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A Brief History of GPS—from James Bond to Pokémon Go

by JamesKantor Posted on November 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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In our current print edition—why, yes! Mother Jones does have a fabulous print magazine, to which you can subscribe at a ridiculously low price—science writer David Dobbs explores the neuroscience of GPS smartphone apps like Waze and Google Maps, and the strange fact that heavy reliance on their step-by-step instructions might literally be messing with our brains. Speaking of brains, it’s time to fill yours with this fun history of the technology that lets us track wandering grandpas and wayward teens, catch Pokémon, and, you know, “bomb the shit out of” ISIS-controlled oil facilities.

1956

Sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke envisions “a position-finding grid whereby anyone on earth could locate himself by means of a couple of dials on an instrument about the size of a watch…No one on the planet need ever get lost…unless he wanted to be.”

1957

The Soviet Union sends Sputnik into orbit; US officials scramble to catch up.

1960

The Navy tests Transit, a satellite program to mark ship positions every 90 minutes.

Early 1960s

Radio collars for Yellowstone’s grizzlies are among the first remote tracking devices created for nonmilitary use.

Vassiliy Vishnevskiy/iStock

1964

A navigation unit on the dash of James Bond’s Aston Martin helps 007 find the headquarters of his evil nemesis Auric Goldfinger.

1973

The Pentagon unveils the Navstar Global Positioning System, a satellite program intended to supplant separate (and jealously guarded) Navy and Air Force systems. These branches try “various tactics to get GPS watered down or defunded,” notes Yale historian Bill Rankin. But the “GPS mafia” prevails: The first satellite goes up in 1978.

Rockwell Clark/National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

1983

Korean Airlines Flight 007 is shot down after straying into Soviet airspace. President Ronald Reagan declassifies GPS technology as a means to avoid similar incidents.

Late 1980s

To avoid giving advanced targeting capabilities to America’s enemies, the Pentagon degrades the civilian GPS signal to make it less accurate.

1989

The Magellan GPS Nav 1000, the first commercial unit, goes on sale for $3,000. It weighs 1.5 pounds and runs for a few hours on six AA batteries.

1991

Operation Desert Storm marks the Army’s first battlefield use of GPS, but receivers are in short supply. Soldiers beg their families to send commercial units.

1992

Kick-started by military demand, the civilian market explodes. In five years, the price of a GPS receiver plummets from $1,000 to $100.

1994

General Motors offers GuideStar navigation on the Oldsmobile 88. It costs $2,000 and service is spotty. Skeptical execs limit the rollout to just four states.

1999

Benefon markets the first GPS-enabled cellphone, and Casio rolls out the first GPS wristwatch.

Casio

2000

President Bill Clinton upgrades the civilian GPS signal, making it accurate to 40 feet or better. (Military GPS can guide bombs to within centimeters of a target.) One result is “geocaching,” a global treasure hunt that eventually includes more than 2 million secret stashes.

2005

Google rolls out a mobile map app. And after a wave of nativity scene thefts, a Manhattan security firm offers GPS locators to plant on at-risk baby Jesuses.

Henrique NDR Martins/iStock

2006

GTX Corp. markets a shoe with GPS inserts to help families track forgetful grandparents.

Smart Soles

2008

Apple gives the iPhone GPS capabilities.

2011

Russia makes its navigation system globally accessible and China, Japan, and India plan their own, Rankin says, to “de-Americanize global coordinates.”

2012

Parallel Kingdom, a GPS role-playing game, gets its millionth user.

2014

Artist Jeremy Wood drives 9,750 miles in 44 days, tracking his movements with GPS software to create the world’s largest drawing.

Vauxhall

2015

Requests for AAA road maps are down 50 percent from a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the Navy, worried that cyberattacks will knock out GPS, resumes teaching cadets celestial navigation, a practice it largely abandoned in 1998.

2016

GPS satellites get off by 13 microseconds, resulting in a 12-hour global telecom glitch.

2016

Pokemon Go players tumble off cliffs, crash their cars, and get robbed at “Pokestops” set up by crooks. The National Safety Council “urges gamers to consider safety over their scores before a life is lost.” Weeks later, a college student is fatally shot while hunting for virtual creatures in a San Francisco park.

CTRPhotos/iStock

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A Brief History of GPS—from James Bond to Pokémon Go

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The World According to Trump

by AnibalBiddle921 Posted on November 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is the version of reality that Donald Trump and the Trump team have been spreading around since the election:

Trump’s victory was one of the biggest in recent history.
Trump kept a Ford plant from moving to Mexico.
Snobby New York theater elites were rude to VP-elect Mike Pence on Friday.
The demonstrations and marches following the election were the work of “professional protesters.”
The New York Times apologized for its anti-Trump coverage during the campaign.
Trump won the debates handily.
He totally could have won the Trump University lawsuit, but chose to settle for the good of the country.

It’s only been ten days so far. Can he keep this up for four years?

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The World According to Trump

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What Went Wrong With Trump And The Media

by DanelleMcdowell Posted on November 19, 2016

Mother Jones

There aren’t a lot of people who have not yet been blamed for the election of Donald Trump.

FBI Director James Comey. Vladimir Putin, Jon Stewart, Sean Hannity, Twitter, Facebook, CNN, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and oh, Donald Trump. There’s a good case to be made for almost every culprit you can imagine, and a tweetstorm or thinkpiece to lay it out.

This is not going to be one of those pieces. As my colleague Kevin Drum writes, “For the most part, people are just blaming all the stuff they already believed in.” But in the flood of emails that have poured into MoJo since the election, many readers have asked us to dive into one issue in particular—the role of media.

And it happens to be an issue we’re obsessed with. We believe that the business model for media in the United States is broken; that if we’re going to have the kind of journalism that democracy requires, we’re going to need different ways of paying for it; and that critical among those will be reader support in many different forms.

So we’re not going to pussyfoot around: By the end of this piece, we hope you’ll invest in our hard-hitting investigative reporting. And if you’re already in for that, you can do it right now. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at where things stand.

We’re preparing to be governed by a man with a record of contempt for truth and transparency, at a time when every potential countervailing force, from the Democratic Party to the courts, is on the ropes. We’re also headed for nearly unmitigated one-party control of the federal government and a growing number of states.

In the past, the Fourth Estate has been essential at moments like this, holding the powerful accountable until the pendulum swings back toward checks and balances. Whether that can happen this time, though, is not so clear. Because this time, the press itself is among the institutions under strain—and that strain may well be part of what made Trump’s ascent possible.

Here’s what played out during the campaign, and is playing out again in the transition: Individual journalists and individual outlets do amazing work under the most difficult circumstances, facing down virulent abuse in person and on social media. But the larger gravitational forces of the industry pull in the opposite direction. Those forces push us toward the lowest common denominator. They reward outrage and affirm anger—and they don’t incentivize digging deep, explaining complex problems, or exposing wrongdoing.

One person who understands this better than most is…Donald Trump. He knew from the get-go that as a celebrity known for saying outrageous stuff, he could call up any show, anytime, and count on being put on the air because he brought the eyeballs. As CBS chairman Les Moonves put it way back in February, his bomb-throwing “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Trump could have capitalized on this at any time, but he really hit a perfect-storm moment. Media revenues are under enormous pressure across the board. Newspapers and magazines are battling cheap and free digital competitors. Cable is threatened by cord-cutting. And digital publishers are watching new ad dollars rush over to Facebook and Google.

That made news organizations desperate for eyeballs and content, and Trump gave them both. Airing his interviews, covering his rallies, turning his tweets into posts and his comments into tweets was quick and inexpensive—far less expensive certainly than digging through his business record or analyzing how his campaign has emboldened white nationalists.

When it comes to news, you get what you pay for, and when the answer to that is “zero,” that’s also the value of a lot of what you get in your Facebook feed.

Which brings us to the other part of the perfect storm: social media. Rage (and fear) motivate sharing. Rage-sharing reinforces the beliefs we and our friends already hold, which makes us want to signal those beliefs even more. Each “OMFG, Trump just_______” pushes the button again, and motivates.

And it’s not just media organizations that noticed Trump driving the clicks and shares. A network of bottom-feeders, bots, and outright provocateurs have discovered that you can cash in on ad networks by simply making up fake news stories that will spread wildly on social media. And what a coincidence that we didn’t learn until after the election that Facebook had a way to tamp down fake news, but held back because it was terrified of a conservative backlash. Google likewise waited until after the election to kick fake-news sites out of its ad network; Twitter didn’t crack down on far-right accounts until November 15. That really bodes well for the future decisions of companies that govern our digital life (and know more about each of us than the National Security Agency ever will).

The last part of the perfect storm was—is—the evisceration of newsrooms. There are, give or take, 40 percent fewer journalists in America than there were a decade ago, and there are about to be even fewer as companies cut back dramatically post-election. Univision is shedding more than 200 jobs, many of them at millennial-aimed Fusion; the Guardian is in the process of reducing its US newsroom by 30 percent, the Wall Street Journal is trimming positions and consolidating sections, and the New York Times has said it has a newsroom downsizing coming in January.

For those journalists who remain, the pressure will only increase—to bring eyeballs, but also avoid offense. Because while big media companies feed on controversy, they are terrified of being targets of controversy themselves. They built big audiences and revenue streams on a style of journalism that avoids any semblance of a point of view, so as not to drive any part of the audience away. Trump’s attacks on journalists as biased are designed to reinforce that fear. That’s one reason why for much of the campaign his lies weren’t called out, his falsehoods weren’t fact-checked—because that would have appeared like injecting a point of view.

Grim, right? Here’s another link where you can support our work during these challenging times with a monthly or one-time gift (along with a Harvard study showing that the act of giving may promote happiness).

In the end, political journalism is deeply conservative—not in the partisan sense, but in the sense of being invested in institutions, ways of doing things, and the foundational belief that the system works and destructive forces will be neutralized in due time. That was what made it hard to imagine a Trump win, or to recognize Bernie Sanders’ movement as more than the usual protest candidacy.

And it’s what now is driving coverage inexorably toward normalization. Already, public radio hosts banter as they inform us that Steve Bannon, a man who ran an openly race-baiting website, has become the senior White House strategist; already People, just weeks after publishing a harrowing article about its own writer’s experience of being assaulted by Trump, has compiled “27 Photos of Ivanka Trump’s Family That Are Way Too Cute.”

Demagogues are dependent on a compliant media. It is the air they breathe, the fuel they run on. They rely on it to legitimize their lies and give their bombast a veneer of respectability. They deploy it to bestow favors and mete out punishment. And they will not abide disrespect from the press, because it’s contagious.

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump champion, showed one way of punishing journalists when he spent millions on the lawsuit that shut down Gawker. (Mother Jones was a target of similar litigation—though we won.) There will be many other opportunities, from rewriting transparency laws like the Freedom of Information Act to defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (So in addition to supporting Mother Jones with a monthly or one-time gift, consider pitching in for your local public media station.)

We need an alternative—and we need it now.

Back to where we started: The business model is broken when it comes to ensuring the kind of journalism democracy requires. In the uncertain, dangerous times ahead, we’ll need something better, and a lot of it.

We’ll need media that doesn’t have to bargain for access or worry about backlash.

We’ll need media that isn’t dependent on giving bigots a platform. (CNN announced that it expects to make $600 million this year—even as it, too, cuts its workforce by 10 percent—in large part thanks to election coverage that had many high moments, but also employed paid Trump operative Corey Lewandowski.)

We’ll need media that doesn’t sell out its own for political ends. (Remember when Fox News’ Megyn Kelly had to “make up” with Trump after nearly a year of bullying and threats?)

We’ll need reporters who can chase after what is shaping up to be cronyism and corruption of epic proportions, and who can stand up to the intimidation that is bound to ensue.

We’ll need a business model that—to circle all the way back to Les Moonves—isn’t dependent on pumping up the eyeballs at any cost.

That’s what we are determined to build here at MoJo.

We don’t claim to have all the answers on where things go from here. But we know a free, fearless press is an essential part of it, and that means doubling down on the investigative reporting that readers like you have demanded, and supported, for 40 years.

Instead of focusing on the controversies that Trump and other politicians spoon-feed the press (over here, five candidates for secretary of state! No here, a fresh Twitter rant against the New York Times!), we’ll dig into the stories they want to keep secret. We’ll go after the unprecedented conflicts of interest and corruption wherever they arise. (These, as you well know, are not limited to either party.)

We’ll expose the danger to vulnerable communities like immigrants and religious minorities, while also exploring how people are organizing and fighting back. We’ll listen to people whose voices aren’t heard enough—including the working-class people who voted for Trump because he promised them better times. And we will ask you, our readers, what else is important to cover now—your input is key as we all find our way in this new landscape.

Whatever the story is, we won’t be held back by timidity or fear of controversy. The only thing that limits us are the resources we have to hire reporters, send them into the field, and give them the time and job security they need to go deep.

That’s where your tax-deductible monthly or one-time donation makes all the difference. (So does subscribing to our magazine, giving a gift subscription—we have some great holiday savings going on—or signing up for our newsletters.) A full 70 percent of Mother Jones’ revenue comes from reader support. It’s the core of the business model we think will be critical to saving watchdog journalism. And many of you agree: Since the election we’ve been seeing unprecedented support from readers who have flocked to our site to read, subscribe, donate, and share their thoughts about where we need to go from here.

And let’s take one more step. While it’s critically important to shore up independent reporting, you’re going to want to take action in other ways too. Here are some things we’re thinking about as we head toward the holidays.

Many of you will talk—and listen—to people you disagree with, to understand where they’re coming from and maybe find the tiniest sliver of common ground. Arlie Hochschild did that in our cover story about Trump voters, and she saw many of the trends others in the media missed. Some of you might want to try to open up your Facebook feeds to people you differ with; we put together a list of tools to get out of your “filter bubbles.” And one of our editors, James West, has started a project where he’s friending all the Trump supporters he interviewed this year. He’ll tell their stories as that evolves.

Finally, we’re remembering to be thankful—not least, to you. Mother Jones as you know it today is the result of a big, risky bet at a moment not unlike this one—2006, when we were looking at media that had failed to challenge a war-mongering government’s lies and a digital news landscape where hot takes had overtaken original reporting. We asked you, our readers, to help us counter that trend, to build a 24/7 digital operation and a newsroom to go after the big stories of the day. And you did.

Ten years later, at a moment of even more radical upheaval, many of you have told us that you want to be part of a movement that builds a bigger, stronger independent journalism scene. Thanks to you, we are ready.

MoJo will need to be stronger, more agile, and even more fearless in an environment that’s growing more dangerous to journalism and democracy. Let’s go.

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What Went Wrong With Trump And The Media

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This Critique of Fake Election News Is a Must-Read for All Democracy Lovers

by RowenaSimonds8 Posted on November 19, 2016

Mother Jones

This story was first published in Pacific Standard.

In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s narrow upset victory last week, many journalists and critics have leveled a finger at Facebook, claiming the social network was partly to blame for the growing milieu of false and misleading “news” stories that only serve to insulate potential voters within an ideological cocoon of their own making.

As Facebook continues to influence voter behavior with each passing election, the rising tide of fake news poses an existential threat to conventional journalistic organizations. “This should not be seen as a partisan issue,” sociologist Zeynep Tufecki observed in the New York Times on Tuesday. “The spread of false information online is corrosive for society at large.”

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg flatly rejected the assertion that Facebook shaped the election. “Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic,” he insisted; of course, the remaining 1 percent of users still encompass some 19.1 million people. Despite Zuckerberg’s denial, Facebook is now actively reassessing its role in distributing false information. And while the social media giant is taking tiny steps toward addressing the issue — excluding fake news sites from its advertising network, for one — it may take a renegade task force within Facebook itself to force how the company to truly understand its outsized influence on how Americans see the world at large.

Until technology companies cope with the structural sources of fake news, it’s up to the American people to rethink their consumption habits. That’s where Melissa Zimdars comes in. A communications professor at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, Zimdar recently began compiling a list of “fake, false, regularly misleading and/or otherwise questionable ‘news’ organizations” in a widely shared Google Doc of “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical ‘News’ Sources.” It is a cheat sheet for media literacy in the Facebook age.

Zimdars’ viral guide — which encompasses websites from the outright fake (nbcnews.com.com) to the ideologically skewed (The Free Thought Project) to the clickbait-inflected (the Independent Journal Review)—began as a media literacy companion for her students. She decided to open-source the list after encountering an outright falsehood at the top of her Google News feed: that Hillary Clinton lost the popular vote.

“It’s a WordPress site! 70news.wordpress.com! And Google treated it like news!” Zimdars said when reached by phone on Tuesday. “That’s when I decided to make this public.” Pacific Standard spoke with Zimdars about fake news, Facebook, and the future of media literacy.

What inspired you to put this guide together?

I had been taking notes and making an unofficial list of questionable news sources to share with my students for the last few days, but I put in a lot of effort on Monday. The original impetus came from a general concern over the years about the sources students were using in their assignments or alluding to in their talking points. I say this not even as a reflection of where I currently teach; I’ve felt this way at every school I’ve worked at.

I strongly believe that media literacy and communication should be taught at a much younger age. Teachers don’t normally approach this content until the college level, and students continually have trouble determining what aspects of an article and website to examine to determine whether it’s actually something they want to cite or circulate.

There’s a wide variety of sites on your list.

The first category is sites that are created to deliberately spread false information. The 70news.wordpress.com site that was at the top of Google News searches about election results is an example. We don’t really know the intent of some false websites — whether they crop up to generate advertising revenue, or to simply troll people or for comedy purposes — but they all belong to one category: blatantly false.

The second category is websites or news organizations that usually have a kernel of truth to them, relying on an actual event or a real quote from a public official, but the way the story is contextualized (or not at all contextualized) tends to be misrepresentative of what actually happened. They may not be entirely false — there may be elements of “truthiness” to them — but they’re certainly misleading.

The third category I’ve used included websites whose reporting is OK, but their Facebook distribution practices are unrepresentative of actual events because they’re relying on hyperbole for clicks.

This category has caused the most controversy and, well, been taken as offensive to some publications. Upworthy wasn’t happy about its inclusion on this list; neither was ThinkProgress, who I initially included because of its tendency to use clickbait in its Facebook descriptions. A number of websites—both liberal and conservative publications—have contacted me; one even threatened to file “criminal libel” against me, although I don’t think they know what that means.

These websites are especially troubling because people don’t actually read the actual stories — they often just share based on the headline. I had the Huffington Post on my list of 300 potential additions because they published an article on Monday with a headline that claimed Bernie Sanders could replace Donald Trump with a little-known loophole. The article itself was chastising people for sharing the story without actually clicking it, but so many people were sharing it like, “oh, there’s a chance!” An effort to teach media literacy ended up circulating information that was extremely misleading.

How much of the rise of fake or misleading news sites can be attributed to structural changes in media consumption wrought by Facebook?

Facebook has absolutely contributed to the echo chamber. By algorithmically giving us what we want, Facebook leads to these very different information centers based on how it perceives your political orientation. This is compounded by the prior existence of confirmation bias: People have a tendency to seek out information they already agree with, or that matches with their gut reaction. When we encounter information we agree with, it affirms our beliefs, and even when we encounter information we don’t agree with, it tends to strengthen our beliefs anyway. We’re very stubborn like that.

I haven’t studied this yet, but my assumption is that this trend toward fake news reinforces this confirmation bias and strengthens the echo chamber and the filter bubble. It’s not just the media, but this weird relationship between how the technology works, this proliferated media environment, and how humans engage psychologically and communicatively.

Facebook is currently struggling with how to address these structural causes. What are some potential solution? I recently read a story about how a group of Princeton University students created an open-source browser extension that separates legitimate news sources from phony ones.

We definitely need media literacy from a young age, but that’s a very delayed process. We can use technology to try to help the situation, but after I read that same article about the Facebook plugin, a reporter from the Boston Globe and I were trying to test it and it didn’t seem to work. I’m glad it’s open source; a lot of programmers had approached me about creating something that people worried about misinformation can actively work on.

But my concern is, ironically, because I’m going through these sources and passing judgment, that as we’re doing this on a structural scale, what will be built as a check and balance for whatever method we end up using? How can some technology solution dynamic enough and reactive enough so that, if a website improves, or one that has a good reputation goes off the rails, it’s able to adapt? What are the metrics by which we’re categorizing news sources?

This seems like a good case for editors, which Facebook has been dealing with for some time.

Some people argue that part of this problem of fake news is inherently connected to editorial trends in mainstream journalism, from consolidation to a greater emphasis on corporate profits. Editing isn’t inherently a safety measure of this technology, even if it’s clearly necessary.

While tech companies grapple with structural issues, what needs to be done to engender media literacy in our classrooms and, I suppose, in our households?

It starts with actually reading what we are sharing. And it’s hard! Look, I’m a professor of media and I’ve been guilty of seeing something posted by a friend I trust and sharing it. I’ve been complicit in this system. The first thing we need to do is get people to actually read what they’re sharing, and, if it’s too much trouble to do that, we’re going to have serious difficulty getting people to look up and evaluate their sources of information.

One of the best things people can do is police websites that are spam or fake on Facebook. But when someone asked me about engaging with people, my advice was “do so with your own risk.” I’ve had tons of trolls and hateful messages and comments since I made this Google Doc public. You have to be prepared to deal with that stuff if you’re even going to try to course-correct misinformation on the Web.

So what, in an ideal world, is the solution here? What’s the future you envision for a cheat sheet like yours?

I think librarians should rule the world! I’ve been approached by people about creating more durable and dynamic documents that can go through a rigorous process to determine how resources are included or excluded or categorized. It’s like trying to index the entire Internet, and it feels impossible, but if we could start holding a few of the major sources of misinformation accountable, that would be important to me.

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This Critique of Fake Election News Is a Must-Read for All Democracy Lovers

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Are GPS Apps Messing With Our Brains?

by christopherprout Posted on November 19, 2016

Mother Jones

Måns Swanberg

About 15 years ago, anthropologist Claudio Aporta and philosopher Eric Higgs traveled to Igloolik, a remote island in far northeast Canada, to answer an intriguing question: How might newly introduced GPS devices affect the island’s Inuit hunters, who possessed some of the sharpest wayfinding skills on Earth?

You don’t want to get lost on Igloolik. The proximity of magnetic north makes compasses fickle. The land can appear utterly featureless, especially in winter, when the cold—like a cat watching a mouse, “waiting patiently to see if he would make a mistake,” as explorer R.M. Patterson once put it—can make the smallest mishap fatal. During the summer, when Inuit hunters stalk walrus by boat, sea fog can close so tight around a vessel that anyone lacking GPS must drop anchor, lest they run aground, or steer out to sea and risk running out of fuel.

To navigate this murk, Igloolik’s hunters had long attended closely to not just stars and landmarks, but patterns of wind, snowdrift, current, animal behavior, and light. They read as much in the wind’s snow sculptures as Polynesian sailors read in constellations and tides. They had no formal training and rarely used paper maps. Yet the best hunters carried in their heads extraordinarily intricate maps of the landscape, constructed through decades of experience and tutelage. During a break in travel, a veteran hunter might ask novices to describe the location of a place, and nudge his protégés along as they worked out the problem aloud. This was easier when the Inuit traveled by dogsled—no engine noise—but it still happens in the snow-machine age.

Like the snowmobile, GPS offered the hunters irresistible advantages. They could travel more safely through terrestrial whiteouts or ocean fog. If a snowmobile conked out or a hunting party had to stash food or equipment, GPS made it easy to mark the spot and find it later. And the hunters always knew the way home. But within a few short years, as Aporta and Higgs documented, the GPS units revealed some sharp limitations. In winter, the batteries quickly failed unless the devices were kept against the body under much clothing. The units themselves were devilishly hard to operate with gloves or mittens, and their screens iced over in seconds.

Worse, GPS was leading young hunters into mortal danger. Some followed straight-line tracks onto thin ice and fell through. Others, when their devices failed, couldn’t read the snow or recognize traditional landmarks. After several near-fatal and fatal incidents, the villagers created a program to integrate GPS with traditional wayfinding. Knowing the technology was here to stay, the Igloolik Inuit wanted to make sure they could harness its advantages without literally losing their way.

An extreme example? Well, no. We mainlanders are getting into far more trouble with GPS than the Igloo­lik people ever have. Particularly in the car-addicted, smartphone-­besotted United States, the last 15 years have produced a daunting database of disasters wherein people navigating with tiny screens drive directly into danger, destruction, and death.

In Bedford, New York, in 2008, a rental car driver fixated on his GPS unit barely escaped being hit by a train. Other people have driven into lakes and oceans. Countless truckers attending to GPS while ignoring sign­age have smashed into overpasses or become wedged beneath them—in 2009, the New York State Department of Transportation blamed GPS as a factor in more than 80 percent of such incidents. That same year, a Death Valley tourist followed her GPS down an increasingly remote road until her Jeep got stuck in the sand. She survived the searing heat for a week; her six-year-old son did not. In his book Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds, author Greg Milner relates how, in March 2015, yet another GPS-smitten driver ignored cones, signs, “and other deterrents” warning him away from a closed bridge. His vehicle plunged 40 feet and burst into flames. The man escaped. His wife died. “Something,” Milner writes, “is happening to us.”

We’re becoming navigational idiots. The problem isn’t GPS itself. The Global Positioning System, which uses a constellation of satellites to determine one’s location on the globe, is just a way of fixing points on a map. Rather, the problem is how smartphone apps such as Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze display our routes. Because these apps seek primarily to direct us efficiently from A to B, their default presentation is a landscape somewhere between minimalist and impoverished—typically a fat colored line (your route) running through a largely featureless void. Mappers call this goal-oriented perspective” egocentric.” It’s all about you.

Paper maps, by contrast, use an “allocentric” presentation—one that forces you to plan and frame your route within a meaningful context: towns, forts, universities, parks, and natural features named for local heroes and history (such as Lake Champlain and Smugglers’ Notch in my home state of Vermont), distinctive shapes (Camel’s Hump), or local flora and fauna. (The Winooski River, which flows through my town, gets its name from the Abenaki word for the wild onion that grows on its banks.) Such maps bear a rough but essential resemblance to the mental map locals carry in their heads.

Display size allowing, a digital map can also show such context. Google Earth does so beautifully. Even your Google Maps smartphone app will display many details of the surroundings, albeit on a small scale, when you’re not in navigation mode. But enter in a destination and the context vanishes. The landscape is cleansed of distracting features and the map spins so that the top of your phone is not north, but whichever direction you happen to be traveling. You’ve just turned an allocentric world egocentric.

The distinction between these two wayfinding modes interests not just mapmakers, but neuroscientists, for each draws upon a distinctive neural network to understand space and move us through it. Your phone’s default egocentric (or “cue-based”) mode is the domain of the caudate nucleus, a looping, snake-shaped structure that is heavily involved in movement and closely tied to areas of the brain that respond to simple rewards. Navigating by map—often called a cognitive mapping strategy because it builds and draws on the map in your head—primarily uses the hippocampus, an area in the center of the brain crucial to spatial memory, autobiographical memory, and our ability to ponder the future.

While most of us favor one or the other of these navigational strategies, both are required; lose either and you’ll soon lose your way. You enlist the caudate’s cue-based mode, for instance, when your friend Jane tells you to take Exit 8, go left on Route 12, turn right about two miles later at the red church, and hers is the fifth house on the right. With decent directions, the method is idiotproof. But it doesn’t really tie into any deeper mental map.

You’ll fire up your hippocampus, though, if Jane mails you a road map with an X marking her house. You’ll need to understand the map well enough to plot your route, and memorize it well enough to make the drive. Studying a map “is difficult, it’s complicated, it’s demanding,” says Veronique Bohbot, who investigates the neuroscience of navigation at McGill University in Montreal. Yet it’s ultimately more versatile and powerful because it provides a richer framework for social, historical, and practical information. In return for your efforts, it lets you improvise, create shortcuts, and, should you get lost, reorient yourself.

Some years ago, Matt Wilson and another scientist at the University of Arizona discovered that by wiring up special neurons, called place cells, in a rat’s hippocampus, they could observe how the animal builds a mental map as it navigates a maze.

As the rat learns a desired route (ending with a treat), some of its place cells begin firing at recognized locations—landmarks or intersections where it needs to turn. After the rat completes a route, Wilson discovered, its place cells replay the route backward, and later forward again—this process continues in the rodent’s dreams as it consolidates the memories of its daily explorations. After mastering several routes in a maze—home to point A, home to point B, home to point C—the rat can improvise routes from C to A or A to B without returning to the start. Bingo: a cognitive map.

We humans appear to do something similar. Say you travel to an unfamiliar city but forget your smartphone. The first night, the hotel clerk gives you directions to a restaurant with a sinfully rich chocolate mousse. The next day, she points you to a park by the river. On the third, to a museum. Each day, absorbing visual cues and landmarks, you develop and refine a sense of geo­graphy and direction. On the fourth day, your love interest arrives. You walk to the museum, and when the two of you emerge, ravenous, you realize that if you cut over a block and walk north a few more, you should find the river, and then, walking east-ish between river and park, that wonderful restaurant. “The one with the sinful mousse?” your companion inquires, eyebrow raised. You nod. Bingo: a cognitive map with benefits.

Now think. Had you relied on Google Maps instead, you’d have absorbed less of the terrain, built a lame cognitive map, gotten lost when your battery died, missed the restaurant, and left your partner parched and peckish.

Small potatoes, maybe—but they get bigger. Bohbot, the McGill researcher, believes we may be actively making ourselves stupid by leaning too heavily on smartphone navigation.

How so? For starters, notes University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Russell Epstein, a leading spatial cognition researcher, we know that followers of cue-based routes have more active caudates than mappers do. We also know that the volume of gray matter in the hippocampi of English cabbies increases as they memorize the streets of central London—a.k.a. “the knowledge”—a longtime requirement for a taxi license.

This raises a question: Might overreliance on our phone apps’ egocentric navigational systems atrophy the hippocampus? Based on limited animal studies and her ongoing work in humans, Bohbot suspects so. And this concerns her, because people with smaller hippocampi stand at greater risk of memory loss, Alzheimer’s, dementia, depression, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. And, of course, getting lost.

So even if you don’t hunt walrus or do much backwoods hiking, it makes sense to protect your ability to wayfind. To that end, I offer a tactic and a strategy. The tactic: Bring back North. You can redirect most smartphone navigation apps to align with the magnetic compass instead of your direction of travel. Doing so forces you to orient yourself to the real world, rather than indulge in the egocentric convenience of having it spin beneath you every time you turn.

The broader strategy comes from Yale historian Bill Rankin, whose book, After the Map, charts the rise of GPS. Rankin says he finds it helpful to distinguish between “coordination” (just get me there), for which a simple route suffices, and “familiarity,” for which a cognitive map serves best.

Coordination, Rankin notes, is why the military developed global positioning to begin with: It’s just the thing when you want to put a cruise missile into a bunker or supplies into a storm-struck village. But truly knowing a place means mastering its landscape, and for that you need a cognitive map. As an undergrad in Houston, Rankin began marking his favorite jogging routes on a paper map pinned on his wall. He stayed in shape and learned the town in the process. Know why you’re traveling, he advises, and choose your navigation mode accordingly.

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Are GPS Apps Messing With Our Brains?

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Trump’s Top Food Guy Just Abruptly Quit

by Lanny96N47 Posted on November 19, 2016

Mother Jones

To manage the transition of the US Department of Agriculture, President-elect Donald Trump settled on a lobbyist who represents Big Soda, Big Pizza, and Big Ag. On Wednesday, in a classic Trumpian lurch, the incoming chief executive announced a ban…on lobbyists serving in the transition.

And so the ag lobbyist, Michael Torrey, had to choose between maintaining his business or his position on the transition team. In a Friday press release, Torrey revealed his choice:

When asked recently to terminate lobbying registration for clients whom I serve in order to continue my role with the transition, I respectfully resigned from my role.

The Trump team has not announced a replacement or responded to my request for comment. One place to look for Torrey’s successor might be the motley crew of right-wing pols and agribiz execs who made up the Trump campaign’s Agricultural Advisory Committee.

Its chair, Charles Herbster, is a Trump loyalist who runs a multilevel marketing firm. One of the committee’s most high-profile members, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, is on the short list to be named USDA chief, according to the New York Times. Miller is most famous for trying to bill Texas taxpayers for a trip to Oklahoma to receive a medical procedure known as “the Jesus shot,” administered by a convicted felon known as Dr. Mike, and for calling Hillary Clinton a “cunt” in a tweet he has since deleted. He has also handed plum state jobs to campaign contributors, compared Syrian refugees to rattlesnakes, and suggested nuclear bombs be dropped on Muslim countries.

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Trump’s Top Food Guy Just Abruptly Quit

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Hate Crimes Against Muslims Spiked 67 Percent Last Year

by SimonHkx5134 Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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There were 5,850 hate crimes in the US last year—a 7 percent increase over the year before—according to new data released by the FBI last week. The main reason for the increase was a massive 67 percent spike in crimes targeting Muslims.

The numbers landed amid an apparent spike in attacks on ethnic and religious minorities in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president. This news comes as no surprise to anti-extremism groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Anti-Defamation League, which have documented a rise in hate crimes for more than a year.

But as stunning as this new data is, it’s probably incomplete: Even by estimates from other federal agencies, the FBI’s figures don’t actually count the vast majority of US hate crimes. Here’s a quick guide to what the new numbers mean—and why they don’t tell the whole story.

Which groups are most likely to be the victims of hate crimes?

According to the FBI data, nearly 60 percent of reported hate crimes were motivated by racial bias, with anti-black crimes leading, followed by anti-white crimes and crimes against Hispanics. More than 20 percent of hate crimes were motivated by religious bias. Anti-Semitic crimes were the most common, while crimes against Muslims followed behind. Incredibly, crimes against Muslims spiked 67 percent over 2014. Anti-gay crimes composed about 18 percent of all hate crimes, with gay men being the most likely target, while hate crimes based on gender identity composed less than 2 percent of all crimes. (However, transgender people—especially trans women of color—are victims of violence at much higher rates than other segments of the population.) Intimidation and assault led among hate crimes against people, while vandalism and destruction were the most common crimes against property. Just over a third of reported hate crimes were violent crimes against people.

But that’s not the whole story.

The FBI has collected data on hate crimes since Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act in 1990. The agency traditionally defined hate crimes as those committed because of a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, but the Obama administration has since expanded the definition to include gender and gender identity and mental and physical disabilities.

Yet despite the FBI’s annual tally, it’s still unclear how many hate crimes happen every year. The FBI generally reports between 5,000 and 7,000 hate crimes a year, according to an AP investigation of national hate crime data. But in a 2013 report, the Department of Justice estimated the average annual total count at more like 260,000. That’s more than 44 times more hate crimes than the FBI data suggests. The DOJ’s report was based on anonymous responses to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts every year.

Comparisons between earlier FBI hate-crime stats and other data sets from the federal government also reveal discrepancies. In 2013, for example, the FBI reported that there were 100 hate crimes on college campuses—but the Department of Education counted 781.

Why is the FBI’s data so incomplete?

The FBI relies on local, county, and state law enforcement agencies to tell it about hate crimes happening in their jurisdictions. But reporting hate crimes to the FBI is voluntary. More than 3,000 of the nation’s nearly 18,500 law enforcement agencies did not provide information to the FBI last year—almost 500 fewer than in 2014.

It’s likely that even the agencies that did participate underreported hate crimes. About 88 percent of the nearly 15,000 departments that participated last year tallied zero hate crimes—including departments in cities with storied histories of racial violence like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Mobile, Alabama; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana—according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League. Departments in many sizable cities reported just one, two, or three hate crimes. Participation in the FBI’s program is consistently limited among many departments across Southern states.

But the vast majority of hate crimes don’t get reported to law enforcement in the first place, says Jack Levin, a hate-crimes expert at Northeastern University in Ohio. Victims usually keep quiet.

Why don’t police departments cooperate?

Many police officers don’t understand how hate crimes are defined, or why it’s important to report them, explained Anti-Defamation League’s Allison Padilla-Goodman in a Mother Jones in an interview in May.

Hate crimes against African Americans are particularly underreported in the South, notes Levin. Five state—Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Wyoming—don’t have hate-crime laws on the books at all, and only 23 states and DC require police departments to keep data on hate crimes in their jurisdictions. But even some departments that do track hate crimes—and report them to state officials—don’t ultimately report them to the FBI, sometimes because of the burdensome paperwork involved, says Michael Lieberman, who serves as legal counsel to the national ADL.

In California—which consistently reports more hate crimes than any other state—officers receive instruction on hate crimes in the training academy, and police departments are required by state law to report details on all hate crimes to the state attorney general. Many large departments in California—like in San Francisco and San Jose—also have designated units that investigate hate crimes. But smaller departments—like most around the country—don’t have the resources for that kind of specialization, Lieberman says.

In any case, what drove the increase in hate crimes last year?

It could be a number of things. Retaliatory hate crimes against Muslims in response to devastating terror attacks in France, Brussels, and San Bernadino, California likely played a role, says Mark Potok, an expert on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He noted the sharp spike in crimes against Muslims that followed 9/11. Pushback against the global refugee crisis—and calls for resettling Arab and Muslim immigrants in the states—may also be at play, Levin said. And the xenophobic rhetoric of Donald Trump—who dominated the news cycle for half the year after declaring his candidacy in June, Potok noted—could also be a factor.

How can we make sure hate crimes don’t continue to rise?

In the wake of the new FBI stats, the ADL has urged more vigorous efforts by law enforcement to collect hate-crime data nationwide. Levin, too, says that now is the time to send a message to would-be hate offenders. “The perpetrator was sending a message when he commits the hate crime,” he said. “We need to send a message back that we as a society will not tolerate this kind of intolerance. That we don’t encourage and support the perpetrator. That we are not hate-filled people.”

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Hate Crimes Against Muslims Spiked 67 Percent Last Year

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 November 2016

by DixieHarden Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Guess who’s getting a Presidential Medal of Freedom? Hopper! Well, Hopper’s namesake anyway, Adm. Grace Hopper:

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, known as “Amazing Grace” and “the first lady of software,” was at the forefront of computers and programming development from the 1940s through the 1980s. Hopper’s work helped make coding languages more practical and accessible, and she created the first compiler, which translates source code from one language into another.1

It’s a posthumous award, but Adm. Hopper is now right up there with Vin Scully and Newton “Television Is A Vast Wasteland” Minow. Naturally, this means that the furry version of Hopper is the star of this week’s catblogging. She is trying her best to look visionary.

1Meh. I guess that’s close enough. No need to get pedantic here.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 November 2016

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The Mystery of Declining Labor Force Participation Continues

by AntonyNeuman Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen says there have been a lot of papers about the declining labor force participation of men, so it’s about time we investigate the declining labor force participation of women. He recommends a paper by So Kubota, a job market candidate at Princeton.

Unfortunately, I ran into a huge roadblock. Kubota thinks the answer involves the rising cost of childcare, and that certainly sounds reasonable. But take a look at the chart on the right. It comes at the very beginning of a presentation based on his paper. I’ve excerpted just the part starting around the year 2000, since that’s when overall female labor force participation started to decline. What it shows is clear: participation rates for women with children declined less than rates for women without children.

What am I missing here? It seems perfectly sensible that rising childcare costs reduce the net income from market labor and therefore reduce the number of mothers who find it worthwhile to work outside the home. And I’m fully willing to accept that the costs of childcare have gone up over the past couple of decades. That should make a difference, and Kubota estimates that it’s reduced female labor force participation by 5 percent. But Kubota’s own chart suggests that it hasn’t had this effect. All the subsequent discussion of subsidies and market vs. home-based childcare doesn’t change that basic fact.

So the interesting question seems to be this: given that childcare costs have increased, why are labor force participation rates for mothers declining less than those for women without children? That’s a genuine mystery.

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The Mystery of Declining Labor Force Participation Continues

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Banning Lobbyists Might Sound Like a Good Idea. But Here’s What Trump Is Missing.

by WilfordLockhart Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s transition team announced one phase of the president-elect’s plan to “drain the swamp” of corruption—a prohibition on registered lobbyists serving in his administration and a five-year lobbying ban for Trump officials who return to the private sector. Trump’s plan effectively doubles down on a policy that the Obama administration already has in place—one that many good government groups and lobbyists alike believe may have created a new problem: un-lobbyists—that is, influence-peddlers who avoid registering as lobbyists to skirt the administration’s rules.

Obama, like Trump, campaigned on a platform of aggressively rooting out the influence of lobbyists. After taking office, he put in place several major good-government initiatives, including a ban on lobbyists serving in his administration and a two-year cooling-off period before ex-administration officials could register to lobby. Once Obama’s lobbying rules took effect, there was a sharp decline in the number of registered lobbyists. Industry insiders and watchdog groups that track the influence game noted that the decrease was not due to lobbyists hanging up their spurs as hired guns for corporations and special interests. Rather it appeared that lobbyists were finding creative ways to avoid officially registering as such. There was no less influence-peddling going on, but now there was less disclosure of the lobbying that was taking place.

The problem lies with the definition of who is a lobbyist. The federal government requires anyone who spends more than 20 percent of their time on behalf of a client while making “lobbying contacts”—an elaborate and specifically defined type of contact with certain types of federal officials—to register as a lobbyist and file quarterly paperwork disclosing their clients and the bills or agencies he or she sought to sway. But by avoiding too many official “lobbying contacts” and limiting how much income that kind of work accounts for, lobbyists can shed the scarlet L, describing themselves as government affairs consultants or experts in advocacy and public policy. In 2014, the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics examined the trend of the “un-lobbyist” and found that 45 percent of the lobbyists who had shed their designation in the previous year still worked for the same employer. In many cases, the lobbyists didn’t leave their jobs, CRP found, they just changed their titles.

The Trump plan, which just tacks three years on to the Obama administration’s existing ban, does stop short of the Obama rules in one area. Under Obama’s policy, people who had been registered lobbyists could not work for agencies they had previously lobbied, though he did offer “waivers” to certain officials. According to Trump aides, registered lobbyists will be eligible for administration jobs if they de-register as lobbyists. The Washington Post reports that Josh Pitcock, a close aide to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, took the step on Monday, sending the Senate Clerk’s office notice that he is no longer a lobbyist for the State of Indiana.

In the end, said Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, the Trump plan may only perpetuate the problem of un-lobbyists.

“People are going to react to the Trump thing in the same way,” Painter notes, “by saying, ‘I’ll figure out a way to not be a lobbyist.'”

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Banning Lobbyists Might Sound Like a Good Idea. But Here’s What Trump Is Missing.

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