After 24 years of championing a ban on commercial whaling, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) will soon weigh a proposal seeking to resume commercial whaling. The plan would let Japan, Norway and Iceland hunt the ocean giants openly despite a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. In return, whaling nations would agree to reduce their catch “significantly” over 10 years [AFP]. These pro-whaling nations have kept up their hunts either by officially objecting to the moratorium or by insisting that they’re killing whales for scientific research.

The proposal is due to be submitted before the body’s annual meeting in June in Morocco, leading some conservationists to complain that the IWC should “save whales, and not whaling.” The details of the proposal will made public on Earth day–April 22. Calling the withdrawal of the ban “the best chance to fight overfishing of these animals,” U.S Commissioner to the IWC Monica Medina said: “It’s a global problem, and needs global solutions” [Washington Post].

Making its case to pull back the ban, the IWC said that during the last few decades whale populations have substantially rebounded–with bowhead whale populations off Alaska increasing to between 8,200 and 13,500, eastern Pacific gray whale numbers rising to between 21,900 and 32,400 in 1999, and blue whale populations also rising. Conservationists, however, are seething, pointing out that 1,800 to 2,200 whales continue to be killed each year. “It’s great to be showing success, but should we be planting the flag and saying, ‘We’re there’?” asked Howard Rosenbaum, who directs the ocean giants program at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “We’re not out of the woods yet” [Washington Post].

They say that despite the rise in numbers, several species still struggle to survive. Just 130 or so western Pacific gray whales swim off the coast of Russia now — compared with at least thousands, if not tens of thousands, in the past — and they are still vulnerable to being caught in Japanese fishing nets and offshore energy projects. Even one of the populations that made major gains over the past few decades, the Southern right whale, is experiencing a sudden die-off. Since 2005, researchers have identified 308 dead whales in the waters around Argentina’s Peninsula Valdes, an important calving ground, and 88 percent of the dead were calves less than three months old [Washington Post].

Critics argue that the resumption of commercial whaling would not just endanger future whale populations but would also legitimize behavior by countries like Japan, which many accuse of overfishing the waters of the Southern Ocean sanctuary and which recently won a victory in Doha, Qatar where a proposed ban on the trade of the bluefin tuna was shot down. Norway and Iceland have already disregarded the IWC’s moratorium and have hunted whales commercially.

Australia, meanwhile, has been extremely vocal in its opposition to the proposal, with a spokesman for the Environment Ministry, Greg Hunt, saying it would set too dangerous a precedent. “It is not about protecting whales, it is about a shoddy deal which gives the green light to whaling and is a white flag on plans to end whaling,” he said [Australia Network News]. The United States, while opposed to commercial whaling, said it was waiting to see the final proposal. The proposal needs a three-quarters majority vote to go ahead. A number of IWC nations have yet to declare their position.

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Image: Flickr / ahisgett

Below I referenced a talk that Peter Thiel gave at the Singularity Summit 2009. In the Q & A I recall that Thiel was skeptical that we’d head into another irrational bubble craze after having gone through two speculative boom & bust cycles in less than 10 years. My friend Michael Vassar points me to an article in Wired from January where Thiel asserts that we are in a bubble. Either I don’t recall correctly, or he’s changed his mind. Here’s the relevant part:

Wired: You’ve had a rough year. The stock market rallied strongly, and Clarium Capital bet the wrong way.

Thiel: I think we’re back to a zone of irrational exuberance.

Wired: Like before the Internet bubble burst?

Thiel: I think it’s maybe even more irrational because there’s no story about the future. At least in ‘99 there was a story.

In ‘99 there was a story based on something concrete, the internet. In the aughts we had a fake story. Now we’re down to no story. Well, at least above the board. If you haven’t you might be interested in listening to this week’s This American Life, which chronicles the market manipulation which one hedge fund engaged in, and which bankers allowed them to get away with because it was in their private (as opposed to corporate) interest. Some people can make money off bubbles, even if aggregate utility is less after than before.

Rod Dreher has a poignant reflection up on his roots in Louisiana. He finishes:

I thought about this memory this weekend, visiting Ruthie and my family. Ruthie and Mike bought part of what was once the orchard from our distant cousins, and built their house there. The rest of the land that had once been Lois and Hilda’s was sold to strangers. The cabin has long been gone; a nice big brick house belonging to someone I don’t know is now where the cabin was. True to Hilda’s palm-reading prophecy, I traveled far in my life. I have now spent well over half my life living away from there. Yet that is home for me, because that is where my family is, and the landscape of my childhood. Now, though, my parents are getting up in years, and my younger sister, at age 40, is battling a disease that may take her life. I hadn’t realized until this crisis with Ruthie how much I had counted on the continuity of her remaining there, even after our parents pass away, to anchor that place as the center of my imaginative universe. She, who has always loved the land and her place there far more than I, and she, whom I could count on to always be faithful to it, however unfaithful I was, sits in her armchair in what was once the orchard, coughing and straining for breath. We hope and we pray for healing, but now the way I thought the world would be may not be the way the world is, or will become. And I am having a hard time coming to terms with that, as both an emotional and a philosophical matter (i.e., trying to understand how to relate to where I come from now that the permanence I assumed would always be there is threatened).

From what I recall Louisiana is a region of the United States where people move least, and are deeply rooted in their locales. In this way I suppose it’s more like Europe and much of the Old World, with the importance of place encapsulated in terms such as Heimat. Though I am an American my family is from Bangladesh, and on the rare occasions that I interact with Bangladeshis I will be asked what my desh is, roughly my ancestral homeland. That would happen to be a small town in the southeast of modern Bangladesh, where my paternal ancestors settled several centuries ago, and where my extended family still has lands. But here’s the thing: I’ve never been to “my” desh. My parents always found this amusing when I asked as a child how my homeland could be a place to which I’d never been, and on some level I think they accept that these terms are anachronistic. Like much of Asia Bangladesh has seen massive urbanization within the past generation, and I get the sense that these old terms are far less relevant. In some ways it may be that Europe and North America, where development and modernization occurred at a slower place, may be the regions where a traditional sense of place remains the most robust because of the more gentle transition from the past to the future.

Study Finds a 1.2 Percent Increase in Faculty Pay, the Smallest in 50 Years:

Over all, salaries for this academic year are 1.2 percent higher than last year, the smallest increase recorded in the survey’s 50 years — and well below the 2.7 percent inflation rate from December 2008 to December 2009.

…

“A lot of faculty are losing ground, and the data probably underestimate the seriousness of the problems with faculty salary this year, because we’re only looking at full-time faculty and, as we’ve seen for several years, there’s an increasing number of part-time faculty, who are not included,” Mr. Curtis said. “Also, the survey doesn’t capture the effect of the unpaid furloughs a lot of faculty were forced to take this year, because the numbers we have are the base salaries agreed on at the beginning of the year, not the actual payroll results.”

Over all, the average salary for a full professor was $109,843, compared with $76,566 for an associate professor, $64,433 for an assistant professor, $47,592 for an instructor and $53,112 for a lecturer. At every type of institution in almost every class of faculty, men were paid substantially more, on average, than women.

Generally, administrative salaries at colleges and universities have been increasing far more quickly than pay for faculty members.

…

Ms. Wellman pointed out that because the costs of benefits, especially health care, are rising so rapidly, total compensation is not slowing as much as salary growth. “Unless we get control over the growth in spending on benefits,” she said, “we’re going to continue to crowd out the resources necessary to get faculty in the classroom.”

There is a distinction between salaries and total compensation. Additionally, I am a bit confused as to what’s going on with administrative costs. You can find the original report online, along with a lot of tables. Tables aren’t so informative at first glance, so I took table 9B and turned it into a line graph. The horizontal axis represents the academic rank, the vertical the average total compenstation within the rank. Each line represents the percentile that the institution is at in terms of average compensation. So that the top line represents the institutions at the 95th percentile in average compensation, and the bottom line the institutions at the 10th percentile. Finally, I added the values for the top and bottom percentiles so you could compare those more easily.

It looks like you’re seeing “winner-take-all” dynamics more at the elite institutions where the pay is high, as the dispersion across institutions increases at the level of full professors (the effect disappears if I do a log-transformation).

“It has been observed at least since the time of Aristotle that people cannot tickle themselves, but the reason remains elusive. Two sorts of explanations have been suggested. The interpersonal explanation suggests that tickling is fundamentally interpersonal and thus requires another person as the source of the touch. The reflex explanation suggests that tickle simply requires an element of unpredictability or uncontrollability and is more like a reflex or some other stereotyped motor pattern. To test these explanations, we manipulated the perceived source of tickling. Thirty-five subjects were tickled twice–once by the experimenter, and once, they believed, by an automated machine. The reflex view predicts that our “tickle machine” should be as effective as a person in producing laughter, whereas the interpersonal view predicts significantly attenuated responses. Supporting the reflex view, subjects smiled, laughed, and wiggled just as often in response to the machine as to the experimenter. Self-reports of ticklishness were also virtually identical in the two conditions. Ticklish laughter evidently does not require that the stimulation be attributed to another person, as interpersonal accounts imply.”

Image: flickr/battywing

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