It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, August 21, 2023
Physicists use a 350-year-old theorem to reveal new properties of light waves
Physicists at Stevens Institute of Technology use a 350-year-old theorem that explains the workings of pendulums and planets to reveal new properties of light waves. Credit: Stevens Institute of Technology
Since the 17th century, when Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens first debated the nature of light, scientists have been puzzling over whether light is best viewed as a wave or a particle—or perhaps, at the quantum level, even both at once. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have revealed a new connection between the two perspectives, using a 350-year-old mechanical theorem—ordinarily used to describe the movement of large, physical objects like pendulums and planets—to explain some of the most complex behaviors of light waves.
The work, led by Xiaofeng Qian, assistant professor of physics at Stevens and reported in the August 17 online issue of Physical Review Research, also proves for the first time that a light wave's degree of non-quantum entanglement exists in a direct and complementary relationship with its degree of polarization. As one rises, the other falls, enabling the level of entanglement to be inferred directly from the level of polarization, and vice versa. This means that hard-to-measure optical properties such as amplitudes, phases and correlations—perhaps even these of quantum wave systems—can be deduced from something a lot easier to measure: light intensity.
"We've known for over a century that light sometimes behaves like a wave, and sometimes like a particle, but reconciling those two frameworks has proven extremely difficult," said Qian "Our work doesn't solve that problem—but it does show that there are profound connections between wave and particle concepts not just at the quantum level, but at the level of classical light-waves and point-mass systems."
Qian's team used a mechanical theorem, originally developed by Huygens in a 1673 book on pendulums, that explains how the energy required to rotate an object varies depending on the object's mass and the axis around which it turns. "This is a well-established mechanical theorem that explains the workings of physical systems like clocks or prosthetic limbs," Qian explained. "But we were able to show that it can offer new insights into how light works, too."
This 350-year-old theorem describes relationships between masses and their rotational momentum, so how could it be applied to light where there is no mass to measure? Qian's team interpreted the intensity of a light as the equivalent of a physical object's mass, then mapped those measurements onto a coordinate system that could be interpreted using Huygens' mechanical theorem. "Essentially, we found a way to translate an optical system so we could visualize it as a mechanical system, then describe it using well-established physical equations," explained Qian.
Once the team visualized a light wave as part of a mechanical system, new connections between the wave's properties immediately became apparent—including the fact that entanglement and polarization stood in a clear relationship with one another.
"This was something that hadn't been shown before, but that becomes very clear once you map light's properties onto a mechanical system," said Qian. "What was once abstract becomes concrete: using mechanical equations, you can literally measure the distance between 'center of mass' and other mechanical points to show how different properties of light relate to one another."
Clarifying these relationships could have important practical implications, allowing subtle and hard-to-measure properties of optical systems—or even quantum systems—to be deduced from simpler and more robust measurements of light intensity, Qian explained. More speculatively, the team's findings suggest the possibility of using mechanical systems to simulate and better-understand the strange and complex behaviors of quantum wave systems.
"That still lies ahead of us, but with this first study we've shown clearly that by applying mechanical concepts, it's possible to understand optical systems in an entirely new way," Qian said. "Ultimately, this research is helping to simplify the way we understand the world, by allowing us to recognize the intrinsic underlying connections between apparently unrelated physical laws."
More information: Xiao-Feng Qian et al, Bridging coherence optics and classical mechanics: A generic light polarization-entanglement complementary relation, Physical Review Research (2023). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.033110
Biphoton state holographic reconstruction. Image reconstruction. a, Coincidence image of interference between a reference SPDC state and a state obtained by a pump beam with the shape of a Ying and Yang symbol (shown in the inset). The inset scale is the same as in the main plot. b, Reconstructed amplitude and phase structure of the image imprinted on the unknown pump. Credit: Nature Photonics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-023-01272-3
Researchers at the University of Ottawa, in collaboration with Danilo Zia and Fabio Sciarrino from the Sapienza University of Rome, recently demonstrated a novel technique that allows the visualization of the wave function of two entangled photons, the elementary particles that constitute light, in real-time.
Using the analogy of a pair of shoes, the concept of entanglement can be likened to selecting a shoe at random. The moment you identify one shoe, the nature of the other (whether it is the left or right shoe) is instantly discerned, regardless of its location in the universe. However, the intriguing factor is the inherent uncertainty associated with the identification process until the exact moment of observation.
The wave function, a central tenet in quantum mechanics, provides a comprehensive understanding of a particle's quantum state. For instance, in the shoe example, the "wave function" of the shoe could carry information such as left or right, the size, the color, and so on.
More precisely, the wave function enables quantum scientists to predict the probable outcomes of various measurements on a quantum entity, e.g. position, velocity, etc.
This predictive capability is invaluable, especially in the rapidly progressing field of quantum technology, where knowing a quantum state which is generated or input in a quantum computer will allow to test the computer itself. Moreover, quantum states used in quantum computing are extremely complex, involving many entities that may exhibit strong non-local correlations (entanglement).
Knowing the wave function of such a quantum system is a challenging task—this is also known as quantum state tomography or quantum tomography in short. With the standard approaches (based on the so-called projective operations), a full tomography requires large number of measurements that rapidly increases with the system's complexity (dimensionality).
Previous experiments conducted with this approach by the research group showed that characterizing or measuring the high-dimensional quantum state of two entangled photons can take hours or even days. Moreover, the result's quality is highly sensitive to noise and depends on the complexity of the experimental setup.
The projective measurement approach to quantum tomography can be thought of as looking at the shadows of a high-dimensional object projected on different walls from independent directions. All a researcher can see is the shadows, and from them, they can infer the shape (state) of the full object. For instance, in CT scan (computed tomography scan), the information of a 3D object can thus be reconstructed from a set of 2D images.
In classical optics, however, there is another way to reconstruct a 3D object. This is called digital holography, and is based on recording a single image, called interferogram, obtained by interfering the light scattered by the object with a reference light.
The team, led byEbrahim Karimi, Canada Research Chair in Structured Quantum Waves, co-director of uOttawa Nexus for Quantum Technologies (NexQT) research institute and associate professor in the Faculty of Science, extended this concept to the case of two photons.
Reconstructing a biphoton state requires superimposing it with a presumably well-known quantum state, and then analyzing the spatial distribution of the positions where two photons arrive simultaneously. Imaging the simultaneous arrival of two photons is known as a coincidence image. These photons may come from the reference source or the unknown source. Quantum mechanics states that the source of the photons cannot be identified.
This results in an interference pattern that can be used to reconstruct the unknown wave function. This experiment was made possible by an advanced camera that records events with nanosecond resolution on each pixel.
Dr. Alessio D'Errico, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa and one of the co-authors of the paper, highlighted the immense advantages of this innovative approach, "This method is exponentially faster than previous techniques, requiring only minutes or seconds instead of days. Importantly, the detection time is not influenced by the system's complexity—a solution to the long-standing scalability challenge in projective tomography."
The impact of this research goes beyond just the academic community. It has the potential to accelerate quantum technology advancements, such as improving quantum state characterization, quantum communication, and developing new quantum imaging techniques.
The study "Interferometric imaging of amplitude and phase of spatial biphoton states" was published in Nature Photonics.
More information: Danilo Zia et al, Interferometric imaging of amplitude and phase of spatial biphoton states, Nature Photonics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-023-01272-3
A song sparrow singing in Delaware, USA. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
]New behavioral traits are often the first response of animals to changing environmental conditions. As cities increasingly become habitats of wildlife, researchers have studied behavioral changes in birds and examined how urbanization impacts parental care behavior of male song sparrows. The team found that in cities, where male song sparrows are known to be more aggressive than in rural surroundings, male birds visited nests more often than rural conspecifics visited countryside nests. The study is published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
When animals settle in new environments, or when their natural habitats are rapidly changed by human influence, their behaviors change. One such behavioral change that has been observed in several bird species that settled in cities is increased aggression, born out of the need to defend territories.
"Male songbirds in temperate zones are thought to reduce parental care when they are more aggressive. Yet in this study, we show that urban male song sparrows provided more care for their young," said Dr. Samuel Lane, currently a postdoctoral research fellow at North Dakota State University and lead author of the study completed in the Sewall Lab at Virginia Tech. "Against our expectations, we found that they visited nests more frequently and were more successful parents than rural males."
Super songbirds
Many songbird species have readily adapted to cities, yet in these new environments they face challenges not found in their native habitats. One way that animals can cope with those changes is by balancing behaviors to manage energy and time resources better.
If urban male songbirds spend more time securing their territory, it would imply that they have less time to invest into the care of their offspring. Therefore, the researchers expected that more aggressive urban male sparrows were sacrificing parental care for territorial aggression, which in turn was expected to have a negative impact on the survival of their young. To test their thesis, they studied six sites in southwest Virginia characterized by recent urban sprawl over four breeding seasons.
Lane and colleagues observed that urban males visited their nests significantly more often than their rural fellows. They also began feeding nestlings earlier in the day. "It turns out urban males are super males—able to defend their territories and care for their young," Lane said.
Born and raised in the city
The researchers also found that hatching and fledging success was significantly higher in urban habitats—despite certain challenges city birds faced. For example, brood parasitism—a behavioral pattern where certain bird species, such as the brown-headed cowbird, use nests of other birds to lay their eggs—was higher in cities. This phenomenon can negatively impact development and survival of the offspring belonging in a nest. On the upside, nest predation rates were significantly lower in the city, contributing to overall higher nesting success.
"It is often assumed that urban areas are more challenging for wild animals," Lane said. "Our study adds to growing evidence that certain species of songbirds even benefit from living in urban environments when there is sufficient green space for them to find food and nest locations." The scientists hope ongoing research in this field will contribute to designing urban environments that support wildlife better.
These results, however, should not be generalized to all locations, or other species and animals. The researchers pointed out that studying sites of more intense urbanization or species that cope worse with urbanization might have produced different outcomes.
More information: Indirect effects of urbanization: Consequences of increased aggression in an urban male songbird for mates and offspring, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2023.1234562
Nuclear War Could End the World, but What if It’s All in Our Heads? Sarah Scoles Updated Mon, August 21, 2023 - 1952 FILE PHOTO - The mushroom cloud of the first test of a hydrogen bomb, "Ivy Mike", as photographed on Enewetak, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean, in 1952, by a member of the United States Air Force's Lookout Mountain 1352d Photographic Squadron. The top secret film studio, then located in Hollywood, California, produced thousands of classified films for the Department of Defence and the Atomic Energy Commission beginning in 1947. A 50th anniversary tribute to these "Atomic Cinematographers" and their work is planned for October 22 in Hollywood.
Nuclear war has returned to the realm of dinner table conversation, weighing on the minds of the public more than it has in a generation.
It’s not just “Oppenheimer’s” big haul at the box office: Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s officials have made nuclear threats. Russia has also suspended its participation in a nuclear arms control treaty with the United States. North Korea has launched demonstrative missiles. The United States, which is modernizing its nuclear weapons, shot down a surveillance balloon from China, which is building up its atomic arsenal.
“The threat of nuclear use today, I believe, is as high as it has ever been in the nuclear age,” said Joan Rohlfing, president and chief operating officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an influential nonprofit group in Washington, D.C.
In this environment, a conventional crisis runs a significant risk of turning nuclear. It only requires a world leader to decide to launch a nuclear attack. And that decision making process must be better understood.
Historically, scholarship on nuclear decision making grew out of economic theory, where analysts have often irrationally assumed that a “rational actor” is making decisions.
“We all know that humans make mistakes,” Rohlfing said. “We don’t always have good judgment. We behave differently under stress. And there are so many examples of human failures over the course of history. Why do we think it’s going to be any different with nuclear?”
But growing scientific understanding of the human brain hasn’t necessarily translated into adjustments in nuclear launch protocols.
Now there’s a push to change that. The organization led by Rohlfing, for instance, is working on a project to apply insights from cognitive science and neuroscience to nuclear strategy and protocols — so leaders won’t bumble into atomic Armageddon.
But finding truly innovative, scientifically backed ideas to prevent an accidental or unnecessary nuclear attack is easier said than done. So is the task of presenting the work with adequate nuance.
Experts also need to persuade policymakers to apply research-based insights to real-world nuclear practice.
“The boundaries of that discourse are extraordinarily well protected,” said Anne I. Harrington, a nuclear scholar at Cardiff University in Wales, referring to internal pushback she says government insiders have faced when challenging the nuclear status quo. “So anyone who thinks that they’re going to make changes from the outside alone — I think that won’t happen.”
— — —
The world’s nuclear powers have different protocols for making the grave decision to use nuclear weapons. In the United States, absent an unlikely change to the balance of power among the branches of government, the decision rests with just one person.
“The most devastating weapons in the U.S. military arsenal can be ordered into use by only the president,” said Reja Younis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., who is also a doctoral candidate in international relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
In a crisis involving nuclear arms, Younis said, the president would probably meet with the secretary of defense, military leaders and other aides. Together, they would evaluate intelligence and discuss strategy, and the advisers would present the president with possible actions.
“Which could range from ‘let’s do nothing and see what happens’ to ‘let’s full-scale nuclear attack,’” said Alex Wellerstein, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and head of a research project called “The President and the Bomb.”
In the end, though, only the president makes the call — and they can forgo guidance from advisers. A president could just press the proverbial button.
“These are the president’s weapons,” Rohlfing said.
— — —
Before his electoral victory in 2016, experts and political opponents began raising concerns about investing in Donald Trump the power to order a nuclear attack. That debate continued in Congress through his presidential term. By the time he left office, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had openly asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to limit his ability to launch nuclear weapons.
It was in this milieu that Deborah G. Rosenblum, the executive vice president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, invited Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist who is currently a professor at the Columbia Business School, to give a lecture to the organization in 2018. He titled it “Your Brain on Catastrophic Risk.” (Today, Rosenblum serves in the Biden administration as assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs — an office that briefs the president on nuclear matters.)
In a black T-shirt and jeans, Cerf briefed a room of experts and researchers on what brain science had to say about existentially troubling topics like nuclear war. The visit preceded a collaboration involving Cerf and a nonprofit called PopTech, whose conference Cerf hosts.
The groups, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, are working to provide the government with science-based suggestions to improve nuclear launch protocols. Changing those policies is not impossible, but would require specific the right political scenario.
“You would need to have some sort of consensus that’s going to come from not just outside groups, but also policy and military insiders,” Harrington said. She added, “You probably also need the right president, honestly.”
The project includes a more public-facing arm: Cerf has been interviewing influential security experts like Leon Panetta, former secretary of defense and director of the CIA, and Michael S. Rogers, former director of the National Security Agency. Excerpts from these interviews will be cut into a documentary series, “Mutually Assured Destruction.”
With this project, Cerf and colleagues may have a conduit to share their findings and proposals with prominent government officials past and present. And he is optimistic about the difference those findings might make.
“I always think things will be better,” he said. “I always think that, with a nice smile, you can get the hardest opposition to listen to you.”
— — —
Cerf has the rapid cadence of a TED Talk speaker. Born in France and raised in Israel, he went to college for physics, got a master’s in philosophy, joined a lab that studied consciousness at Caltech and then transitioned to and completed a Ph.D. there in neuroscience.
Along the way, he did mandatory military service in Israel, worked as a white-hat hacker, consulted on films and TV and won a Moth GrandSlam storytelling competition.
Cerf said his primary critique of the system for starting a nuclear war is that despite advances in our understanding of the fickle brain, the status quo assumes largely rational actors. In reality, he says, the fate of millions rests on individual psychology.
One of Cerf’s suggestions is to scan presidents’ brains and gain an understanding of the neuro-particulars of presidential decision making. Maybe one commander in chief functions better in the morning, another in the evening; one is better hungry, the other better sated.
Other ideas for improving the protocols that Cerf has spoken about publicly generally can be traced back to existing research on decision making or nuclear issues.
Cerf says one important factor is speaking order during the big meeting. If, for instance, the president begins with an opinion, others — necessarily lower in the chain of command — are less likely to contradict it.
The idea that the hierarchical order of speaking affects the outcome of a discussion is not new. “That’s a classic experiment done in the ’50s,” said David J. Weiss, a professor emeritus at California State University, Los Angeles, referring to studies conducted by the psychologist Solomon Asch.
Cerf has also proposed decreasing the time pressure of a nuclear decision. The perception of a strict ticking clock to respond to a nuclear attack originated before the United States developed a more robust nuclear arsenal that might survive a first strike.
“We know that compressed time is bad for most decisions and most people,” Cerf said — an idea that goes back to at least the 1980s. Ideally, he says, if the United States received information indicating a launch, then the president could assess it and make a decision outside the direct heat of right-away.
The group’s main recommendation, though, mirrors proposals by other advocates: Require another person (or people) to say yes to a nuclear strike. Wellerstein, who did not contribute to the group’s research, says that such a person needs the explicit power to say no.
“Our belief is that the system we have, which relies on a single decision-maker, who may or may not be equipped to make this decision, is a fragile and very risky system,” Rohlfing said.
While Cerf and colleagues have other papers in the works, the research from the project that he has produced doesn’t address nuclear weapons head-on. In one paper, participants made riskier decisions when they pretended to be merchants seeking deals on unidentified fruits of unknown value.
Cerf says that research is relevant to scenarios of high risk and low probability — like starting nuclear war — which often have numerous sources of uncertainty. A nuclear decision-maker might be unsure of whether a missile is really in the air, how high a nuke’s yield is, why the missile was launched or whether more missiles will follow.
Another of Cerf’s studies focused on climate change. It found that when people were asked to stake money on climate outcomes, they would bet that global warming was happening, and they were more concerned about its impact, more supportive of action and more knowledgeable about relevant issues — even if they began as skeptics. “You basically change your own brain without anyone telling you anything,” Cerf said.
He thinks the results could be applied to nuclear scenarios because you could use bets to make people care about nuclear risk and support changes to policy. The findings could also be used to evaluate the thinking and prediction of aides who advise the president.
Some scholars of decision science don’t agree on such extrapolations.
“To go from there to giving advice on the fate of the world — I don’t think so,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist who studies decision making at Carnegie Mellon University.
Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and president of the nonprofit Decision Research, said no psychological inquiry can stop at the experiment.
“You have to go back and forth between the laboratory studies, which are very constrained and limited, and looking out the window,” he said.
Experts say it’s also important to avoid selling too good a story about behavioral science to policymakers and elected officials.
“It’s just really easy to sell them stuff if you have enough bravado,” Fischhoff said.
— — —
Any brain, even a commander in chief’s, has a difficult time with the large-scale empathy required to understand what launching a nuclear weapon means. “We can’t really perceive what it means to kill 30 million people,” Cerf said.
There is a long-standing psychological term for this: psychic numbing, coined by Robert Jay Lifton. Just because humans are intelligent enough to master destructive weapons “does not mean that we’re smart enough to manage them after they’re created,” said Slovic, whose research has extended the concept of psychic numbing.
Compounding this effect is the difficulty of paying appropriate attention to all important information. And that compounds with the tendency to make a decision based on one or a few prominent variables. “If we’re faced with choices that pose a conflict between security and saving distant foreign lives to which we’re numb because they’re just numbers, we go with security,” Slovic said.
Slovic has also researched factors that tend to make people — including presidents — more likely to favor a nuclear launch. In one experiment, for instance, he found that the more punitive domestic policies a person supported — like the death penalty — the more likely the person was to approve of using the bomb. Other researchers, like Janice Stein, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, have looked into scenarios where military officers show a reluctance to pass information up the chain of command that may trigger a nuclear launch.
That actually happened in 1983, when Col. Stanislav Petrov’s command center near Moscow received data suggesting the United States had launched intercontinental ballistic missiles. Petrov thought it could be a false alarm and decided not to send the warning to his superiors. He was right. Because the colonel feared a nuclear war fought under false pretenses more than he feared not retaliating, a third world war did not begin.
— — —
In the past, Wellerstein says, nuclear launch plans have adapted to changing circumstances, philosophies and technologies. And presidents have changed the protocols because of fears that emerged in their historical moments: that the military would launch a nuke on its own, that the country would experience a nuclear Pearl Harbor or that an accident would occur.
Perhaps today’s fear is that individual psychology governs a world-altering choice. Given that, working to understand how brains might work in a nuclear crisis — and how they could work better — is worthwhile.
What comes after the science — how to change policy — is complicated, but not impossible. Nuclear protocols may have a sense of permanence, but they’re written in word processors, not stone.
“The current system that we have didn’t fall out of the sky fully formed,” Wellerstein said.
c.2023 The New York Times Company
DR STRANGELOVE; NO FIGHTING IN THE WAR ROOM
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, TWO TRIBES
How conservatives use ‘verbal jiu-jitsu’ to turn liberals’ language against them
Analysis by John Blake, CNN •1d
The two frontrunners for the White House in 2024 are tied in a hypothetical rematch. Congress is paralyzed. Every big election seems to be decided by razor-thin margins.
By almost any measure, the struggle for political dominance in the US seems deadlocked between Republicans and Democrats. At times, the two parties resemble a pair of punch-drunk boxers, slugging away at one another in a contest that neither can end.
But there is one political battleground where Republicans triumph virtually every time — and control of this arena could determine who wins the White House in 2024.
Republicans are masters of verbal jiu-jitsu. It’s a form of linguistic combat in which the practitioner takes a political phrase or concept popularized by their opponent and gradually turns into an unusable slur. Like the Japanese martial art known as jiu-jitsu, its devotees avoid taking opposing arguments head on and instead redirect their opponents’ momentum to beat them.
If this sounds abstract, consider the evolution of “ woke.” The word is defined as being “actively aware of social injustice.” But it has been transformed into a contemporary scourge, one that a politician compared to a “virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.”
Mention almost any touchstone phrase adopted by the left in recent years — “critical race theory,” “diversity,” “global warming,” even the word “liberal” itself — and it has been redefined or tarnished by conservatives.
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Meanwhile, Republicans continue to proudly use words and pet phrases such as “family values,” “conservative” and “patriot” – no matter who or what is associated with the terms.
As candidates prep for the first 2024 GOP presidential debate Wednesday in Milwaukee, it’s a good time to ponder this question: Why are Republicans so good at this form of verbal combat, and Democrats so bad?
Part of the answer comes down to effort and discipline — Republicans devote more time to turning words into weapons and do a better job of sticking to their message, says Lindsey Cormack, a political scientist who focuses on race, gender, communications and politics at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.
“I’ve been studying their communications for 15 years and it sort of blows me away because I think Democrats are good at doing plenty of things, but they really dropped the ball on the communications piece a lot,” Cormack says.
Cormack says conservatives have built a think-tank ecosystem of linguists and focus groups to test words and phrases for political battle. Democrats do some of the same, but with not the same level of commitment, she says.
“They (conservatives) think about what words resonate, what words cue other sorts of thoughts or what sort of images come to mind with people when they’re hearing messages,” Cormack says. “They seem to have more invested in that, and they have more people who write about that sort of work and linguists who do these sorts of things for them.”
How conservatives flipped the script on race
Verbal jiu-jitsu is not new in American politics. Conservatives have long employed it on racial issues. During the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties often used a series of verbal feints that changed the direction of their opponent’s moral arguments.
They didn’t say they opposed integration; they said they were for “state’s rights.”
They didn’t say they didn’t want their children sitting next to Black or brown kids when opposing desegregation of public schools; they said they were against “forced busing.”
They didn’t say they opposed civil rights leaders’ efforts to make the US a genuine multiracial democracy; they called those leaders “communists” or “socialists.”
They flipped the script by offering new words to replace other terms that were hard to attack head-on.
Sometimes they disarmed a liberal phrase by transforming its meaning.
“Social justice warrior,” for example, didn’t start off as an insult. What’s wrong with someone fighting on behalf of the poor and exploited? Then the term was turned by conservatives and internet culture into something else: a “whiny,” self-righteous progressive who can’t take a joke.
Recent years have brought numerous headlines about another liberal term that has been dismantled by the right.
Critical race theory was once an obscure academic discipline that insisted that racism is more than individual prejudice; it’s embedded in laws, policies and institutions. But conservatives redirected the discussion and turned the term into a catchall phrase that criticizes virtually any examination of systemic racism or history that could make White people uncomfortable.
Whatever the method, this form of verbal jiu-jitsu is used for one purpose, says Robin DiAngelo, author of “White Fragility,” a popular book that spawned another popular liberal catchphrase.
“The function is to silence the conversation and to protect the status quo,” DiAngelo says. “It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to work and get race off the table and prevent any challenges to the status quo.”
How ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’ became dirty words
Next on the hit list are two other terms favored by liberals: “diversity” and “equity,” DiAngelo says.
Those words originally meant values that were virtually universally accepted. Not many people would openly argue for exclusion or inequity.
In recent years many institutions have launched initiatives around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) to make their workplaces more fair and diverse.
Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers and Higher Education, recently told a reporter she doesn’t use the acronym DEI anymore because it’s been “weaponized.”
Republicans also have sought to reframe “equity,” which means “being fair or impartial,” by calling the word “a “mandate to discriminate.” And they have attempted to delegitimize “diversity” by expanding the term to “diversity industrial complex,” which a critic described as “a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.”
“I’m going to tell you as somebody who’s been in this work for decades, there’s no diversity industrial complex,” DiAngelo says. “When an organization has a diversity program, there’s often one person up against the entire institution. And they maybe have a staff of one or two people on a minimal budget. But using language like that implies that it’s some kind of getting over on people, like it’s some kind of trick.”
When ‘global warming’ becomes ‘climate change’
Some of the most skillful practitioners of verbal jiu-jitsu are able to disarm their opponents without them knowing that they’ve given ground. As a result, liberals eventually end up using the terms favored by their conservative opponents.
The phrase “global warming” was popularized by the media and some scientists in the 1980s. It’s been virtually eliminated from public discourse by verbal jiu-jitsu. Some of that change is due to science. Some scientists believe climate change is a more accurate description of the environmental challenges facing the planet.
But it was Republicans who initially pushed for the name change, for reasons that had little to do with scientific accuracy. Instead of acknowledging the science pointing toward a looming environmental disaster, one Republican pollster offered another phrase to mute the alarm: climate change.
That term was popularized in part by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who advised GOP politicians in the early 2000s to stop using the term “global warming” because it had “catastrophic connotations” and reframe the issue as the more benign “climate change.” (Luntz has since disavowed his efforts to cast doubt on global warming.)
Two decades later, many liberal politicians and activists continue to use the phrase “climate change, the cognitive scientist George Lakoff noted.
“The word ‘climate’ sounds nice – like palm trees or something – and the word ‘change’, well, ‘change’ just happens,” Lakoff said in an interview. “It’s not a big deal. Nothing you can do about it. Not humanly caused. So, the term itself is a right-wing position that people on the left just innocently adopted instead of saying, well, this is a climate disaster that’s approaching.”
One famous liberal fought back against verbal jiu-jitsu
“They assume all you have to do is tell people the facts and they will reason to the right conclusion,” he said in another interview. “This is utterly ridiculous. Thought is mainly metaphorical. The frames trump all the facts.”
Take the word liberal, which is defined as someone who is “open-minded,” “tolerant,” someone who believes in “personal freedom” and that society should change “so that money, property and power are shared more fairly.”
By the 1960s conservatives had successfully twisted liberalism’s connotations to what one commentator described as a “bureaucracy-loving, freedom-depriving, taxation-and-entitlement ideology of largesse.”
But one famous Democrat knew better. He gave a master class in defeating attempts to tarnish him with the word “liberal.”
John F. Kennedy met that perception head-on when he ran for president in 1960, in a speech at a New York hotel. Instead of dodging the label, Kennedy proudly embraced it.
“If by a ‘liberal’ they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions,” he said, “someone who cares about the welfare of the people – their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties… if that is what they mean by a ‘liberal,’ then I’m proud to say I’m a liberal.”
Kennedy may have been a profile in linguistic courage, but many left-leaning people in recent decades still chose to call themselves “progressives” in subsequent decades after conservatives continued tarnishing the term.
The term, though, is making a comeback. Kennedy’s lesson endures.
Verbal jousting could help decide the 2024 race
Debates over the meaning of words and phrases may seem trivial given the high-stake political battles ahead. But the 2024 presidential election and former President Trump’s looming court battles won’t just be fought in the voting booth or in the courts – they’ll also be fought on the verbal battlefield.
If that sounds like hyperbole, consider some momentous recent political battles around the meaning of words and phrases.
Was what happened at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, an “insurrection”? Or was it what some GOP leaders have called “legitimate political discourse”?
Was former President Trump exercising “free speech” when he questioned the 2020 presidential election results? Or did he attempt to “defraud” the US?
And will words like “diversity” and “inclusion” be turned into another version of “woke” – terms so tarnished by relentless attacks that even their proponents are reluctant to use them?
Some form of verbal jiu-jitsu may determine the answers to those questions. It’s shaped the nation’s history more than many people realize.
RIP John Warnock, who helped invent the PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, dies at age 82
PDF GREATEST INVENTION SINCE THE FAX MACHINE
Mon, August 21, 2023
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — John Warnock, who helped invent the PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, has died. He was 82.
The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and computer scientist died Saturday surrounded by family, Adobe said in a statement. The company didn't give a cause of death or say where Warnock died.
“John’s brilliance and innovations left an indelible mark on Adobe, the technology industry and the world,” Adobe said.
Warnock worked for Xerox before he and colleague Charles Geschke created a company around a rejected idea in 1982. Nearly a decade later, Warnock outlined an early version of the Portable Document Format, or PDF, transforming the way documents are exchanged.
Originally from the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay, Warnock described himself as an average student who later flourished in mathematics.
He earned an undergraduate in math and doctorate in electrical engineering, or computer science, from the University of Utah and maintained close ties with his home state after he retired as CEO of Adobe.
Warnock was the son of a prominent local attorney but was an average student until a teacher at Olympus High School took an interest in him, he told the University of Utah’s alumni magazine, Continuum, in 2013.
“I had an amazing teacher in high school who, essentially, completely turned me around,” Warnock said. “He was really good at getting you to love mathematics, and that’s when I got into it.”
He continued to be a self-described “mediocre” student as he earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy, but he made a mark while working on his master’s degree.
In 1964, he solved the Jacobson radical, an abstract algebra problem that had been a mystery since it was posed eight years before. The following year he met his wife, Marva Mullins, and married her five weeks later.
After a summer spent working at a tire shop, he decided the low-paying field of academia wasn’t for him and applied to work at IBM, starting his training in computer science. He earned a doctorate at the University of Utah, where he joined a group of cutting-edge researchers working on a Department of Defense-funded precursor to the internet in the 1960s. Even then, Warnock was working on rendering images on computers. In the late 1970s, Warnock moved to Palo Alto, California, to work for Xerox on interactive computer graphics. There, he met Geschke and went to work developing InterPress, a printing and graphics protocol that they were convinced would be the wave of the future. When Xerox balked, they decided to create their own company.
They founded Adobe in 1982 and created PostScript, a program that helped make small-scale printing feasible for the first time. The company later created the PDF, which let people create electronic versions of documents that could be preserved and sent it to other users, who could search and review them.
With that, Adobe took off, and PDF eventually replaced many paper copies in legal, business and personal communication.
Other iconic programs, such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, followed before Warnock stepped down as CEO in 2000. He and Geschke remained as co-chairs of the company’s board of directors until 2017, and Warnock remained a board member until his death.
“John has been widely acknowledged as one of the greatest inventors in our generation with significant impact on how we communicate in words, images and videos,” Adobe chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen said in an email to company employees.
After his retirement, Warnock and his wife devoted more time to hobbies such as collecting rare books, many of which he’s scanned and put online at rarebookroom.org. They also collected Native American art, including moccasins, shirts, and beadwork that has toured the country in exhibitions.
Warnock is survived by his wife and their three children.
Lindsay Whitehurst, The Associated Press
Manager with Colorado cannabis business is tapped to lead New Mexico's team of marijuana regulators
Mon, August 21, 2023 at 5:42 p.m. MDT·1 min read
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — A manager with one of Colorado’s largest cannabis companies will serve as the next director of New Mexico’s Cannabis Control Division.
New Mexico announced the hiring of Todd Stevens on Monday, saying he has years of experience working in Colorado’s marijuana industry. He most recently served as the manager of training and development at Native Roots Cannabis Co.
Stevens’ appointment follows a year of turnover at the division and comes as regulators try to ramp up enforcement against non-compliant businesses. Most recently, a state district judge granted the division’s request to halt operations at an Albuquerque business that regulators claimed was unlawfully selling out-of-state cannabis products and manufacturing extracts without a proper license or permit.
Stevens said in a statement that he wanted to help the industry become an economic driver while protecting consumer safety.
“In the past year, New Mexico has established a thriving new industry, licensed more than 2,000 cannabis businesses, and held those businesses to the high standard that comes with an adult-use cannabis market,” he said.
During his time in Colorado, Stevens was part of the design and development of training and recertification for more than 200 retail employees and oversaw operations at five dispensaries.
The Associated Press
I was a USPS letter carrier for 44 years. To protect us from extreme heat, the postal service needs to provide more training and air-conditioned trucks.
Story by khawkinson@insider.com (Katie Hawkinson ) •23h Mike Kurz retired this summer after 44 years as a USPS letter carrier.
This as-told-to essay is based on a series of conversations with Mike Kurz, a 65-year-old recently-retired USPS city letter carrier from Elizabeth City, North Carolina about heat-related safety for USPS employees. It's been edited for length and clarity.
When I had to undergo treatment for sepsis in May and take a break from work, I wasn't planning on retiring from my job as a letter carrier for the US Postal Service. In fact, I planned on staying on for another two or three years.
But I'm glad I did because ever since the beginning of July, temperatures have been in the upper nineties. And in the past couple of years, there's been a handful of letter carriers who have died from heat-related illness.
I worked as a letter carrier for 44 years. Throughout my career, I experienced varying degrees of heat-related illness more times than I can count. I can't stress enough how bad it gets in the heat. I learned the signs of heat-related illness, and it saved me
Throughout my career, I suffered heat-related illness often, with at least one incident every few years.
My most recent incident of heat-related illness happened over two summers ago, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was delivering mail and had to pull over to go into an air-conditioned church because I was dizzy and nauseous, which are two symptoms associated with heat illness. Plus, it was a day with high heat and humidity — and I had no air conditioning in my truck.
I always worried during the pandemic. People were secluded in their houses so if I fainted in my truck or while I was walking outside because of the heat, nobody would be out there to actually see it happen.
Thankfully, that never happened, and I didn't have to go to the hospital that day because I was able to tell the signs before they escalated. I took off the rest of the day and went home.
But some letter carriers don't have the same experience I do to recognize the signs.
Kurz says the USPS should implement further training to keep letter carriers safe in the heat.
The USPS must improve their heat safety training and give us air-conditioned trucks
While the USPS has the Heat Illness Prevention Program, we need further education. In order to protect letter carriers from heat-related illness and death, the postal service should improve the quality of their heat-safety training and invite experienced letter carriers like me to lead them.
As the president of my local union branch, I've given several talks on heat safety to employees. Having someone like me come in and talk to them — who has on-the-ground experience — rather than reading from a script that comes from national headquarters, would help improve education. Someone like me could elaborate a lot more thanks to on-the-ground experience.
Some national employees were former letter carriers, but people like the current postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, were not. We get blurbs from the national office, but they're not long enough. And since we've had DeJoy as the postmaster, they haven't explained a lot.
We also need air-conditioned trucks. Many of our trucks have been in use since 1989 and do not come with air conditioning. I've been saying for 25 years we need air conditioning.
The USPS has gotten wise to it and is now building new ones with air conditioning. Several of them are supposed to be electric vehicles or hybrids, too. This will help because letter carriers won't be dealing with heat from the engine either. Letter carriers have to remember their health is more important than the mail
I also tell my fellow letter carriers to use wet towels on their heads and neck to keep cool. I recommend materials like terry, which works best for cooling. I also often brought several bottles of water with me on shift.
In the last 15 years, I've had two employees at my union branch go to the hospital for heat-related illness because they worried more about delivering mail.
If it's between your health and the mail, you should always prioritize your health.
Zoom's scrapped proposal to mine user data causes concern about our virtual and private Indigenous Knowledge
Story by Andrew Wiebe, PhD Student, Information, University of Toronto Platforms like Zoom have been helpful in bridging geographical distances. However, a recent proposal to mine data raises questions about ownership of Indigenous Knowledge.
Even though Zoom pedalled back this time, their drive to gather data highlights the possibility of future hidden data extraction by them and other big tech companies.
More specifically, as a researcher working with and looking at Indigenous communities and their data, I am concerned about the privacy of these valuable data sets from Indigenous communities on Turtle Island.
Vulnerable Indigenous Knowledge
Over the past three years, Zoom calls have become a tool for organization and activism for many Indigenous communities.
For my own work, I use video and voice chat which lets us balance geographical differences to collaborate and share, as well as access communities that are hard to reach. Discussing issues with queer community members of different Indigenous Nations is often private and perhaps even sacred.
These conversations have elements that are public facing, but they also contain wisdom from Elders or Knowledge Keepers specifically trained to know what they can and cannot share in specific spaces. Some of this knowledge is sacred and is part of promoting and preserving Indigenous (and sometimes queer) ways of being.
A valuable commodity
This private information is constantly at risk of extraction from companies seeking to monetize or otherwise gain from our data.
Indigenous Knowledge represents a large gap in current big data. AI only works with large data sets which enables predictive technology to operate.
With knowledges that are primarily oral, it is difficult to gather proper data sets that often come from writing. The possibility for big companies to gather audio and visual data, could render this oral information visible by machines. Protecting communities
“Refusing research” has been an important concept for protecting marginalized communities from the extractive practices of researchers aiming to obtain data.
Related video: M&A is a strong possibility for Zoom, it needs to acquire new technologies, says CFRA's Keith Snyder (CNBC)
However, if platforms are extracting data without our knowledge, or demand our consent in order to use a service, a conflict emerges.
The conflict becomes one of free choice versus free-to-leave: If we do not consent to use the infrastructure, we simply do not get access to that service. Access to voice and video sharing infrastructure has been a fundamental component of activism and community research, especially post COVID-19.
Can we ‘opt-out?’
Can we accept or refuse to be turned into research data?
Each individual who is opting for nearly any big service is being tracked to some capacity. And so, there needs to be a critical element of what is considered private.
Likewise, Zoom has the ability to gather this data, whether or not they use it for AI with consent. There is an anxiety that next time, the ambiguity will go unnoticed or perhaps force consent to access a seemingly necessary service.
As someone who looks at ethical data collection and mobilization, I believe we all need to be critical of those requests to have access to our private data when using these services.
The relationship between data and Indigenous communities and the Canadian government has always been fraught. However, after the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada (which concluded in 2015), it became even more clear that access to data and information is crucial to achieving justice and truth in relation to our histories.
For Indigenous peoples whose history has been systematically erased, demanding that organizations return records and data has become an important element of achieving the truth behind the experiences of Indian Residential School survivors. Communities have both the desire and need to have their data returned so that they can maintain ownership, control, access and manage permissions to access information.
Ease of Zoom for communication
In-person collaboration between Indigenous communities can be difficult because of things like geographical differences, the lack of public transportation, and interruptions in Indigenous sovereignty. These issues continue the social and political fragmentation caused by settler colonialism to isolate these communities from one another.
Many of these challenges have been alleviated by information technologies like Zoom. And a platform like Zoom has been potentially unifying by bridging space. However, it could also become a tool to recreate the problem of data extraction in a new way.
We need to be attentive to these kinds of data gathering possibilities that offer to extract data from users.
These technological infrastructures may disproportionately harm Indigenous communities by making their private and sacred knowledges legible by AI. Data collection for AI could lead to the commodification of this sacred knowledge for profit.
Protecting this kind of data is not just the responsibility of Indigenous communities but a shared commitment that has a present and future urgency. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
