The single best way to increase voter turnout?

Abolish the polling place.

A century ago, the direct election of senators sounded audacious, too. But in six states, it’s already true that more than 12 million voters don’t need to traipse to polling places on Election Day or apply for absentee ballots.

The U.S. Postal Service delivers our ballots automatically, several weeks before each election. Voters can mail their marked ballots — sometimes even postage paid — or take them to one of hundreds of official ballot collection sites.

Since most voters choose the latter option, vote-at-home is a more accurate label than vote-by-mail. At many locations, voters can also receive replacement ballots, update their voter registration and get language or other assistance. For those so inclined, some sites still have voting booths.

Oregon rolled out its system in 1998 after voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure. Washington finished its county-by-county approach in 2012, while Colorado’s first vote-at-home election took place in 2014. Voters today also enjoy this system in 27 of Utah’s 29 counties and more than 40 counties in North Dakota, Nebraska and California.

Oregon and Washington weren’t battleground states in 2016. But even so, had every state matched our 80 percent turnout of active registered voters, 15 million more votes would have been cast nationwide.

Vote-at-home shines even brighter in lower-turnout midterm and primary elections. Both Oregon and Colorado exceeded 70 percent turnout in 2014 among registered voters, compared with the national average of 48 percent.

Source: Opinion | Voting at Home Will Help Save Our Democracy

This warrants a bit of skepticism, because neural networks are extremely good at finding spurious signal in random noise, but very cool if true!

Plenty of animals communicate with one another, at least in a general way—wolves howl to each other, birds sing and dance to attract mates and big cats mark their territory with urine. But researchers at Tel Aviv University recently discovered that when at least one species communicates, it gets very specific. Egyptian fruit bats, it turns out, aren’t just making high pitched squeals when they gather together in their roosts. They’re communicating specific problems, reports Bob Yirka at Phys.org.

According to Ramin Skibba at Nature, neuroecologist Yossi Yovel and his colleagues recorded a group of 22 Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, for 75 days. Using a modified machine learning algorithm originally designed for recognizing human voices, they fed 15,000 calls into the software. They then analyzed the corresponding video to see if they could match the calls to certain activities.

They found that the bat noises are not just random, as previously thought, reports Skibba. They were able to classify 60 percent of the calls into four categories. One of the call types indicates the bats are arguing about food. Another indicates a dispute about their positions within the sleeping cluster. A third call is reserved for males making unwanted mating advances and the fourth happens when a bat argues with another bat sitting too close. In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people. Skibba points out that besides humans, only dolphins and a handful of other species are known to address individuals rather than making broad communication sounds. The research appears in the journal Scientific Reports.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-translate-bat-talk-and-they-argue-lot-180961564/

Not better than the arms I was born with — but getting closer 🙂

Manami Ito is not only a talented musician, but also a Paralympian swimmer and the first nurse in Japan to have a prosthetic arm. She represented Japan at the 2008 and 2012 Paralympics, receiving 4th and 8th place in 100m breaststroke, and currently travels the country with her violin performances. The above video was taken on September 2, 2018, when she performed Thread by Miyuki Nakajima at the Takarazuka City General Welfare Center in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan.

Source: Manami Ito Performs a Violin Solo With a Customized Prosthetic Bow Arm | Colossal

Imagine going on a first date with someone whose perfume drives you wild. But when you lean in for that first kiss, you realize your suitor is actually nothing more than a writhing mass of parasitic blister beetle larvae.

This is the plight of the burrowing bee.

You see, sometimes when a male bee is buzzing along the sand dunes, he smells what appears to be a female’s pheromones. Mating is highly competitive in these species, so it pays for the male to buzz in and have a look.

Unfortunately for him, blister beetle larvae have evolved the ability to create chemicals that make them smell like a female burrowing bee. The critters even boost the profile of their scent by crawling up a strand of grass and forming a bee-sized ball of baby beetles. These larvae are known as triungulins, for their feet, which have three claws that resemble grappling hooks.

When the male bee attempts to mate with this decoy, the triungulins latch onto him with their hook-like claws and tackle him to the dunes below. Eventually, when the male flies off in search of a real female, he does so with a horde of hitchhikers attached to his fuzzy body. The larvae then latch onto the female and ride her to a burrow.

There, she lays a single egg and deposits a ton of pollen and nectar. But those nutrients may not make it to the baby bee, because the triungulins gobble them up first before transforming into adults.

Source: Sex, Lies, and Grappling Hooks: Meet the Parasitic Blister Beetle

Dancing office chairs 🙂

I’d really like to see a video of it interacting with visitors, but haven’t found one as yet.

Source: Gagosian on Instagram: “#UrsFischerPLAY: Conceived by Urs Fischer with choreography by Madeline Hollander, “PLAY” is now open to the public! You have until October…”

Also more info at: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-urs-fischer-9-office-chairs-dancing-gagosian-join

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a “conflict between science and religion.” Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.

Will Durant, The Story Of Civilization, 1935

Caveat: I haven’t read the book, and know little about Durant; I just ran across the quote and found it interesting to consider from the vantage point of 2018.

Oh, this is absolutely terrific! I’m thrilled. Go EU!

Research funders from France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlandsand eight other European nations have unveiled a radical open-access initiative that could change the face of science publishing in two years — and which has instantly provoked protest from publishers.

The 11 agencies, who together spend €7.6 billion (US$8.8 billion) in research grants annually, say they will mandate that, from 2020, the scientists they fund must make resulting papers free to read immediately on publication (see ‘Plan S players’). The papers would have a liberal publishing licence that would allow anyone else to download, translate or otherwise reuse the work. “No science should be locked behind paywalls!” says a preamble document that accompanies the pledge, called Plan S, released on 4 September.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7

Found in our garden this morning:

This post happens to be talking about education, but I’m interested more broadly in this view of the tensions inherent to liberal democracy:

Here’s something we don’t talk about nearly enough: schools are simply not in the learning-maximization business. It turns out that parents, taxpayers and politicians call on schools to perform many jobs. At times, there are trade-offs between the educational goals schools are asked to pursue, and educators are forced to make tough choices.

Historian David Labaree has one way of thinking about these conflicting educational goals, which he expands on at length in Someone Has to Fail. For Labaree, there are three competing educational goals that are responsible for creating system-wide tensions:

• democratic equality (“education as a mechanism for producing capable citizens”)
• social efficiency (“education as a mechanism for developing productive workers”)
• social mobility (“education as a way for individuals to reinforce or improve their social position”)

As Labaree tells it, these goals end up in tension all the time. A lot of things that seem like gross ineptitude or organizational dysfunction are really the result of the mutual exclusivity of these goals:

‘These educational goals represent the contradictions embedded in any liberal democracy, contradictions that cannot be resolved without removing either the society’s liberalism or its democracy … We ask it to promote social equality, but we want it to do so in a way that doesn’t threaten individual liberty or private interests. We ask it to promote individual opportunity, but we want it to do so in a way that doesn’t threaten the integrity of the nation or the inefficiency of the economy. As a result, the educational system is an abject failure in achieving any one of its primary social goals … The apparent dysfunctional outcomes of the school system, therefore, are not necessarily the result of bad planning, bad administration, or bad teaching; they are an expression of the contradictions in the liberal democratic mind.’

http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/04/acc-entry-does-the-education-system-adequately-serve-advanced-students/

Economic analysis in a technologically-advanced future society, as imagined from 1942, by Robert Heinlein: