MB Civic

The following are all from annual The New York Times Sunday Magazine issue on “Ideas.” They are all short, interesting reads. Civic “Category” of each is in brackets after the title.

Peace.

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Energy-Harvesting Floors [Environment]
By CLAY RISEN
The average human being generates about eight watts of energy with each step, most of which is expended as vibration. It may not sound like much, but take the 30,000 or more people who pass through a major-city subway hub at rush hour, and suddenly you’ve got serious power. That’s usually a problem for architects and engineers, who have to design structures to withstand such small but persistent pressure. But the Facility, a London architecture firm, sees it as an opportunity. The company proposes putting small hydraulic generators in floors to capture vibration and convert it into electricity.

The Facility will roll out a prototype energy-harvesting staircase next year and ultimately use the technology, dubbed the Pacesetter, as part of a larger project to revamp London’s South Central subway stations. “For each footstep we can harvest three to five watts of energy,” says Claire Price, the director of the Facility. “In a rush-hour period in this country, some of the larger stations experience 34,000 people walking through it. At three to five watts, you’re generating a lot of kilowatt hours, enough to power all of the lighting and audio equipment within the building and beyond.” Price and her company are also developing a similar unit to be placed in train tunnels — essentially, as Price describes it, “a microgenerator that resonates in tune with passing trains and that will generate power that will then power a series of wire-free L.E.D. light units, such as street lamps.”

The Pacesetter is part of a growing body of devices that capture the diffuse energy emanating from human and natural activity, ranging from enormous ocean-borne floats that make use of wave energy to the devices in some tennis rackets that draw power from the impact with a ball and use it to counteract vibration, thus reducing strain on a player’s wrist. Someday, the Facility team speculates, systems like the Pacesetter will be everywhere — not just in the floor but anywhere small amounts of vibration or other ambient energy can be harvested efficiently: under roadbeds, at gyms, even inside fabric. “It goes on and on,” Price says. “The possibilities are endless.”

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Jujitsu Advertising [Media]
By KATE BOLICK
For one brief, shining moment it seemed that TiVo, the ubiquitous digital-video-recording device, would kill the television commercial. Viewers, the thinking went, would mercilessly fast-forward through midshow interruptions, slowly driving them into extinction, until the networks blended into a glorious HBO-like paradise of seamless ad-free content.

Then the commercial stood up and, jujitsulike, fought back by turning TiVo against itself.

In February, Kentucky Fried Chicken showed on prime-time and cable networks an unusual television commercial. To the naked eye, it didn’t look terribly radical: a few firefighters sitting around the station cracking wise about dinner. But if you’d received one of KFC’s viral e-mail messages or read any of the 21 newspaper articles that ran the first day of the promotion, you knew the spot contained a hidden message. To access it, you could use your TiVo or any other DVR device to scroll through the ad frame by frame, eventually finding the one bearing the secret code that, when entered into KFC’s Web site, earned you a coupon for a free Buffalo Snacker — the crispy chicken sandwich that inspired the whole game.

A lot of bother, perhaps, if you’re a busy person without much time. But KFC had someone else in mind: 18-to-34-year-old males with tight budgets and a marked devotion to electronics. “In the tech-savvy world of fast communication and blogging, word spread quickly,” says Tom O’Keefe, chief creative officer at the ad agency DraftFCB in Chicago, who made the spot. “It was the cool club to be in.”

It didn’t hurt that the campaign carried the whiff of controversy. Subliminal programming on broadcast TV has been opposed by the F.C.C. since 1974, so it’s not surprising that KFC’s own “hidden message” seemed vaguely illegal — and, presumably, all the more enticing among the fast-food chain’s chosen audience. Within a week of the ad’s initial broadcast, KFC.com received nearly 3 million page views, and more than 100,000 people signed on to win the free treat. As of this writing, 300 million Snackers have been sold.

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The Myth of ‘the Southern Strategy’ [Politics]
By CLAY RISEN
Everyone knows that race has long played a decisive role in Southern electoral politics. From the end of Reconstruction until the beginning of the civil rights era, the story goes, the national Democratic Party made room for segregationist members — and as a result dominated the South. But in the 50s and 60s, Democrats embraced the civil rights movement, costing them the white Southern vote. Meanwhile, the Republican Party successfully wooed disaffected white racists with a “Southern strategy” that championed “states’ rights.”

It’s an easy story to believe, but this year two political scientists called it into question. In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth. In the postwar era, they note, the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. (This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)

The two scholars support their claim with an extensive survey of election returns and voter surveys. To give just one example: in the 50s, among Southerners in the low-income tercile, 43 percent voted for Republican Presidential candidates, while in the high-income tercile, 53 percent voted Republican; by the 80s, those figures were 51 percent and 77 percent, respectively. Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves but poorer ones didn’t.

To be sure, Shafer says, many whites in the South aggressively opposed liberal Democrats on race issues. “But when folks went to the polling booths,” he says, “they didn’t shoot off their own toes. They voted by their economic preferences, not racial preferences.” Shafer says these results should give liberals hope. “If Southern politics is about class and not race,” he says, “then they can get it back.”

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The New Inequality [Economics]
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Economic inequality has now been increasing in the United States for more than 30 years, and for much of that time its causes seemed fairly clear. Computers and other new technologies replaced many blue-collar workers, undercutting the bargaining power of those workers. Global trade was doing the same by allowing companies to make their products elsewhere. Highly educated workers, on the other hand, were able to work more efficiently — and thus make more money — thanks to new technology, and to play on a bigger stage thanks to globalization. This was the story of inequality from the mid-1970s through the late 1990s.

But the story seems to be changing. This year, a new economic statistic that casts doubt on the old consensus began getting some serious attention. Over the last five years, the average pay of college graduates grew at only a little better rate than inflation. For now, most holders of bachelor’s degrees appear to be on the wrong side of the inequality divide, which suggests that the slice of the American work force on the right side of the divide has become extremely narrow. Even families at the 90th percentile of the income distribution (now earning about $110,000 a year) have received only a marginally bigger raise over the last decade than those in the middle of the distribution.

For years, research on inequality generally didn’t go higher than the 95th, or occasionally the 99th, percentile. But two economists in their mid-30s, Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, have made names for themselves by conducting more detailed studies and discovering that at the very highest levels of the income ladder, inequality has indeed continued to accelerate. The top 0.1 percent of earners — that’s one out of every 1,000 families — made 6.8 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2004, up from 4.7 percent a decade earlier and about 2 percent in the ’60s and ’70s.

For Democrats, these trends seem to have given inequality a new political resonance, because they suggest, as liberals long have, that education alone won’t change things. In this year’s Virginia Senate campaign, for example, Jim Webb argued that people at the top had “never had it so good” but that everyone else was struggling. Tax policy and trade policy, not education, topped of his list of solutions.

Still, nobody has yet come up with a wholly persuasive explanation for what has caused the new inequality. Education is still a big part of the overall picture. Beyond education, it’s possible that social mores have changed to make huge salaries for chief executives and other top earners more acceptable. It’s also possible that the new inequality is a natural outgrowth of what Robert Frank, a Cornell professor, has called the “winner-take-all society,” in which globalization and technology have raised the relative value of the very highest paid jobs. Or it’s possible that the rightward drift of government policy over the last generation — deregulation and falling tax rates, for example — has somehow enabled the rich to gain at everyone else’s expense.

Whatever the causes, the work by Saez and Pikkety suggests that there may not be a solution to please everyone. From World War II through the 1970s, while most Americans were getting solid raises every year, the incomes of the richest 1 percent were doing only a little better than inflation. Since the 1980s, the two groups have switched places. The affluent have received huge gains, and everyone else’s pay growth has slowed down. For the last six decades, in other words, the American economy has been much more of a zero-sum game than we might like to believe.

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Redefining Torture [Politics]
By DAHLIA LITHWICK
There were always two narratives offered about the change in American torture policy after 9/11. The first story — told by the Bush administration — was that the Geneva Conventions mandating humane treatment of war prisoners could be unilaterally suspended by the president for the duration of the war on terror. But, this story continued, our prisoners were nevertheless well treated, as required by honor if not by law; only a few renegade bad apples abused detainees.

The alternate version of the story went this way: from the outset of the war, human rights groups said, Bush-administration attorneys devoted considerable energy to secretly redefining torture. Leaked memos revealed that widely agreed-upon definitions of torture had been changed; ambiguous new rules started filtering down through the C.I.A. and the military — with lethal consequences.

The two narratives collided this summer with the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. After striking down the tribunals proposed to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the court went on to rule that the Bush administration was obligated to comply with the “laws of war,” including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions — the provision barring torture, cruel and humiliating treatment or “outrages upon personal dignity.”

The Hamdan decision demolished the argument that the president’s war powers were limitless and beyond review. It also meant that C.I.A. and other administration officials faced possible criminal liability for past and future acts of abuse. So the administration scrambled to both justify the torture and change the law.

The result was a “showdown” in Congress, wherein the president requested the power to redefine the legal standard for torture and the power to determine whether and how the Geneva Conventions apply. The administration also requested the authority to keep the specifics of its “alternative interrogation methods” secret. Even though the president acknowledged that he had sent prisoners to secret “black sites” for interrogation, Congress passed legislation decreasing Congressional and judicial oversight of detainees. When Bush admitted, in short, that the second narrative — America tortures people in secret — was true, Congress effectively made it legal.

The final detainee bill, as passed by Congress in September, immunizes some of those who abused detainees and relaxes restrictions on abuse. It strips the courts of jurisdiction to hear whole classes of cases and denies “alien unlawful combatants” (a classification left to Bush to define) the power to assert Geneva Conventions claims in courts. The bill purports to apply the Geneva Conventions, then defines them away. It purports to prohibit torture, then defines the prohibition away.

In October, Dick Cheney allowed that one of the most controversial torture methods — simulated drowning or “water boarding”— could be called a mere “dunking.” The White House later contended that he’d not been referring to water boarding but to something else. Perhaps. But it’s striking that in the span of 12 months, prisoner abuse had morphed from a secret to the law to a punch line.

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The Return of the Corporate State [Politics/Economics/Foreign Affairs]
By GARY J. BASS
Karl Marx wrote that the state was nothing more than the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. But in Russia, President Vladimir Putin has stood Marx on his head: the state dominates many of the most important businesses, not the other way around. A new hybrid of country and corporation has been created, fusing the public and private sectors together to serve the Kremlin. Andrei Illarionov, who in December 2005 resigned as an economic adviser to Putin, calls it “a corporate state.”

This goes way beyond mere cronyism. Dmitri Medvedev is both a deputy prime minister and the chairman of the gigantic state gas monopoly Gazprom, which controls one-fifth of the world’s natural gas reserves. Igor Sechin, Putin’s deputy chief of staff, was appointed chairman of the sprawling state-owned oil company Rosneft. The Kremlin has also tightened its control over other industries. In February, Putin consolidated Russia’s aircraft makers into one state-owned corporation. Last month, the secretive state arms trader Rosoboronexport grabbed a controlling stake in VSMPO-Avisma, the world’s largest maker of titanium, with Rosoboronexport’s director, Sergei Chemezov, becoming the company’s chairman. As Illarionov put it, “There is no free economic space remaining anywhere in Russia.”

The corporate state is more than a way for Putin apparatchiks to get rich — although it’s certainly that too. According to Keith Darden, a Russia expert at Yale, it’s in large part a solution to an enduring political headache for authoritarian rulers: how can you maintain enough of a market economy to generate wealth without allowing the creation of independent businesses that could grow powerful enough to challenge your government’s authority? First, Putin cracked down on oligarchs who dared cross him. Now the Kremlin seems to be consolidating control over the remaining potential bases of opposition. And the corporate state shows no signs of withering away: Medvedev, the Kremlin’s man at Gazprom, may well be Putin’s pick to be Russia’s next president.

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Sailing an Oil Tanker [Environment/Economics]
By TIMOTHY LESLE
While you might fume about rising gas prices while filling up your car, you can always take the bus and save a few dollars. Not so if you’re in an industry tasked with, say, shipping cars or oil from one hemisphere to another. That’s one reason 2006 has been a good year for the California-based company KiteShip, which makes “very large free-flying sails”— basically, giant traction kites that harness the wind to pull very large free-floating objects.

If you’ve ever gone to the beach and seen someone kite-surfing — standing on a board while being pulled by a kite — then you’ve seen a traction kite in action. KiteShip currently sells the Outleader, which helps increase yacht speeds. And it is working to improve the range and the speed of fast ferries and oceangoing research vessels without burning more fuel. Dave Culp, the engineer who helped found KiteShip, calls the three-person operation a “micromultinational.”

But Culp has bigger plans, which helped KiteShip win the Lexus Transportation Prize at the first California Clean Tech Open this year. Culp would like to build kites of up to 50,000 square feet — roughly the size of a football field and big enough to help move cargo ships and oil tankers. Working in tandem with an engine, the kites could allow fuel savings of 15 percent to possibly 30 percent. But why kites and not traditional sails? It’s all a matter of cost, Culp says. A traditional sailing rig needs a mast, which requires either significant structural modifications — or building an entirely new ship. A kite is much more flexible and can easily be attached to an existing ship or moved from one ship to another.

KiteShip is currently talking with two of the world’s largest oil companies — macromultinationals — about testing its kites on their tankers. Who knows? In a few years, we may see tankers full of non-renewable fossil fuel being pulled across the oceans by completely renewable wind.

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Voting-Booth Feng Shui [Politics]
By ADRIENNE DAVICH
Ever since the 2000 election, Democrats and Republicans alike have complained that our voting system is vulnerable to fraud and manipulation. They have scrutinized “hanging chads,” “hiccupping” and “choking” voting machines, miscounted absentee ballots and e-votes that leave no paper trail. Now, though, they may have something more subtle to worry about: the location of polling stations. This year, Jonah Berger, Marc Meredith and S. Christian Wheeler, researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, released a study suggesting that where you vote may significantly influence how you vote.

After analyzing data from Arizona’s 2000 general election, the Stanford researchers found that voters were more likely to support raising the state sales tax to support education if they voted in schools. This bias remained even when results were controlled for voters’ political views and demographics. In a follow-up laboratory study, subjects were asked to vote on a number of initiatives, including California’s 2004 stem-cell-research financing proposition. Before casting a vote, each subject was primed with a picture of a school, church or generic building. Voters were less likely to support stem-cell initiatives when presented with images of a church.

It’s a discomfiting insight: a person’s vote, a hallmark of democracy, may be biased by polling environment. Yet this has nothing to do with dirty politics or foul play. Rather, it’s a fairly basic principle of psychology — the idea that environmental cues can trigger ideas and affect our behavior without our being conscious of it. If you’re voting in a school, then the part of your brain that values kids and education might be activated, whereas if you vote inside a church, your ideas about spirituality might be invigorated. For some people, it seems, a change in location is enough to change a vote.

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Web-Based Microfinancing [Economics]
By SONIA NARANG
The idea of microfinancing — small-scale loans to the entrepreneurial-minded poor — reached the front page this fall when the Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize. But now the San Francisco-based nonprofit Kiva.org may have taken the idea a step further: with just a few clicks of the mouse, most everyone can become a microfinancier. At Kiva.org, a schoolteacher in Kansas can partner with an expert seamstress in countries like Kenya, Mexico and Ecuador to jump-start a tailor shop.

The founders Matthew Flannery, a Stanford graduate, and his wife, Jessica Flannery, a Stanford M.B.A. candidate, came up with the idea for Kiva, which means “unity” in Swahili, after spending time in East Africa. They noticed that many people there had no access to affordable credit. By contrast, Kiva.org offers loans to handpicked microfinance institutions at zero percent interest. These microfinance institutions, in turn, screen local applicants and lend money to individuals at an average interest rate of about 19 percent, lower than the 35 percent worldwide average for microfinance loans.

On Kiva.org, a Web site that includes photos of loan recipients and stories about them, lenders can choose aspiring small-business owners and make their own loans. (The current average is about $70.) Since it went online last year, Kiva.org has worked with more than 20 microfinance institutions around the world and enabled more than $1 million in loans for more than 2,000 businesses. (Across the entire microfinance industry, recipients of loans meet their repayment obligations more than 95 percent of the time.)

Jessica Flannery says that one of the earliest small loans helped a Ugandan fish seller take a bus to the Nile River and buy fish for a fraction of the price she previously paid a distributor. “A $10 bus ticket,” Flannery notes, “separated her from vastly expanding her profit.”

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