MITPressLog

Personal and Political Paralysis

Kari Norgaard, author of Living in Denial, on the gaps between information, concern, and social response to climate change.

Earth Day is one of the largest and most successful social movements in U.S. history—yet, unlike other powerful social movements of our time, our success must be measured not only by the standard of cultural and political change, but the yardstick of our ecological impact.

 For over 20 years, atmospheric scientists have provided increasingly dire assessments of alteration in the biophysical world around which human social systems are organized. Yet, worldwide, we see remarkably little public response.

The category of climate change did not even make it onto the Pew Research Center’s annual list of national domestic priorities for the U.S. government until 2007—24 years after the first front-page story on climate change ran in the New York Times! And the economic, ecological, security, and justice implications of increased drought, wildfire, and storm activity from climate change did not merit attention as a presidential campaign issue until 2008.

We are told we need to cut emissions by 80 percent by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. But nobody, not movement activists, political leaders, nor social scientists, is offering an actual roadmap of how to get there.

These gaps between information, concern, and social response have been the subject of much scientific study. Why do some social and environmental problems result in people’s rising up when others do not? And given that many people do know the grim facts of climate change, how do they manage to produce an everyday reality in which this urgent social and ecological problem is invisible?

Climate change poses the greatest material and symbolic threat that our society has encountered to date, and fear, guilt and helplessness are common reactions to this threat. We need to pay attention to the role of these troubling emotions on individual cognition, as well as the way that people collectively normalize disturbing information through social interaction.

And although Earth Day serves as a good reminder, we need to measure our ecological impact on more than just one day a year.

 

A Year After the BP Oil Spill, Uncertainty Reigns

Bob Gramling, author of Blowout in the Gulf, brings us up to speed on what has changed in the Gulf of Mexico in the year following the BP oil spill.

What has changed in the Gulf a year after the blowout of BP’s Macondo well is that the uncertainty along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast has continued to rise. 

Uncertainty about the ultimate, cumulative environmental effects is one that is seen a lot. The news has shown that an unprecedented number of baby dolphins have washed up on shore and there is much speculation, from various predictable camps, as to whether this phenomenon is due to BP oil or a cold winter. And if most of the oil is gone, as headlines told us, why do we still have thousands employed in "cleanup” activities?

Uncertainty about the future of traditional coastal occupations and businesses is everywhere. A fifth-generation shrimper in coastal Louisiana speculates as to whether he will be able to support his family this year, and whether the shrimp he may catch will be safe to eat. The owner of a motel in Orange Beach, Alabama wonders if tourist will show up this summer.

Uncertainty about promised compensation is found across the Gulf and in all walks of life. Ken Feinberg, a lawyer who is working for BP, is in charge of this process. He seems to spend most of his time trying to convince various groups—motel and restaurant owners, fishermen, souvenir sellers, local officials and almost anyone who lives in a coastal economy—that he really has their interests (as opposed to that of his employer) at heart, but few settlements are finalized. Oh, and by the way, he needs to double the amount his law firm is being compensated for his services. The rule is that if you can’t document it, then you didn’t lose it. Most of the commercial fisheries have long worked on a cash basis, so that’s gone. Ditto for tips for waitresses and bartenders. And various public agencies that appear to have received cash from BP with few questions asked seem to find increasingly stupid ways to spend it.

Uncertainty over whether the “new” regulatory regime will work and whether the offshore oil industry will get back to business as usual are both topics of conversation and speculation in the press. We changed the name of Minerals Management Service to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE—how do you pronounce that acronym? Maybe that’s the point), but it’s the same people with the same budget to do offshore inspections. Many down here in this economy so tied to offshore activity (there are over 3,500 rigs in the federal waters of the Gulf, most off Louisiana) argue that the moratorium has hurt them worse than the spill. Their supporters are frequently in print.

Finally, slowly, uncertainty about health is starting to appear. People who live by the beach, worked in the “cleanup,” fishermen who leased their boats to BP and futilely operated them as “vessels of opportunity” by putting out booms because the fishing season was closed last year, are finally starting to go to their doctors. Many are experiencing difficulty in breathing, weakness, memory loss, vision loss, and chronic headaches—and the results from the few that have been tested show up with various carcinogens associated with crude oil, such as benzene, in their blood at levels ten, twenty, and thirty times that found in the general population.

Uncertainty gnaws at people. It drags them down and there is so much of it a year after the BP oil spill.

Space Roundup

Today marks the 50th anniversary of manned spaceflight. If clicking around Google's suggested links didn’t satisfy your appetite for space knowledge, we’ve got you covered with three (count ‘em, three!) books that examine space from three very different angles.

 

Bettyann Holzmann Kevles’ Almost Heaven tells the story of how women like Kalpana Chawla and Lauren Clark—both on the last flight of the Columbia—met two challenges: the risk of space travel and the struggle to succeed in a man's world.

 

 

In Digital Apollo, David Mindell draws on transcripts and data telemetry, astronaut interviews, and NASA’s extensive archives to examine the design and execution of each of the six Apollo moon landings and the relationship between humans and computers in the Apollo program.

 

In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux recounts how Playtex seamstresses—whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles—triumphed over military contractors to design the iconic twenty-one layer uniform that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin debuted on their 1969 moonwalk.

 

For more space-related fun, check out Science Friday’s Spacesuit Ballet.

 

Martha Farah Discusses Neurolaw

Martha Farah, editor of Neuroethics, recently talked about neurolaw and what it means for neuroscientific research with Stavroula Kousta, editor of Trends in Cognitive Science. 

Here's the podcast!

 

 

April Hacks

The MIT hackers are at it again! This beach scene mysteriously appeared on a wall in front of MIT’s old media lab building this week, and reminds us an awful lot of the upside-down “high-class lounge” hack that’s featured on Nightwork’s cover.

For more about clever MIT hacks, stop by the MIT Museum tonight (free admission!) from 6 to 7:30 p.m. for a celebration of the newest edition of Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT’s release. The event will feature talks from various MIT alumni, hack-parts on display, and an open mic session with the “hackers” themselves.

 

And it's root, root, root for the vector!

With snow on the ground and icy rain falling outside, it can mean only one thing: Opening Day for the Boston Red Sox, the unofficial MLB team of the MIT Press. Before you ask: No, we don't rigorously police the baseball preferences of our employees - we even have Yankee fans on our staff. Or, we had one, at one point...he left a while ago. And my boss is - get this - a Mets fan. But I digress.

As of this writing, first pitch is just an hour or so away - in Texas, thankfully. So we thought we'd bring you some news that has absolutely nothing to do with the Press but does relate to our beloved home institution. Dimitris Bertsimas, an operations research professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, recently published a paper called "The Analytics Edge in Baseball." He and a doctoral student crunched the numbers and predicted that the Sox would win - drumroll please - 101 games.

"A player is a vector of numbers and from that, we can forecast overall team statistics," writes Bertsimas,who had the honesty to admit to being a Red Sox fan.

In fact, Bertsimas and his coauthor, Allison O'Hair, ran the numbers for the entire American League East division, predicting that the Tampa Bay Rays would be close on with 100 wins and the Yankees a mere 93 (please, let it be so).

In case you think that all this number crunching is bunk, consider that last year he picked Boston to win 90 games - final total was 89.

So with regression analysis and invariate parametric correlation in mind...play ball!

 

PS - Okay, just one bit of MITP-related info. If you want to know the origins of all this nerdy statistical-analysis-of-baseball stuff, you could check out its founding text: Percentage Baseball by Earnshaw Cook, proudly published by us in 1966 - the year in which the Orioles won the World Series in four straight and the Red Sox won a mere 72 games. Take heart, the Yankees won only 70 and came in last. But again, I digress.

Foolproof Humor Recipe?

In early 2010, Hurley, Dennett, and Adams put the finishing touches on their evolutionary/neurocomputational model of humor and wondered if, just possibly, they had cracked the mystery that had baffled intrepid analysts and researchers for several millennia: it seemed they might have not only uncovered the neural mechanisms of humor but in the process devised a foolproof recipe for generating humorous stimuli of all varieties, from slapstick to witty retorts, from dirty jokes to high comedy. Set the dial and turn the crank and out comes Oscar Wilde, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, P.G. Wodehouse; nudge the dial and turn the crank again and out comes Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, Dave Barry, Gary Larson… Reductionistic science has triumphed again, and humor, as we know it, will soon be dead.

OK…we lied about the humor recipe. Not only does the theory in this book not uncover such a recipe, it shows why it is extremely unlikely that anybody—or any bank of computers—will ever find one.

From the preface of Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams, Jr.’s new book, Inside Jokes. Happy April Fools’ Day!