by Aditya Dev Sood

In just a few days Startup Tunnel (STun) will begin. Twenty-one young founders building nine startups over thirteen weeks. I'm in charge of this experimental incubator, which is backed not by Microsoft or Google, not by Valley money, nor even the Times of India, but by a motley network of entrepreneurs, technologists, professionals and consultants, who've come together and agreed to try and mentor these new companies. It's a lot like a snake eating it's own tail. There's every reason to be sceptical, every reason to worry, not least for all the talk of another tech bubble brimming, of which we ourselves might be the latest worrying sign.

The nine companies we are supporting do things like deliver services to your doorstep, allow freelancers to connect, improve sourcing and hiring for companies, integrate your social media feeds and allow health professionals to share information. It's a motley mix of different ends of the online economy, almost always addressing the professional and personal needs of urban elites — the global and connected middle class — of which there is now a critical mass not only in India, but also Indonesia, the Philippines, South-East Asia and other parts of the world, all now addressable from India.

I feel compelled to explain why I think incubators and accelerators like STun are a good thing. So much is written about the culture of Silicon Valley and how new wealth is creating new disparities there. Uber is the new ethically-challenged face of startups, not only in India, but everywhere else in the world. And the magnates of Sand Hill Road were among the first to slam Picketty's book, Capital in the 21st Century, for failing to understand how capitalism really works. I'm sympathetic to both sides, and often struggle to articulate my sense that these worldviews can be reconciled, that they're both right in different ways. I for one find Picketty's statistically-supported argument, that we are indeed living in a more unequal society, quite compelling. But I also sense, in a way that I can't yet defend, that the way for us to get to a more equal society is to find ways to funnel capital more effectively towards the kind of social and technical innovation that might envision and create newer better ways with which to navigate our everyday lives.

Read more »

Lani Guinier in Salon:

“Manly, Christian character.” That was the ideal that Endicott Peabody, a member of the New England Brahmin class, hoped to cultivate in the boys who attended his private boarding school, Groton. Peabody founded Groton in 1884 with the purpose of building character and embedding the value of “noblesse oblige” into the social fabric of late-nineteenth-century America. Groton students, like young men from seven other boarding schools in the northeastern United States, were to embody character, manliness, and athleticism. The “Big Three” colleges—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—validated these ideals by admitting nearly all boarding-school applicants and conferring honorary degrees upon Peabody.

Admission into the “Big Three” was fairly easy if the applicant possessed a “manly, Christian character.” He had to pass subject-based entrance exams devised by the colleges, but the tests weren’t particularly hard, and he could take them over and over again to pass. Even if a student didn’t pass the required exams, he could be admitted with “conditions.” Once enrolled at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, he would focus primarily on his social life, clubs, sports, social organizations, and campus activities, while often ignoring his academic work.

Admissions began to change, however, when Charles William Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869. Annoyed with “the stupid sons of the rich,” Eliot sought to draw into the university’s fold capable students from all segments of society. To ensure that smart students could attend Harvard regardless of their means, Eliot, in 1898, abolished the archaic Greek admission exams that were popular up until that time. He also replaced Harvard’s admissions exams with exams created by the College Entrance Examination Board because it tripled the number of locations where applicants could be tested. The result of Eliot’s changes was the admission of more public school students, including Catholics and Jews.

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

The British chemist Lesley Orgel had a rule: Evolution is cleverer than you.Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have repeatedly proven him right.

Since humans started making antibiotics for ourselves in the 1940s, bacteria have evolved to counteract our efforts. They are now winning. There are strains of old foes that withstand everything we can throw at them. Meanwhile, our arsenal has dried up. Before 1962, scientists developed more than 20 new classes of antibiotics. Since then, they have made two.

More, hopefully, are coming. A team of scientists led by Kim Lewis from Northeastern University have identified a new antibiotic called teixobactin, which kills some kinds of bacteria by preventing them from building their outer coats. They used it to successfully treat antibiotic-resistant infections in mice. And more importantly, when they tried to deliberately evolve strains of bacteria that resist the drug, they failed. Teixobactin appears resistant to resistance.

Bacteria will eventually develop ways of beating teixobactin—remember Orgel—but the team are optimistic that it will take decades rather than years for this to happen. That buys us time.

Teixobactin isn’t even the most promising part of its own story. That honour falls on the iChip—the tool that the team used to discover the compound. Teixobactin is a fish; the iChip is the rod. Having the rod guarantees that we’ll get more fish—and we desperately need more.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

Central to free speech activism has always been the distinction between defending the right to disseminate Idea X and agreeing with Idea X, one which only the most simple-minded among us are incapable of comprehending. One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the ACLU vigorously defends the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march; they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while defending the right to express them.

But this week’s defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself. Numerous writers thus demanded: to show “solidarity” with the murdered cartoonists, one should not merely condemn the attacks and defend the right of the cartoonists to publish, but should publish and even celebrate those cartoons. “The best response to Charlie Hebdo attack,”announced Slate’s editor Jacob Weisberg, “is to escalate blasphemous satire.”

More here.

Jenni Marsh in South China Morning Post Magazine:

“My husband is the best Chinese chef in Zambia,” says Liu Xiuyi, a former takeaway employee from Chongqing. “Whenever the president has Chinese guests in Lusaka, my husband is hired to cook for them.”

Twenty years ago, with no savings or formal education, the couple emigrated to Zambia when Liu's husband was hired as a chef by a Chinese state-owned construction company contracted to build roads in dusty Lusaka.

Now in their 50s, the Lius have just built a 15 million kwacha (HK$18.3 million) three-star hotel and restaurant, called the Golden Chopsticks, in the former British colonial outpost of Livingstone. They also own property in the Zambian capital; employ about 100 staff, local and Chinese; and rub shoulders with presidents and diplomats.

The Lius are among the estimated 20,000 to 100,000 Chinese living in the copper-rich southern African nation – weak census practices mean precise figures are elusive – and were among the first wave of daring migrants who sought their fortune here.

Although mining and construction brought the Chinese to Zambia, their presence is now having a significant effect on another industry: tourism.

Zambia, one of Sub-Saharan Africa's most politically stable states, is an underdeveloped tourism market, home to wild elephants, lush safari parks and the world's biggest series of waterfalls – the Mosi-oa-Tunya, or “the smoke that thunders”, which was found by Scottish explorer David Livingstone in 1855 and renamed after Britain's Queen Victoria.

In 2013, China became the world's largest outbound tourist market, with an increasing number of the estimated 100 million Chinese who left the mainland for leisure travel turning their attention away from Europe towards Africa; Chinese tourist arrivals to the continent grew by 56 per cent from 2011 to 2012.

Read the full story here.

Nina Martyris in Lapham's Quarterly:

The watch never left his side. It was the first thing Gandhi reached for when he rose each morning at 4 a.m., and the last thing he checked before going to bed, often past midnight. He consulted it frequently through the day so as never to be late for an appointment. And, at that final moment, when three bullets from an assassin’s Beretta knocked him over, his 78-year-old body slumped to the ground, and the watch also stopped. Mahatma Gandhi’s Ingersoll pocket watch, costing just a dollar, was among the handful of material possessions he owned. Since he didn’t have a pocket to carry it in, he attached the watch to his dhoti with a safety pin and a loop of khadi string. The Ingersoll is displayed in a glass case at the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi alongside his bloodstained dhoti and shawl. Together, the three items form a striking metaphor of Kala, the Hindu god of time who is also the god of death.

Gandhi’s legendary punctuality had a utilitarian imperative—without it he would never have been able to answer the sacks of letters and streams of visitors that demanded his attention each day. But, as with everything he valued, it had a moral imperative as well. Simply put, time was tied to his philosophy of trusteeship: the belief that just as we do not own our wealth but are trustees of it—and thus have to use it wisely—similarly, we are trustees of our time. “You may not waste a grain of rice or a scrap of paper, and similarly a minute of your time,” he wrote. “It is not ours. It belongs to the nation and we are trustees for the use of it.” Consequently, any abuse of time was unethical. “One who does less than he can is a thief,” he wrote to a friend. “If we keep a timetable we can save ourselves from the last-mentioned sin indulged in even unconsciously.” While this focus on punctuality may portray Gandhi as skittish and anxious, the opposite was true: a timetable allowed him to give the issue at hand his tranquil and undivided attention.

More here.

Martin Chilton in The Telegraph:

In 2011 Penguin launched 50 Modern Mini Classics. Here is our guide to the books.

HELL SCREEN (1918) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Performance

I starred that night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,

a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit;
I was blusters of glitter-bombs expanding
to mantle and aurora from a crown,
I was fouéttes, falls of blazing paint,
para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,
loose gold off fierce toeholds of white,
a finale red-tongued as a haka leap:
that too was a butt of all right!

As usual after any triumph, I was
of course, inconsolable.
.

by Les Murray
from Subhuman Redneck Poems, 1996

Jeff Gordinier at The New York Times:

Like his friend and fellow Scotsman Don Paterson, Robertson hasn’t yet crossed over into the realm of mainstream adoration that Ireland’s Seamus Heaney enjoyed among American readers, but that’s probably only a matter of time. He is not hip, and I mean that as a compliment. His work is accessible without being dopey, traditional without making him look like a fogy, and utterly free of fashionable snark. And somehow, the visceral language of a Robin Robertson poem has a way of feeling simultaneously luxurious and spartan. To put it bluntly, he writes lines that you want to read again and again: “He wore fish-gutter’s gloves to pick brambles,” and “the forest is triggered and tripwired,” and “a dab of blood on her cheek / from a rabbit or a deer.” In fact, he has such a deft hand that when his poetry takes a turn for the gory, as in “The Halving,” where he conveys the act and the aftermath of a median sternotomy, or “The Flaying of Marsyas,” his retelling of a scene of torture from Ovid, the gruesomeness can be hard to bear.

In “The Long Home” Robertson captures the atmosphere of a sleepy, crepuscular Aberdeen bar with such cinematic attention to detail that you half expect to see a boom mike hovering a few inches above the scene:

The firewood’s sap

buzzing like a trapped fly,

the granular crackle of a Green Final

folded and unfolded,

the sound of the coals

unwrapping themselves like sweets.

He only looked up when the barman

poured a bucketful of ice

into the sink, like a tremendous

burst of applause.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

In a 1998 piece in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnick described Houellebecq's literary intentions this way: “There are certain books — sardonic and acutely pessimistic — that systematically affront all our current habits of living, and treat our presumptions of mind as the delusions of the cretinous.”

The idea, in other words, is to make a mockery of our hypocrisies, to show us not as flawed but fatally self-deluded, the creators of a useless culture built on corrupt pieties.

“What I think, fundamentally,” he told the Paris Review in 2010, “is that you can’t do anything about major societal changes…. That’s the difference between me and a reactionary. I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe. I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values.”

In “Submission,” these disasters have to do with the conflict between religious and secular values. “More and more people,” he told the Telegraph this week, before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, “can’t stand living without God.”

more here.

Samuel Moyn in Dissent:

A powerful wave of historians insist, however, that federalism was no flash in the pan. They contend that the nation-state was not inevitable, especially when it was time for France to decolonize in Africa. These historians have presented tremendous evidence of what some call a “federal moment”—one which, thanks to the distended process of decolonization, lasted surprisingly long into postwar history. Frederick Cooper is the leader of the group, but several other historians like Todd Shepard and Gary Wilder have buttressed his findings. The implications of their way of thinking are profound. After millennia of imperial arrangements that incorporated different peoples into the same polity, Cooper and others say, there is no reason to regard the nation-state of our time as much more than a historical accident and political mistake—one that perhaps ought to be undone.

In an era of revulsion towards nation-states, and especially nation-states in postcolonial circumstances, we can appreciate why the story of federalism might be worth recalling. Is there anything else besides the nation that otherwise implacable enemies—liberals, Marxists, and postcolonialists—can more easily agree about, if only to agree in what they hate? The nation-state has always been exclusionary and has often been violent, offending the cosmopolitanism of liberals and the desire of Marxists for solidarity beyond borders. The nation-state has also been a severe disappointment to postcolonialists, who believe that new nations succeeded mainly in creating new elites and perpetuating the suffering of their populations at large.

However, for the history of federalism to be more than trivia, it has to be shown that it was actually possibile and that it might have yielded better results than the nation-state. Neo-federalist historians rarely take it upon themselves to solve what ought to be the central puzzle: why did the nation-state model win out, when the alternatives were supposedly so compelling?

Read the rest here.

Ferdinando Giugliano at the Financial Times:

Ever since the business cycle replaced the seasons as the prime driver of economic life, mankind has learnt to adapt to the inevitability of booms and busts. Yet, just as our farming ancestors struggled to cope with extreme weather, large-scale financial crises have repeatedly caught industrial and postindustrial societies off guard. Policy makers have had to dig deep into the past for lessons as they sought to contain bank runs and fight soaring unemployment.

The Great Recession has been no exception. After the largely benign economic fluctuations of the 1990s and early 2000s, central bankers were stunned by the financial crisis that struck in 2007-08. Their immediate instinct was to look back 80 years, to the upheavals of the Great Depression.

In Hall of Mirrors, Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that knowledge of what happened in the 1930s has been a mixed blessing for today’s policy makers. Hindsight allowed politicians and central bankers to avoid many of the errors made by their predecessors, sparing the world a more dramatic crisis. But Eichengreen also believes that the success of the initial response meant the reform effort stopped halfway. This has left the west vulnerable to a new financial shock.

more here.

Erik B. Steiner in Wired:

A few weeks ago, I asked the internet to guess how many coins were in a huge jar. For more than 27 years, my parents had saved their spare change. My mother recently trucked the whole load to a bank to cash in, and in so doing finally learned the stockpile’s actual value, or at least the value as calculated by that particular coin-counting machine. The update from Mom got me wondering: Might someone be able to guess that amount? What about our collective estimate—is the crowd really as wise as some say it is?

The mathematical theory behind this kind of estimation game is apparently sound. That is, the mean of all the estimates will be uncannily close to the actual value, every time. James Surowiecki’s best-selling book, Wisdom of the Crowd, banks on this principle, and details several striking anecdotes of crowd accuracy. The most famous is a 1906 competition in Plymouth, England to guess the weight of an ox. As reported by Sir Francis Galton in a letter to Nature, no one guessed the actual weight of the ox, but the average of all 787 submitted guesses was exactly the beast’s actual weight.

Galton, who also happens to be the inventor of eugenics, was shocked to find such value in “democratic judgment.”

The notion that the hive is more intelligent than the individuals comprising it is a seductive one, and a keystone of today’s bottom-up Big Data revolution. It’s democratic ideology, open-source goodness, the “invisible hand,” and New Age humility all wrapped into a big networked hug.

But is it true?

More here. By the way, I was one of the people who took part in the experiment. Below are emails between Erik and me. I didn't do so good! 🙂

Read more »

Carl Zimmer in This View of Life:

The vinegar worm (officially known as Caenorhabditis elegans) is about as simple as an animal can be. When this soil-dwelling nematode reaches its adult size, it measures a millimeter from its blind head to its tapered tail. It contains only a thousand cells in its entire body. Your body, by contrast, is made of 36 trillion cells. Yet the vinegar worm divides up its few cells into the various parts you can find in other animals like us, from muscles to a nervous system to a gut to sex organs.

In the early 1960s, a scientist named Sydney Brenner fell in love with the vinegar worm’s simplicity. He had decided to embark on a major study of humans and other animals. He wanted to know how our complex bodies develop from a single cell. He was also curious as to how neurons wired into nervous systems that could perceive the outside world and produce quick responses to keep animals alive. Scientists had studied these two questions for decades, but they still knew next to nothing about the molecules involved. When Brenner became acquainted with the vinegar worm in the scientific literature, he realized it could help scientists find some answers.

Its simplicity was what made it so enticing. Under a microscope, scientists could make out every single cell in the worm’s transparent body. It would breed contentedly in a lab, requiring nothing but bacteria to feed on. Scientists could search for mutant worms that behaved in strange ways, and study them to gain clues to how their mutations to certain genes steered them awry.

Brenner’s instinct proved correct. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize with John Sulston and Robert Horvitz for their research on the vinegar worm. Other scientists have done pioneering work on the animal as well, with over 22,000 papers published on it over the past five decades. Today, they show no signs of slowing down.

But something fascinating unfolded along the way.

More here.

Darhil Crooks, creative director at The Atlantic:

On January 7, 12 people were brutally murdered in Paris, including journalists, editors, and illustrators. Along with the brave staff of Charlie Hebdo, freedom of expression itself was attacked that day, and, in France and elsewhere, it remains under threat. We reached out to some of our contributors and asked them to articulate their reactions to this assault the best way they know how: through illustration. This gallery is dedicated to the people who lost their lives this week.

More here.

David Ferguson in Raw Story:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that Americans are now statistically more likely to be killed by a gun than in a car accident.

The Economist reported Friday that death by cars in this country is on the decline. Safety technology continues to improve, states and municipalities have enacted tougher seatbelt laws and fewer young people are driving, which means that streets and highways in the U.S. are safer than ever.

Deaths by gunshot, however, are on a slight increase in the U.S., meaning that currently, Americans are slightly more likely to be killed by bullets — whether through suicide, accidents or domestic violence — than in a road accident.

The Center for American Progress released a report last year saying that soon the two lines would intersect for people 25 and under, but now the Bloomberg News has released its own numbers, which indicate that gun deaths have overtaken road accidents as a cause of death for the whole population, regardless of age.

More here.