Decrypting an iPhone for the FBI →

Earlier this week, a federal magistrate ordered Apple to assist the FBI in hacking into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple will fight this order in court.
The policy implications are complicated. The FBI wants to set a precedent that tech companies will assist law enforcement in breaking their users' security, and the technology community is afraid that the precedent will limit what sorts of security features it can offer customers. The FBI sees this as a privacy vs. security debate, while the tech community sees it as a security vs. surveillance debate.
...
The FBI's demands are specific to one phone, which might make its request seem reasonable if you don't consider the technological implications: Authorities have the phone in their lawful possession, and they only need help seeing what's on it in case it can tell them something about how the San Bernardino shooters operated. But the hacked software the court and the FBI wants Apple to provide would be general. It would work on any phone of the same model. It has to.
Make no mistake; this is what a backdoor looks like. This is an existing vulnerability in iPhone security that could be exploited by anyone.
...
What the FBI wants to do would make us less secure, even though it's in the name of keeping us safe from harm. Powerful governments, democratic and totalitarian alike, want access to user data for both law enforcement and social control. We cannot build a backdoor that only works for a particular type of government, or only in the presence of a particular court order.
Either everyone gets security or no one does. Either everyone gets access or no one does...

U.S. Obesity Rate Climbs to Record High in 2015 →

The obesity rate among U.S. adults in 2015 climbed to a new high of 28.0%, up 2.5 percentage points since 2008. This represents an increase of about 6.1 million U.S. adults who are obese.
...
The obesity rate has continued to rise in the U.S. after leveling off from 2011 to 2013, and has done so despite rising public concern. Past research has demonstrated that obesity and its associated chronic conditions including diabetes cost the U.S. economy $153 billion per year in unplanned absenteeism due to poor health, a figure that has increased since the time of that study. And while blacks suffer disproportionately from chronic conditions associated with obesity, the sharp increase in obesity measured among whites since 2008 signifies that this is not a problem isolated to one racial or ethnic group.
Obesity affects all elements of well-being, not just physical wellness...

Report on Syria conflict finds 11.5% of population killed or injured →

Syria’s national wealth, infrastructure and institutions have been “almost obliterated” by the “catastrophic impact” of nearly five years of conflict, a new report has found. Fatalities caused by war, directly and indirectly, amount to 470,000, according to the Syrian Centre for Policy Research (SCPR) – a far higher total than the figure of 250,000 used by the United Nations until it stopped collecting statistics 18 months ago.
In all, 11.5% of the country’s population have been killed or injured since the crisis erupted in March 2011, the report estimates. The number of wounded is put at 1.9 million. Life expectancy has dropped from 70 in 2010 to 55.4 in 2015. Overall economic losses are estimated at $255bn (£175bn).

Negative 0.5% Interest Rate: Why People Are Paying to Save →

When you lend somebody money, they usually have to pay you for the privilege.
That has been a bedrock assumption across centuries of financial history. But it is an assumption that is increasingly being tossed aside by some of the world’s central banks and bond markets.
A decade ago, negative interest rates were a theoretical curiosity that economists would discuss almost as a parlor game. Two years ago, it began showing up as an unconventional step that a few small countries considered. Now, it is the stated policy of some of the most powerful global central banks, including the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan.
On Thursday, Sweden’s central bank lowered its bank lending rate to a negative 0.5 percent from a negative 0.35 percent, and said it could cut further still; European bank stocks were hammered partly because investors feared what negative rates could do to bank profits. The Federal Reserve chairwoman, Janet Yellen, acknowledged in congressional testimony Wednesday and Thursday that the American central bank was taking a look at the strategy, though she emphasized no such move was envisioned.

School Choice Fails to Make a Difference →

And we don't exactly know why yet, though we have a few ideas:

This is the kind of news that school-choice advocates and skeptics alike need to pay attention to: The Economist magazine reports that a team of academic economists found that students who won a lottery in Louisiana to receive vouchers to go to the public or private school of their choice did worse than students who didn't win the lottery.
This outcome flies in the face of the predictions of many economists, who often tout school choice as a way to improve the U.S. educational system while also increasing equality of opportunity. Economists typically assume that people are rational and well-informed, and will make decisions that benefit them. If giving students and their parents more school choice hurts the students academically, then something is seriously wrong with the theory.
The Louisiana finding is just a more extreme version of a fairly typical finding. School-voucher programs rarely actually hurt students, but most produce little if any positive effect...
...
But a third possibility is that parents, even when given the chance, simply don’t choose schools that raise their children’s test scores. Parents might be incapable of discerning which schools provide a better education. Or they might simply care about factors other than academic quality. Although evidence shows that parents do care about a school’s overall level of academic performance, that doesn’t necessarily mean that parents care about a school’s ability to boostperformance. They might simply want their children to be around a bunch of smart high-achievers -- but this might not actually help their own kids achieve more.
This highlights a big and fundamental problem with the idea of school vouchers. Parents might decide that they prefer schools that let their kid get away with doing little real work. Grade inflation and other perks might become rife, lowering schools’ real educational power while the government foots the bill. This unpleasant possibility is perfectly consistent with the rational-choice theories preferred by most economists. What parents and students want from schools may simply be different from what we want them to get.

What Should We Say About David Bowie and Lori Maddox? →

Word choice is hard here. Should we say “raped” automatically if a grown man has sex with a teenager? Does it matter at all if the 15-year-old, now much older, describes their encounter as one of the best nights of her life? What is our word for a “yes” given on a plane that’s almost vertically unequal? Does contemporary morality dictate that we trust a young woman when she says she consented freely, or believe that she couldn’t have, no matter what she says?

The best article I've read on resolving the moral tensions between the present and the (rather recent) past on sexual norms, language, and law. Relevant to other debates, too: flying the Confederate flag, keeping monuments to morally-compromised and long-dead national leaders... Knowledge and ethics have increased so much in such a short time; it's easy to see predecessors as monsters. And really, aren't we all. With any luck, in 100 years, we'll be the barbarians.

The remarkably different answers men and women give when asked who’s the smartest in the class →

The surveys asked each student to “nominate” their most knowledgeable classmates at three points during the school year. Who best knew the subject? Who were the high achievers?
To illustrate the resulting peer-perception gap, researchers compared the importance student grades had on winning a nomination to the weight of the gender bias. The typical student received 1.2 nominations, with men averaging 1.3 and women averaging 1.1.
Female students gave other female students a recognition “boost” equivalent to a GPA bump of 0.04 — too tiny to indicate any gender preference, Grunspan said. Male students, however, awarded fellow male students a recognition boost equivalent to a GPA increase of 0.76.
"On this scale," the report asserted, "the male nominators’ gender bias is 19 times the size of the female nominators’."

How the Southern Strategy Made Donald Trump Possible →

But there is another way of looking at Trump: Far from being a “cancer” on Republicanism, or some jihadi-style radicalizer, he’s the natural evolutionary product of Republican platforms and strategies that stretch back to the very origins of modern conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s.