Technology

Missionaries and Modernization

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The medical missionary David Watt Torrance.

Walker recently posted on a study showing that 19th century missionary efforts had a positive, even vital effect on the development of liberal democracy.

The study focused on “conversionary Protestants,” but if we look beyond the scope of democracy, we still find that the influence of missionary group was by large a positive one. This includes ”non-conversionary” Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox. Some interesting examples come from missionary efforts in 19th century Palestine, and they have something to tell us about the supposed dichotomy between science and religion, as well as the contention that religion is a corrosive, negative influence.

Missionary movements have made a very real contribution to the spread of modern medicine. As an example (though certainly not the earliest), for over half a century one of the few modern hospitals in Israel/Palestine was the one run by Scottish missionaries in Tiberias, by the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In 1885, the young Dr. David Watt Torrance arrived as a medical missionary. His clinic was at first very small- only two rooms- and the locals were understandably suspicious of his motives. Torrance gained the confidence of the locals due to his skill and compassion, although very few took any steps toward conversion. In 1894, a proper hospital was built, and it remained in operation until 1959. Malaria and dysentery were among the most common illnesses treated at the hospital.

To give an idea of just why this was a big deal, before the medical missionary efforts traditional medicine in Palestine involved amulets, pilgrimages to the tombs of holy men, exorcisms, and bloodletting. This was true no matter to what religion or social class you belonged.

One measure of these medical missions’ success was that Jewish communities in turn made increased efforts to establish their own hospitals and clinics wherever missionaries operated as a way to counter their influence.

It is probably not an exaggeration to say that tens of thousands owe their lives to the Torrances’ religion (Herbert took over from his father until his own retirement in 1953), and the number increases significantly if one takes other mission hospitals into consideration. Torrance himself paid a terrible price- he buried two wives and four children in Tiberias. It was Torrance‘s faith in God which led him to dedicate his life to improving the health and lives of Galileans, regardless of their religious denomination or convictions. Science, that is, modern medicine, was his tool, but religious faith was the motivator. What the Torrances and other medical missionaries show is that religion has often led to the spread of science in very practical ways.

The scholars Ruth Kark, Dietrich Denecke, and Haim Goren wrote a paper entitled “The Impact of Early German Missionary Enterprise in Palestine on the Modernization and Environmental and Technological Change, 1820—1914.”

We suggest that it is informative to emphasize a new dimension to the study of missions- that of the relationship between religion and belief systems and place or space. Within the missionary context this relates to the study of the impact of missionary concepts and activity on environmental and spatial change and the creation of new urban and rural landscapes. These reflect far-reaching effects that remain evident to the present.

Their study deals with two German missionary groups. The first, Protestants, founded an orphanage and school in 1860 just outside of Jerusalem for Christian victims of persecutions in Lebanon. Not only did they provide schooling, they also taught the children various practical trades employing and constantly upgrading modern methods of production.

In 1889, German Catholic missionaries purchased land at Tabgha, the traditional site of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. They established a network of schools for local Arab Christians, and an agricultural commune run by monks. They introduced a lot of modern agricultural tools and techniques, re-introduced bananas to the region, and sailed the first motor-boat on the Sea of Galilee.

The article is well worth a read, and it gives a new spin on the role of religion in progress and modernization.

Green Imperialism

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Having failed to stem carbon emissions in rich countries or in rapidly industrialising ones, policy makers have focused their attention on the only remaining target: poor countries that do not emit much carbon to begin with.

So begins a recent op-ed in the Financial Times by Roger Pielke (University of Colorado) and Daniel Sarewitz (Arizona State University). The attempt to cap carbon emissions in developing countries has vast consequences for the poor:

A recent report from the non-profit Center for Global Development estimates that $10bn invested in renewable energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa could provide electricity for 30m people. If the same amount of money went into gas-fired generation, it would supply about 90m people – three times as many.

In Nigeria, the UN Development Programme is spending $10m to help “improve the energy efficiency of a series of end-use equipment . . .in residential and public buildings”. As a way of lifting people out of poverty, this is fanciful at best. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter, with vast reserves of natural gas as well. Yet 80m of its people lack access to electricity. Nigerians do not simply need their equipment to be more efficient; they need a copious supply of energy derived from plentiful local sources.

Or consider Pakistan, where energy shortages in a rapidly growing nation of 180m have led to civil unrest – as well as rampant destruction of forests, mostly to provide firewood for cooking and heating. Western development agencies have refused to finance a project to use Pakistan’s Thar coal deposits for low-carbon natural gas production and electricity generation because of concerns over carbon emissions.

This is worth considering, especially on the heels of Nathaniel’s climate science post. Science writer Matt Ridley has compared the policies proposed to address climate change to a tourniquet being used to stop a nosebleed: the bleeding is real, but the solution will do more harm than good. It is actually my acceptance of climate change that drives my support for innovation-based solutions. It strikes me as morally wrong to deny the poor energy consumption (such as a washing machine). As Pielke and Sarewitz write,

…[I]f the rapidly urbanising poor are to have any chance of prosperity, they need access to energy on the same scale as all modern economies. Climate activists warn that the inhabitants of poor countries are especially vulnerable to the future climate changes that our greenhouse gas emissions will cause. Why then, do they simultaneously promote the green imperialism that helps lock in the poverty that makes these countries so vulnerable?

Indeed.

Double-dipping, The Verizon Way

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one-sided-traffic

Ars Technica has an article with responses from two sides, Cogent Communications vs. Verizon, of an increasingly-relevant corporate backroom debate involving multiple players that has already begun to affect the everyday life of a huge swath of internet subscribers in the US and has ties to the growing debate over net neutrality. The argument breaks down as follows. Let’s use the roads analogy I used in my earlier post about net neutrality and stretch it into absurdity:

Imagine that Verizon owns all the roads from you to halfway to the nearest Netflix distribution center, and another company, Cogent, owns all the roads from that point and the rest of the way to the Netflix distribution center. Verizon and Cogent have an implicit arrangement to allow traffic to pass unmolested at the switch point from one road network to the other. You have an explicit contract with Verizon that every month you can receive unlimited shipments from anywhere in the world but at a maximum of twenty per day, and each time you or anyone else wants a shipment they have to dispatch a messenger on a bicycle, creating a small but steady stream of outflowing traffic.

Netflix is sending at least a million shipments a month to everyone in your neighborhood and surroundings and the number is growing. Eventually, the incoming Verizon road starts to become clogged with shipments, many of them Netflix’s big trucks, and people start to miss their shipments from both Netflix and elsewhere and instead of being able to get twenty shipments per day per their contract with Verizon, they can only get ten or fifteen. Meanwhile, Verizon, instead of using money from their existing business to upgrade their roads to handle a higher volume of traffic, simply allows the road to remain gridlocked unless Cogent or Netflix pays them money to finance the upgrades, and the price they are demanding is many times higher than a typical equivalent construction project requires.

This is essentially what is happening right now. In a sense, Verizon is leveraging their stranglehold on huge parts of the US ISP market to hold both customers and content providers hostage from each other, separating customers from the content they have requested and content providers from their subscribers unless someone ponies up to their satisfaction. Their complaints about traffic disparity aren’t necessarily unjustified, but punishing their customers and reneging on their agreements is wrong. What they’re doing is tantamount to extortion, and it only works because there is no recourse for anyone, and they know it. The problem will only get worse so long as Verizon, Comcast, et al face little or no competition in their markets. Traffic will degrade, it will be discriminated against, and we’ll pay more for it.

This is what happens when we let the government bestow superpowers on rich corporations and not take seriously their mandate to regulate anti-consumer behavior.

Playing The Blame Game

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ea-is-evil

There’s been some outrage in the video game community lately about a recent mobile game, Dungeon Keeper, released by EA, a game which, according to said community, embodies the worst and most cynical of what the mobile game industry has to offer. Why the outrage at this particular game? Well…

  1. It’s an EA game. EA was once the pride of the video game industry. Back in the late ’80s to late ’90s, EA released classics year after year like they couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. In true “you either die a hero…” fashion, however, their phenomenal successes led to interest by the world at large and EA became a corporate behemoth more interested in vacuuming up talent wherever it could find it and putting it to work 80 hours a week pumping out half-finished yearly installments of the most lucrative properties than creating the labors of love that characterized their earlier days. Today, EA, together with Activision, represent to many gamers everything that is unsustainable and wrong with the modern video game industry[ref]This is manifested in EA’s predictable yearly appearances at the top of many “worst company” lists across the web.[/ref].
  2. It’s a “remake” of a classic title. The original Dungeon Keeper (1997) holds a special place in the hearts of many gamers and was a product of the EA golden age.
  3. It’s a “broken-by-design” free-to-play (F2P) game[ref]Game developer/designer Jonathan Blow has an interesting discussion of effects of F2P game design here.[/ref]. These types of games are only “free” in the loosest sense of the word. While there is no charge to download and begin playing the game, your progress in the game is punctuated by hours-long wait times to perform even simple actions, forcing players to wait upwards of 24 hours before an action completes and being allowed to queue up another. The only way to actually play the game continuously is to pay real money for resources which eliminate or reduce the timer mechanic. The exchange rate of this resource is such that to have an experience roughly “comparable” (see #4) to the original Dungeon Keeper game, a player would have to pay tens or even hundreds of dollars.
  4. It is not anything like the original game. Even putting aside the F2P mechanics, very little of the game experience actually resembles the original. If the art assets and the title were changed, it is debatable that anybody would conclude that this new game were even so much as an homage to the first Dungeon Keeper.

Predictably, gamers are upset about the game and its business model. It cheaply cashes in on a classic title while engaging in psychological warfare with players in an attempt to separate them from their money. And what to make of the overwhelmingly positive customer reviews for the game on the App Store? Many are convinced that this means the future generation of players will accept this type of “gameplay” as standard and, as such, it will become increasingly widespread. Gamers are calling EA out, vicious in their criticism of the title and its predatory business model, but is that where the problem is?

I wonder what legitimate justification we have in blaming EA for creating and releasing such a game if people are willing to play it and pay money for it. Obviously, if people weren’t paying for these types of games then there wouldn’t be much reason to continue releasing them. Does EA have any responsibility to adhere to some standard of integrity with regards to the games it releases? In two words: absolutely not. Why should they? The responsibility for the enforcement of “integrity” lays with the customer. That’s the way the it works. It’s a voluntary market.

In my mind, it’s every bit as insidious as EA’s repulsive business practices to imagine companies should cleave to some arbitrary standard of conduct with regard to the type and quality of their products. So long as they are not doing anything illegal, the notion that they’re doing anything objectively wrong or evil is misguided. EA is not your friend, nor should you expect them to be. They’re not on your “side.” They want your money and they’ll happily take it if you’ll give it. The idea of the benevolent business, of companies and individuals laboring for the love and passion of their work with money as simply a byproduct is often symptomatic of a very dangerous and pervasive mindset that seeks to dictate remuneration rather than allow it to emerge a result of free exchange. We can hope for (what we consider) better, yes, but we should not expect it and we should never enforce it.

Companies like EA by and large reflect the tastes of the market they serve, therefore the market shoulders the blame. Dungeon Keeper may be cynical, it may be exploitative, it may even barely qualify as a game at all, but it also represents jobs, and it represents what we, as a game-playing public, have told them we’re prepared to pay for. This is not a defense of the new Dungeon Keeper, of EA or of such so-called “games,” it’s simply an opportunity to take responsibility.

After all, if a seal bathes himself in blood and swims lazily across the nose of a shark, whose fault is it if he gets bitten?

1991 Radio Shack and Dematerialization

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Look at the 1991 Radio Shack ads below.

As the author of the piece I’ve borrowed this from states, “There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.” Here is the list of the items above which are now conveniently on your iPhone:

  • All weather personal stereo, $11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box
  • AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
  • In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
  • Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
  • Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
  • VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
  • Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
  • Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
  • 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
  • Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
  • 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
  • Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
  • Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
  • BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’  Do you even know how to use a phone book?

All this was $3054.82 in 1991 (about $5100 in 2012 dollars) and has been “replaced by the 3.95 ounce bundle of plastic, glass, and processors in our pockets” (which is about $200 nowadays). A few years ago, Reason‘s science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote on the concept of “dematerialization”:

Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, show that the world economy is increasingly using less to produce more. They call this process “dematerialization.” By dematerialization, they mean declining consumption of energy or goods per unit of GDP. In a 2008 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ausubel and Waggoner, using data from 1980 to 2005, show that the world is on a dematerialization binge, wringing ever more value from less material. It turns out that dematerialization achieves many of the same environmental goals as deconsumption. 

Ausubel and Waggoner demonstrate that the global economy dematerialized (got more outputs from fewer inputs) steadily in the production of crops, use of fertilizer and wood, and carbon dioxide emissions. For example, while global per capita income rose by 40 percent between 1980 and 2005, farmers around the world raised crop yields 57 percent. Had farming productivity remained stuck at the 1980 level, farmers would have had to plow down an additional 1 billion hectares (about half the land area of the U.S. and six times current U.S. cropland) to produce the amount of food grown in 2005. Instead cropland expanded by less than 100 million hectares and farmers so boosted their productivity that they could produce the same amount of crops on only 60 percent of the amount of land they used in 1980. 

The world economy emitted more carbon dioxide in 2005 than it did in 1980, but nearly 30 percent less than it would have had emissions grown at the same rate as the world economy grew. Using European Carbon Exchange prices per ton of carbon dioxide, Ausubel and Waggoner calculate that this dematerialized carbon would be worth nearly $400 billion dollars per year.

As the Cato Institute’s Marian Tupy notes, “Dematerialization, in other words, should be welcome news for those who worry about the ostensible conflict between the growing world population on the one hand and availability of natural resources on the other hand. While opinions regarding scarcity of resources in the future differ, dematerialization will better enable our species to go on enjoying material comforts and be good stewards of our planet at the same time. That is particularly important with regard to the people in developing countries, who ought to have a chance to experience material plenty in an age of rising environmental concerns.”

 

Why Bitcoin Matters

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2014-01-25 Bitcoins

This New York Times piece is by far the best one I’ve read yet on the impact of Bitcoin. It’s interesting, then, that it’s also one of the most positive. In the post Marc Andreessen puts Bitcoin in context as the culmination of decades of computer science research rather than just some weird, ultra-libertarian pipe-dream. He explains what really matters about the new currency (mostly: eliminating the 2-3% charged by credit cards and making transactions almost literally costless). And lastly, he responds to some of the complaints that it is a criminal paradise (“Much like email, which is quite traceable, Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous.”)

Definitely worth the read.

And almost enough to convince me to join a mining pool…

If You Post on Twitter, You Might Be a Narcissist

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"If you constantly Tweet or your name is Kanye West, you might be a narcissist."
“If you constantly tweet, or your name is Kanye West, you might be a narcissist.”

A recent study has linked Twitter to narcissism, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. However, there appears to be a generational divide: narcissistic college students preferred Twitter, while narcissistic adults preferred Facebook (likely due to Millennials viewing status updates as routine as telephone calls were to previous generations). When it comes to Facebook, “the frequency with which users post status updates is a better predictor” of narcissism than mere usage, notes one of the study’s authors. “We can also begin to dig deeper – if posting frequency is linked to narcissistic traits then it’s important to determine whether this applies to any kind of posting (like linking to a news story) or only postings related to one’s own thoughts, feelings, and accomplishments.” A piece in The Atlantic followed up with a nice overview of the research behind narcissism and social media, including online gaming.

I wonder what this says about bloggers…

Yes, Net Neutrality Is Important

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verizon

Imagine our roads are owned by a few large private corporations. Next, imagine that they can dictate who gets to use them and how, and they hand out preferential access to certain people and companies to curry favor, or who do them favors, or who pay them money. Your purchases from Amazon still arrive on time but now cost more. Deliveries from your favorite Etsy shop? Same cost, but now they take twice as long to arrive. Sound like a fun time? What about when access to information becomes a life-and-death issue?

That is, essentially, what may happen to internet access in the US after a DC Court of Appeals ruling threw out FCC rules preventing internet service providers from discriminating against traffic on their infrastructure.

I’m not a populist. I’m also not a corporatist. This issue is usually framed as a lack of enough or effective government regulation over the giant, powerful telecom industry. It could also be said that the entire mess could have been avoided if over the past 25 years or so federal and local governments hadn’t habitually handed out special privileges to a select few industry players, giving them inroads and allowing them to entrench themselves, making true competition nearly impossible.

For the moment, let’s put aside the fact that we, the taxpayers, are the ones that paid for much of the internet infrastructure we’re using. Let’s put aside the fact that telecoms promised high availability, high speeds, were given incentives by government in the form of tax breaks and cash and then failed to deliver, but kept the money anyway. Let’s put aside the complaints from Verizon, AT&T, et al that the strain put on “their” infrastructure (that, remember, we paid for) due to the way the modern internet is used is the reason they’re being “forced” to sue for preferential treatment of traffic on their lines.

Let’s put all that aside and focus on the issue at hand: ISPs do not have your interests at heart and they will abuse the lack of net neutrality. It’s in their nature. Getting mad about it is like getting mad at a lion for hunting and killing a gazelle. But that doesn’t mean we should just let it happen. As I see it, there are three solutions given the situation we’re in:

1. Enforceable, unimpeachable net neutrality legislation. Since both the FCC and Congress have much to gain pleasing their corporate interests and risking a bit of unpopularity in the home constituency, it will take a fairly sizeable grassroots movement to overturn that kind of momentum. This is difficult, but possible, given the demographics of internet enthusiasts in the US.

2. More competition. What better way to say “screw you” to Verizon, AT&T or Comcast and their anti-consumerism than switching ISPs? Well, first you need an ISP to switch to. I believe the market-based solution is the strongest, the most unassailable long-term, but may be much harder to effect than getting more rules and laws on the books: Local and federal government need to stop discouraging if not preventing new entrants in the market. They need to stop playing favorites. They need to incentivize new players to enter the market but recoup the outlays when projects fail.

3. Government takes over provision of broadband internet. No, thank you.

Unless the FCC, with its own questionable motives, manages to pull out a Hail Mary victory from this seemingly-sure defeat, this isn’t something we can ignore and expect it to go away. Just like SOPA and PIPA, this matters. Let’s hope it’s not too late before we realize it.

Evil Pharmaceutical Companies and Drugs for Profit

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"Profits over people! Mwahaha!"
“Profits over people! Mwahaha!”

Many cannot seem to wrap their heads around the high costs of pharmaceuticals. The typical claim is that pharmaceutical companies are evil and greedy, plundering the pockets of those sick and desperate and exploiting the misery of others. While there are numerous reasons for the expensiveness of drugs, very few seem to realize that one of the major contributors is the actual science. Thankfully, Scientific American has published two articles on the subject by chemist Ashutosh Jogalekar: “Why Drugs Are Expensive: It’s the Science, Stupid” and “Why Drug Discovery Is Hard – Part 2: Easter Island, Pit Vipers; Where Do Drugs Come From?” The articles go very well with the following ReasonTV video (from 2009) on medical innovation. Worth thinking about.

The Pace of Technology Adoption

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Columbia business professor Rita McGrath has a brief blog post at Harvard Business Review demonstrating that technological innovations are being adopted more quickly than in the past. For example, “it took decades for the telephone to reach 50% of households, beginning before 1900.  It took five years or less for cellphones to accomplish the same penetration in 1990.”

Furthermore, “it took 30 years for electricity and 25 years for telephones to reach 10% adoption but less than five years for tablet devices to achieve the 10% rate.”

 

McGrath concludes, “It’s clear that in many arenas things are indeed speeding up, with more players and fewer barriers to entry.” Just one more reason I’m optimistic about the future of living standards.