the full-sized game of Go, a feat previously thought to be at least a decade away,” according to the abstract presented in Nature. Computers managed to outplay humans in tic-tac-toe in 1952, checkers in 1994, and chess in 1997, the Google Research Blog reminds us. What’s so special about Go? “As simple as the rules are, Go is a game of profound complexity. The search space in Go is vast — more than a googol times larger than chess (a number greater than there are atoms in the universe!). As a result, traditional “brute force” AI methods — which construct a search tree over all possible sequences of moves — don’t have a chance in Go.” AlphaGo will face its greatest challenge in March, Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok writes, when it faces the top Go player in the world over the last decade, Lee Sedol. Win or lose, Tabarrok expects Sedol to be the last human world champion the world will know – before computers begin to rule the game.

THE WEEK’S MOST-CLICKED STORIES

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week were:

  • Why MENA should welcome slower growth in China, by EFG Hermes Head of Strategy Simon Kitchen (Enterprise)
  • Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund Chairman James Harmon’s annual letter (EEAF)
  • Guns n’ Roses, Egypt-style (Photograph by Ahmed Gomaa)
  • Egypt’s Judiciary: Obstructing or Assisting Reform? (Middle East Institute)
  • Ahmed Malek and Shady Hussein prophylactic video (Facebook video)

ON YOUR WAY OUT

The cost of living everywhere in the world — in a single infographic suggests that Egypt is the seventh least-expensive country in which to live in the world. No comment.

Straight from central casting, China has anointed its designated fall guy:The man in charge of China’s deeply suspect economic data is now under investigation,” reports Quartz, noting that “Wang Baoan, the head of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, is under investigation for ‘serious violations of party discipline.’”

ICYMI- “Doom mongers have their day in the sun,” by the FT, looks at Société Générale’s Albert Edwards, the bank’s head of “alternative strategies.”

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