Month: July 2020

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New Books in Native American Studies - Wade Davies, “Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970” (UP of Kansas, 2020)

The game of basketball is perceived by most today as an “urban” game with a locale such as Rucker Park in Harlem as the game’s epicenter (as well as a pipeline to the NBA). While that is certainly a true statement, basketball is not limited to places such as New York City.

In recent years scholars have written about the meaning of the game (and triumphs on the hardwood) to other groups, such as Asian Americans (Kathleen Yep and Joel Franks) and Mexican Americans (Ignacio Garcia). To this important literature one can now add an examination of the sport in the lives of Native Americans, through Wade Davies' Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970 (University Press of Kansas, 2020).

The game, as Davies notes, was not just something imposed upon Natives in locales such as the Indian Industrial Training School in Haskell, Kansas (and elsewhere). The game provided linkages to the Native past, and was embraced as a way to “prove their worth” within a hostile environment designed to strip students of all vestiges of their cultural inheritance. The sport provided both young men and women with an opportunity to compete against members of other institutions (both Native and white) and to challenge notions of inferiority and inherent weaknesses.

Davies’ work does an excellent job of detailing the role of the sport in the lives of individuals, schools, and eventually, Native communities. Additionally, it examines how these players competed against sometimes seven opponents (the five players on the court and the two officials) to claim their rightful place on the court. They also often had to deal with the taunts and racism of crowds at opposing gyms. Still, most of these schools managed to field competitive teams that created their own “Indian” style of basketball that proved quite difficult to defeat.

Wade Davies is professor of Native American studies at the University of Montana, Missoula.

Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University.

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CoinDesk Podcast Network - BREAKDOWN: Are Stablecoins Eurodollars 2.0? Long Reads Sunday

Long Reads Sunday features two essays previously published on CoinDesk that show the trajectory of stablecoins in the global economy in 2020.

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Crypto.com.

On this week’s Long Reads Sunday, we look at two essays about stablecoins previously published on CoinDesk. 

The first is called “USD Stablecoins Are Surging, but Zero Interest Rates Complicate Business Model” by Hasu and was one of the first pieces to recognize that demand was coming not just from the crypto space but from emerging markets facing crisis time currency pressures. 

The second is “Hyper-Stablecoinization: From Eurodollars to Crypto-Dollars” from Pascal Hügli. The piece argues that stablecoins are likely to play an increasingly important role in the global economy. In effect, they are a better version of the critical eurodollar system.

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Everything Everywhere Daily - The 1960 Popular Vote

There have been 5 acknowledged presidential elections in US history where the winner of the popular vote did not win in the electoral college. However, there is a very good argument to be made that there is a sixth election that should be added to that list. The conventional wisdom holds that John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the 1960 popular vote by 112,827 votes. However, to get to this number, you have to put a tortured spin on the numbers from one state in particular.

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CoinDesk Podcast Network - RESEARCH: The Origins of the World’s Oldest Bitcoin Metric, Explained

Bitcoin days destroyed (BDD) was first introduced as a concept back in 2011. At the time, it had only been two years since the creation of the world’s first cryptocurrency, bitcoin. Individuals were already beginning to innovate ways to measure on-chain transaction activity and value. 

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Crypto.com.

As the first cryptocurrency metric to be created, BDD was quickly followed by a plethora of other unique metrics including unspent transaction output (UTXO), market value to realized value (MVRV) and spent output profit ratio (SOPR). Despite the sophistication of cryptocurrency data and analysis since 2011, BDD remains a fundamental metric to understanding and valuing bitcoin. 

See also: Coin Days Destroyed: Giving Meaning to Transaction Volumes

“[BDD] is a metric that reflects the collective action of long-term [BTC] holders,” said CoinDesk senior research analyst Galen Moore on a special podcast episode about the metric. “What’s the psychology of the long-term holder? You can see that in a collective way [through BDD] in a way I don’t think is possible in other asset categories.”

Moore interviewed Coin Metrics’ Lucas Nuzzi on Tuesday, July 7, to learn more about the use cases for and limitations against BDD. In a follow-up discussion about the interview recorded Thursday, July 9, Moore noted no other financial asset enables traders and investors to see the activity of long-term asset holders as transparently as bitcoin. 

To this, CoinDesk research intern Duy Nguyen noted the motivations behind why long-term holders are moving funds at any given time is still largely a guessing game that requires further off-chain analysis beyond the scope of BDD. 

For more information about BDD, you can watch the 30-minute webinar featuring an exclusive presentation on the metric by Nuzzi on the CoinDesk Research Hub. 


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A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford

Welcome to the seventh and final in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . I’m glad to say that this pledge week has been successful enough that I may do another of these in a year or so.

This one is about “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford, a record that was a huge influence on many, many artists in the mid fifties.

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Unexpected Elements - How long do Covid-19 antibodies last?

Science in Action looks at some of the latest research on how response of our immune system to infection by the coronavirus. Researchers at Kings College London find that protective antibodies appear to fade away after about three months following infection whereas a team at the Karolinska Institute has discovered that although antibodies may decline, other important players called T cells in our defences do not. Dr’s Katie Doores and Marcus Buggert talk about the implications of these discoveries for the quest for a vaccine against the coronavirus.

Roland Pease also talks to Dr Barney Graham of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States about the results from the Phase 1 trial of novel type of vaccine against the virus. NIAID have partnered with biotech company Moderna to produce the first mRNA vaccine in the Institute’s pandemic preparedness program.

Biologist Dr Sonja Wild tells Roland about the remarkable fishing strategy devised by dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia. They chase fish into the empty shell of giant sea snails, then take the shells to the surface and tip the fish into their mouths. Dr Wild’s 7 years of research has revealed how the dolphins have learned to do this.

Think of the oceans and an empty and peaceful expanse relatively untouched by humankind might come to mind. But is this peace an illusion? CrowdScience listener Dani wants to know if the noise of shipping and other human activity on the oceans is impacting on sea life.

To find out, Marnie Chesterton takes a deep dive to learn how marine animals have evolved to use sound; from navigating their environments to finding a mate or hiding from prey. She then speaks to a scientist who is using acoustic observatories to track the many ways human activity - like sonar and shipping – can interfere.

Marnie virtually visits a German lab which tests the ears of beached whales, dolphins and seals from around the world to try and ascertain whether they suffered hearing damage, and what might have caused it. What other smaller creatures are negatively impacted by underwater noise? Marnie learns that acoustic trauma is more widespread than first thought.

As human life continues to expand along ocean waters, what is being done to reduce the impact of sound? Marnie meets some of the designers at the forefront of naval architecture to see how ship design, from propellers to air bubbles and even wind powered vessels can contribute to reducing the racket in the oceans.

Main image: Abs COVID-19 antibody - Viral Infection concept. Credit: Getty Images

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Lex Fridman Podcast - #109 – Brian Kernighan: UNIX, C, AWK, AMPL, and Go Programming

Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University. He co-authored the C Programming Language with Dennis Ritchie (creator of C) and has written a lot of books on programming, computers, and life including the Practice of Programming, the Go Programming Language, his latest UNIX: A History and a Memoir. He co-created AWK, the text processing language used by Linux folks like myself. He co-designed AMPL, an algebraic modeling language for large-scale optimization.

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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
04:24 – UNIX early days
22:09 – Unix philosophy
31:54 – Is programming art or science?
35:18 – AWK
42:03 – Programming setup
46:39 – History of programming languages
52:48 – C programming language
58:44 – Go language
1:01:57 – Learning new programming languages
1:04:57 – Javascript
1:08:16 – Variety of programming languages
1:10:30 – AMPL
1:18:01 – Graph theory
1:22:20 – AI in 1964
1:27:50 – Future of AI
1:29:47 – Moore’s law
1:32:54 – Computers in our world
1:40:37 – Life