Escape To The Countryside

Escape To The Countryside

Since I can remember, the concept
of a weekend away at a friend’s house
in the country has had immense
charm—the romanticism of arriving
by train, passing rolling hills and
trickling brooks to eventually be
collected and ensconced in a private
estate, sheltered from the realities
of the outside world. Along the way, this was reinforced by fi lms such as Brideshead Revisited and Peter’s Friends but the reality of a stately escape was not so easy to realise. The irony of it all was that I actually lived in the country so a weekend away to the country seemeda little pointless.

Escaping the madness of the city has
historically been seen as de rigueur. But with
the availability of cheap travel, visiting the
country fell out of fashion; however, luckily for
an old romantic, this seems to be changing and
country sojourns are once again trending.
If you want to truly experience the traditional
country escape, you need a friend with a stately
home—think Downton Abbey. Nowadays, most
of these places are unviable to run as homes and
are fast getting converted into cookie-cutter
hotels with a veneer of history to make them
respectable. So discovering a place that doesn’t
feel like a hotel but more like a friend’s retreat is
nigh on impossible, I thought.

Then to my delight, we discovered the muchtalked-about Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons
outside Oxford this summer. Exiting the
motorway for Oxford City Centre always feels
slightly anticlimactic as you pass row upon row
of unassuming and uninspiring houses. As you
get closer to Oxford, the architecture begins to
hint at the cornucopia of styles that stamp their
personality onto the city. The mishmash of
periods is what gives Oxford its charm.
The most glorious elements of Oxford are
about Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons
outside Oxford this summer. Exiting the
motorway for Oxford City Centre always feels
slightly anticlimactic as you pass row upon row
of unassuming and uninspiring houses. As you
get closer to Oxford, the architecture begins to
hint at the cornucopia of styles that stamp their
personality onto the city. The mishmash of
periods is what gives Oxford its charm.

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Land Of Pain And Promise

Land Of Pain And Promise

The day I moved back to Mississippi after living in New York for 15 years, I drove into a full-fledged Confederate funeral procession. On the corner of North Lamar Boulevard and Price Street in Oxford, I got out of my car and stood under magnolia, maple, and live oak trees that shaded throngs of sweaty white men dressed up like the soldiers of Lee's army. Some marched with guns holstered, hoisting a battle flag that took up two lanes of the road.

Near the front of the procession, behind a gray hearse, was the brown face of Paula Tingle Hervey, wife of Anthony Hervey, the author of a book called Why I Wave the Confederate Flag, Written by a Black Man, who'd been killed in a car crash two weeks earlier. The whole pitiful spectacle, fueled by a longing for a time when neither the Herveys nor I would have been free, was the kind of demonstration that had prompted me to run away from the Deep South 22 years ago. And yet it was also part of why, 22 years later, I decided to run back home.

After leaving Mississippi for college in Ohio, graduate school in Indiana, and ultimately a professorship in New York, I wasn't sure how much home I'd find when I returned to the Deep South — nor how much home the Deep South might find in me. Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, I spent summers and far more weekends than I wanted to with my grandmother in the small poultry town of Forest. Located 45 miles east of Jackson and 55 miles west of the Alabama state line, Forest was what demographers call a minority-majority community. Most of its citizenry was black, but most of the political, economic, and social power rested with the town's white residents.

When Grandmama was young, most of our family, along with more than 3 million other black Americans from the Deep South, moved to cities in the Midwest in search of decent jobs and less terrorizing forms of oppression. Rather than join the Great Migration, Grandmama chose to remain, working first as a domestic and later as a buttonhole slicer at a chicken-processing plant, which meant it was her job to cut open the bellies and pull out the guts. Even though she was legally forbidden to drive down certain roads, to enter certain stores, to use the bathroom of her choice, or to vote freely until she was middle-aged, she insisted that the region rightfully belonged to black Americans, too. "We worked too hard on this land to run to Milwaukee," she told me. "Some of us believed, and still believe, this land will one day be free."

As a child growing up in the Deep South, I found nothing speculative or surreal in asserting that all who worked the land should have equal access to quality food and housing, equal access to transformative education, and equal protection under the law. We descendants of those who refused to run saw corpses hanging, but to us, they looked like angels flying. We watched the gray tears of the hanging moss trees dripping over the land. When we think of those trees, even more than the gray of the moss we think of the dark, bleeding-red brown of those trees' creased bark. That same brown saturates the soil, birthing cotton, soybeans, collard greens, and purple hull peas in Greenwood, Mississippi. It coats our hollowed manufacturing plants in Memphis, Tennessee. It peeks out of the open doorways of haunted plantations, mansions, projects, trailers, and shacks in Little Rock, Arkansas. It lines the cracks of the hastily built Confederate monuments commemorating bruising parts of yesterday we've yet to reckon in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Charleston, South Carolina. We see, smell, and feel the residue of that dark, bleeding-red brown in our region's music and literature, our classrooms and country stores, our churches.

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Body, Heal Thyself

Body, Heal Thyself

Ever since a Savanna dweller first slapped mud on a wound to ward off flies—and infection—our frail human bodies have relied on creative intervention to survive. Science has since come up with all manner of potions and procedures (from aspirin to organ transplants to bionic knees) to keep us from falling to pieces. But it turns out the body might be its own best pharmacy; each one of us possesses internal stores of life-extending remediation. Scientists are now learning to access those once locked and guarded inner warehouses to nudge us toward durability.

Witness the frontier of using the body to fix itself. From supercharging our immune systems to bolstering protective microbes in our guts to tweaking our genes, medical research is now enhancing our own defenses and selfrepair mechanisms. And not just in terms of immediate threats but future ones too—in some cases protecting generations down the line.

Nowhere is this more evident than in   the booming immunotherapy field for cancer treatment, in which geneticists soup up the body’s own defense system to fight off life-threatening illness. In August, the FDA approved one of the most advanced techniques, Kymriah, making it the first gene therapy to reach the market. With it, doctors can extract T cells from a patient, train the cells in a petri dish to fight cancer, then re-inject them into the body where they go to work as world-class tumor bullies. The newly armed immune system could remain a lifelong powerhouse, preventing that cancer from coming back.

But wielding immunotherapies is still tricky. For now these tools can defeat certain cancers but not others, cure some patients but not all. This year alone, researchers undertook an astonishing 1,000 or so clinical trials to address these and other challenges. “The reason a thousand trials are going on is because they’re mixing and matching everything they can get hold of,” says Jeff Bluestone, an immunologist at the University of California at San Francisco and head of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. These trials will eventually identify more-specific targets. “We’ll see a much more scientific approach to learning from people who failed treatment.”

This year also saw the culmination of the Human Microbiome Project, a decade-long effort by 53 research groups to assemble something like an Audubon guide of all the microbes inhabiting our mucosa. This newfound knowledge about all the bacteria, yeasts, parasites, and viruses that live in our guts, on our skin, in our mouths and nasal passages, and in our urogenital tracts is helping researchers devise fixes for things that once took years of medication.

With that knowledge, scientists are trying to go one step further. They are attempting to reprogram microorganisms to release natural antibiotics, anti-inflammatory molecules, and protective proteins. For example, lab researchers have engineered a benign E. coli strain to detect specific lipids found in a form of bacteria called P. aeruginosa, a drug-resistant pathogen that can infect humans and cause pneumonia. The harmless E. coli finds and kills these invaders. In concept, such “smart bacteria” could remain in a    person’s body for life, detecting and preventing disease.

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Popular Science Magazine November & December 2017 USA Edition

Popular Science Magazine November & December 2017 USA Edition

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Visitor Management in Tourism Destinations

Visitor Management in Tourism Destinations

This book considers VM as a component of destination management at all levels of a destination and involving a wide range of stakeholders. It aims to demonstrate current knowledge on VM and to provide insights into conceptual issues rather than providing merely descriptive case studies. This book is primarily aimed at postgraduate students and researchers as it seeks to provide specialist perspectives on the state of the art of important aspects of and issues within VM.

The introduction and foundation chapters in Part I provide the context for the book as well as the broader topic of VM. Part II considers critical concepts and influential factors in VM while Part III illustrates current issues. Where case studies are included these are research-based and they contribute to our overall understanding of core issues in VM. Part IV of the book covers the state of the art in guiding and interpretation, followed by concluding thoughts and an overview of current issues and future research directions.

The fact that VM is seen as part of overall destination management rather than a management task in its own right may arguably account for the relative lack of VM-specific research. Chapter 2 systematically explores this relationship by investigating and comparing the goals, policies and implementation activities associated with destination and visitor management. By bridging the two streams of literature, this chapter thus lays an important foundation for the appreciation of VM research at the different levels of a destination in this book. In providing the foundation for the consideration of visitor experiences, Chapter 3 has a similar role in this book. Arguing that visitor attractions comprise objects, people and places that are perceived differently by the various target markets, the authors emphasize the challenging nature of visitor attraction management. Several conceptual frameworks relating to visitor experience management are examined with a view to identifying beneficial factors. Chapter 4 is the final chapter in the foundation section. It examines factors that are simultaneously part of the external and internal business environments, namely social and political aspects of the host culture, destination and community. Demonstrating how social and political conditions influence the selection of VM interventions, it addresses factors that, to date, have been largely neglected in VM research. Furthermore, Chapter 4 is one of the relatively few studies of tourism management in the Middle East – Iran specifically – published in the English language.

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Backing The Blockchain

Backing The Blockchain

When the price doubled in price from mid-July to early September, Bitcoin could no longer be ignored. Regarded as variously a scam, a joke or at best a curiosity since its creation in 2009, Bitcoin now occupies the thoughts of government regulators and mainstream investors alike. But is it just another pump - and- dump get rich scheme, or are Bitcoin’s true champions - those who call it nothing less than the future of money - about to be proven right?

The solicitor begins reading  from the old, yellowed card. “Autumn,” he says. “Firelight. Baker. Lounge.  Density.”  He pauses and glances as his paralegal - the younger man is keeping up, typing in each word. “Hasty. Awful. Caramel. Accident...” The solicitor finishes reading  a list of 24 words, and then  looks expectantly at the paralegal.

The younger man taps a few more keys, clicks the mouse, stares intently at the screen... and then nods.

The small group of people in the solicitor’s office exhales in relief. Tension drains from the room, and everyone starts hugging or shaking hands, congratulating each other.

No, they didn’t just activate a sleeper agent with a code phrase. This was the retrieval of a Bitcoin wallet, left by the estate of the group’s mutual grandfather. With this key, granddad’s balance of Bitcoins can now be used, split up amongst the family, and of course some of it handed to the solicitor as legal fees.

Could this kind of thing become common, 30 or 40 years from now, as Bitcoin’s first wave of “hodlers” - speculative investors who buy coins just to store them - begins to die off ? Perhaps. If the events of August and September 2017 are anything to go by, Bitcoin is poised to become a big part of everyone’s lives.

License to Email Money
Bit coin is a strange thing. Traditional economists first dismissed it as “made up money”, then insisted it was just another fad like tulip bulbs or the South Sea Company or the Dot com  boom . Then, they  said government regulators would shut it down as an “illegal currency”. And finally, the finance industry just started tracking it, like any other stock, security or commodity.

Life moves fast in the sphere of so-called cryptocurrencies. As I wrote the first draft of this article, Bitcoin had just retreated from its all-time-high of US$5000 set on 1st September, to a still astonishing US$4190.

Then  as we were preparing  to send the magazine to the printer, a wave of fear, uncertainty and doubt swept the market, intiating  what some saw as an overdue  dip down to $3800. So I had to make some edits.

Trying to keep curren though, is pointless. The price will change again before I finish this paragraph, and many times before I reach the end of this article. Bitcoin trades 24/7, globally, and the exchanges never rest.

The recent  price  retre at  first  began because on a Friday afternoon, rumours began circulating  that China would ban the trading of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in exchanges. Debate raged over the next 72 hours about whether this was, inevitably, “fake news”, or whether China was only going to ban trade of non-Bitcoin  crypto, or whether exchanges were going to be shut down while person-to-person trading remained legal.

Or whether indeed this was just what pop- psychologists call FUD - fear uncertainty and doubt - spread deliberately by China, to cause the price of Bitcoin to fall, thus allowing the Chinese government to buy cheap coins.

On the Monday,  JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon saw his chance, and gave an interview in which he described Bitcoin as “a fraud”. Others piled on, calling it “a classic pyramid scheme”. The market’s indecision deepened. The price fell, but hardly  crashed, partly because of a pervasive belief that Dimon’s comments, along with Chinese uncertainty, created an opportunity for “cheap coins.”

Around and around the theories and counter-theories went, while on the sidelines, an alternative to Bitcoin - called Bitcoin Cash and distinguishable from Bitcoin only to the heavily invested - maintained a campaign of subtle harassment, both psychological and perhaps  even technological in the form of crafty mining practices..

Ah yes, mining. Because beyond internet forums and social media threads, large scale “mining” operations continue to chew through megawatts of electricity keeping  Bitcoin functioning, influencing its price, and directing (or at least trying to direct) future development of the technology.

Money has never been so fun.

Satoshi Who?
It’s all a far cry from the original vision of Bitcoin’s... well, creator  isn’t quite the right word.  Instigator?  Progenitor?  Whatever - Bitcoin first met the world in November 2008 with the publication of a whitepaper on a cryptography mailing list. Signed by the obviously pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, it described how proof- of-work systems, originally designed to combat  email spam, could be adapted to create a digital peer-to- peer currency, free of a central bank.

In January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto “mined the genesis block”, as the cypherpunks say, launching the Bitcoin network. An open-source Bitcoin client was made available for anyone to download, and the first Bitcoins were issued.

From there, the network grew organically, spreading around the world. Geeks in university dorms slept with their PCs roaring as they “mined” for “free” Bitcoins. For most of 2009, the system worked as little more than an exercise in crypto-wonkery, and as a working example of a blockchain.

You Blockheads!
Blockchains are distributed databases. Every computer running a blockchain client - in this case, Bitcoin - has a copy of the blockchain. Of course, clever coders can get into their copy of the blockchain and mess with database, giving themselves 10,000 Bitcoins, or whatever.

So how does the system know the blockchain is “true”? By consensus. As computers mine for Bitcoin, they create blocks of data. These blocks are stacked on top of the existing blocks. The chain grows longer and longer.
When you want to send or receive Bitcoins, the system checks the blockchain for validity. Which of the potentially many versions is the true one? Quite simply, the longest one.

The idea is that the overwhelming majority of honest miners keep the blockchain growing too fast for any single malicious actor to replace it with a doctored version.

So if a bunch  of hackers  created a fake blockchain that assigns 100,000 of the world’s finite supply of Bitcoins to their own “private keys” (thus giving them ownership of the coin), and tried to copy it over the “real” blockchain, they’d have a problem.

By the time their fake blockchain was ready, the real one would have grown longer, and so the system would reject their shorter,  fake version. This is one half of what makes Bitcoin plausible as real money. The other half is its finite supply.

Inflated Opinion
Critics of state-issued currency call it “fiat”, as in, it’s created by decree rather than accurately reflecting the amount of work being done by an economic  system. They say the problem with fiat is that governments can just order the printing of another billion dollars. While this can keep a struggling economy afloat, it’s just kicking the can down the road. Someone has to answer for all that magic money, at some point.

The extent to which you agree with this reflects your view of economics.

Gold, by contrast, has a finite supply. It needs to be dug out of the ground, cleaned up, melted into bullion, whatever. Its scarcity is part of why everyone agrees it’s valuable. The actual price of gold, to the last dollar, is set by the market.

Bitcoin, like fiat currency, was created “out of thin air”. But like gold, it can only be created in a certain way, and it has a finite supply.

Satoshi Nakamoto designed Bitcoin so that there would only ever be 21 million Bitcoins issued,  ever. New coins are created when miners do compute  work on a block, which confirms transactions on the network.

Their reward for doing this mining - which the system needs to allow Bitcoins to be “spent” - is a small fee from each transaction and, in certain conditions, the issuing of new Bitcoins. When  the Bitcoin network  first started up, the reward for mining a new block was 50 Bitcoins (now worth $250,000, give or take). Every four years though, the reward halves. Right now, the block reward is 12.5 Bitcoins, and based on the amount of computing power being dedicated to mining, the reward will next halve in June 2020.

The difficulty of creating  a block on the Bitcoin blockchain is determined by the speed at which new blocks are being created. The system constantly adjusts so it takes roughly 10 minutes to create a new block.