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To reach net zero, the world may need as many 200,000 offshore wind turbines generating 2,000 gigawatts (GW) of energy.
To put this in context, by the end of 2022, 63 GW of offshore wind capacity had been installed worldwide. Within the next 28 years, the offshore wind energy sector needs to expand so that it is capable of producing 32 times its current energy capacity.
But where do we put all these extra offshore wind farms? Their locations will need to be chosen in order to maximise their energy output and their social benefits, while ensuring they have the minimum impact possible on the environment. Balancing all these factors is not a straightforward task.
To work out where to place new turbines, a good starting point is to define how much of the ocean we need to use in order to meet the 2050 net zero targets. This calculation depends on the dimensions of the turbines, how wind power technology is likely to evolve between now and 2050, and the exact configuration of the turbines within a wind farm.
Together, these factors control the future “power density” of offshore wind farms –- how much offshore wind capacity can be installed per unit area of space in the ocean. The figure required for achieving net zero is 4 megawatts (MW) per sq km. This means the area of ocean we’ll need for offshore wind is around 500,000 sq km, which is roughly the size of France.
Once the total space is known, the next task is to gather data on the factors that constrain infrastructure development in the ocean. There are numerous constraints, from ensuring there is adequate windspeed for turbines to turn, to avoiding shipping lanes and marine protected areas, to whether seabed conditions are difficult to build in.
Some types of constraint create “no-go zones”, because an offshore wind farm would cause clear and unacceptable disruption to an existing activity, such as a site used for military exercises, for oil drilling or a shipping lane.
For other constraints, it’s a case of working out whether the net impact of a wind farm is harmful to the environment or the activities already there. It’s important to identify how crowded prospective sites are, as this provides a baseline, or starting point, for assessing a site’s suitability.
Our recent research shows how such considerations can be used to identify suitable future sites for offshore wind farms, using UK waters as a case study.
The UK is a leading region for offshore wind, so the country offers insights into the challenges faced globally in placing new wind farms. The UK is also a leader in legislating for net zero, including plans for transforming energy infrastructure.
Our study used 34 different layers of constraints, from which the available space for future sites is defined by excluding the no-go and crowded zones. We identified the available ocean space for future offshore wind turbines as covering an area of about 240 sq km, which is equivalent to the area of the UK’s landmass.
The data further reveals that, to achieve the basic net zero target for domestic electrification in the UK, 7% of that available area will need to be used for offshore wind farms. Domestic electrification refers to the conversion of homes to electric heating from (predominantly) gas.
For more ambitious decarbonisation targets for offshore wind, accounting for increased domestic electricity demand among other things, the required space rises to 44%.
If future offshore wind farms are to be shared out equally across the space available for them, up to 70% of future sites will overlap with one to three constraints. Moreover, about 90% of future sites will have to be in deep water (roughly 60m in depth).
New technology, such as floating platforms, will be crucial to enable wind turbines to be installed in these places.
Our study suggests that the huge expansion of offshore wind farms required to meet net zero targets may be achievable. Furthermore, it can be done without increasing the average level of overlap with existing activities in UK waters.
However, it’s still possible that an expansion of offshore wind could harm the environment or limit existing ocean activities. For example, in the case of marine protected zones, wind farms could stop fish and animals from spreading into adjacent parts of the ocean. Potentially, this would undermine some of the objectives behind creating the protected zone in the first place.
Increasing interaction between wind farms, natural ecosystems, heritage sites such as shipwrecks, and human activities is inevitable. Without careful planning and study, these interactions could harm the environment and disrupt wider human activities. They must therefore be anticipated and addressed proactively.
The move to turbines in deeper water and further away from shore, however, poses some real challenges. It is these challenges that will need to be overcome by improved technology.
Hugo Putuhena is affiliated with the Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) hub and the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies - Intelligent & Resilient Ocean Engineering.
Fraser Sturt is a deputy director for the University of Southampton's Marine & Maritime Institute. He receives funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering Engineering X programme, looking at Safer End of Engineered life for offshore infrastructure and ships, and the Arts & Humanities Research Council as part of the Towards a National Collection Unpath'd waters project.
Susan Gourvenec receives funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering supporting her Chair in Emerging Technologies for Intelligent & Resilient Ocean Engineering.
The recent coronation of King Charles III was a high-profile example of when facial recognition technology has been used to monitor a crowd, but there are plenty of others. The technology is used by law enforcement all over the UK and other countries.
It’s now common in US airports. It’s being used to monitor refugees and identify dead bodies in Ukraine. Even Beyoncé fans have been subjected to it.
And there’s more to come. The UK government is reportedly planning to add facial recognition to the police’s body-worn devices, drones and numberplate cameras. It may soon be very difficult to leave your house without having your face scanned.
There are serious questions about whether the benefits of this technology outweigh such concerns. But steps could be taken to address the issues people are worried about.
Facial recognition can be used by police to scan many faces in a crowd and compare them with a “watch list” of known criminals. This “live facial recognition” is used with the aim of reducing crime. It can also be used retroactively on recorded CCTV footage.
In the UK, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 provides a legal basis for the use of surveillance camera systems in a public place.
And according to the government’s surveillance camera code of practice, it’s justifiable to use facial recognition systems in decisions that could negatively affect people, such as whether to arrest them, so long as there is a human in the loop to supervise and make decisions.
So the use of facial recognition systems, or those for other types of biometric information, cannot be used for autonomous decision making, such as automatically tracking a suspect across multiple camera feeds.
But why should this be of concern to law-abiding citizens? Civil liberties groups argue facial recognition use in public places affects our privacy and freedom, particularly in terms of its ability to track individuals at mass gatherings and to potentially engage in racial profiling.
Security cameras have long captured us as we went about our daily lives. However, authorities easily being able to put a name to a face in the video footage is something we’re not so used to.
The technology creates a situation where many more people could get caught in the sights of the authorities than before. A person’s casual indiscretions or errors of judgement can now be easily tracked and linked to a name and address.
Those with a criminal record could be targeted in public based on their past, regardless of whether they intend to carry out any illegal activity. The technology could provide new opportunities for racial profiling, where authorities track or suspect people based on their background, rather than because of specific information about them.
Facial recognition could also be used against people with no criminal past or plans to commit a crime but who the police simply want to stop, such as protesters. The Metropolitan Police may have announced that facial recognition would not be used to target activists at the coronation, but they also provoked outrage for arresting anti-monarchy demonstrators who were later released without charge.
It’s also important to recognise facial recognition technology still suffers from inaccuracies, which can result in false positive matches where an innocent person is mistaken for a known criminal.
With facial recognition posing such perceived threats, it could have a chilling effect on free speech and demonstrations
However, there are ways that the technology could be used more safely. Law enforcement teams could perform two preliminary steps – activity recognition or event detection – before they resort to face recognition. This approach can help minimise the potential for privacy violations and false positive matches.
Activity recognition refers to the process of identifying and categorising human activities or actions based on CCTV or other sensors. It aims to understand and recognise the activities of individuals or groups, which can include standard activities such as running, sitting or eating.
On the other hand, event detection focuses on identifying specific events or occurrences of interest within a given context. Events can range from simple events like a car passing by or a person entering a room to more complex events like accidents, fights, or more unusual behaviour. Event detection algorithms typically analyse CCTV and other sensors to detect and locate events.
Hence, activity recognition or event detection should be the first step before applying facial recognition to a surveillance camera feed.
Ensuring the data from cameras remains anonymous can also enable police to study the activities of people in the crowd while preserving their privacy. Conducting regular audits and reviews can ensure that the collected data is handled responsibly and in compliance with UK data privacy regulations.
This can also help to address some of the concerns related to transparency and accuracy. By using activity recognition or event detection as a first step, it may be possible to give people more clarity – through signage, for example – about what exactly is going on during police surveillance in a public place.
It is the responsibility of the state to ensure the privacy and security of its citizens in order to foster a healthy society. But if facial recognition is implemented in a way that a significant proportion of citizens feel infringes their rights, it could create a culture of suspicion and a society where few people feel safe expressing themselves publicly.
Nadia Kanwal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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This article was originally published by Quanta.
More than four decades ago, field ecologists set out to quantify the diversity of trees on a forested plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, one of the most intensively studied tracts of tropical forest on the planet. They began counting every tree that had a trunk wider than a centimeter. They identified the species, measured the trunks, and calculated the biomass of each individual. They put ladders up the trees, examined saplings, and recorded it all in sprawling spreadsheets.
As they looked at the data accumulating year after year, they began to notice something odd. With some 300 species, the tree diversity on the tiny 15-square-kilometer island was staggering. But the distribution of trees among those species was also heavily lopsided, with most of the trees belonging to only a few species.
Since those early studies, that overstuffed, highly uneven pattern has been seen repeatedly in ecosystems around the world, particularly in rainforests. The ecologist Stephen Hubbell of UCLA, who was part of the team behind the Barro Colorado surveys, estimates that less than 2 percent of the tree species in the Amazon account for half of all the individual trees, meaning that 98 percent of the species are rare.
Such high biodiversity flies in the face of predictions made by a leading theory of ecology, which says that in a stable ecosystem, every niche or role should be occupied by one species. Niche theory suggests that there are not enough niches to enable all the species the ecologists saw to stably exist. Competition over niches between similar species should have sent the rarities into extinction (or led them to adapt to slightly different niches).
A new ecological modeling paper in Nature by James O’Dwyer and Kenneth Jops of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explains at least part of this discrepancy. They found that species that should seemingly be head-to-head competitors can share an ecosystem if details of their life histories—such as how long they live and how many offspring they have—line up in the right way. O’Dwyer and Jops’ work also helps explain why one of the most successful ways to model ecologies often arrives at accurate results, even though it glosses over almost all we know about how organisms function.
Back in 2001, the paradoxically high biodiversity on Barro Colorado Island inspired Hubbell to propose the groundbreaking neutral theory of ecology. Traditional ecology theory stressed the competition for niches between species. But Hubbell pointed out that species might not really matter in that equation because, in effect, individuals compete for resources with members of their own species too. He suggested that patterns of diversity in ecosystems might largely be the products of random processes.
[Read: A basic premise of animal conservation looks shakier than ever]
For a theory that dealt with biodiversity, Hubbell’s neutral theory was sparse. It ignored variations in life spans, nutritional quirks, and other details that distinguish one species from another. In models based on the theory, every individual in a theoretical ecosystem is identical. Once the clock starts, the ecosystem evolves stochastically, with individuals outcompeting and replacing one another at random. The theory was completely at odds with species-based approaches to ecology, and it provoked impassioned debate among ecologists because it seemed so counterintuitive.
Yet surprisingly, as the random walks in the neutral models progressed, they reproduced key features of what Hubbell and his colleagues saw in their data from Barro Colorado Island and what others have seen elsewhere. In this modeling that almost perversely acknowledges no differences, there are flashes of the real world.
That tension between the models and reality has long interested O’Dwyer. Why did neutral theory seem to work so well? Was there a way to bring in information about how species function to get results that might look still more realistic?
One of the things that make neutral models appealing, O’Dwyer told me, is that there really are deep universalities among many living things. While animal species are not identical, they are remarkably similar at the level of, say, the circulatory system. According to a principle called Kleiber’s law, for example, the metabolic rate of an animal generally increases with its size, scaling as a power law—the same power law, no matter the species. (Several theories about why Kleiber’s law is true have been offered, but the answer is still debated.)
Given those signs of underlying order, O’Dwyer wondered whether some details of how organisms live matter more than others in determining how successfully species will compete and survive over evolutionary time. Take metabolism again: If an ecosystem can be seen as an expression of its inhabitants’ metabolisms, then the organisms’ sizes are special, significant numbers. The size of an individual may be more useful in modeling its fate over time than any number of other details about its diet or species identity.
O’Dwyer wondered whether one of those crucial, privileged factors might be captured by life history, a concept that combines species statistics such as average number of offspring, time until sexual maturity, and life span. Imagine a plot of 50 individual plants. Each has its own life span, its own pattern of reproduction. After three months, one plant might produce 100 seeds, while another, similar one produces 88. Maybe 80 percent of those seeds will germinate, producing the next generation, which will go through its own version of this cycle. Even within a species, individual plants’ numbers will vary, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, a phenomenon called demographic noise. If this variation is random, in the manner of Hubbell’s neutral theory, what patterns will emerge over successive generations?
O’Dwyer knew he had found someone who could help him explore that question when Jops joined his lab as a graduate student. Jops had previously studied whether models using life histories could predict a vulnerable plant species' survival. Together, they started to hammer out the math that would describe what happens when life history meets competition.
In Jops and O’Dwyer’s model, as in neutral models, stochasticity—the influence of random factors on deterministic interactions among the species—is important. The life histories of species, however, can amplify or reduce the effects of that randomness. “Life history is a kind of lens through which demographic noise works,” O’Dwyer said.
When the researchers allowed their model to progress through time, putting each simulated individual through its paces, they found that certain species could persist alongside each other for long periods even though they were competing for the same resources. Looking deeper into the numbers for an explanation, Jops and O’Dwyer found that a complex measurement called effective population size seemed useful for describing a kind of complementarity that could exist among species. It encapsulated the fact that a species could have high mortality at one point in its life cycle, then low mortality at another, while a complementary species might have low mortality at the first point and high mortality at the second. The more similar this measurement was for two species, the more likely it was that the pair could live alongside each other despite competing for space and nutrition.
[Read: One of evolution’s biggest moments was re-created in a year]
“They experience demographic noise at the same amplitude,” O’Dwyer said. “That’s the key for them to live together a long time.”
The researchers wondered if similar patterns prevailed in the real world. They drew on the COMPADRE database, which houses details about hundreds of plant, fungal, and bacterial species collected from a variety of studies and sources, and they zeroed in on perennial plants that all lived together in the same research plots. They discovered that, as their model had predicted, the plant species that lived together had closely matching life histories: Pairs of species living in the same ecosystem tend to be more complementary than randomly drawn pairs.
The findings suggest ways in which species that are in competition could work well alongside each other without invoking distinct niches, says Annette Ostling, a professor of biology at the University of Texas, Austin: “The coolest part is that they are highlighting that these ideas … can extend to species that are pretty different but complementary.”
To William Kunin, a professor of ecology at the University of Leeds in England, the paper suggests one reason the natural world, for all its complexity, can resemble a neutral model: Ecological processes may have a way of canceling each other out, so that what seems like endless variety can have a simple outcome he described as “emergent neutrality.” Hubbell, for his part, appreciates the expansion of his initial work. “It offers some thoughts on how to generalize neutral models, to tweak them to put in a bit of species differences, expanding and contracting to see what happens to diversity in a local community,” he says.
This is just one bite out of the problem of understanding how biodiversity arises and why it persists, however. “In ecology, we struggle with the relationship between pattern and process. Many different processes can produce the same pattern,” Ostling says. O’Dwyer hopes that in the coming years, more data about the real world can help researchers discern whether effective population size is consistently able to explain coexistence.
Kunin hopes that the paper will inspire others to keep working with ideas from neutral theory. In a field where the unique qualities of individuals, rather than their commonalities, have long held sway, neutral theory has forced ecologists to be creative. “It’s kicked us out of our mental ruts and made us think about which things really matter,” he says.
Hubbell, who unleashed neutral theory on ecology so many years ago, wonders whether truly immense data sets about real forests could yield the kind of detail needed to make the relationship between life history and biodiversity clearer. “This is the kind of building on neutral theory that I was hoping would happen,” he says of the new paper. “But it’s only a baby step toward really understanding diversity.”
In a playful moment a century ago, the historian Carl Becker pondered this counterfactual: What if Benjamin Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson, had drafted the Declaration of Independence? A scholar of the American Revolution, Becker knew that such a thing was plausible. Franklin was, after all, on the Committee of Five in Philadelphia, which was allotted the job of drawing up the text in June 1776. A gifted writer of great standing, he was just the sort of person who might compose a document of such paramount importance.
Yet Becker thought the idea absurd. Although he admired Franklin for his “intimate and confidential” style, Becker did not believe that the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack could have written such sentences as “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” or “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” These lines were charged with a peculiar, arresting quality, mixing precision with poetry. This quality Becker associated with Jefferson’s “engaging felicities”—quite different from Franklin’s prose, which had an “air of the tavern or print shop.”
In fact, Franklin would have been very unlikely to produce the Declaration’s first draft. By 1776, he was too worn out by the strains of life to tackle the challenge. Also, as he later confided to Jefferson, he had made it a rule to “avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body,” because taking on a task of that nature was to invite trouble. Jefferson, then still 33, would learn the wisdom of this for himself when Congress debated his draft. First, on about June 12, he sat down at a traveling desk of his own design in the parlor of his lodgings on Seventh and Market Street and started work on the Declaration of Independence.
[Tom Nichols: Reclaiming real American patriotism]
Franklin was, however, among the first to read Jefferson’s efforts, a week or so later—as was John Adams, who found himself “delighted with its high tone, and the flights of oratory with which it abounded.” From Adams, this was high praise, but there was also a hint of something else in his compliment. The “flights of oratory” certainly had luster, but did the words have real substance? Becker himself, in a close rereading of the “original Rough draught,” confessed that Jefferson’s prose sometimes left him with a feeling of insecurity, “as of resting one’s weight on something fragile.”
Nowhere is this sensation more present than in the Declaration’s most celebrated phrase, “the pursuit of Happiness.”
This appears in the second sentence of the document as Jefferson outlines his brief list of “unalienable rights”—“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The final four words have an instant aesthetic allure, but the longer one lingers over them, the more a riddle appears. Why has Jefferson denoted both life and liberty as rights, but not happiness, which is qualified by the word pursuit? Was this use of pursuit purely rhetorical? As the 19th-century lawyer Rufus Choate believed, was it nothing more than one of those “glittering and sounding generalities” designed to ornament “that passionate and eloquent manifesto”?
Many commentators have interpreted pursuit in this way over time. It adds rhythm and flourish at a pivotal early moment in the text. Others, however, have not been so sure. To the Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., “the pursuit of Happiness” had real meaning, but not the meaning most readers recognize today. To illustrate his point, Schlesinger sifted through patriot literature by such writers as James Otis, Josiah Quincy II, James Wilson, and Adams himself. All of them wrote about happiness, though—unlike Jefferson—framed it not as something people should merely “strive for but as something that was theirs by natural right.”
The clearest expression of this strand of American thought came in George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was drafted in May 1776. In it, Mason spoke of “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Mason’s text, which was reprinted in Philadelphia newspapers in early June, has long been acknowledged as a key influence on Jefferson. The link between the two declarations is plain enough, yet the crucial shift from “obtaining happiness” to simply pursuing it is not so easily explained.
[Arthur C. Brooks: Ben Franklin’s radical theory of happiness]
In 1964, Schlesinger wrote a striking short essay titled “The Lost Meaning of ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’” in which he offered a new interpretation. For years, he argued, people had been reading that line incorrectly. Schlesinger believed that when Jefferson wrote pursuit, he was using it in the word’s “more emphatic” meaning—as lawyers used to talk about “the pursuit of the law” or doctors spoke of “the pursuit of medicine.” This did not mean questing after or chasing down. Instead, it implied a person’s engagement with a practice or vocation already in their possession. Jefferson was not at odds with the other Founders at all, according to Schlesinger, but in his reading of the line the shift in meaning was significant: Some of the romantic sense of mission, some of the novelty of its idea of itself, was gone.
“The pursuit of Happiness” may be pure rhetoric, as Choate believed, or it may have a lost meaning, as Schlesinger argued, but there is a third interpretation we should consider. The age of Enlightenment out of which the United States arose was abuzz with discussions of happiness. What was it? How best to acquire it? Debating clubs churned over these issues. The philosopher Francis Hutcheson came up with complex formulas involving human qualities such as “benevolence” (B), “ability” (A), “self-love” (S), and “interest” (I) to create the conditions for what he termed the “moment of good” (M). (One part of his workings went M = B + S x A = BA.) Others relied on experience more than theory. Having encountered the Indigenous people of New Holland (modern-day Australia) for the first time, Captain Cook sailed away mulling, ungrammatically, whether they were “far more happier than we Europeans.”
But the author who wrote with the most intensity about happiness during the Revolutionary period was Samuel Johnson. Johnson was someone all of the Founders knew well. Ever since the reproduction of parts of his poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” in Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1750, his work had found a ready audience in the colonies. As the historian James G. Basker has pointed out, “Johnson was a part of the consciousness of every literate American during the Founding Era.” And for Jefferson, he notes in particular, “the connection was unusually subtle and sustained.”
As a young man, Jefferson sought out Johnson’s political tracts. He recommended Johnson’s Dictionary as a necessary addition to the library a friend was constructing, and he always made sure he had a copy to hand himself, whether he was in Monticello or Paris. Later, in a 1798 letter, he confessed to using it as “a Repertory, to find favorite passages which I wished to recollect,” although he added intriguingly, “but too rarely with success.”
This line captures something of the place Johnson occupied in Jefferson’s mind—often there, not always as a welcome guest. In 1775, Johnson had emerged as the sharpest British critic of what he called the “wild, indefinite and obscure” resolutions of the Continental Congress. Jefferson had felt the warmth of his prose more than most. Reading the copy of Johnson’s furious polemic Taxation No Tyranny that he’d acquired shortly after its publication that year, the slave-owning Jefferson would have been confronted with a distinctly personal taunt: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
[Read: Lessons from Thomas Jefferson’s failure on slavery]
Johnson’s admonitions did not just haunt Jefferson at Monticello; they also followed him to Philadelphia in 1776. The week that Jefferson arrived to attend the Congress in May, The Pennsylvania Evening Post printed a long letter about “Doctor Johnson,” his Dictionary, and the use of words as weapons. Jefferson would not respond openly to any of this. In politics, he and Johnson were as divided as could be, but when it came to another matter, happiness, there was an odd convergence between the two. Five times before 1776, in all of his major works—The Rambler, Dictionary, The Idler, the novella Rasselas, and the political pamphlet The False Alarm—Johnson used the phrase the pursuit of happiness.
That construction was not itself exceptional: As Basker observes, “it also occurs in other writers of the period and the question of whether Jefferson took it directly from Johnson remains tantalizingly open.” More notable, and important, is the similarity in how these two great figures thought about happiness. Time and again, Johnson stressed his belief that pursuing happiness was a natural human instinct. This impulse, however, came with a warning. To pursue was natural; to obtain was a different proposition.
Johnson demonstrated this distinction most powerfully in Rasselas, which was published first in Britain in 1759 and then in Philadelphia in 1768. This moral fable recounted the adventures of an Abyssinian prince who, with his colorful entourage, was always seeking but never quite finding happiness. Sometimes, their journey would be lit up by moments of hope; more frequently came disappointment. At one point, in a quintessentially Johnsonian twist, one of the characters cries out in exasperation at the paradox that confronts them: “Yet what, said she, is to be expected from our persuit of happiness, when we find the state of life to be such, that happiness itself is the cause of misery?”
As the literary scholar Thomas Keymer has noted, Rasselas provides a clue to help us unpick one of the most engaging and ambiguous lines in the Declaration. By 1776, Jefferson was already known for his “happy talent for composition,” but this was only a part of his genius. He seems, too, to have had the gift of foresight. In that line, he frames, eloquently yet economically, the kind of country this new republic would be.
It was to be a place of promise, but it would not promise too much. It could not be both the land of opportunity and a place of greater safety. Pursue happiness, by all means, but do not expect a guarantee of obtaining it. Already in Jefferson’s rough draft, “The United States of America”—one of the very first uses of this name—we can glimpse the emerging nation’s essential character.
That character endures to this day. The United States would offer those who wished to come the chance of bettering themselves. But like Johnson, Jefferson seems to have appreciated the risks of the quest. Who knew, especially in the perilous summer of 1776, what lay ahead? The “pursuit of Happiness” was enough.
It is currently held, not without certain uneasiness, that 90% of human DNA is ‘junk.’ The renowned Cambridge molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, makes a helpful distinction between ‘junk’ and ‘garbage.’ Garbage is something used up and worthless which you throw away; junk is something you store for some unspecified future use. (Rabinow, 1992, 7-8)
In the bioscience lab near Tokyo where I did my ethnographic study, the researchers taught me how to do PCR experiments. This was before Covid when almost everyone came to know what PCR was, or at least, what kind of instrumental information it could be good for.[1] The lab was working with mouse models, although I never got to see them in their cages. But the researcher I was shadowing showed me how to put the mouse tail clippings she collected into small tubes. She hated cutting tails, by the way, and preferred to take ear punches when she could. She told me that she didn’t like the way the mice wiggled under her hand, as if they just knew. But at this point anyway, the mice are alive in the animal room and she is only putting small, but vital, pieces of them into a tube to dissolve them down (mice becoming means), to get to the foundation of what she really wants.
I’ve still got the protocol that I typed up from the notes I made with her in the lab. Step 1 was: “Add 75 ul of NaOH to each ear punch tube (changing tips as I go).” The changing pipette tips part was really important to avoid haphazardly spreading around DNA, I learned. I also had to make sure the clippings were at the bottom of the tube and submerged. She said I could flick the tubes with my finger to get the “material” to fall down to the bottom and she showed me how to do it. I also, she cautioned, always had to be very careful of bubbles, but more flicking could help there and by making sure I didn’t put the pipette too far down into the solution. Then we would spin the tubes in the vortex (which I always typed as VORTEX for some reason), add some other reagents, and put it all in the “PCR machine,” but that is not at all its technical name.[2] Then we would usually go with all the others to the cafeteria for lunch.
In writing this now, I couldn’t remember what “NaOH” stood for so I had to ask the internet. And as I looked back over this protocol, and these practices I was just barely learning to embody before the pandemic sent us all home, I realize that they must have settled back in my mind somewhere, just as the material-ness of the lab which anchored them for me has receded like a shrinking lake in a drought summer. But what I do hold on to is what the researcher taught me about the importance of repetition and focus, for a kind of purity of practice, and the diligence to make materials—whether of mice or of sodium hydroxide—do what they ought to do.
Because what captivated me about these initial PCR steps was what appeared to me to be the profound transformation they wrought (of course, I am not the first person to say so)—from fleshy ear punch to silt DNA multiplied in a clear plastic tube, with just a little bit of chemicals and some repetitive cycles of heat—but even more, how this transmutation had the potential to fail in one way, or for one reason, or another. How difficult it could actually be to get the materials, and even the researchers themselves, to do what they ought. Once, I used some unknown solution instead of water because it was on a shelf in an unmarked bottle close to where the water, which I later supposed had gone missing, was usually kept. Once, I didn’t remember to change pipette tips. Or the sense in my hands of precisely what to do next and properly would simply begin to unravel. When we had to throw the tubes in the trash, the researcher comforted me by telling me about a time when her mind wandered for just an instant while pipetting and she lost track of which tube she had last filled with reagent. A minor momentary mistake that grows, and can even burst, into a huge error in the downstream. She taught me that sometimes, if I lifted the tubes to the light to examine their volume of liquid, I might be able to get back on track.[3] Other times the PCR machine might not cycle its heat properly. One machine was already considered to be of questionable working order but the lab didn’t have the funding to replace it. We didn’t know about its full potential for failure until we got all the way through to the very last stage of the process and discovered we had to go back to the beginning with new clippings.
The researcher and I classified these particular (wait, was that water?) experiments-in-the-making as failures because they missed the mark of their intentions. Their purposefulness, decided in advance by the goal of genotyping these mice, was also appended to other purposes, specifically to cultivate a living gene population that the researchers needed for other more central concerns. Trashing the experiments that deviated from this intentionality, although it could be costly, was a seemingly simple decision. After the PCR melt and the second half of the experiment, the electrophoresis machine either “read” back the base pair numbers we were looking for, or those numbers were just wrong and we’d made an obvious mistake. Or worse, everything collapsed into inconclusiveness and we needed to repeat the experiment anyway.[4] In this case, deviation from expectation, and therefore from usefulness, was what pushed experiments to a kind of failure, beyond which point they could not, in this context at least, be so easily reclaimed.
But what does something like “junk” have to do with mice ear punches, chemical transmutation, and mundane laboratory failures? Garbage experiments are routine in scientific practice after all. But as any scientist might tell you, failure can be its own kind of productive; in the least, as a way to learn the value of steady hands, and how to recognize water by smell, or its necessity as a control in genotyping—to become a “capable doer,” as one scientist told me. But beyond these mundane errors, some scientists argue that failures of a particular kind can break open old ways of thinking and doing, although what that failure is, and can be, is variously classified:
Science fails. This is especially true when tackling new problems. Science is not infallible. Research activity is a desire to go outside of existing worldviews, to destroy known concepts, and to create new concepts in uncharted territories. (Iwata, 2020)
I wish “failure” were the trick to seeing and moving beyond the limits of current knowledge. Is that what Kuhn said? I think that paradigm change requires making a reproducible observation that does not fit within the existing model, then going back to the whiteboard. But I don’t think these observations are very well classified as a failure. If failure = unexpected result of a successful experiment/measurement, then I can agree. (Personal communication with laboratory supervisor, 2020)
Failure has more potential than we might often recognize, where an instinct to trash can instead push to new beginnings. Just as Rabinow described Brenner’s description (1992), failure is like junk, those materials or states that are in-the-waiting—waiting to be actualized, reordered, and reclaimed as meaningful, valid and valuable, even if we don’t yet know how or why. Junk is, in this way, more than matter “out of place,” although it may land there interstitially. If “[d]irt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (Mary Douglas, 1966, 36), then junk is garbage and failure and decay, and even breakdown, on the precipice of being made anew. After all, without intentionality or purposefulness and other values, there can be no garbage, or failed and failing experiments and paradigms, in the first place.
Consider an example that seems categorically different from scientific experiments: inventory management in role-playing videogames. In Diablo 4 (2023), any item picked up from downed enemies or collected in the environment can be marked as “junk” and then salvaged by visiting an in-game merchant. These bits of amour and other gear reappear in your inventory afterwards as junk’s constitute materials, useful again for crafting and building up new things—strips of leather and other scraps as well as blueprints for better stuff. In Fallout 4 (2015), the “Junk Jet” gun lets you repurpose your inventory instead as ammo, anything from wrenches to teddy bears, which can be shot back out into the world and at random adversaries, where you might later be able to pick them up again, if you want. Managing encumbrance in Skyrim (2011), on the other hand, is a task of drudgery and tedium. Almost every item in the game world is moveable, each with its own weight calculation, and can be picked up and stored even accidentally, until your character is weighed down to the point of being unmovable. But the game is designed to make you feel that there is always the possibility that some magical potion, random apple, or 12 candlesticks, might just come in handy for a future encounter, a book that you might really read later, leading to a hesitancy to trash anything. In turn, every item brims with, as yet undiscovered, use-value. As Caitlin DeSlivey argues: “Objects generate social effects not just in their preservation and persistence, but in their destruction and disposal” (2006, 324). And certainly this is true when, over-encumbered deep inside a dungeon, I agonize over which items to drop, in order to move again, in order to continue to collect more—or laugh as I spray the world with cigarettes and telephones.
A decaying dog, reanimated by something that is not supposed to be there. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
For me then, junk is a way to look for when and where particular boundaries of the useful or valuable—and even the clean and functioning—are “breached” (Helmreich 2015, 187), and then reordered. Although Helmreich is speaking to scientific experimental practices and their organizing ideologies, his insight is useful for junk’s attention to those very breaches: “moments when abstractions and formalisms break, forcing reimaginations of the phenomena they would apprehend” (185). Of course, junk DNA itself has experienced this very kind of breaching—more recent scientific research demonstrating its non-coding role is actually not without usefulness (c.f. Goodier 2016)—(re)animating it for future use. And although DeSilvey is describing vibrant multispecies-animated decay within abandoned homesteads, like Helmreich, she points to junk’s transformative potential. We just have to dig through rotted wood and insect-eaten paper, or virtual backpacks and books, to find it.
Junk merges failure, trash, and decay with the processual and everyday negotiation of culturally meaningful and policed categories: garbage, scraps and waste, but also “breakdown, dissolution, and change” (Jackson 2014, 225). Although Steven J. Jackson describes the ways these last three are fundamental features of modern media and technology, an anthropology of junk collects and extends these processes into broader techniques and social practices. Junk can help us see connections criss-crossing symbolic and material breakage and disintegration. It helps us see in/visibility of the dirty and diseased, not as a property of any material or technological object alone, but as also always in coordination and collaboration with the ways they are imagined and invested—and more, always enmeshed in variously articulated forms of power.
If infrastructures like computer networks, for example, become (more) visible when broken (Star 1999), it is not their brokenness or decay in an absolute sense that reveals them, but the way their state change defies our everyday and embodied expectations—the way they push against normativity. We may be just as surprised to find things in good working order.
Metal becoming wood in “animation of other processes” (DeSilvey 2006, 324). (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Bit rot after all, has just as much to do with the made-intentionally-inoperable systems that force the decay, or really uselessness, of data (Hayes 1998), as it does with any actual mold on CD-ROMS and other corruptions of age and wear. In fact, digital information or technological and material infrastructures don’t become broken, just as they don’t become fully ever fixed either. Breaks and breaches are hardly so linear. Instead, these are “relative, continually shifting states” (Larkin 2008: 236). This view may be in contrast to Pink et al.’s suggestion to attend “to the mundane work that precedes data breakages or follows them” (2018, 3), but not to their entreaty to follow those everyday practices of maintenance and repair, and even intentional failure and forced rot. This is not simply because data and other material practices like PCR experiments may fail under given conditions or focused intentions, perhaps as a result of a momentary distraction or a faulty machine—or in the case of programming, because debugging is actually 90% of the work, as one bioinformatician told me. Indeed, software testing in practice goes beyond merely verifying functionality or fixing bugs and broken bits of code, but helps to define and make “lively” (Lupton 2016) what that software is, and can do, and can be made to do in the first place (Carlson et al. 2023). Along the way, as a generative process, testing, tinkering, and fixing have social effects (DeSilvey 2006) which are external to, but always in extension of, broken/working materials themselves (Marres and Stark 2020).
More importantly, perhaps, broken things can be used, as Brian Larkin argued in relation to Nigerian media and infrastructures, as a “conduit” to mount critiques of the social order (2008, 239)—to call attention to inconsistency and inequality, and to demand or remodulate for change. To see this resistance at work demands a collating of junk practices. As Juris Milestone wrote in his description of a 2014 American Anthropology Association panel, “What will an anthropology of maintenance and repair look like?”:
Fixing things can be both innovation and a response to the ravages of globalization—either through reuse as a counter-narrative to disposability, or resistance to the fetish of the new, or as a search for connection to a material mechanical world that is increasingly automated and remote.
Junk’s transformative potential asks us to see removal and erasure, or in Douglas’ terms “rejection,” as always coupled to these reciprocal practices: rebirth, repair, repurpose, renewal. In this way, junk shows us the way decay, even technological corruption, is less a “death” than a “continued animation of other processes” (2006, 324).
But if junk describes a socio-cultural ordering system concerned with practices of moving materials—even ideas and people—into and out of categories of value and purposefulness, it must also contend with the vital agency of other material and microscopic worlds, which just as easily unravel out or spool up regardless of human presence, intention, and desire. Laboratory mice in fact are particularly disobedient, they hardly ever behave as they are supposed to—just as cell cultures in a lab are finicky and fail to grow to expectations, and junk ammo from the Junk Jet has a 10% chance of becoming suspended in mid-air, becoming irretrievable.[6] If we repurpose sites or moments of breakdown to resist configurations of power, then materials themselves are also always resisting what they ought to do or become.[7] This is the draw of the things in which we are enmeshed, where we are always extending, observing, destroying and deleting. If junk is the possibility, under particular cultural expectations and desires, for things to be pushed or cycled across such thresholds, and also, of making and unmaking these, it also must contend with the things themselves—with what we see in a corroded mirror, looking, or not, back at us.
A woman in a corroded mirror, disappearing and extending. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Although junk may be over-bursting in its use here as a metaphor, I argue it can still usefully be used to stitch growing anthropological attention to material decay, breakage, and deviation together with tinkering, maintenance, and repair—across locations, states, practices and materialities. Granted, “manifesto” is also a too decisive word to attach to this short piece. Too sure of itself. But this post is also an attempt to challenge the understanding of what it means to be (academically) polished and complete. I use manifesto here mostly tongue-in-cheek, while still holding to the idea that any argument has to begin in small seeds, and start growing from somewhere.
My thinking about junk began years ago with Brian Larkin’s attention to breakdown (2008). More recently, I found DeSilvey (2006) by way of Pink et al. (2018); and Jackson (2014) from Sachs (2020); and Hayes (1998) from Seaver (2023). This lineage is important because I am not inventing, but building. These ideas are also bits and tears of conversations with Libuše Hannah Vepřek, Sarah Thanner and Emil Rieger, and very long ago, Juris Milestone. But everything gets filtered first through Jonathan Corliss.
This research has been supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 20K01188.
[1] PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. It is an experimental method for duplicating selected genetic material in order to make it easier to detect in secondary experiments.
[2] Thermal cycler, for anyone interested. Also, just to note, but for the purposes of this retelling, I gloss over the most detailed part in writing so simply: “add some other reagents” and later, “after the PCR ‘melt’ and the second half of the experiment.”
[3] I wrote in my protocol notes, as an (anthropological) aside to myself: “K. stressed that the amount of liquid in this case doesn’t have to be super accurate, but that this is rare in science experiments. When I tried it for the first time, I almost knocked over all the new tips and also the NaOH solution which can cause burns! Yikes~)”
[4] Inconclusiveness includes an unclear or unaccounted for band in the electrophoresis gel, which is seen in the machine’s output as an image file.
[5] The images in this post are part of the artistic work of Sarah Thanner, a multimedia artist and anthropologist who playfully and experimentally engages with trashing and untrashing in her work.
[6] Fallout Wiki, Junk Jet (Fallout 4), https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Junk_Jet_(Fallout_4)
[7] Here, I also gloss over (new) materiality studies, Actor Network Theory, etc. which have linages too long to get to properly in this small piece.
Carlson, Rebecca, Gupper, Tamara, Klein, Anja, Ojala, Mace, Thanner, Sarah and Libuše Hannah Vepřek. 2023. “Testing to Circulate: Addressing the Epistemic Gaps of Software Testing.” STS-hub.de 2023: Circulations, Aachen Germany, March 2023.
DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11: 318-338.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Goodier, John L. “Restricting Retrotransposons: A Review.” Mobile DNA 7, 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13100-016-0070-z
Hayes, Brain. 1998. “Bit Rot.” American Scientist 86(5): 410–415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/1998.5.410.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2015. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Iwata, Kentaro. 2020. “Infectious Diseases Do Not Exist.”「感染症は実在しない」あとがき. Retrived May 9, 2020, https://georgebest1969.typepad.jp/blog/2020/03/感染症は実在しないあとがき.html.
Jackson, Steven. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pp. 221-239.
Lupton, D. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Marres, N, Stark, D. 2020 “Put to the Test: For a New Sociology of Testing.” British Journal of Sociology 71: 423–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746.
Milestone, Juris. 2014. “What Will an Anthropology of Maintenance and Repair Look Like?” American Anthropological Association Meeting.
Pink, Sarah, Ruckenstein, Minna, Willim, Robert and Melisa Duque. 2018. “Broken Data: Conceptualising Data in an Emerging World.” Big Data & Society January–June: 1–13. https:// doi:10.1177/2053951717753228.
Rabinow, Paul. 1992. “Studies in the Anthropology of Reason.” Anthropology Today 8(5): 7-8.
Sachs, S. E. 2020. “The Algorithm at Work? Explanation and Repair in the Enactment of Similarity in Art Data.” Information, Communication & Society 23(11): 1689-1705. https://doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1612933.
Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391. https://doi:10.1177/ 00027649921955326.
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All 24 Russell Group universities have reviewed their academic conduct policies and guidance
UK universities have drawn up a set of guiding principles to ensure that students and staff are AI literate, as the sector struggles to adapt teaching and assessment methods to deal with the growing use of generative artificial intelligence.
Vice-chancellors at the 24 Russell Group research-intensive universities have signed up to the code. They say this will help universities to capitalise on the opportunities of AI while simultaneously protecting academic rigour and integrity in higher education.
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70% of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white, and being a legacy student makes an applicant roughly six times more likely to be admitted.
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After the death of affirmative action as (per SCOTUS) unfair preference, the complex business of legacy admits seems also to be circling the drain.
The word “legacy” covers not merely people admitted to selective schools because close relatives attended; it also can involve super-rich people donating (or likely to donate) multiple millions to buy a seat at these schools for their children. And it can have to do with talented athletes (most of them from expensive private secondary schools) admitted for their athletic rather than academic skill. It usually exhibits a mix of some of these elements.
Let’s look at a notorious case that in fact contains every one of these elements.
George Huguely, currently rotting in jail for killing his ex-girlfriend, was a legacy admit to the University of Virginia. “George III, George V’s grandfather, went to Sidwell Friends and the University of Virginia.” A friend of Huguely’s at the expensive, prestigious prep school he attended comments: “He was not a great student, but he didn’t care.” He was a great lacrosse player.
A hopeless alcoholic from a young age (Huguely’s father showed him how), Huguely boasted several booze-related arrests, including a quite serious one in Lexington, Virginia while he was a UVa student:
Officer Rebecca Moss discovered Huguely wobbling drunk into traffic near a fraternity at Washington and Lee University. She told him to find a ride home or face arrest. He began screaming obscenities and making threats. [Apparently he said “I’ll kill all you bitches.“]
“Stop resisting,” Moss said. “You’re only making matters worse.”
Moss and another female officer tried to subdue Huguely. He became “combative,” the police chief reported. Moss stunned him with a Taser, put him in a squad car, and took him to the police station.
At his court hearing a month later, Huguely said he didn’t remember much about the night and apologized. He pleaded guilty to public swearing, intoxication, and resisting arrest. He was fined $100 and given a 60-day suspended sentence.
Huguely bragged about the incident to [UVa] friends…
Some of these friends were, like Huguely, part of a drunk, entitled, obnoxious sometimes to the point of violence, rich lacrosse player culture where you don’t rat out buddies even if you know they’re really really dangerous and out of control. One assumes most of these friends laughed drunkenly along with Huguely as he detailed the latest incident in which he got away with… not murder. Not yet. But things were escalating, and some of his friends certainly knew he was threatening his ex-girlfriend and assaulting people he thought she was dating and just being a really scary violent crazy piece of shit.
It’s certainly worth asking what sort of subculture sees all of this and does nothing. It’s certainly worth asking how a non-academic, violent, total alcoholic with a criminal record was rewarded with an extremely competitive seat at one of the nation’s greatest universities. What did his prep school teachers and coaches, many of whom must have known or guessed how incredibly dangerous he was, write in their letters of recommendation about him? (Think also about poor drunk well-connected short-lived Paul Murdaugh, still a student in good standing at the University of South Carolina despite having recently killed a young woman and injured others while drunkenly at the helm of a family boat. Like Huguely, he already had a bunch of booze-related run-ins with police.
Two months after he was sprung from jail, a judge removed the only condition of his release — allowing him to travel outside the 14th Judicial Circuit, according to the news outlet.
Although he faced BUI charges, the state did not restrict him from drinking alcohol or driving a boat, the report said.
Another entitled rich kid given one free pass after another until… Well, one can’t help feeling for Paul Murdaugh. His own father murdered him.)
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“I was drinking a lot all the time, all the way from my freshman year to my senior year,” Huguely said at his trial. “I was drinking all the time. It was out of control.”
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Look. My point isn’t that legacy admits are murderers and degenerates. Most of them are pleasant well-meaning non-Ivy League material. But there’s a really anti-social pathology underlying the culture of lifelong consequence-free unearned social rewards of which some (not all) legacy admits are Exhibit A. The Varsity Blues criminal syndicate, and whatever current bogus athletics conspiracy has replaced it, is merely the crude extension of the basic legacy M.O. The socially acceptable con game of legacy admits makes the world safe for the scandal of Varsity Blues.
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And can you think of anything more morally corrosive than knowing that your corrupt parents and a corrupt institution engineered your sorry ass into a seat at Harvard? Knowing that you’re little more than a cold hard cash epiphenomenon to the institution – does that bother you at all? Does it feel like a prefiguration of your entire entitled life? Here’s a bunch of nice people getting me into Harvard; here’s a bunch of nice people showing me how to evade taxes. And so it goes.
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The tragedy of wealth-based admissions is that wealthy students are taking up seats from the poor, unconnected students who need them most. This is not a victimless crime.
… [C]ollege leaders … sell access while squatting on multibillion-dollar endowments and spending vast sums of money on palatial campus buildings, leadership compensation, and administrative bloat.
And you’re paying for it:
… If a donor earns seven figures a year and lives in California, taxpayers can wind up subsidizing more than 52 cents of every dollar used to buy his child’s way into college. Even in states with less exorbitant tax rates, taxpayers routinely pick up more than 40% of the tab. That’s because these kinds of donations are wholly tax deductible: As long as there’s no explicit quid pro quo agreement, the IRS allows parents to write off their influence-peddling donations in full.
… Offering a special admissions track to the wealthy on the taxpayer’s dime impedes equal opportunity, rewards influence peddling, and robs the public. It’s time for a change. Colleges and universities should be places of opportunity, not institutions where background or wealth determine success. Wealthy applicants should have to earn their place in a university by the same rules as everyone else.
… We should press college officials to mean what they say about opportunity and equity, and to spend less time strong-arming wealthy donors. But at a bare minimum, we should get taxpayers out of the business of subsidizing campus shakedown artists.
And when I say pathology: Harvard is currently squatting on 53 billion dollars. It has yet more from other sources. And because the government, risibly, continues to consider it a non-profit institution, it enjoys amazing tax breaks. What sort of fucked up institution is still trading its integrity for more money under these circumstances?
If you consider yourself a mobile creator and you’re not using some sort of dedicated microphone, you might be holding yourself back. We’re not judging, but your audience likely is. Audio, especially dialog, is often overlooked, but if you want true, high-quality content, you need good sound. There are many, many options for the home or office/studio, but there are a surprising amount of mobile-specific (or at least, mobile-friendly) solutions out there to elevate your on-the-go recordings be that for social, a jam session, live streaming, making movies, podcasting and beyond.
What “the best mic for your iPhone or Android” is will vary depending on the task you need it for. If you want to record a TikTok or a podcast or even a jam session, all have slightly different needs but the selection below covers most bases (and maybe even a few you didn’t think of yet) for recording high-quality sound with little more than a mobile phone.
This guide is all about recording on the go, free from the constraints of a studio or office, but also far away from luxuries like power outlets, acoustically friendly rooms and a full-size PC. As such there are two styles of microphone that really shine here: Lavalier (lapel) and shotgun. We’ll be covering a few other types, too, but between those, most tasks are covered.
We’ll also show you how you can use the USB mics you may already have with your phone and even ways to connect heavy-duty studio classics (XLR) to your humble handset, but all that will be through accessories. For now, let’s start with the classic clip mics.
The obvious benefit of a lapel mic is size. Their small profile makes them perfect for presenting to the camera with the flexibility to move around while maintaining consistent audio quality. If you’re a budding TikTok or YouTube creator it’s definitely worth having one of these in your bag.
The main trade-off, however, is that they’re only good for recording the person they’re attached to. If you have two people talking and only one is wearing the mic, you’ll only get good audio for one half of the conversation, so for multi-person recordings you’ll need a mic for each guest and a way to record them at the same time, so costs can go up quickly.
Fortunately, lapel mics have become a very competitive market with good, viable options costing as little as $14.95. For an absolute bargain with a long cord and some connectivity accessories, the Boya BY M1 is hard to argue with. But, while these budget choices are great value, if you want something that should either last longer, is more versatile or just sounds better it’s worth paying a little bit more.
Rode’s Lavalier II is a slick-looking low-profile lavalier that sounds great. At $99, it’s somewhere in the sweet spot between budget and higher-end clip-on options. It’s easy to recommend the Lavalier II just on its sound alone, but it comes with a rugged case and a good selection of accessories. For even more flexibility you can pair this with Rode’s AI Micro interface ($79) which provides easy connection to an iPhone or Android (or even PCs) and adds support for a second mic – perfect for recording podcasts or interviews.
At $60, Sennheiser’s XS (USB-C) lav mic is fairly affordable, sounds great and plugs right into your phone (or laptop) without needing an adapter. This not only makes it convenient but reduces the overall cost as you don’t need a headphone adapter for your phone. What’s more, the XS has a 2-meter long cable which gives you plenty of scope for movement or framing.
Recently there has been an explosion in mobile-friendly wireless systems but there are two we really like. The first is Rode’s Wireless GO II. Arguably the original defined this category, but the second generation improves on it with two wireless transmitters making this podcast and interview friendly. This wireless microphone is also incredibly versatile as it doubles as a standalone recorder, can be mounted in a camera cold shoe and even has its own “reporter” mic adapter. Oh, and you can make any 3.5mm mic (including the lavaliers above) wireless by plugging it into one of the receivers.
The second is the Mikme Pocket. This Austrian-designed pack is a high-end wireless lavalier microphone system designed to be particularly mobile-friendly. There’s a comprehensive app for both video and audio recording and internal storage so you won’t ever experience dropouts. It also means you can enjoy a practically infinite range. At $399 it’s a higher spend, but if high-quality audio and near-infinite range are what you need then this is the one.
So we’ve already touched on this with the AI Micro, which is an adapter of sorts. One of the first things you might bump up against when dealing with mobile audio accessories is TRRS vs TRS connectors. Simply put, 3.5mm TRS is what you might know as the age-old classic headphone connector while TRRS became common for its support for headsets and inline mics. You can easily tell them apart as TRS connectors have two black bands on them while a TRRS has three.
For you, the budding creator, it can be a bit of an annoyance as many 3.5mm lavaliers are going to be TRS and won’t work when plugged into your phone’s headphone adapter. Sometimes your lavalier might include what you need in the box, but otherwise, you’ll want to pick up a TRS to TRRS adapter like this. Of course, some smartphone-specific mics have TRRS connectors already – for those, you’ll want a cable that goes the other way should you want to use it with other devices like a DSLR.
You may be more familiar with shotgun mics when it comes to video recording. It’s the style of microphone most often found atop a DSLR or mirrorless camera, but they make great companions for other portable devices too, your cell phone included.
The benefit of a shotgun is that they tend to be highly directional, which makes them perfect for podcasts, recording instruments, foley sounds and much, much more.
For us mobile recordists, another benefit is that they tend to be light and portable, perfect for slipping into a backpack or even a laptop bag. Even better, there are some great mobile-specific options.
You shouldn’t buy a mic just because of how it looks, but the MKE 400 from Sennheiser ($200) definitely makes its rivals look wimpy. More important than aesthetics, though, is how it sounds and the MKE 400 records very cleanly without obvious coloration to the audio. What’s more, the battery-powered mic won’t steal power from your phone or camera, and with three gain levels to choose from you can boost things when needed, or avoid clipping on louder subjects. The MKE 400 also comes with both TRS and TRRS cables for compatibility with a variety of devices.
The MKE 400’s physical gain controls and high pass filter (unlike the other two below that are updated via an app) take the stress out of worrying if your audio source moves or changes volume as you can adjust that on the fly. If you’re a musician looking to record loud drums and then softer vocals on the move, for example, these tactile gain settings are a massive plus.
When we tested the VideoMic GO II we were surprised at just how good it sounded right out of the box. At $100 it rivals many desktop microphones that cost three times the price. You’ll need a companion app to change settings, otherwise this performs well across the board.
Not to be confused with the older MV88 that plugged directly into a Lightning port, the MV88+ is a mini shotgun mic made with the smartphone in mind. Often sold as a vlogging kit ($249) with a tripod and phone grip, the MV88+ has modular cables for connecting directly to Androids and iPhones.
Mobile-specific mics are great, but there’s nothing stopping you from using your phone mic or another you might already have (if it’s somewhat portable). You’ll definitely need to do a little dance with some adapters, but that’s half the fun. Below are a couple of recommendations for “regular” microphones that pair well with a phone and then the cables and adapters that you’ll need to get setup.
Arguably, there are few microphones that are could be described as "mobile-friendly" than the HypeMic from Apogee. While it looks like a regular handheld mic, it's actually deceivingly small, making it very light and portable. It also comes with cables to directly connect it to iPhones and Android handsets — no adapters needed. Don't let the small size deceive you though, the HypeMic has a big trick up its sleeve: a built-in analog compressor for professional-sounding vocals. Whether you record podcasts, vocals or instruments there's a setting on the HypeMic just for you. At $349 it's a little on the spendy side, but you get a very versatile device that's just as useful for the desktop too.
This dynamic mic is a favorite with podcasters, with many production companies using it as their standard mic to send out to remote guests thanks to its excellent quality to value performance. The Q2U features both USB and XLR connectivity making it versatile for both desktop and mobile applications, but it’s the former we’re interested in here as that’s what allows you to connect it to your phone with nothing more than a USB cable and an adapter (see below).
What’s more, the Q2U is solid enough to endure a little bit of rough and tumble, so will happily live in the bottom of your backpack ready for when you need it. Meanwhile, the handheld design is versatile enough it can turn its hand to singing/instruments, podcasts, interviews and more.
You may not be familiar with the name, but Tula snuck into our hearts with its versatile, vintage inspired debut microphone. From a mobile perspective, the Tula connects to Androids directly over USB-C or iPhones with the right USB-C to Lightning cable (more on this below) or a USB “camera kit” adapter. What makes the Tula special is that it’s also a desktop mic and portable recorder with lavalier input and 8GB of storage and even features noise cancellation – perfect for cutting down on outside background sounds. With the Tula you could theoretically have one mic for home, mobile and standalone recording.
If you already have a stash of XLR mics or really do need a studio condenser mic with phantom power then the iRig Pre 2 is a portable interface that will feed any XLR mic into your phone. It runs off two AA batteries which it uses to supply phantom power when needed and won’t drain your phone. There’s also a headphone port for monitoring, gain controls and LEDs to help prevent clipping.
Connecting USB microphones directly to phones is rarely as simple as just one cable, although that’s starting to become more common. In general, Android makes this simpler, but also, thanks to the wide range of manufacturers and software versions you can’t always guarantee things will work smoothly.
The iPhone is a whole other situation. USB microphones have a good chance of working via the USB camera kit we mentioned earlier, but that’s still inelegant sometimes. Frustratingly, some USB-C to Lightning cables will play nice with microphones, but sadly most will not – including Apple’s own. One confirmed option is this cable from Fiio or this generic alternative. These are inexpensive enough that it’s worth having a couple around if you work with audio a lot (they of course can also be used to charge your phone as a bonus).
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-mobile-microphones-for-recording-with-a-phone-154536629.html?src=rss
The best microphones for iPhones and Android
A phone surrounded by microphones that are particularly suited to recording on the go.
Remember the early days of the AI hype train, when everyone spent their time making stupid images using text prompts? If you want to recapture the nostalgic haze of, uh, late 2022, Picsart has got you covered. The popular image editor just launched an AI-powered animated GIF generator.
The major difference between earlier text-to-image platforms like DALL-E and Picsart’s new tool is animation. DALL-E is best known for making static images, whereas Picsart’s software creates animated GIFs, just like the ones you’ve been sending in group chats and social media platforms for years. Only, now you don’t have to search for your favorite It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia characters doing outlandish things. You can just make those outlandish things up. You can even make two cats arm wrestle.
Picsart is calling the tool its “most unhinged” platform yet, and it works exactly how you expect. Type a bunch of nonsense into the chat box, wait a minute or so and marvel at your “chaotic and eccentric” creation. The platform’s integrated into the regular Picsart app and is available for iOS devices, Android devices and on the web. You can download the GIF directly to your device to share with your group chat or to send anywhere else.
The images created by this platform are on the cartoony side, so don’t expect photorealism. However, that just adds to the fun. Picsart’s AI GIF generator is available right now, so let the nonsense begin. Just don’t use these tools to make the opening credits for an uber-expensive TV show based on popular comic book characters.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/animated-gif-generator-from-picsart-makes-ai-fun-again-175935532.html?src=rss
Picsart AI GIF Generator
Guy Fieri and dancing corgis popular GIFs.
The UK prison population has risen by around 74% since 1990, with 78,037 people now serving sentences. Research shows that taking part in educational activities while serving a sentence can help people cope with prison life and reduce reoffending.
There is an education department in every prison typically offering academic courses such as literacy and numeracy, and vocational courses such as joinery and bricklaying. However, numbers of people engaging in prison education are declining as it becomes increasingly undervalued and under-resourced. So, it’s vital to develop engaging educational activities in prisons.
One way to do this is to link education with family activities. Around half of the people in prison have children. Maintaining good relationships between parents and their children during a sentence can reduce reoffending and help people to reintegrate with their families upon release. It can also help children to better cope with someone close to them being in prison.
However, it is challenging to maintain family relationships because of the lack of meaningful contact between prisoners and their children. With our White Water Writers project, we believed that linking education with family activities would encourage prisoners who might not typically participate in education to get involved, and help foster better family relationships.
White Water Writers (WWW) gives groups of eight to ten people the opportunity to collaboratively plan, write and publish a full-length novel in just one week. Books go on sale online and the authors receive professionally printed copies of their novels. Originally developed in schools, WWW has enabled more than 3,000 young people to become published authors.
We decided to run the project in a prison to provide an engaging and motivating educational opportunity. We linked the work to families by inviting participants to write a novel for their children, who would then produce the illustrations for the book. Our research explored the impact WWW had on both the prisoners and their families.
Eight men from a prison in England took part, and were given four days to collaboratively write and publish a novel for their children, supported by a facilitator and prison staff.
A key principle of WWW is that no one from outside the group is involved in developing the plot, writing or editing. On the first day, each writer created their own character and, together, the group developed the plot. On the second and third days, they collaboratively wrote their novel. On the fourth day, they proofread it – and then the final day was a family day, where children visited the prison and produced the illustrations.
While the writers were initially a little daunted at the prospect of writing a novel, they worked hard to produce something their children would enjoy – the result was an exciting fantasy adventure of around 8,000 words. To understand the impact of the project, we then interviewed the writers, their families and prison staff about their experiences, as well as analysing their novel.
The book helped the children to better understand their fathers’ experiences. It had two main themes: “people not being bad” and “people changing for the better”. The villains in the book are not bad people. Rather, they experience difficult circumstances which lead to challenging emotions, and these in turn lead to bad behaviours.
However, by the end of the novel, the villains are reformed. For example, one character, who is a bear, is in prison at the start of the book but wants to change his life. The book ends with him putting his life at risk to save the world.
Many of the writers included their own children in the novel as characters. This helped them connect with their children, who enjoyed seeing themselves in the book. One participant said he wrote the plotline of his daughter becoming braver in the story to help her deal with the anxiety she was feeling about moving to a new school.
The writers said they would not have engaged with WWW if it had not been linked to their families. The family visit day was an incentive, and they enjoyed creating something tangible for their children. All the authors said they improved a range of skills including writing, typing, computer skills and “soft skills” such as teamwork.
As many had negative experiences of education and few had any formal qualifications, they did not expect to complete the novel. Their success led them to feel proud of themselves: “The fact that I can write a thousand words, I am stunned,” one said.
The project also led the men and their families to feel more connected to each other. Family members discussed feelings of pride in what the writers had achieved.
We even discovered that one of the children had dressed as her character for World Book Day at school. She told her teacher about the book, and the class then used it as their reading book. One member of prison staff said:
How that child must feel to have something positive from her daddy and to share that with her classmates. I certainly didn’t expect that, and I think it’s a massive success and has obviously had an impact.
This suggests that linking projects with families, where appropriate, may be a way to increase engagement with education and provide meaningful opportunities for contact between people in prison and their families. This will have positive results not just for those in prison, but for their families as well.
Yvonne Skipper is a Trustee for the Charity eQuality Time which runs the White Water Writers project. She has received funding from Novus Prison Education, the British Academy, EPSRC and ESRC.
Zafar Khan, the former finance director of collapsed mega-contractor Carillion, has been banned from being a company director for 11 years. It is the longest ban imposed on an executive of a listed company by the Insolvency Service (IS) in 60 years, raising the prospect of lengthy bans for seven other former directors being pursued in relation to the collapse.
Khan, 54, is a former Ernst & Young accountant who joined Carillion’s senior finance team in 2011. He was promoted to chief financial officer in August 2016, replacing the long-serving Richard Adam, though he only remained in post for nine months as the company’s financial troubles prompted a boardroom clear-out.
Carillion then collapsed in 2018, putting thousands of staff out of work and leaving debts of around £7 billion, including a pension deficit in excess of £1 billion.
The government said that Khan’s disqualification was for several reasons, including causing the company to rely on “false and misleading information” that led to a material misstatement of profits in various projects to the tune of at least £209 million. He also sanctioned a £54 million dividend payment that couldn’t be justified because it was based on financial statements that did not give a fair view of the company’s position.
Khan has yet to respond to the announcement. The fact that only his disqualification has been announced suggests that he may have reached an agreement with the IS, perhaps in exchange for a lighter punishment. The remaining directors, including former chief executives Richard Howson and Keith Cochrane, as well as Richard Adam, are due at the high court later this year to defend the IS’s disqualification actions against them.
Khan, Howson and Adam have also been fined a total of almost £1 million by the Financial Conduct Authority for issuing misleading statements to investors about Carillion’s finances. They are reportedly appealing – again, it will be interesting to see whether this still includes Khan.
Carillion was created in 1999 after being spun off from construction group Tarmac. It mainly built and operated government buildings and infrastructure, and appeared to be in good health for much of its corporate life.
It was hard to see how the company could suffer from liquidity issues, particularly when it reported a record annual dividend of £79 million as recently as 2017.
However, Carillion’s fall from grace was swift and dramatic. On January 15 2018 it was placed into compulsory liquidation by the high court, the biggest of its kind in UK legal history.
As well as the loss of jobs, this had huge ramifications for Carillion’s many ongoing building projects, including schools, hospitals and roads – not to mention a facilities management business providing, amongst other things, school meals to children.
The government’s Official Receiver was put in charge of the liquidation, but appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to help oversee the process. This has involved things like completing schools and motorways, transferring hospital jobs and numerous contracts. PwC has earned more than £50 million in fees as a result.
Meanwhile, the 27,000 members of Carillion’s defined benefit pension scheme have seen their pensions reduced, and roughly 30,000 suppliers are likely to have lost most of the billions of pounds owed to them by the company.
The collapse initially triggered investigations by the National Audit Office and by several parliamentary committees. The parliamentary findings did not mince their words, finding that the directors “misrepresented the reality of the business”.
The report described the company’s collapse as, “a story of recklessness, hubris and greed … its business model was a relentless dash for cash”.
There have been previous high-profile actions against directors. The directors of the failed MG Rover group were disqualified for between three and six years in 2011, while the IS brought an unsuccessful case against the trustee directors of the Kids Company charity in 2021.
The difference with Carillion is that the directors face longer bans, and now the former finance director of all people has accepted the punishment instead of waiting for the court hearings. It may indicate that he agrees that the evidence is sufficient to show that he behaved in an unfit manner as a director.
It looks as though the IS has stuck to its guns over Carillion and is potentially heading for a significant success in its efforts to ensure that directors of listed companies do not see themselves as immune from the consequences of poor management decisions.
It hopefully sends a signal that the government is serious about punishing corporate wrongdoing. The big question now is what happens with the rest of the directors.
John Tribe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Millions of UK mortgage borrowers could experience significant payment shocks this year. This is happening due to a steep rise in the Bank of England’s base rate over the past year to the highest level since 2008. This rate feeds through to many of the mortgage deals taken out by homeowners around the UK.
To attempt to alleviate some of the pain for homeowners that will see large spikes in their payments this year and next, major UK lenders agreed to provide limited help to those struggling with the mortgage repayments.
Among other measures, lenders that participate will agree to allow borrowers to switch to interest-only payment terms or to extend the duration of their mortgage. Borrowers will be able to return to their original deal within six months without any impact on their credit rating. Lenders have also been asked to sign up to a 12-month repossession break to provide a grace period to people at risk losing their homes due to arrears.
But while these measures will help some borrowers, they could cause unintended consequences and create further mortgage payment issues. First of all, the Bank of England’s base rate is already expected to rise to 6% by the end of 2023 and could go higher next year.
Interest-only borrowers’ repayments only include the interest charged on the loan and nothing towards the principal amount. So, after six months (and at the same level of income), they could face much higher payment shocks. If rates are still relatively high after 12 months, many households could still be at risk of losing their homes.
There is also the question of which lenders will participate in mortgage rescue plan – it is a voluntary scheme. According to the FCA, around 75% of lenders will join. Those borrowers with nonparticipating lenders would not be able to use the grace period or other measures.
Another overlooked issue in the rescue plan is that, according to my research, households across the various regions of the UK will be affected differently by the mortgage crisis. Payment shocks will be amplified for those in the areas with higher house prices and higher average loan amounts.
The table below shows the difference in the increase in repayments for an average loan amount across the UK, based on different types of mortgage product. These figures show what repayments would have been in June 2022 versus June 2023, when the Bank of England had increased rates from 1.25% (for June 2022) to 5.00% (for June 2023) – repayments will be even higher if it goes to 6%, as expected by financial markets.
Repayment increases by region, June 2022 vs. June 2023:
The monthly mortgage repayments of households in London on standard variable rates (SVRs – the rate borrowers tend to automatically switch to after a fixed or tracker deal period ends) increased by £1,398 and by £1,142 for those on three-year fixed rate mortgages, for example. In the East Midlands, in comparison, average SVR repayments have increased by £587 and by £429 for three-year fixed rates since last year.
Taking current base rate changes into account, borrowers making interest-only mortgage payments will be even more exposed to future payment shocks when only repaying the interest on their principal loan amount. These borrowers will not have been chipping away at the equity part of their loans, like those on repayment mortgages, keeping their loan larger than it would have been if they hadn’t taken advantage of the rescue measure.
For the average principal loan amount of £250,000, for example, monthly interest-only repayments on the average UK SVR would be £587, compared to a total interest payment of £323 for a repayment mortgage (plus an additional amount towards paying off the borrowed amount, called the equity).
This is because when repayment borrowers pay interest plus equity, the total interest charged on a mortgage falls as the remaining debt decreases. So while repayment borrowers pay less interest as their equity builds and the principal debt falls, they still have to make higher payments overall.
So, for a three-year fixed rate deal, average total interest payments would be £497 per month for the six months for interest-only borrowers, compared to a similar repayment deal for which total interest payments would be £226. This means the exposure to overpayment when choosing to pay interest-only for the six-month rescue period would be:
Three-year fixed rate 6x(£587-£323) = £1,584
SVR: 6x(£497-£226) = £1,626
That is, choosing to pay interest only for six months could add at least £1,500 to a borrower’s bill over the life of the average home loan versus what they would pay if they remained on a repayment mortgage.
Regional differences will also come into play here when considering exposure to payment shocks and excessive mortgage payments. This is because households in regions with higher house prices borrow larger loans and so repay more over the life of the loan.
So, both base rate changes, but also the negative impacts of the mortgage rescue initiative will disproportionally affect households in areas with higher houses prices, such as London or East Anglia.
There is no straightforward solution to this situation, particularly since mortgage rates operate at the national level. A light-touch intervention, such as temporary caps on lenders’ profit margins could help. For example, if lenders were not allowed to make more than 2 percentage points above the bank base rate for certain mortgage products.
But the government also needs to consider the significant differences in payment shock levels across the country, particularly as it is likely to face a general election by January 2025, if not before. This is important when evaluating the robustness of the economy to recession, which already has an uneven effect on different locations and households.
Alla Koblyakova works as the Property Investment and Finance Course Leader at the Nottingham Trent University
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