The Weekend Edition

As you can probably tell if you’ve been following us for a while, one of our editors is a huge rugby fan. Besides helping deliver you Enterprise every day, he also helps run the Cairo Rugby Football Club, Egypt’s oldest. (He also occasionally tries to play international matches in a cow costume, but that’s another story). Since 1980, Cairo Rugby has worked on spreading the game across Egypt, internationally, and for all ages, often battling against brutal conditions, operational restrictions, and financial obstacles. The club is a volunteer-based organization and survives on fundraisers, particularly the annual Cairo Rugby gala Desert Dinner, held at Fairmont Nile Towers this year, and in which our Enterprise readers are invited to participate in this year.

Is there anything wrong with “food plagiarism”? To get an actual cronut, you “must be willing to brave the sea of humanity that amasses each morning outside Dominique Ansel Bakery in Manhattan. You can also go to a Dunkin’ Donuts in pretty much any city and order something that’s kind of like Ansel’s iconic pastry, cut from croissant dough and then deep fried. Or, in Sacramento, you could have a Doissant. In San Francisco, you can scarf down a Cruffin, which is not a doughnut at all, but hey, close enough” or just pop by the nearest TBS here in Cairo, which markets a similar product in its stores under the exact same name. Where are we going with this? Cooking has always revolved on adapting and perfecting existing dishes using common ingredients, but now, the speed of this “evolution” is “happening so quickly, it’s impossible to control.” This is happening because chefs can protect the “names of their unique creations … [but] it’s far harder … to prove that someone’s dish is a knockoff, mostly because it’s a high bar to prove that yours is original.” Yet, this is not a major problem necessarily. At the end of the day, one chef argues, restaurants’ real intellectual property isn’t their dish recipes, but the intangibles: service, consistency, mood, and ambience. H/t Marginal Revolution

Non-compete contracts may occasionally make sense, but they should be used much less than they are now, economist Timothy Taylor suggests. About 18% of all US workers are covered by noncompete contracts and they are used by employers mainly to protect trade secrets. “By preventing a worker from taking such secrets to a firm’s competitors, the non-compete essentially solves a “hold-up” problem: ex ante, both worker and firm have an interest in sharing vital information, as this raises the worker’s productivity. But ex post, the worker has an incentive to threaten the firm with divulgence of the information, raising his or her compensation by some amount equal to or less than the firm’s valuation of the information. Predicting this state of affairs, the firm is unwilling to share the information in the first place unless it has some legal recourse like a non-compete contract.” Taylor believes the overuse of non-compete contracts is rendering them obsolete as many of the employees who are subjected to the contracts are not necessarily in hold of material trade secrets. More importantly, they could curb innovation and drive the need for more regulation. Taylor adds that “the presumption in a market-oriented economy should be that workers are free to switch between jobs when they wish to do so. Employers who want to keep employees have many tools to do so, including paying bonuses related to length of time on the job.”

Bloomberg Businessweek has published its 2016 picks for the top undergraduate business programs in the United States, surveying nearly 30,000 students and recruiters at almost 600 companies. The top three spots went to Villanova, University of Notre Dame, and Boston College. The ranking gives a 40% weight to the employer survey, 35% to the student survey, and 15% to a measure of starting salaries graduates receive.

Don’t lie to the International Monetary Fund. Yes, we know, we have a moratorium on hard news in the Weekend Edition. But given the number of us sitting around hoping the Ismail government will sign up for an IMF facility, the Financial Times’ reasonably brief cautionary tale from Mozambique is worth considering if you’re a subscriber. The issue: The IMF has cut the country off after learning it had failed to disclose around USD 1 bn in government debt. “It is probably one of the largest cases of the provision of inaccurate data by a government the IMF has seen in an African country in recent times. They deliberately kept from us at least USD 1 bn, possibly higher, of hidden loans.”

Those of us aged 40 and above perform best on a shorter work week, according to a report published in the Melbourne Institute Worker Paper (pdf) series. While the cognitive performance of middle-aged people improved as the work week increased up to 25 hours a week, it fell significantly after that. "The degree of intellectual stimulation may depend on working hours. Work can be a double-edged sword, in that it can stimulate brain activity, but at the same time long working hours can cause fatigue and stress, which potentially damage cognitive functions.” (Editor’s note: Don’t worry, Enterprise isn’t moving to a three-day publishing schedule any time soon, despite the not-so-subtle hints of the younger generation around here…)

Picking up where we left the story in yesterday’s edition: The seventh US President, Andrew Jackson, will no longer be the face on the USD 20 bill. The Treasury Department made a decision to replace his image with abolitionist hero Harriet Tubman’s. “Harriet Tubman was born into slavery. After she escaped, she became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, helping slaves escape to freedom. During the Civil War, she was active in the Union cause, serving as a nurse, a cook, and a scout, gathering intelligence. Looking back on her life, Harriet Tubman said, ‘I would fight for liberty so long as my strength lasted.’ After the war, she supported the cause of women’s suffrage and was active in suffragist organizations. She died in 1913 and was buried with military honors.” Vox are more blunt about the change, calling Jackson “a slaver, ethnic cleanser, and tyrant.” There will also be new USD 10 bills commemorating women’s suffrage and new USD 5 bills commemorating the historic events that occurred at the Lincoln Memorial and will include images of Marian Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr.

If you’re driven nuts by your eight-year-old’s addiction to Minecraft, read this story. “…Minecraft culture is a throwback to the heady early days of the digital age. In the late ’70s and ’80s, the arrival of personal computers like the Commodore 64 gave rise to the first generation of kids fluent in computation. They learned to program in Basic, to write software that they swapped excitedly with their peers. It was a playful renaissance that eerily parallels the embrace of Minecraft by today’s youth. … Minecraft may well be this generation’s personal computer … [it] has become a stealth gateway to the fundamentals, and the pleasures, of computer science. Those kids of the ’70s and ’80s grew up to become the architects of our modern digital world, with all its allures and perils. What will the Minecraft generation become?” Read: “The Minecraft Generation: How a clunky Swedish computer game is teaching mns of children to master the digital world.”

It is costing a fortune to keep Vladimir Lenin’s body preserved: Russia will spend around USD 198k this year to maintain Lenin’s corpse, which has been on display in Moscow’s Red Square since his death in 1924. Scientists add a fresh coat of embalming fluids to the body every year, a “weeks-long ‘process that involves submerging the body in separate solutions of glycerol solution baths, formaldehyde, potassium acetate, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid solution and acetic sodium,’” The Atlantic Reports.

Enterprise has an office dog. She’s a baladi dog, mostly black but with a patch of tan on her chest. Sweet-natured, she lives in the garden of our office building. We feed her and lavish her attention on her (as do our corporate neighbors, good-hearted souls that they are) and in return protects us from scoundrels, youts, and random passers-by on bikes. Her name is Rita, though one editor’s daughter insists “Diego” is a much more appropriate name. Like the hundreds of others what inhabit the streets of Maadi, Rita / Diego and 750 mn other street / village / free-breeding dogs around the world are “the closest living things to the dogs that first emerged thousands of years ago.” The New York Times profiles a couple whose research on street dogs has turned on its head everything we thought we knew about the evolution of Man’s Best Friend. Read: “The World is Full of Dogs Without Collars.”

Still getting started in the children department? Why name your kid when you can pay a company to do it: Expecting and have USD 29,000 to spare? Fork it over to Switzerland-based naming agency Erfolgswelle and they’ll spend weeks and over 100 hours of work, rifling through data and social perceptions, particularly by employers, to determine the best name for your child and his/her success in life. On a budget but still want to figuratively throw money down the drain? Fear not, My Name for Life’s services begin at several hundred USD, but they’ll only spend around 30 hours of work on a report for you.

One of Enterprise’s favourite podcasts is back for a new season: Season three of Startup is a bit different than the first two; instead of tracking one company, the season will follow several that are “caught in this moment, when something needs to change, and it’s not clear what will happen next.” The first episode is about “a group of friends that moves across the country to launch an unlikely website that they think could replace television. The media loves them. They just need to figure out how to get their users to feel the same way.” (Run time 29:52)

Where science and morality intersect: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk Radio podcast discusses the areas where science and morality meet, like “why we’re evolutionarily prone to pigeonholing, and why racism is actually the nefarious hijacking of an evolutionary force, tribalism.” One piece of good news: We have data indicating that the general population is getting smarter and more scientifically literate. (Run time 55:09)

The UN has preemptively held a conference to stop Skynet. Nope, this is not the plot from the next horrible entry to the Terminator franchise, but real [expletive] life. The "Meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems" session, which wrapped up last week, is looking to put the brakes on what appears to be an avalanche of more advanced, more autonomous, and ever-spreading weapons systems. The plethora of systems out there — to say nothing of the ones now being developed — is enough to turn you into a survivalist. Exhibit A: Long Range Anti Ship Missile, which can formulate a strategy, and choose targets mid-flight without human commands. Exhibit B: Sea Hunter, an unmanned, robotic "ghost ship" designed to prey upon enemy submarines in the Pacific. Are robots that kill individual humans in a targeted manner far behind? Can such a UN conference succeed in face of such blatant military necessity and overwhelming commercial viability? The answer, according to PW Singer, is simple: We probably can’t. But as long as we continue to demand accountability from the humans who make and manage the AI and drones, we can at least hope to curtail their harmful impact. Read: “Humans Can’t Escape Killer Robots, but Humans Can Be Held Accountable for Them.”

‘If Work Is Digital, Why Do We Still Go to the Office’: Even though predictions by prominent theorists over the years claimed that “distance will die,” with the advancement of technology allowing us to communicate instantaneously anywhere, MIT researchers Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel illustrate in the Harvard Business Review how the contrary appears to be taking place, as many firms are still investing significantly in renovated office spaces because “even if we can work from anywhere, that does not mean we want to.” Over the years, there has been a transformation from tight cubicle spaces to more open, sociable spaces that promote interaction and the sharing of intellectual and physical tools. They even state that the strive for the ideal workspace has already enlisted the help of data analysts attempting to “quantify” human interactions by building tools that measure human connections and spatial behavior and how they relate to productivity and creativity. “Imagine rooms that automatically go on stand-by and save on energy when left empty,” an initiative the authors claim to be already studying. All this feeds into the notion of thinking of buildings as “T-shirts” rather than a “corset.”

A secretive company near Fort Lauderdale, Florida has been making ripples in tech news after landing USD 793.5 mn in the largest C-round of financing in internet history bringing the total invested amount to USD 1.4 bn, writes tech journalist Kevin Kelly for Wired. The startup in question is Magic Leap, who create an optical system that creates the illusion of depth in such a way that your eyes focus far for far things, and near for near, and will converge or diverge at the correct distances. Magic Leap have put together a video that briefly explains the difference between VR, AR, and MR (run time 2:06). So while the description of what Magic Leap really is is a little difficult to decipher, in fact, the vagueness surrounding what Magic Leap’s product really is adds to the mystery of a company invested in by Google, Alibaba, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins, but about which nobody really knows anything. A video has been released that provides some insight (run time 4:24), in it CEO Rony Abovitz claims, “Your brain is like a graphics processor … we basically tried to clone what that signal is, we made a digital version of that, and we talk to the GPU of the brain.”

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

• Trumpism and Clintonism are the Future (New York Times)
• Email etiquette abroad, email pointers in Egypt (New Yorker, Enterprise)
• François Hollande in Egypt: The French national anthem is butchered (Youtube)
• How Alexandria’s landmarks have (and haven’t) changed over the last 20 years (Egypt Independent)
• Is the Northwest Passage threatening the Suez Canal? (Enterprise) (tie)
• The bad smell hovering over the global economy (Guardian) (tie)

What is the Nagorno-Karbakh conflict about? About 50 people were killed some two weeks ago after intense fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed enclave between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Economist Explains blog gave a primer on the conflict: “ Armenia and Azerbaijan have a long history of tension,” after both countries came under Bolshevik control and “Soviet commissars declared Nagorno-Karabakh a part of Azerbaijan, though a majority Armenian population remained… As the Soviet Union collapsed, a bloody war broke out over the territory. Some 30,000 were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced before a 1994 ceasefire halted the combat.” In the latest attacks, Azeri forces “attempted for the first time not only to rattle their Armenian foes, but to seize new territory… the moment may have seemed ripe for reshuffling the diplomatic cards.” What are the wider risks? “A new outburst could erupt at any time. If allowed to spin out of control, Nagorno-Karabakh could morph into a wider regional war, one that could pit Russia (which has a military base in Armenia and a treaty obligation to defend it against external attacks) and Turkey (which backs its ethnic brethren in Azerbaijan) against each other.”

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has collaborated with French electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre on a techno track, named Exit, after the Guardian put the artist in touch with Snowden. The track is set to appear on the French artist’s upcoming album of collaborations, and will see Snowden “speak” instead of sing lyrics over the “obsessive” track. The subject? Pretty much what you’d guess: Snowden’s the importance of privacy in the age of technology. After several Skype sessions, Jarre flew to Moscow to meet the exiled Snowden and filmed a video to be played at the artist’s festivals. ”There are tracks about the erotic relationship we have with technology, the way we touch our smartphones more than our partners, about CCTV surveillance, about love in the age of Tinder. It seemed quite appropriate to collaborate not with a musician but someone who literally symbolises this crazy relationship we have with technology,” the French artist said. Snowden, on the other hand, says that the request came as a surprise because “as an engineer, someone who’s not really cool, it was something of a treat to collaborate on a big cultural project.”

The Wall Street Journal is getting some serious flack for a full-page ad that ran in its print edition from the genocide-denial group FactCheck Armenia that seeks to deny that the Armenian genocide, when as many as 1.5 mn Armenians were killed by the Ottoman government in what is now Turkey, in 1915. The WSJ responded to Gawker’s request for comments with: “We accept a wide range of advertisements, including those with provocative viewpoints. While we review ad copy for issues of taste, the varied and divergent views expressed belong to the advertisers.”