The Weekend Edition

After the high of a near-win at the Africa Cup of Nations, we’re back to the sorry reality that is our domestic football season. Ahly and Zamalek face off at 6:00pm CLT this evening for the Egyptian Super Cup, which is being held in the UAE for the second time. Ahram Online says the national team’s players have already re-joined their respective clubs. If you, like some of us, are more into the odd-shaped ball, round two of rugby’s Six Nations gets underway on Saturday with matches between Ireland and Italy and the always exciting encounter of Wales vs England. The French and Scots face off on Sunday.

One thing to make you look forward to the end of the week for is that the second season of “Bns,” one of our favorite TV shows, starts a week from Sunday. But if you’re reading this in Amreeka and are a Showtime subscriber, you can catch episode one tonight online. And if you’re on the east coast — say, anywhere between New York City and the south coast of Newfoundland— you’ll want to load up the iPad with as many episodes of your favourite show as possible, with reports suggesting power outages are a possibility as a blizzard dumps 10-14 inches of snow atop your fair lands.

And if you’re recovering from a long work week, find some joy in the notion your week was probably better than Karl Pilkington’s when he visited Egypt a few years back as part of the An Idiot abroad series and was unwittingly made to feast on “beef [redacted]” (runtime 03:40). Otherwise, just read this, go spend time with friends and family, romp around in the outdoors, and maybe catch the last day of the Cairo International Book Fair at the Nasr City fairgrounds and find yourself a new book, or a dozen, there (we’re currently reading Gloria Steinem’s excellent memoir, My Life on the Road).

Also, we will be kind enough to remind you it’s Valentine’s Day on Tuesday and that you might need to prepare something for it other than this Netflix special with “the world’s greatest lover,” Michael Bolton.

Not celebrating Valentine’ Day? Bask in it by staying home and learning how to make the world’s longest-flying paper airplane (watch, runtime: 0:44 courtesy the Harvard Graduate School of Design) as folded by The Paper Airplane Guy.

Among the stories on our to-be-read list this weekend:

• Backing into World War III, by Robert Kagan, the neo-conservative and American interventionist turned basher of The Donald (“This is how fascism comes to America”) writes on why it is that we all need to keep living under a Pax Americana. Or: “America must check the assertive, rising powers of Russia and China before it’s too late. Accepting spheres of influence is a recipe for disaster.” (Foreign Policy)
• Guardians of a Vast Lake, and a Refuge for Humanity: Thousands of years ago, every lake was like Great Bear Lake. So pure you could lower a cup into the water and drink it. So beautiful that people composed love songs to it. So mysterious that many believed it was alive. Today, of the 10 largest lakes in the world, it is the last one that remains essentially primeval. (New York Times, Travel section)
• Michael Bloomberg’s advice or students who want to succeed in business, which we plan to read and (if any good) send to our favourite nieces, nephews and younger siblings. (New York Times, Education section)
• Watch a frozen engine warm up with a thermal camera. Also known as: Life in Canada, for those of you planning to flee Omm El Donia and emigrate. Note: The video was taken in -6°C weather. Wimps, eh? (Youtube)
• Total recall: the people who never forget: How an exceptionally rare form of “photographic memory” could change the way we understand human memory. (The Guardian)

And one little nugget of news for your before we get underway: “A federal appeals panel on Thursday unanimously rejected President Trump’s bid to reinstate his ban on travel into the United States from seven largely Muslim nations, a sweeping rebuke of the administration’s claim that the courts have no role as a check on the president.” The better angels of their nature, ladies and gentlemen. This, America, is one of the many reasons why we love you, however much you infuriate us. The fantastic Adam Liptak has the story for the New York Times.

Possibly the most unusual company prospectus, possibly ever: We mentioned earlier the week how Evan Spiegel, the 26-year-old Stanford dropout and co-founder of Snapchat (now Snap Inc.), is now officially the tech entrepreneur we most dislike, and that’s because of the terms of his company’s IPO. Snap, which made almost USD 900 mn in losses during the last two years combined, is offering its shareholders zero voting rights. Already, NYT’s Deal Book’s Steven Davidoff Solomon called Snap Inc’s plan “the most shareholder-unfriendly governance in an initial public offering, ever.” He says the model deviates from Google’s and Facebook’s, which went public with a dual class structure that gave outside shareholders one vote per share and insiders 10 votes per share and that in recent years added a nonvoting class of shares too.

Solomon writes: “Snap may be right, and Evan Spiegel truly is the second coming, but this just does not justify the extreme governance given the risk. Instead, it just seems silly, but not in the fun Snapchat sort of way.” The FT’s Matt Klein warns saying the academic evidence suggests the odds are strongly against Snap shares overperforming the market. He says “sexy” companies like Snap tend to be bad investments.

The always on-point Matt Levine looks specifically at Snap’s initial public offering S-1 prospectus filed, which he calls “full of interest.” He ridicules how company just extrapolated its 2015-16 growth in revenue (+590% y-o-y) and expenses (110% y-o-y) to show how it, assuming the growth rates are constant, is going to turn around a USD 520.4 mn net loss recorded in 2016 to a profit of USD 846.6 mn the following year and to USD 124 bn by 2019. The more interesting part, in Levine’s opinion is the long section that explains how to use Snapchat, complete with labelled diagrams showing the dog ears and tongue filters. “If you want to fit in with the cool teens these days, there’s no one better qualified to help you than a team of securities lawyers,” he jokes. The prospectus also includes how advertising campaigns and geofilters work on Snapchat too, including Starbucks one pictured above. Less facetiously, Levine quotes Bloomberg Gadfly’s Shira Ovide who says: “the issue is Snapchat is going public with serious, unanswerable questions about its business. The company’s financial model requires a leap of faith, and it has an unproven strategy to concentrate on a smaller audience than the typical highly valued internet company.”

See the Snapchat Starbucks picture above? It’s all about augmented reality (AR). The Economist defines it as a technology that “would paint computerised information directly on top of the wearers’ view of the world.” It could alter the way we see and interact with the world. “In effect, it would turn reality itself into a gigantic computer screen.” Pokémon Go is another application of the technology, but it doesn’t have to run through a smartphone. Microsoft just launched the new Hololens in Ireland, a wearable AR device, an echo of the failed (for now) Google Glass.

Hololens’ creators hope it could be used not just for games, but for other fields including engineering remodeling and the study of anatomy, according to the Independent. Experts on physical security at Sandia National Laboratory are already using the technology for training on installation security. “We model the mock facilities so the students can see the spatial relationships, see where things are in relation to each other. This helps them to understand a facility’s vulnerabilities, which can be difficult to see on paper or in writing,” computer scientist Tam Le said, Phototonics reported. It can even be used in art installations, like this project called Prosthetic Reality. It is an art book that showcases artwork by 45 artists. Viewed through the EyeJack app, the artwork is brought to life “with a colourful animation and soundscape that reveals a deeper meaning.”

The Donald — the most unpopular first 100 days president in recent memory, as common wisdom has it — may be more popular than pollsters think, and it’s for exactly the same reason as pollsters underestimated his chances of winning the White House in the first place. “Traditional phone polls that use live interviewers — including some of the most trusted polls in politics and media — report limited support for Trump and the controversial executive orders he’s signed. But automated phone and Internet-based surveys tell a different story. Once the element of anonymity is added, the president’s approval ratings suddenly look a lot better.” Read more at Politico.

Digging through the desert south of Cairo in Abydos, Pennsylvania University archaeologist Josef Wegner and his team did not expect to find the remains of what could have been one of Ancient Egypt’s last traditional funerary boats and clues to the burial place of 12th dynasty Pharaoh Senwosret III, which has eluded archaeologists for years. Underground, Wegner and his crew found a 21-meter long and 4-meter wide vault that had been robbed of most of its valuables during ancient times. Inside were some jars and a few wooden planks from a ship they now believe belonged to Senwosret III’s funerary procession. The ruler built several tombs during his lifetime — one in his capital Itjtawy about 450 kilometers north of Abydos, a pyramid in Dahshur not for from the Giza Plateau, and a temple in the far south of Abydos, but none had ever been confirmed as his final resting place, National Geographic says.

Etched on its outside walls of this chamber were more than 100 drawings of boats, each slightly different from the other and likely the marks left by mourners after the king’s funeral. The quality of the planks found in the chamber and the fact that the boat had been stripped down suggest “a royal connection,” Wegner says, as the “lumber probably included expensive cedar plans imported from Lebanon.” In a nearby site, close to the mythical temple of afterlife god Osiris, with whom Senwosret III was connected, Wegner and his crew also stumbled on a “magnificent stone sarcophagus [that was both] empty and not in its original location,” supporting even more the claim that the pharaoh was buried in Abydos. The funerary boat custom disappeared not long after Senwosret III’s reign ended, as kings then began building secret tombs, probably to protect their mortal remains and worldly possessions from suffering the same fate as many of their predecessors’, meaning that Senwosret III’s are probably the last remaining relics of that ancient tradition. In 2017, Wegner and a team of students and specialists intend to return to the site and hopefully uncover more of its mysteries.

Rejoice, Harry Bosch fans: Author Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles detective will be back in a new book this year (7 November, admittedly, but still this year), and he has a new series due out in late July, it seems. Meanwhile, the season three of the very good Amazon TV adaptation of Bosch series (titled simply “Bosch”) makes its debut on Amazon Video in April. Sneak peek here (runtime: 7:01).

If you live in a non-Arab country and have both a Muslim name and a job, count yourself very lucky. Precisely three times luckier — if you’re in the UK — than the average person with a Muslim name, in fact. The BBC’s Zack Adesina and Oana Marocico sent out CVs of an Adam and a Mohamed (fake candidates) with identical skills and experience and looked at the number of interviews they got — and found Adam was three times more likely to get a call for an interview than Mohamed.

“Muslim men are 76% less likely to be employed than their white Christian counterparts, according to research by the Research Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol.” Over next door in France, a much more rigorous 2015 study picked up by the Washington Post found the same results. It’s not a recent phenomenon: A 2005 BBC story reads, “Sheikh Ali Tariq Ahmed became Daniel Jacob. And when he sent his original CV back out to the same companies who had shown no interest, "Daniel" got calls.”

Forget getting rich at IPO time — coding isn’t the job of “rock stars” or “ninjas.” It’s the blue-collar job of the future. Solid. Predictable. Stable. Paying a living wage. Clive Thompson writes in a short piece for Wired that we can’t quite get out of our heads: “When I ask people to picture a coder, they usually imagine someone like Mark Zuckerberg: a hoodied college dropout who builds an app in a feverish 72-hour programming jag—with the goal of getting insanely rich and, as they say, ‘changing the world.’ But this Silicon Valley stereotype isn’t even geographically accurate. The Valley employs only 8 percent of [America’s] coders. All the other mns? They’re more like Devon, a programmer I met who helps maintain a ­security-software service in Portland, Oregon. He isn’t going to get fabulously rich, but his job is stable and rewarding: It’s 40 hours a week, well paid, and intellectually challenging. ‘My dad was a blue-­collar guy,’ he tells me—and in many ways, Devon is too.”

On a similar note, Fast Company argues — in one of the most transactional stories that we’ve ever read — that it’s not learning a tech-based skill that will advance your career, it’s realizing what every investment banker knows in his or her bones: “Your network is a job skill.”

On Peter Pan, memory, and sleep: J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan encodes thoughts about the way sleep contributes to memory maintenance that were far ahead of where the research stood at the time, neuropsychologist Rosalind Ridley found. She got interested in the exploration of Barrie’s insightful work, culminating in a study published by the Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The study explores “his astute observations on the peculiarities of human memories, sleep and dreams, and the puzzle of consciousness,” writes David Robson for BBC Future. “Many of the things being discussed weren’t discovered until the 1970s,” Ridley says.

Sleep helps you remember things: A study published only eight years ago finally demonstrated the relation between memory and sleep. “Our work demonstrates the molecular link between post-experience sleep and the establishment of long-term memory of that experience,” said Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study, in an MIT News article. “Ours is the first study to demonstrate this link between memory replay and memory consolidation. The sleeping brain must replay experiences like video clips before they are transformed from short-term into long-term memories.”

It is about signals that pass from the hippocampus where the memories are formed, and the neocortex where long-term memories are stored. You know when you sleep just because this day needs to end and you want a new day? This process literally happens in the brain. Your brain connections get reset in your sleep, as it “allows the brain to wind down its activity, consolidate our memories, and be ready to start again the next morning,” writes Ian Sample for the Guardian. So when you don’t get enough sleep, it affects its functions, including memory storage. “Deprived of rest, the brain’s neurons seemingly became over-connected and so muddled with electrical activity that new memories could not be properly laid down.”

Are you a serial killer? If so, you should fear Thomas Hargrove. Or at least his algorithm. “On Aug. 18, 2010, a police lieutenant in Gary, Ind., received an e-mail, the subject line of which would be right at home in the first few scenes of a David Fincher movie: ‘Could there be a serial killer active in the Gary area?’” Let Bloomberg introduce you to the man who is “building software to identify trends in unsolved murders using data nobody’s bothered with before.”

Constructing the “sound of happy” for babies: An organization that aims to support mothers and mothers-to be by the name of C&G baby club enlisted the help of developmental psychology lecturer at the University of London Caspar Addyman and Grammy-award winning Imogen Heap to compose and record “a song scientifically proven to make babies happy,” Robby Berman writes for BigThink. With the help of music psychologist Lauren Stewart, Heap carefully constructed a song that incorporated essential elements including a major key and surprise sounds. It is uptempo to match fast baby heart rates, has an energetic female vocal line, and [allegedly] will “not make mommy and daddy want to kill themselves.” The full song can be heard here. It’s surprisingly good.

Today’s communication system is horizontally disseminated: While print and broadcast media were very similar to the top-down centralized network of communication used by the Church, today’s communication has a different architecture, says tech entrepreneur Oliver Luckett in a video for Big Think. Because anyone with a device and cellular coverage can produce, distribute, and report news, today’s communication is horizontally disseminated, but that does not mean we’re any closer to the truth, he says. Human emotion has become the primary editor-in-chief of today’s news, and a concerted effort in social responsibility will be required to avoid misinformation — something that we may not be capable of en masse (runtime 06:04).

What would borders look like if economists ran them? NPR’s Planet Money re-aired a very relevant episode from 2013 on why US immigration policy “doesn’t add up” and “just doesn’t make sense.” The show asked three economists on their views on how the policy could be improved and, even then, it still is a mess. There are plenty of different, and often conflicting, answers of what a “perfect policy” would look like. Some suggestions include just letting in more STEM immigrants, auctioning off immigration slots to highest bidders with separate categories for high-skilled and low-skilled labor, and just a free-for-all system that lets everyone in except for criminals, suspected terrorist, and people with serious communicable diseases. None, however, involve introducing any walls or imposing country-specific bans (runtime 19:35).

Operating the world’s most valuable football club: Real Madrid are the most valuable football club in the world. Columbia Business School professor Steven Mandis was given “unprecedented access” to every part of the club and, for a BBC Documentary, he got the club to open their doors and their books to outside scrutiny for the first time. Through conversations with fans, players, coaches, and board members, including an in-depth interview with club president Florentino Perez, Mandis looks for answers to questions including: How does an organization co-owned by 92,000 fans operate? How was the club transformed from the brink of bankruptcy 16 years ago? What is the relationship between success on the pitch and off the pitch? What role do values play in the business? What lessons are there for other sports teams and for businesses more widely? The lessons he learns, Mandis says, apply not just to sports teams, “but to organizations in all walks of life” (runtime 26:46).

New research suggests that scientific curiosity could be the key to curing polarized opinions and unyielding biases, Brian Resnick writes for Vox. Yale Law professor Dan Kahan was working on a project to measure individual levels of scientific curiosity when he discovered, to his surprise, that the more curious an individual was about the universe and its wonders, the more open they were to accepting opinions that contradict their beliefs. Participants in Kahan’s survey (divided into liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans) who displayed higher levels of scientific curiosity appeared to be less biased in their answers than those more knowledgeable. In addition to questions meant to gauge science knowledge and curiosity, Kahan also asked about more “politically charged [issues] that tend to polarize even the smartest of partisans,” such as gun control or climate change. Interestingly enough, the research also found that the more knowledgeable the partisans were, the more their answers tended to diverge. “There’s a gulf in the answers between highly intelligent Democrats and Republicans… the most curious [of them] are not as polarized on the question.” The results of Kahan’s latest research on scientific curiosity complement his earlier work on the relationship between knowledge and partisan bias, which showed, to his great concern, that politics can actually make a smart person stupid, or more articulately, that “partisanship has a way of short-circuiting intelligence.”

The phenomenon “politically motivated reasoning,” which Kahan believes is “the source of persistent public conflict over policy-relevant facts,” means that people tend to use their wits to be right rather than correct, when faced with information that threatens their belief systems and identity. In the case of Kahan’s previous experiment, “being better at math made partisans less likely to solve the problem correctly when solving it meant betraying their political instincts.” While those findings are unsurprising for Kahan, he believes they are dangerous, as he also admits that “at any given moment some fractions of the things I believe [are] for identity protective purposes.” But being conscious of it is one way to mitigate its effect. That is not to say that anyone should go on making radical changes to the way they think, but until further studies are conducted, Kahan is asking people to begin to “value scientific curiosity more in politics and in life.

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

• Anthony Bourdain eating feral pigeon in Cairo, Egypt (Youtube)
• Inflows, Inflation and IMF: Egypt’s Economic Overhaul in Charts (Bloomberg)
• BNP Paribas’ outlook on Egypt (Research note, BNP Paribas, pdf)
• Salafi sheikh channels his inner Michael Jackson (Facebook video)
• Promo for the HBO documentary Becoming Warren Buffett. (HBO)
• Statement from the Cairo Heritage Development Committee (CHDC, pdf)
• European Bank for Reconstruction’s Egypt Country Strategy (EBRD, pdf)
• The Egyptian Book of the Dead: A guidebook for the underworld (or: Why we’ve always been bureaucratic) (Youtube)

The season’s cultural events worth traveling for: A lot is going on all over the world in the next couple of months. The Economist’s sister magazine, 1843, compiled a list of exciting event taking place and worth traveling for. On their list is the Las Fallas Fiesta in Valencia, Spain. Its origins trace back to the Middle Ages where each neighborhood in the city fashions its own bawdy statue satirizing public figures and on 19 March – the Night of Fire – they go up in flames, except for one, which is spared by people’s votes and joins the crew of previous winners in the Museo Fallero. “The five days leading up to the final conflagration are a continuous street party, with fireworks, bullfights and paella.” Robots exhibition is on at the Science Museum in London starting this week. Starting from 5 March, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts is hosting the exhibition “Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950.” The exhibition is hinged on the anger, frustration and admiration of Cuba’s artists towards its 1959 revolution. Back in Europe and for the next six weeks, art will be everywhere in the Swiss village of Gstaad as it holds the Elevation 1049 art festival. The art, exploring the theme of “avalanche,” will take over spaces from the Palace Hotel to the high glacier, inspired by the instability of the snow that transforms Gstaad each year, 1843 says. On the quirkier side, on 15 March, Japan celebrates honen matsuri – the fertility festival, and 1843 recommends being in Komaki as it “one place does it with particular aplomb.”

Rest easy, Joost: South African rugby legend Joost van der Westhuizen died this week at the age of 45. The World Cup winner was battling Motor Neurone Disease (MND), which when he was diagnosed with in 2011 Van der Westhuizen was given only a couple of years to live. “Typical of the man, Van der Westhuizen defied the doctors’ predictions to hold on for six years, all the while raising funds for fellow suffers of this vicious disease through his charity, the J9 Foundation,” Daniel Schofield writes for The Telegraph. “He was absolutely one of the lynchpins of the 1995 World Cup-winning side, up there with captain Francois Pienaar. Who can forget those telling tackles on the giant Jonah Lomu in the final,” former England player Matt Dawson writes for BBC. Van der Westhuizen is remembered not only for being a prolific rugby player (runtime 04:31), but also for his off the pitch and after his diagnosis with MND. He formed the J9 Foundation in aid of those suffering from MND and created a platform to allow people, companies and friends to support the quality of life programs available within this organization. You can learn more about the foundation and how you can help with the fight against MND here.