Thursday, July 3, 2014
Watch This Strongman Pull A Boeing 777
Ladies and gentleman, this is your pilot speaking. We'll be taking off just as soon as the large man drags us to the end of the runway.
Inside Monsanto, America's Third-Most-Hated Company
Inside Monsanto, America's Third-Most-Hated Company
Robb Fraley, Monsanto’s chief technology officer
The 4,400 acres Dustin Spears farms with his father-in-law stretch for 50 miles across northern Illinois in an archipelago of disconnected, mostly rented plots. Even in the best of circumstances, it’s a race to get the corn in the ground in time to take advantage of the full growing season. When spring is unusually cold and rainy, as it was this year, the window narrows even more.
Which is why Spears is in his tractor at two in the morning the first Monday in May, moving at 8 miles per hour through a halogen-lit haze of stirred-up topsoil. On the 60-foot planter behind him, a $47,000 sensor array helps deposit each corn kernel at a depth of 2 inches, no matter how hard or soft the soil. A computer in the cab calculates the fertility of different parts of the field and adjusts the planter accordingly. The seeds themselves are a new hybrid with a candy-green coating containing insecticides and fungicides. DNA inserted into the seeds produces a protein that kills pests such as corn borers, earworms, and rootworms. Other spliced-in genes confer immunity to the weed killers Spears uses, greatly simplifying his spraying schedule.
The 32-year-old farmer sits in the bouncing tractor cab, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, a baseball cap, jeans, a Bluetooth headset, and a look of fatigue. The steering wheel is folded up out of the way. When the tractor nears the end of a row, its autopilot beeps cheerfully, and he taps a square on one of the touchscreens to his right. The tractor executes a turn, and he goes back to surfing the Web, watching streaming videos, or checking the latest corn prices. “You see how boring this gets?” Spears asks. “I’ll be listening to music for 12 hours. I’ll refresh my Twitter timeline, like, a hundred thousand times during the day.”
Spears is an early adopter who upgrades his equipment every 12 months (next year’s tractor will have a fridge in the cab, he says) and who just bought a drone to monitor his fields. He can afford to: Corn prices are high, and farmers like him can take home hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Still, he thinks such technologies—the smart planter software and sensor array, the iPad app offering planting and growing advice—are only going to get more common. So does the company that makes many of those tools, as well as the high-tech seeds Spears is planting: Monsanto (MON), one of the most hated corporations in America.
In a Harris Poll this year measuring the “reputation quotient” of major companies, Monsanto ranked third-lowest, above BP (BP) and Bank of America (BAC) and just behind Halliburton (HAL). For much of its history it was a chemical company, producing compounds used in electrical equipment, adhesives, plastics, and paint. Some of those chemicals—DDT, Agent Orange, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—have had long and controversial afterlifes. The company is best known, however, as the face of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
A May protest against Monsanto in Manhattan’s Union Square
On May 24, cities worldwide saw the second annual “March Against Monsanto.” In New York City, a couple thousand protesters gathered in Union Square, next to a farmers’ market, to hear speakers charge that the company was fighting efforts in states all over the country to mandate the labeling of GM foods; that organic crops were being polluted by GM pollen blown in on the wind, only for Monsanto to sue the organic farmers for intellectual-property theft; that Monsanto had developed a “Terminator” gene that made crops sterile. Some of the protesters were dressed as bees—studies have found a connection between the colony collapse die-off of honeybees and a common class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. (Monsanto does not make neonicotinoids, but it does incorporate them into some of its seed treatments.)
The company’s name has become shorthand for corporate villainy, like Standard Oil a century ago or the private military contractor Blackwater. A rumor persists that Blackwater, whose own reputation problems have led it to change its name multiple times, has merged with Monsanto. At the New York march, one young man held a sign that read, “Why buy Blackwater if your goal is to feed the world?”
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
How To Put On Your Pants With No Hands
We will point out that this might be dangerous given what appear to be a number of bruises on this guy's legs. But hey, "no pain, no gain," right?
Why You Shouldn't Stand Anywhere Near A Demolition Site
Why You Shouldn't Stand Anywhere Near A Demolition Site
There's a reason demolition crews bar the public from being remotely close to demolition sites. This man in the Czech Republic narrowly escaping death by high velocity concrete is why.
This Guy Is Playing 'Fruit Ninja' Without A Smartphone
This Guy Is Playing 'Fruit Ninja' Without A Smartphone
When life gives you lemons, make halves of lemons.
What Happens When You Crack An Egg Underwater?
What Happens When You Crack An Egg Underwater?
This was uploaded to Nokia's channel. We think they're either announcing a waterproof phone soon, or pivoting into the omelette business.
Harrier With Jammed Nose Gear Lands On A Stool
Harrier With Jammed Nose Gear Lands On A Stool
Harriers are some of the toughest planes to handle, but this guy makes it look easy.
Where Do the Smartest People Move?
Where Do the Smartest People Move?
new report finds that higher intelligence is linked with rural-to-city migration, and with city-to-suburb movement.
There are obvious economic reasons why people move some places and not others: Maybe they want a higher-paying job, or maybe a lower rent or mortgage. There might be personality factors involved, too, hence American stereotypes about friendly Midwesterners or irritable Northeasterners. But what role, if any, does basic intelligence play in determining where people choose to live?
That's the question at the heart of a new analysis from psychologist Markus Jokela of the University of Helsinki. In an upcoming issue of the journalIntelligence, Jokela reports that cognitive ability does explain some of America's migration decisions, even after accounting for factors like income. But the findings are hard to boil down into any simple takeaway other than this: Smart people just don't like to stay put.
On one hand, according to Jokela's analysis, central cities draw the smartest people from rural, suburban, and outer-urban areas, especially among younger populations. ("In terms of managing cities, I think all the points about how cities try to attract 'talent'—measured in terms of skills, education, etc.—apply," he tells CityLab.) On the other hand, city centers also lose many of their brightest to these areas at some point in time.
"The most general message is that the selective residential mobility we observe associated with socioeconomic status has its psychological underpinnings in intelligence differences," says Jokela.
Jokela based his analysis on a long-term study of young Americans initiated in 1979 that tracked the same participants over time. From this nationally representative sample, Jokela focused on nearly 11,500 people who had been between ages 15 to 23 at the start of the study and who'd been involved in at least one follow-up survey by 1996. He identified where these people lived at baseline (the four place categories being rural, suburban, urban, and central city) and where they lived at the time of the follow-up. Then, he compared this movement (or lack thereof) to cognitive scores determined by a battery of intelligence tests.
The first clear finding was that people who moved to central cities from less urban areas had higher intelligence scores. People who lived in rural areas at the initial survey and remained there at the follow-up, for instance, scored in the 46th percentile of cognitive ability (charted below, far left line). Those who started in rural areas and moved to the suburbs scored in the 50th percentile. Those who started rural then moved to urban areas reached the 54th percentile. And those who started in rural areas and ended up in city centers hit the 57th percentile—an 11-point gap over those who stayed put.
That trend held relatively true for people who began the survey in suburbia (below, the line second from left) and moved inward. Participants who started out in the suburbs and lived there at follow-up ranked in the 50th percentile, while those who ended up in city centers reached the 57th—a 7-point gap.
Things start to get complicated for people who lived in the city center at baseline (below, the far right line). Those who remained in the city center at follow-up scored in the 52nd percentile; those who migrated to urban areas scored in the 54th; and those who migrated to the suburbs reached the 56th—a 4-point gap. In this case, then, the intelligence-migration trend ran in reverse.
When Jokela controlled for socioeconomic status, some of these patterns disappeared, but others remained intact—just to a lesser degree. There was still a rural-to-city center gap, for instance, but it was down to 4 points from 11 (below, far left). In other words, income explained much of this movement pattern, but intelligence explained some of it, too.
The most interesting finding here (below, far right) is that once income was taken into account, people who moved from the city center to rural areas actually showed a slight jump in cognitive ability over those who stayed.
For good measure, Jokela ran a second analysis that incorporated additional follow-up surveys and found very similar trends.
So how do we explain these relationships? Well, the inward moves make intuitive sense, as smart young people often seek education and higher-paying jobs, both of which tend to be found in cities. The move outward from city to suburb is likely a result of many educated Americans leaving the city for the suburbs to raise a family—especially in the 1980s, at the height of the survey.
As for the intelligence shifts from cities to rural areas, found once socioeconomic status was factored in, Jokela has no good explanation. "I assume this is a very special group of people," he says—perhaps converted city residents returning to their country roots.
The findings should be taken with caution. Jokela's statistical analysis couldn't determine if intelligence actually caused the moves, just that the two were linked. Migration patterns might well have changed after 1996, when Jokela cut off the study window for geographic consistency. Another crucial caveat is that the actual difference in IQs (as opposed to cognitive percentiles) wasn't very large among all groups, typically only a few points (and always five or less).
Which brings up perhaps Jokela's most interesting finding: The very highest IQ levels were found not among people who grew up in city centers but among those who grew up in rural areas and ended up in cities. That suggests longer migration distances into the city "require individuals to have increasingly high IQ to make the move," he says. Call them restless intellects if you will. Just don't call them country bumpkins.
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