The Weekend Edition

“There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students,” Heather Shumaker writes for Salon in “Homework is wrecking our kids,” quoting the Duke University “homework research guru” who arrived at his conclusion — in part — after reviewing more than 180 independent studies on the subject. Not only does homework poison an elementary schooler’s attitude toward school and future learning, it’s corrosive to families, too: “In thousands of homes across the country, families battle over homework nightly. Parents nag and cajole. Overtired children protest and cry. Instead of connecting and supporting each other at the end of the day, too many families find themselves locked in the “did you do your homework?” cycle.” Says another education professor: “Even in middle school, the relationship between homework and academic success is minimal at best. By the time kids reach high school, homework provides academic benefit [but] more than two hours per night is the limit.”

The bottom line: “Elementary school kids deserve a ban on homework. This can be achieved at the family, classroom or school level. Families can opt out, teachers can set a culture of no homework (or rare, optional homework), and schools can take time to read the research and rekindle joy in learning.”

BONUS CONTENT: If you have a teen struggling with any subject in high school, go read The New Teacher Project’s “One Classroom, Twenty Teachers” about how one teacher made pre-calculus accessible to everyone by engaging her students. Then go book a time to speak with your kid’s teacher.

You have exactly two work weeks left to get in some of the best work you can do all year. At least according to Bloomberg. “August is secretly the best time to get things done. The lack of work (and people) makes it a good time to do ‘deep work,’ to use a term coined by Georgetown professor Cal Newport. The rest of the year, when the office is running at full steam, we’re plagued with what Newport calls ‘shallow work’—such things as e-mail and meetings that we must do as part of our jobs but that don’t contribute to the meat of our tasks.”

The Economist’s list of big economic ideas moved forward, presenting John Maynard Keynes’ idea of the fiscal multiplier. The most important contribution of Keynes’ magnum opus — The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money — “is the reasoning behind the proposition that when an economy is operating below full employment, demand rather than supply determines the level of investment and national income.”

The idea of Keynes’ multiplier effect, which reemerged after the 2008 financial crash, supported the notion that extra money spent by governments would add directly to national output and income, first by reaching direct contractors, suppliers, and civil servants who, in turn, would spend the extra income on other goods and services and so on. “Should the government cut back, the ill effects would multiply in the same way.”

Keynes’ ideas received plenty of criticism in the 1970s, peaking in 1979 with an article published by eventual Nobel laureates Robert Lucas and Tom Sargent titled “After Keynesian Economics,” suggesting that the flaws in Keynesian economic models were “fatal.”

But he’s back in style again: Now, after the great recession, plenty of economists “argue that insufficient fiscal stimulus has been among the biggest failures of the post-crisis era… austerity has substantially reduced growth, leading to levels of public debt that are higher than they would have been had enthusiastic stimulus been used to revive growth.” Next up in The Economist’s series is a brief on The Nash Equilibrium, the basic tenet of game theory.

Why do you feel like vomiting when you try to read in the car? You brain thinks it’s being poisoned. Here’s how.

Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ 105-year-old secretary is still alive — and fundamentally unrepentant, saying in a new film about her life that “no one believes me now, but I knew nothing. … Those people nowadays who say they would have stood up against the Nazis – I believe they are sincere in meaning that, but believe me, most of them wouldn’t have. The whole country was as if under a kind of a spell.” The Guardian has more on Brunhilde Pomsel, who is probably the last surviving member of the Nazi inner circle and the film “A German Life” based on life.

Not enough Nazis for you in one weekend? How about reading up on the search for a lost “Nazi gold train,” which we had mentioned a few months back. The train, rumored to be filled with stolen gold, gems and artwork, is said to have “disappeared in 1945 in a secret tunnel system as the Soviet Army advanced west toward Germany.” The New York Times reports that two treasure seekers began a 10-day dig this week. The Washington Post also has the story, and Russia’s RT has daily updates from the dig site, including word that it so far has turned up “traces of steel and porcelain” not native to the area. While historians are generally skeptical the train existed in the first place, the type of tunnel system the search team is looking for were very real. The Mail Online has more in “Abandoned guns, forgotten munitions carts and peeling paint: Inside the eerie military shelters in Poland where children were forced to dig tunnels to help the Nazi military machine.”Just be careful not to hit too much click bait while you’re there.

Is bigger better. In a world in which conglomeration has become a bad word, the healthcare giant is making the case that what Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky calls “broad-base advantages” is a good thing, offering “consistent financial experience, wide-ranging expertise, and a customer base that spans from consumers to hospitals to governments,” according to Fortune. But while the company sticks to its legacy guns as “a sprawling, old-fashioned conglomerate,” the healthcare industry has been moving more toward decentralisation, spinning off pharma and consumer divisions to “unlock value.” Abbott freed USD 92 mn for shareholders when it spun off its pharma division while Baxter freed USD 4 bn doing the same, according to Goldman Sachs research. In fact, “There is absolutely no evidence that these businesses create more value as a result of being together,” says Daniel O’Keefe, a managing director at Artisan.

But J&J doesn’t agree. “In Gorsky’s view, decentralized didn’t have to mean disconnected. The whole point of a broad-based health care enterprise was that the different business units could work together to find synergies, cross-fertilize ideas, and reap cost savings that could be reinvested in the business. That, thought Gorsky, was the best way to unlock value.”

McMansions, now becoming popular in some gated communities here in Egypt, are architectural monstrosities — and it’s not a matter of taste: They fail to live-up to basic architectural concepts. The McMansion Hell blog explains basic architectural concepts and “why not all suburban / exurban / residential houses are McMansions, as well as what makes a McMansion especially hideous.” A starting point, according to the blog, is that a McMansion has no concept of “mass” and that it uses too many “voids” as “Some McMansions are so guilty of this they resemble Swiss cheese in appearance.” They also have notoriously poor “balance,” they are neither symmetrically nor asymmetrically balanced, and also have horrible proportions. McMansion Hell also says commercialised McMansions lack architectural rhythm and fail to abide by the Gestalt Principles. McMansions typically have “contrasting materials [that] distract the eye from an otherwise somewhat asymmetrically balanced (if massive) house. The inconsistency of the window shapes as well as the shutters make this house incredibly tacky.” The blogpost provides visual examples of all the architectural critiques it presents.

The world is not ending. And if you feel like it is, that’s probably Enterprise’s fault: Take the rise of Donald Trump, add in Islamophobia, Brexit and a dash of terrorist attacks, failed coups and mass shootings, and it’s easy to fall prey to the argument that we’re in the end times. But we’re not “backsliding toward a more violent, less tolerant time in history.” In fact, the Harvard researcher who has “meticulously documented a steady decline in violence over the last several centuries” — something he claims "may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species” — says we’re actually in really good shape today. Among the reasons we don’t feel this way, he suggests, is that following the news is a “misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened, not about things that didn’t happen.” Read “You may think the world is falling apart. Steven Pinker is here to tell you it isn’t.”

**Saving Cairo from itself: If you’ve ever wondered what could be done to save our nation’s capital from imploding under the weight of some 20 mn inhabitants, SODIC’s Cairo Series is your starting point. The fifth and final installment in the series ran yesterday; links to each installment in the full series are below if you’ve missed one and want to catch up during this next-to-last long weekend of summer.

• Part 1: Why is your day in Cairo so hard — and what can we do about it?
• Part 2: Egypt’s real housing sector: Market-based informality
• Part 3: There’s a reason middle-income housing doesn’t exist — here’s how the government can fix it
• Part 4: Mythbuster: Land registration has nothing to do with why Egypt doesn’t have a large-scale mortgage system
• Part 5: Beloved Cairo, here’s how we can fix you — together

We finally have an answer to why traffic jams happen for no reason. Apparently “If there are enough cars on a highway, any minor disruptions to the flow of traffic can cause a self-reinforcing chain reaction: one car brakes slightly, and the ones behind it brake just a bit more to avoid hitting it, with the braking eventually amplifying until it produces a wave of stopped or slowed traffic.” Here’s a video (run time 0:39) to show you exactly how that happens. So how do we stop it? “If people anticipate higher traffic densities ahead, and take their feet off the gas earlier and leave more room in front of them — instead of waiting until they have to brake — that can prevent traffic jams from arising,” says Benjamin Seibold, a mathematician who’s worked on the problem. Which would be a literal impossibility in Egypt as we all suffer from a mass allergy to leaving space between cars. We’re like sharks, if we stop moving, we die. Another solution? Smoother roads. To which we say this.

“China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech” the New York Times tells us, noting that features now becoming popular in “Western” apps such as Snapchat and Kik were first made popular in China. “More people [in China] use their mobile devices to pay their bills, order services, watch videos and find dates than anywhere else in the world. Mobile payments in the country last year surpassed those in the United States. By some estimates, loans from a new breed of informal online banks called peer-to-peer lenders did too.”

What will the world look like if we’re all living to be 120, as some scientists believe may be in the cards thanks to recent scientific advances? One tight piece in the Economist asks questions on what this could mean for everything from discrimination to boredom, from retirement to public finances. The piece is almost good enough to see us forget their hit-job on Egypt the week before last.

On the ridiculous notion that you can separate politics from sports: Islam El Shehaby isn’t unique in turning the Olympics into something of a political side-show. “When John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists in the black power salute at the 1968 Games in Mexico, they were widely reviled. Both men were suspended from the US Olympic team and received death threats,” writes Ruby Hamad for Daily Life. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the “blood in the water” match between Hungary and the USSR, which took place a month after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. In 1972, the terrorist attacks in the Munich Olympics claimed the lives of 11 Israeli athletes, five terrorists and one policeman. In 1976, 30 African countries boycotted because the International Olympic Committee allowed New Zealand to join when it had legitimized South Africa during its Apartheid regime. In 1980, the US led over 60 countries to boycott in protest of the USSR invading Afghanistan. This time around, the Lebanese Olympic team refusing to share a bus with the Israeli team caused a fuss in international media. So did El Shehaby’s refusing to shake Israeli Or Sasson’s hand after losing the judo match. This year, Israeli officials prevented the Palestinian Olympic Team chief from leaving the Gaza Strip. The Olympics are in fact the one of the most politicized sporting events in human history.

How do Olympians stay so driven? The New York Times asks, profiling the feats of former medalists and their responses on how they remain motivated, inspired, and capable of pushing themselves to stick to a demanding schedule. “The key to training is reaching the point of beyond, where everything hones in and you move automatically, knowing in your bones what you have to do…It also means knowing who you are. When I teach kids, I tell them to get in touch with the reflection in the mirror: You can’t see your gifts, and you won’t know how to use them, if you don’t know who you are,” says former bronze track-and-field medalist John Carlos. The short response essays compelling even to the least athletic of readers, with comments as diverse (yet similar) as “the trickle-down effect that [my] efforts could have” with more females represented in the sport, to “My mom always told me, ‘never quit on a bad day. And I think that it’s important to extend that resolve to life after the Olympics.’”

Science geeks, read this: “The tyranny of simple explanations” in The Atlantic, by Philip Ball, argues that “the history of science has been distorted by a longstanding conviction that correct theories about nature are always to most elegant ones.” Occam’s razor, Isaac Newton and Francis Crick on a Friday morning. What could be better than that?

Sometimes, war is inevitable. Sometimes, war is good. And today, it’s time to start a Third World War — against climate change. So argues Bill McKibben in The New Republic, writing that “we’re under attack from climate change — and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII. … It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing.” And the answer, surprisingly enough, starts with business: “Defeating the Nazis required more than brave soldiers. It required a wholesale industrial retooling.” If you worry about the future of the planet and are a World War II history buff, this is what you want to read this morning. Read: A world at war.

A Syrian refugee is living Tom Hanks’ life from The Terminal: Fadi Mansour has been stuck inside Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport for over a year, Patrick Kingsley writes. Upon reaching Turkey in November 2014 and finding out he could not seek legal work, Mansour bought a fake passport and attempted to fly to Germany. His flight went via Kuala Lumpur, and the border police there detected his false paperwork and sent him back to Turkey, where he was taken to a detention room instead of being readmitted. “When I watched the movie [The Terminal], I realised they were dealing with it in a comic way, and my situation was not very comic. He used to eat hamburgers and I used to eat hamburgers. But Tom Hanks was free to go around the airport, whereas I was just stuck in a single room… There were no windows and I didn’t see daylight for eight months … they kept the lights on 24 hours a day. I don’t know how I got out of that room capable of walking,” Mansour says. After being trapped in Atatürk Airport for 12 months, he was ultimately released after Australia heard of his case and agreed to give him asylum. Read his story in the Guardian.

Planet Money explains the business of oil: NPR’s Planet Money is putting together an excellent series explaining the nitty-gritty details of oil business. “How many of us have actually seen crude oil? How does it get from ground to gas tank? And who are the people along the way turning thick black crude into light, clear, gasoline.” In a five-part series, the Planet Money team is looking to explain some of the many operations that make the oil business run, going from buying actual oil barrels, to setting the price, refining the oil and eventually selling it. In episode one (runtime 18:20), they start-off from a rural oil field in Kansas to buy oil in cash. The team heads to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to see how the price of oil is set in episode two (runtime 22:25) and actually talk to real-life oil speculators. Episode 3 of the series talks about how fracking changed the game entirely and talk to the oil engineer who “unlocked the secret to making fracking work like it does today” (runtime 27:00)

Low-orbit flyby over Planet Trump: So much happens with the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on a weekly and even daily basis that it could fill a book.

It’s been a rough week for Paul Manafort, formerly Trump’s senior campaign advisor and currently the “national chairman” of the campaign following the appointment of two new, even more controversial henchmen — sorry, advisors. Manafort, previously campaign advisor to Kremlin-linked former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and whose firm lobbied on behalf of dictators Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has for weeks been at the center of controversy surrounding the Trump campaign with regard to questionable positions on Ukraine and Russia.

On Sunday, the New York Times broke the story that Ukrainian prosecutors are investigating USD 12.7 mn in previously undisclosed payments found in a handwritten ledger, known in Ukraine as “the black ledger,” earmarked for Manafort made by Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party. The report notes that “though they [Ukrainian prosecutors] have yet to determine if he [Manafort] actually received the cash,” that “he must have realized the implications of his financial dealings.” Says a former senior official in the Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office: “He understood what was happening in Ukraine… It would have to be clear to any reasonable person that the Yanukovych clan, when it came to power, was engaged in corruption.”

On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that unnamed sources said Manafort’s firm “helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least USD 2.2 mn in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence US policy.” Manafort’s lack of disclosure on the revelation could potentially be viewed as a violation of US federal law, which carries a potential five year prison sentence and a fine of up to USD 250k. Just hours ago, the AP backed up its claims, saying it had obtained emails demonstrating that Manafort “directly orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine’s ruling political party, attempting to sway American public opinion in favor of the country’s pro-Russian government.”

Adding further fuel to the Manafort dumpster fire, “a memo leaked to the Times of London on Wednesday suggests Ukrainian prosecutors believe Manafort actively helped to foment unrest in the incident [an anti-US protest targeting US Marines in Ukraine in 2006], one of a long line of provocations they say may have contributed to Eastern Ukraine’s secession from the country and Russia’s interference in the region.”

MOVES– Whether or not the scandal-ridden Manafort’s questionable Ukrainian links were any reason for him being unceremoniously pushed aside and kicked upstairs as the Trump campaign’s “national chairman” on Wednesday, one would be tempted to assume that it is probably not the best thing in the world for the Trump campaign to be overshadowed by a campaign manager more controversial than Trump himself. And one would be wrong. On Wednesday, the Trump campaign announced that chairman of far-right wing news outlet Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon, was the campaign’s new CEO.

Adding to the lineup of Trump’s Suicide Squad is Kellyanne Conway, his new campaign manager, replacing Manafort. Rounding out the team is Roger Ailes, the recently ousted Fox News chairman, former Nixon advisor, and serial harasser of women, who is now officially serving as an advisor to the campaign after having secretly been an advisor for some time. No news yet if Harley Quinn will be joining up with the Trump campaign.

“Playing is not the opposite of learning; playing is learning,” argues a piece by clinical psychologist Erica Reischer an excerpt from her newly-released book What Great Parents Do: 75 Simple Strategies for Raising Kids Who Thrive published in The Atlantic. As more school-age children and young adults struggle to balance piles of homework with athletic or extracurricular achievements, potentially even developing mental illnesses, Reischer suggests that a “backdoor” approach may be more effective in helping students achieve success. Her alternative to more traditional methods of measuring achievement and potential? Encouraging students to practice and develop skills related to self-control — for younger kids, that could be through imaginative play. Older adolescents should be allowed to participate in activities of their own selection, be it something as (seemingly) obscure as knitting, as opposed to “someone else’s ideas about what will best position them for a competitive college or career.” Engagement, rather than striving for a particular goal, is what she encourages.

Should doping be a free-for-all? Australian philosophers Robert Sparrow and Julian Savulescu debate over whether or not doping should be allowed in sports for a piece published by Nautilus. “We should drop this criterion of banning something because it’s performance-enhancing. It’s complete nonsense. Sport is about performance-enhancement,” says Savulescu. Whereas his counterpart, Sparrow, responds, “We have to understand that people who’ve dedicated their lives to these achievements are quite vulnerable. Having a set of rules that makes it more plausible for them to damage themselves is bad public policy.” An engaging read, the discussion between the two thinkers goes on to discuss myriad related topics such as whether women with more testosterone should be allowed to compete or if swimmers born with webbed fingers have an unfair advantage. The likes of Maria Sharapov, particularly, would probably be happy with Savulescu’s more progressive arguments, as he believes in relaxing the rules: “We are our own masters, and that includes deciding what kind of physiology, what kind of mental determination we have. In my view, it’s a part of human evolution to enhance our performance in those ways.”

Coffee drinkers live longer. Actually, make that shorter. Saturated fat is actually good for you. Wait, scratch that — it’s actually not so great. Confused yet? You’re not alone, according to the New York Times, which runs down why food and exercise studies often give such wildly different results. “The problem is one of signal to noise. You can’t discern the signal — a lower risk of dementia, or a longer life, or less obesity, or less cancer — because the noise, the enormous uncertainty in the measurement of such things as how much you exercise or what exactly you eat, is overwhelming.” To add insult to injury, there’s no gold standard guidelines that everyone agrees on to measure aspects of certain lifestyles, meaning we have large bodies of studies that no one can reproduce. In short: “We don’t know how to measure diet or exercise,” according Barnett Kramer, director of the National Cancer Institute’s division of disease prevention.

Augmented reality is not new: It was not invented for Pokemon Go, but up until very recently, it existed almost exclusively in military situation awareness and aircraft maintenance applications, writes Roger Smith for Techcrunch. Don’t believe us? How many of you own a Google VR, Samsung Gear VR, or even an Oculus Rift? Augmented reality is similar to Virtual Reality, but does not immerse you in a completely fictional world. Instead, it layers fictional data over the real world. This is not only in the form of digital Pokémon roaming around your screen in real-world geographic locations, but the idea of layering real-world and digital data together, like pokestops and gyms, can itself be expanded. An extension of this technology can mean emergency service apps can show you locations of every AED, fire extinguisher, fire alarm and emergency phone clearly displayed. Applications in entertainment are the most obvious, Disney partnered with Google to use AR for promotion of its upcoming Pete’s Dragon movie. Apple’s Tim cook has declared AR a “core technology” for the company. So the question is no longer “if” augmented reality is seeping into our lives, it already did when it was paired with the smart phone.

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

• That horrible Dreamland Gold’s Gym advertisement (screen shot)
• Responses to Islam El Shehaby on Facebook (satire, profanity) (here and here)
• Beloved Cairo, here’s how we can fix you — together (Enterprise)
• Eight female television presenters allegedly suspended for weight gain (Enterprise)
• World outrage at Egyptian judoka El Shehaby’s poor sportsmanship in Rio (Enterprise)

Hollywood has ruined method acting according to The Atlantic’s Angelica Jade Bastien, who points to Jared Leto’s performance as The Joker in Suicide Squad as being the final death knell. Long held as the key tool at an actor’s disposal in the 20th and 21st century to embody the character, bring it to life and win critical acclaim, method acting has now become a gimmick to promote a movie and generate critical buzz before awards season. The “method” — as taught by Lee Strasberg — gave us some of the most memorable roles by some of the best actors of the time: from Marlon Brando to DeNiro and, more recently, Daniel Day-Lewis. The latter was famous for staying in character off set, insisting that he be addressed as the character, an approach that translated into a record three best actor Oscar wins. Leto’s version of the Joker — coming off the back of Heath Ledger’s legendary portrayal — was underwhelming by comparison. According to interviews with costars, his method acting involved watching a lot of violent videos and sending his co-stars rats. The results have apparently contributed to the dismal critical reviews of Suicide Squad. Bastien holds the view that the technique (awesomely parodied in 2008’s Tropic Thunder) will no longer be seen as a vital prerequisite to acclaim. To quote Robert Downey Jr.’s character in Tropic Thunder (the character underwent pigment reassignment surgery to portray an African-American): “never go full retard” (runtime: 2:42). Leto apparently did, and in the process, ruined an almost-century-old method for everybody.

“Generational inequality risks becoming a new inequality for our times”: According to a new report by the Resolution Foundation, millennials in the UK are earning GBP 8k less than their predecessors, Generation X, were earning when they were at the same age, the Guardian reported. The future does not seem bright either, with the report adding an optimistic scenario for the future, where the future pay of millennials increased rapidly after a slow growth, their generational pay progress would be set at only 7% over their predecessors, with lifetime earnings at GBP 890k. A more pessimistic scenario would see lifetime earnings cut to GBP 825k, where they’d face a generational pay penalty. This issue can partly be blamed on the financial crisis, however, researchers claim that this trend existed before that. While these researchers also state that “public policy has ignored for too long” the issue of fairness between generation, the new UK government under Theresa May has addressed the growing gap between “a more prosperous older generation and a struggling younger generation.” This trend has also showed signs of prevalence in the United States, where the median income of young adults today was found to be USD 2k less than their parents.