Israel is much farther ahead than other countries in vaccinating its population against COVID-19, which is making "the country into a live laboratory for setting the rules in a vaccinated society — raising thorny questions about rights, obligations and the greater good," according to this recent article from the New York Times.
"Under a new 'Green Badge' system that functions as both a carrot and a stick, the government is making leisure activities accessible only to people who are fully vaccinated or recovered starting Sunday. ... Customers and attendees will have to carry a certificate of vaccination with a QR code. ... “Getting vaccinated is a moral duty. It is part of our mutual responsibility,” said the health minister, Yuli Edelstein. He also has a new mantra: “Whoever does not get vaccinated will be left behind.” ... Dr. Maya Peled Raz, an expert in health law and ethics at the University of Haifa, defended some limits on personal liberties for the greater good. Employers cannot force employees to get vaccinated, she said, but they might be allowed to employ only vaccinated workers if not doing so could harm their business. ... Mr. Edelstein, the health minister, said on Thursday that vaccination would not be compulsory in Israel. But his ministry is proposing legislation that would oblige unvaccinated employees whose work involves contact with the public to be tested for the virus every two days. And he is promoting a bill that would allow the ministry to identify unvaccinated people to the local authorities. Local authorities and volunteers have been trying to lure people to vaccination centers with offers of free pizza, Arabic sweets and, in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, bags of cholent — a slow-cooked stew traditionally prepared for the sabbath. ... Concerts and restaurants are luxuries that people can more easily forgo. But the questions become more pressing and contentious when it comes to the rights of employers and workers. ... [T]wo rights organizations, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Worker’s Hotline, said they had already received complaints from other unvaccinated workers. The groups wrote a letter to the attorney general this month demanding that he issue a clear opinion and said that under existing law an employer may not demand information from workers regarding their vaccination status." www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/world/middleeast/israel-covid-vaccine-reopen.html
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This geo-graphic is supposed to be a visualization of countries' share of the earth's surface, but the more salient piece, at least for me, is the share of the earth's surface that is either international water (43%) or, perhaps more surprisingly, territorial water (27%).
www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-by-share-of-earths-surface/ Beat poet (and publisher and owner of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore) Lawrence Ferlinghetti died earlier this week at 101. You can read one of his most famous poems, "I Am Waiting," published in 1958, on the Poetry Foundation's website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42869/i-am-waiting-56d22183d718a You can find some of his more recent work on the City Lights site: http://www.citylights.com/Ferlinghetti/?fa=ferlinghetti_poems In honor of his passing, I am sharing one of his more recent poems, "Pity the Nation," written in 2007:
"PITY THE NATION" (After Khalil Gibran) Pity the nation whose people are sheep And whose shepherds mislead them Pity the nation whose leaders are liars Whose sages are silenced And whose bigots haunt the airwaves Pity the nation that raises not its voice Except to praise conquerers And acclaim the bully as hero And aims to rule the world By force and by torture Pity the nation that knows No other language but its own And no other culture but its own Pity the nation whose breath is money And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed Pity the nation oh pity the people who allow their rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away My country, tears of thee Sweet land of liberty! Until the U.S. passed the grim milestone of 500,000 COVID deaths recently, over the last month most COVID news in the U.S. has focused on aspects of vaccine rollouts. But as of earlier this week, the countries shown in red on this map have not yet been able to start COVID vaccinations: www.statista.com/chart/24242/status-of-global-vaccination-campaigns
Much of America's produce comes from water-scarce regions, including Arizona and central California. Are vertical racks moved around indoors by robots the future of farming, at least for some crops? A Bay-area agricultural startup is running "a two-acre indoor vertical farm [that] produces yields that would normally require a 720-acre ‘flat farm’—and it can be done with 95% less water" and no pesticides. Instead of transporting produce from farms to population centers, produce could be grown in warehouses and other spaces closer to urban consumers. www.goodnewsnetwork.org/2-acre-vertical-farm-plenty-grows-350x-more/
A recent report by the U.S. Naval War College details the development of Sansha City, China's military-civilian effort to expand its claims to the South China Sea. "Sansha City was founded by China in 2012 and is the world’s largest city by area, covering 800,000 square miles of the South China Sea within the 'nine-dash line' that China claims for itself. That makes it 1,700 times the size of New York City. Most of Sansha City is salt water, although it includes the Paracel Islands, which Vietnam and Taiwan claim, and the Spratly Islands, various of which are claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei. City Hall, so to speak, is on Woody Island, one of the Paracels. 'Once a remote outpost, Woody Island has become a bustling hub of activity,' says the 57-page, heavily footnoted report, which was written by China expert Zachary Haver for the War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute. 'The island now boasts expanded port infrastructure, seawater desalination and sewage treatment facilities, new public housing, a functioning judicial system, 5G network coverage, a school, and regular charter flights to and from the mainland.' Beyond Woody Island, Sansha City is 'developing tourism in the Paracel Islands, attracting hundreds of newly registered companies, cultivating aquaculture, and encouraging long-term residency,' the report says. There are jails and a courthouse, where two people were tried and sentenced for buying and transporting endangered wildlife in the Spratly Islands. ... Sansha City, just nine years old, is evidence that China is settling in for a long stay. ... 'Through Sansha’s system of normalized administrative control, China is gradually transforming contested areas of the South China Sea into de facto Chinese territory.'"
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-19/china-has-an-800-000-square-mile-city-in-the-south-china-sea The federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 per hour, has not increased in 11.5 years (during which inflation has eroded purchasing power by 24%). All of the states shown in a color other than red on this topological map have a state minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage. www.statista.com/chart/17169/state-minimum-wages-united-states
Advances in computer-brain interfaces -- of which Elon Musk's Neuralink might be the most prominent example -- raise important ethical issues about their use and about who decides, as this article from Science News points out.
"Today, paralyzed people are already testing brain-computer interfaces, a technology that connects brains to the digital world. With brain signals alone, users have been able to shop online, communicate and even use a prosthetic arm to sip from a cup. The ability to hear neural chatter, understand it and perhaps even modify it could change and improve people’s lives in ways that go well beyond medical treatments. But these abilities also raise questions about who gets access to our brains and for what purposes. Because of neurotechnology’s potential for both good and bad, we all have a stake in shaping how it’s created and, ultimately, how it is used. But most people don’t have the chance to weigh in, and only find out about these advances after they’re a fait accompli. So we asked Science News readers their views about recent neurotechnology advances. We described three main ethical issues — fairness, autonomy and privacy. Far and away, readers were most concerned about privacy. "The idea of allowing companies, or governments, or even health care workers access to the brain’s inner workings spooked many respondents. Such an intrusion would be the most important breach in a world where privacy is already rare. 'My brain is the only place I know is truly my own,' one reader wrote. Technology that can change your brain — nudge it to think or behave in certain ways — is especially worrisome to many of our readers. ... "'We are getting very, very close' to having the ability to pull private information from people’s brains, [Columbia University neurobiologist Rafael] Yuste says, pointing to studies that have decoded what a person is looking at and what words they hear. Scientists from Kernel, a neurotech company near Los Angeles, have invented a helmet, just now hitting the market, that is essentially a portable brain scanner that can pick up activity in certain brain areas. ... Technology that can change the brain’s activity already exists today, as medical treatments. These tools can detect and stave off a seizure in a person with epilepsy, for instance, or stop a tremor before it takes hold. ... But the power to precisely change a functioning brain directly — and as a result, a person’s behavior — raises worrisome questions. ... Precise brain control of people is not possible with existing technology. But in a hint of what may be possible, scientists have already created visions inside mouse brains. Using a technique called optogenetics to stimulate small groups of nerve cells, researchers made mice 'see' lines that weren’t there. Those mice behaved exactly as if their eyes had actually seen the lines, says Yuste, whose research group performed some of these experiments. ... "People ought to have the choice to sell or give away their brain data for a product they like, or even for straight up cash [according to Zurich-based bioethicist Marcello Ienca]. 'The human brain is becoming a new asset,' Ienca says, something that can generate profit for companies eager to mine the data. He calls it 'neurocapitalism.' ... "A lack of ethical clarity is unlikely to slow the pace of the coming neurotech rush. But thoughtful consideration of the ethics could help shape the trajectory of what’s to come, and help protect what makes us most human." www.sciencenews.org/article/technology-brain-activity-read-change-thoughts-privacy-ethics According to Foreign Policy, Irish citizens are getting around their country's coronavirus restrictions by booking dentist appointments...in the Canary Islands. Ireland's travel restrictions provide an exemption for "essential medical, health or dental services" with proof of the appointment from a medical provider. Dental offices in Spain's Canary Islands, a sunny archipelago off the coast of Morocco, report a surge in appointments from Irish patients requesting email confirmations of their appointments. The Irish "patients" are, apparently, generally no-shows, creating bottlenecks for Canary Islanders with actual dental problems. canariesinfo.co.uk/images/spaingif.GIF
High school students can learn about cybersecurity by playing the CyberStart game online for free. Those who complete 20% of the challenges by March 8 will be eligible to compete for college scholarships. www.cyberstartamerica.org (Not a high school student but interested in seeing what it's like? Try the 60-minute CyberStart Go instead: go.cyberstart.com/)
In advance of the fighting season that usually resumes with the spring, the Taliban is using armed drones and conventional fighters to squeeze Afghanistan's major population centers, taking control of key highways leading to Kabul and territory on the outskirts of Kunduz in the north and Kandahar in the south. Long War Journal, which has mapped shifting territorial control in Afghanistan since June 2014 when NATO ended its military mission in Afghanistan and switched to an “advise and assist” role, shows more than half of the country's population is living in areas either under Taliban control or actively "contested." www.longwarjournal.org/mapping-taliban-control-in-afghanistan
It might seem boring to talk about the weather, but a deep freeze across much of the U.S. is wreaking havoc on the power grid, shutting down oil refineries, causing rolling blackouts, and raising questions about an economy dependent on electricity.
"Energy markets have never seen anything quite like this. In a matter of four days, an intensifying cold blast gripping the central U.S. froze natural gas pipelines, sent electricity prices skyrocketing to record levels and ultimately forced Texas’s grid operator to plunge more than 2 million homes into darkness in the first winter weather-related rolling blackouts since 2011. As electricity outages began spreading through a 14-state grid across the southwest, plenty of blame for the crisis was already being assigned. ... As temperatures continued to fall, gas pipelines began to seize up, wind turbines started to freeze, and oil wells shut in -- just as homes and businesses raised demand for heating to record levels. ... By Friday Feb. 12, traders were panicking and trying to line up additional supplies for the long holiday weekend. That evening, Texas’s chief energy regulators called an emergency meeting to prepare to ration gas supplies across the state. ... Texas’s grid operator and the Southwest Power Pool have both implemented rolling electricity outages. These are controlled blackouts -- designed to last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour (but in reality are proving much longer) -- that force electricity demand offline to protect the grids from total collapse. In the past three decades, Texas has only resorted to such a drastic measure four times. ... Half of the wind power capacity on Texas’s grid was knocked offline, and wind accounts for nearly a quarter of the state’s supplies. ... The crisis reinforces the need for policy makers and regulators to think carefully about what a world wholly dependent on electricity for lighting, cooling, heating, cooking and transportation would look like under extreme circumstances. The same risks were on full display last year when California, the largest electric car market in America and one of the biggest in the world, went through rolling blackouts of its own caused by intense heat waves and wildfires." www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-15/how-extreme-cold-turned-into-a-u-s-energy-crisis-quicktake A new book about the impact of Amazon on American geography was recently reviewed in The Atlantic: "There are countless ways to measure Amazon’s hold on American life. More people in the U.S. subscribe to its Prime service than voted for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden in the past election: more than 100 million, by recent estimates. Amazon reaps fully half of what people in this country spend online. It is the second-biggest private workplace in the United States, after Walmart, employing more than 800,000 people, most of whom will never set foot in the Seattle headquarters’ plant spheres. Among Amazon’s large Arizona-based workforce, most of it inside warehouses, one in three people was on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2017. ... The rise of the internet in the 2000s accelerated the process in ways we’re by now familiar with, and a handful of companies—Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, in particular—came to dominate large swaths of economic life. What [author Alec] MacGillis feels is underappreciated is the geographical remapping of wealth—and, with it, power—that the transformation has brought about."
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/alec-macgillis-fulfillment-amazon/617796/ Bill Gates is not only one of America's most generous philanthropists, he is also the biggest private owner of farmland in the U.S. According to The Land Report, Bill Gates now owns 242,000 acres of farmland spanning 18 states. landreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Gates-Map.jpg Although Gates may be the country’s biggest owner of farmland, his holdings pale compared to the 2.2 million acres of forest and ranch land owned by John Malone, chair of Liberty Media, and the 2 million acres of forest and ranch land owned by CNN founder Ted Turner. (Map from landreport.com/2021/01/bill-gates-americas-top-farmland-owner/)
Happy Valentine's Day! This short, entertaining piece from freelance philosopher Clifton Mark writing for Canada's CBC considers three philosophers' views on love: www.cbc.ca/life/wellness/love-advice-from-three-of-philosophy-s-deepest-thinkers-1.4521152
The region of northwestern Somalia known as Somaliland (shown in yellow on this map) has been seeking independence from Somalia for more than 30 years. Unlike the rest of Somalia, Somaliland is largely peaceful, with a functioning government and no significant threat from Al-Shabaab terrorism. Somaliland has its own currency, military, and flag. But what it doesn't have is international recognition. Now Somaliland hopes to use its ancient rock paintings, some of the world's oldest, as a bargaining chip with the international community: without recognition of its independence, Somaliland is dependent on Somalia for all aid, including cultural aid, which leaves Somaliland's archaeological treasures, like the rock paintings at Laas Geel, vulnerable to neglect and attack. If the world wants to save these early records of human art, the theory goes, the world needs to pave the way for tourism and outside funding by recognizing Somaliland's independence. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/02/01/somaliland-independence-laas-geel-rock-paintings
So many other things have been canceled over the last year, but the Great Backyard Bird Count continues! Today through Monday you can donate as little as 15 minutes of your time to participate in an ongoing citizen-science project and learn about birds. For more information about the 24th annual Great Backyard Bird Count, see www.birdcount.org.
This geo-graphic shows the world's biggest sovereign wealth funds (i.e., state-owned investment funds), by asset value as of January. (GIC Private Limited and Temasek Holdings are both Singaporean; together they would move Singapore into the #3 position.) Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, is derived largely from its offshore oil reserves in the North Sea. It was established in 1990 "to invest government revenues from fossil fuel industries into sectors deemed more sustainable in order to provide for a future when the country can no longer rely on its income from oil" and helps give Norwegians one of Europe's highest median disposable incomes. www.statista.com/chart/24060/the-worlds-biggest-sovereign-wealth-funds
A perfect storm of under-investment, increased demand, shifts in manufacturing, and the COVID pandemic has led to a global shortage in computer chips, creating substantial production delays in goods ranging from smartphones and game consoles to automobiles. For carmakers, the lag time is reportedly as long as 40 weeks to fill a chip order placed today. Because companies in Taiwan and South Korea account for 83% of global production of processor chips and 70% of memory chips, the current shortage has raised concerns in the U.S. about overreliance on foreign manufacturers for critical technology components. www.bbc.com/news/technology-55936011
The waters surrounding Indonesia are home to 20% of the world's coral reefs, with 75% of the world's coral species living in the so-called "coral triangle" of Southeast Asia and Oceania, from Indonesia to the Philippines to the Solomon Islands. Researchers studying these corals are finding they may be more resilient to temperature changes than has been feared. "In 2019, [scientists found] that corals that were predicted to exceed the bleaching threshold, defined by previous climate models, were actually showing a greater ability to adapt to thermal stresses. To investigate, [Kenya-based coral scientist Tim] McClanahan launched a study with researchers from 19 tropical research institutions to assess the sensitivities of 226 reefs in 12 countries across 2016, one of the Earth’s warmest years on record. Field observation data of bleaching events were collected and compared with satellite data of coral exposure to high sea temperatures. The team found that past climate warming models overestimated coral destruction in the Coral Triangle – the region that spans Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands, where three quarters of the world’s coral species live. In particular, reefs around the Australian, Indonesian and Fiji-Caroline regions were better able to adapt to thermal stress than was previously thought." geographical.co.uk/nature/oceans/item/3949-corals-susceptibility-to-bleaching-varies-with-geography-raising-conservation-hope
Last week the Brazilian mining company Vale agreed to pay $7 billion to compensate victims of a mine tailings dam collapse that killed 270 people in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais two years ago. Tailings dams are earthen embankments designed to hold back the sludge resulting from mining operations. This map from The Wall Street Journal shows tailings dams in the U.S. and notes the proportion of dams in each state that are considered particularly likely to pose a "severe hazard" to nearby communities. (from www.wsj.com/articles/minnesotas-iron-range-likes-its-miners-a-deadly-brazil-disaster-is-giving-it-pause-11571064180)
Recent estimates suggest that poorer parts of the world, including much of Central America, parts of Asia and almost all of Africa, will not achieve widespread COVID vaccination until 2023. What guidance can moral philosophy provide to those making decisions about global vaccine distribution? This piece from The Guardian (UK) compares communitarianism with utilitarianism.
"'Vaccine nationalism' refers to a ... kind of response to the issue, demanding 'My country first!' It assumes that each country is responsible for the safety and wellbeing only of those living within its territory, not abroad. This seems to be the approach of the UK government so far: if the EU has problems with the supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine, then tough luck. This argument finds justification in communitarianism, the philosophy that argues our identities and values are intricately linked to the communities we belong to, and therefore our moral obligations are first and foremost to those who belong to our community – in this case, our political community. But according to a different, more cosmopolitan, approach, moral responsibility doesn’t stop at a country’s borders. The value of a person’s life isn’t dependent on where they live: everyone has equal moral worth. Utilitarianism, the moral philosophy that measures the value of an act by measuring its impact on overall wellbeing, doesn’t discriminate between British, French or Brazilian wellbeing. It sees the preferential treatment of those close to us as immoral, and as an unfortunate feature of human nature. According to this framework, the UK shouldn’t prioritise its own citizens, but treat the citizens of the EU, and indeed of the rest of the world, as equally deserving of the vaccines it has secured. The most vulnerable from around the globe should, as in the domestic case, take priority. So, which of the two ethical frameworks gets it right? "One way that philosophers assess ethical principles is by testing them in thought experiments. Imagine a neighbour asks you for a favour, say to help them move, and a stranger asks you the same. Would it be immoral to prioritise your neighbour? That doesn’t sound quite right. In fact, the special ties you have with your neighbour make helping them seem like a kind of obligation, one you don’t have towards a stranger. Now imagine a different scenario: your neighbour is again asking for help with moving, but a stranger is at the same time crying for help, drowning in the lake next to your house. Here your moral duty is to help the stranger, not your neighbour. Both the ethical principle that says we should always prioritise those we have ties to, as well as the one that suggests it is always wrong to do so, have their limitations. No one moral rule can capture the particularities of every ethical conundrum... "Given the current situation, and the fact the UK is suffering one of the world’s highest number of deaths relative to population size, there is a moral argument for prioritising its people. But it’s important to keep in mind that even though the political leadership of the country is democratically accountable only to its citizens, its moral accountability doesn’t stop with them. If and when the UK finds itself in better epidemiological shape than other countries, it will be time to help them out." www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/29/covid-vaccine-nationalism-row-eu-uk The anti-corruption NGO Transparency International has released its 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index. The interactive map shows country corruption scores and gives users an opportunity to delve into historical data and analysis. (Spoiler alert: the United States has fallen to 67/100, tied with Chile for 25th least-corrupt country.) www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020
If early February is cold and dreary where you are, you might want to check out one of these virtual field trips. Options include museums, farms, zoos, a recycling center, Buckingham Palace, and even an M&M factory: www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a32403098/virtual-field-trips-for-kids/
With Myanmar back in the headlines this week, this geo-graphic shows Myanmar's growing importance in rare earth minerals mining. Myanmar (shown in lavender on this chart) is the world's third biggest producer of rare earth minerals, behind China and the U.S. (Rare earth minerals have become essential to the production of everything from electric car batteries and smartphones to flat-screen displays and wind turbine generators.) www.statista.com/chart/18278/global-rare-earth-production
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