Gambling with Namibia’s Future

Originally published in the Informanté newspaper on Thursday, 7 April, 2016.

As I read through President Geingob’s State of the Nation address, I remained in awe at what our president had accomplished in such a short time, and at how well thought-out the Harambee Prosperity Plan seemed to be. I remained in awe until I stumbled across a paragraph that made me stare slack-jawed at the speech in confusion, as it seemed to be completely at odds with the stated objective of the Harambee Prosperity Plan. 

I refer, of course, to the following: “…and investigate the establishment of a State Lottery. The objective of the State Lottery will be to supplement State revenue and ring-fence income for poverty eradication and social developmental programmes. Revenue collected through the State Lottery will therefore, like the Solidarity Wealth Tax, be strictly directed to poverty eradication activities under the supervision of a Special Tax Committee.” 

After the initial jaw dropping moment, I realised that the President was merely investigating the concept, much my relief. Lotteries aren’t a new concept. The first mentions in history of lotteries were from the Han dynasty in China, about 205 BCE, referencing a game of chance called “the drawing of the wood” or as we now know it, drawling lots – a lottery. The modern concept of a state-run lottery comes from England and France during the 1500’s. These games were originally sold via tickets, with the draw to be in a few years’ time – essentially granting the government an interest-free loan. Over time, however, the payout ratio was reduced from 100% in order to fund other projects from the proceeds – in South Africa, for example, only 50% is paid out in prizes - and a lottery is more palatable to the citizenry than a tax. After all, it is voluntary. Or is it?

Lotteries prey on several of the deficiencies of the human psyche, most obviously our inability to properly comprehend probability. In layman’s terms, it is often stated that lotteries are a tax on those suffering from innumeracy – mathematical illiteracy. For example, in South Africa, the odds to win the lottery is about 1 in 14 million each week. With a population of 52 million, someone could win every week! Why not you? Because the odds show that if you play every week, for 50 years, the chance you’ll win the jackpot is 0.02%. So out of 10 000 people who buy tickets every week for 50 years, only 2 will win. Thus, when you consider just how counter-intuitive the results of probability can be, you realise that it can even flummox mathematicians. But I contend lotteries are worse than a tax on innumeracy – it is a tax on hope.

Lotteries have been around long enough that statistical studies could be done on lottery players, and the results are anything but a prosperity plan. In the United States, it was found that lottery sales are the highest in the poorer areas of the states. Uneducated players made up a disproportionate share of the players. Since lotteries are supposed to be a game, people should play for fun, but 25% of the poor players were playing for the money! Lotteries were more popular among blue collar workers and least popular amongst professionals, and tickets were more likely to be bought if a person was out of work than if a person was employed or retired. In fact, unemployment correlated with higher lottery ticket sales. Only on rare, ‘Super’ jackpots were the rich found to swoop in to buy tickets.

Lotteries, in fact, are a regressive tax on the poor – i.e. the poor bear the brunt of this tax, the exact opposite of what the Harambee Prosperity Plan intends. When you think about it, it makes sense. A N$10 ticket is 10% of the N$ 100 a poverty stricken person might have to live on, whereas it’s a tenth of a percent of the salary of someone who earns N$ 10 000 per month. For the poor, it might seem like the only way out, and they might forego buying that bread their starving children so desperately needs, just for the chance to be lifted out of poverty.

Lotteries are also a form of gambling – a game with financial rewards. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, back in 1930, showed how conditioning with unpredictable rewards for completing repetitive tasks affects animals, when he showed how rats pushing a button to receive food repeated this behaviour even more intensely when the food was delivered irregularly in his operant conditioning chamber. BF Skinner’s work was shown to be effective as well in humans, and his work is extensively used in the reward structures in online video games. Unfortunately, it is also evident in our love for slot machines which work in a similar manner. And, self-evidently, in lotteries, which has us repeating a ritual of buying tickets, with small prizes to be won, and repeating it while waiting for the big win. This is more commonly known as gambling addiction.

But perhaps the tax on the poor does not concern you, and you consider the rising spectre of gambling addiction among the Namibian populace a non-issue, because, after all, the payout will raise some lucky individuals out of poverty. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the effect among lottery winners. Statistics show that 70% of lottery winners end up bankrupt after 5 years. After all, the poor have had to rely on the help from others to survive for many years – those friends and family are now going to demand that that help be repaid in kind. When you consider the extended families that Namibians have, this can quickly become overwhelming. 

And who among us have had to manage that amount of money? For a person whose average monetary transactions were a maximum of N$ 500 in a single transaction, the ability to distinguish between transactions of N$ 20 000 and N$ 200 000 is difficult. Who of you can distinguish between a home valued at N$5 million and one valued at N$ 7 million? If you’ve never had to practise financial discipline, it is going to be difficult to learn it while you feel like you’re on top of the world. And even then, only 55% of lottery winners report being happier two years after their winnings than before. 

The state lottery hides an even worse consequence, though. And that is the message it sends to the people of Namibia. A message that proclaims that you should not work hard to lift yourself from poverty, just pay your lottery tax and the government will provide. Don’t try to save and start your own business, just pay your savings to the state lottery and you’ll win big. Don’t be entrepreneurial and try to do something else, simply do the same thing over and over again, while expecting different results. Some would say that is the definition of insanity. 

A plan that involves taxing the poor while addicting them to poverty and sapping their savings does not sound like a Harambee Prosperity Plan to me. It sounds like a Harambee Poverty Plan. Perhaps the government has a brilliant plan that circumvents the issues I’ve raised above, then it could be considered, but as it stands now, let us hope that the government investigation realises that this is an ill-advised idea, and instead focuses on the rest of the Harambee Prosperity Plan, based on the excellent State of the Nation address.

When All Is Burnt And Done

Originally published in the Informanté newspaper on Thursday, 31 March, 2016.

It’s a refrain we hear all too often these days. “I’m too busy.” It’s hard to find a person who doesn’t think she’s busy. Busyness seems to have become an intrinsic feature of modern life. Unfortunately, it frequently seems that it does not necessarily mean ‘happy’ or ‘fulfilled’ but rather ‘frayed’ and ‘overloaded.’ And that can be a problem…

People nowadays have a lot going on in their lives, but we imagine ourselves to be more efficient. With email, smartphones, laptops and WhatsApp, you can be busy all the time. Working all the time, even when you’re not supposed to. Answering an email while microwaving food. Watching television while working on a spreadsheet. Answering a call from work while watching your child play sport.

It all adds up, and eventually, we all end up at the same place. Those who’ve experienced it, describe themselves as physically and emotionally exhausted. They’re chronically tired, and get sick easily. Suddenly, these patient, caring people become cynical and short-tempered, usually with a healthy dose of paranoia to boot. They experience burn-out.

Those who experience burn-out are treated with derision. “Oh, look like you couldn’t take it. Shape up, or ship out!” This sounds similar to how those with depression were usually treated, being told to “lighten up,” and there may be a reason for that. As it turns out, evidence suggests that burn-out presents with the same symptoms you’d find in the clinically depressed. 

Burnout was first identified by Herbert Freudenberger in 1974, but it was Christina Maslach that built the first working model of burnout with her Maslach Burnout Inventory. In it, she identified 6 problems that can cause burnout: working too much, working in an unfair environment, working without emotional support, working without agency or control, working for values we don’t support and of course, working for insufficient reward, reward being cash, prestige or recognition.

In effect, she identified that burnout occurs due to a dissonance between effort, expectation and reward, and not necessarily stress, as is often thought. It is quite often experienced by perfectionists – after all, their expectations are of perfection, and when that success doesn’t follow, they’ll redouble their efforts. And when reality doesn’t comply, the result is a spectacular burnout.

The data backs her up. While we may associate a burnout as a mid-life crisis scenario, in fact it seems that the young are often those who experience it more often – the young are much more idealistic, with older workers having more perspective concomitant with their greater experience. Married people are also less prone to burnouts, as they have a better support system at home. And as it turns out, having children further reduces the chance of burnout – after all, it’s much easier to invest emotionally and physically in your job if you have nothing to invest in at home. Still, the added time pressure of managing a family and a career does affect an individual as well.

This comes back via our faster and more interconnected lives as well – we feel as if we must be active and productive all the time. No one likes spending energy and seeing little back, and thus the more we speed up, the greater our frustrations become when we have to slow down. In 2005, Glenn Wilson from King’s College at London university conducted a study comparing the performance of individuals doing IQ tests with and without constant interruptions, and found that interruptions via emails and phone calls caused people to perform worse on the test than those doing it while on marijuana. 

Still, it’s useless to try and examine the cause without also examining the environment. While it can ultimately be the individual’s responsibility for pushing themselves to the limit and experiencing burn-out, it rarely happens in isolation. They would be much less likely to do so if they did not think they were required to. Luckily more and more companies are seeing the value of trying to get the best out of their employees, instead of the most. 

Here at Trustco, for example, almost half the company usually has a Friday afternoon off. The Top 40 best performing employees have the additional benefit of flexitime, allowing them some flexibility around their schedules. The bonus and incentive structures allow all employees to receive equity bonuses, giving every employee a measure of agency. Even the open plan floor structure allows you to receive emotional support from colleagues, should you not have any other. While this does not solve the problem completely, it greatly alleviates it.

Burn-out, then, is a “crisis in self-efficacy,” as Michael Leiter, a research fellow of Maslach, so eloquently stated. You feel like you’re struggling way too much for too little reward. The Protestant work ethic that seems embedded in our culture emphasises hard work, but we must be careful not to fall afoul of the Hard Work fallacy. After all, not every outcome is proportional to the effort put in. Failure is not always the result of not putting in enough effort. 

It’s good to dream big, I feel. But not to expect big. After all, expecting big is often called entitlement. In Silicon Valley, the motto is ‘Fail Fast, Fail Often.’ But often, it’s “Fail Better, Fail Forward.” If your expectations aren’t met by the effort you put in, maybe it’s not the amount of effort that needs to change. Maybe you need to find something else to change.

Victor Hess’ Triumph

Originally published in the Informanté newspaper on Thursday, 24 March, 2016. 

Back in 1912, Victor Francis Hess took thee electrometers into the atmosphere by balloon, 5km up. He discovered that ionization (the process by which atoms gain or lose an electromagnetic charge) occurred four times faster than at ground level. And because he did this during a near total eclipse, he ruled out the sun at a potential source. “The results of my observation are best explained by the assumption that a radiation of very great penetrating power enters our atmosphere from above," he said. Hess had discovered cosmic rays, and received a Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1936.

Cosmic rays, as it was later discovered, were high-energy particles that originated outside of our Solar System. These cosmic rays are of great interest due to the damage they inflict not only on living organisms outside the atmosphere, but also on electronics in satellites, other spacecraft, and even high altitude flights. They consist mostly of single subatomic particles, mainly protons, that move at such speeds that the highest energy particles detected have the equivalent energy of a 90km/h cricket ball. 

Most, of course, are not imbued with such energy, with the majority having the energy of about 0.3 Giga electronvolts (GeV), or about one three thousandth the energy of a flying mosquito. The scientific community speculated for years as to the source of cosmic rays, with the general consensus being that they originated from supernovae, the immense explosion that occurs during the final stage of a supermassive stars’ collapse. 

 But cosmic rays had been detected with energies of at least a few PeV (Peta electronvolts, or about a thousand times the energy of a flying mosquito), and that implied our galaxy had to have a source capable of generating them. And none of the existing sources showed indications that they were the source. But in the Khomas Highland, near the Gamsberg, a system of Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes was watching the skies. The High Energy Stereoscopic System (or HESS, named after Victor Hess) was designed to investigate cosmic gamma rays. 

Normal cosmic rays, as I’ve noted above, is generally subatomic particles, like protons and electrons. But protons and electrons are charged particles, meaning their path can be deflected by electromagnetic fields. This makes it all but useless to try and determine their origin without knowing the location of all electromagnetic fields in its path – a nigh impossible task. 

But space is filled with vast gas clouds in certain regions, left over from stellar formation, and when high energy cosmic rays hit these gas clouds, it can result in a high energy gamma ray being released. And gamma rays are different. A gamma ray is nothing other than a high-energy photon, the same particle that normal light consists of. Like light, gamma rays are not affected by electromagnetic fields, only by gravitational fields, and since this is a high energy gamma ray, it can also penetrate matter to a much greater degree.

Cosmic gamma rays can thus be traced to their source much easier. And due to their ability to penetrate matter, they are not as obscured by the aforementioned gas clouds in space as visible light is. But this also poses a problem when trying to detect cosmic gamma rays, as you’d need a large collecting area to detect them.

That is where the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope comes in. A photon, being a particle of light, naturally moves at the speed of light, having no mass. But Einstein’s discovery of the lightspeed constant refers to the speed of light in a vacuum – and our atmosphere is most empathically not a vacuum. And when a high-energy photon passes near an atom’s nucleus, something strange happens. The photon’s energy is converted into matter via Einstein’s equation E=mc^2, and an electron and a positron is formed. This is known as pair production. 

Given the high energy of the photon, these two new particles are moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And since they’re now charged particles, they get deflected by other particles, slowing them, and producing Bremsstrahlung, or braking radiation – which produces another photon, also with high energy! As you might imagine, this sets off quite a chain reaction in the atmosphere of charged particles moving at high speed – this shower of charged particles is known as an Extensive Air Shower.

These high energy particles, as I’ve mentioned, move at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And as I’ve pointed out before, the lightspeed constant is the speed of light in a vacuum. In other media, the speed of light is slower than in a vacuum. It is thus possible for particles to move faster than the local speed of light – and that is where the final piece of the puzzle lies. 

When particles move faster than the local speed of light, they emit what is called Cherenkov radiation. Underwater nuclear reactors frequently emit the faint blue glow of Cherenkov radiation, since the speed of light in water is only three-quarters of its speed in a vacuum. Thus, when a particle shower occurs in the atmosphere due to a high energy gamma ray, a flash of Cherenkov radiation is produced, for about 5 to 20 billionths of a second. 

And that is what the five telescopes at HESS is looking for. It’s four 12m mirrors and one 28m mirror collecting the light from the flashes of Cherenkov radiation, indicating that a high-energy gamma ray has been detected. Focused on Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, they detected high energy cosmic gamma rays being emitted from its surrounding gas clouds. Based on their energy signatures, they concluded that Saggitarius A* was a source of PeV cosmic rays.

And thus, more than a hundred years later, a team on more than 170 scientists from 32 scientific institutions and 12 different countries could finally provide at least part of the answer that Victor Hess was undoubtedly also searching for, using instruments named for him, half a world away. The universe is an open book, if you just know where to look.

Scientia Potentia Est

Originally published in the Informanté newspaper on Thursday, 17 March, 2016.

Knowledge is power. The earliest use of this phrase is from Imam Ali, the first imam of Shia Islam, who said (translated from Arabic), “Knowledge is power and it can command obedience. A man of knowledge during his lifetime can make people obey and follow him and he is praised and venerated after his death. Remember that knowledge is a ruler and wealth is its subject.”

Here in the 21^st century we can’t deny its truth. Our industrialized society has been shaped by our knowledge of the natural world, or, as we call it now, science. Scientific discoveries have propelled us forward at breakneck pace, but with it as well, brought undesirable side effects of said discoveries. And too often, these side effects are blamed on ‘science’ and ‘scientists’ by people who don’t understand that while science can create problems, ignorance will not solve them. 

Science, as it were, came about from human curiosity. Pre-civilized man was more likely to survive if he kept a sharp eye on his surroundings, for food, and threats, and thus the curious survived. A desire to know was cultivated in early humans, and what was not known, was constructed as myths that could explain the unknown. 

It was the Greeks who first conceived of a universe as a machine, with limitations and rules. They assumed nature was fair, and that, if studied, would keep following the same rules they have discovered. This bore fruit, as Thales of Melitus was able to successfully predict an eclipse in 585 BCE. And so the Greeks developed rigorous methods of reasoning to discover truths about nature. 

Aristotle of Stagira first summarized these rules. Firstly, collect observations about an aspect of nature. Secondly, organize these observations in a fashion to see if you can find a pattern. Thirdly, derive from these observations a principle that would explain the observations. The Greeks called this method of studying nature ‘philosophia’ (philosophy), which means ‘love of knowledge.’

The Greeks mastered geometry by developing two techniques derived from this method: abstraction and generalization. It was known, for example, that you could get a right angle if you divided a rope into twelve equal pieces, and made a triangle in which the three sides were three parts, four parts and five parts long respectively. The right angle would form on the corner of the three and four part sides. By abstraction, they removed all parts of the problem not necessary to describe the problem, and visualized it as pure lines. Then they applied themselves to the problem in general – what property could be found that would be the same for all right-angled triangles? 

They discovered that the square of the two sides equals the square of the hypotenuse, and in 525 BCE Pythagoras of Samos proved this is true for all right-angled triangles. By 300 BCE, Euclid had compiled all of their known theorems and proofs and arranged them in order, so each could be proved with ones worked out previously. Eventually they all worked back to statements so simple is was accepted as obvious and true – these were called axioms. From these axioms, all others followed, and Euclidean geometry is still used today.

Working out knowledge as a consequence of these axioms (called deduction) became all the rage due to success of geometry, but it introduced two critical errors in scientific reasoning. Firstly, deduction became the only respectable way of attaining knowledge – they were loath to look at nature instead of abstract principles. Secondly, knowledge involved with everyday life was looked down upon. As a result, they developed theorems about movement and space that were never tested, based on ‘self-evident’ axioms that turned out to be not true.

For nearly 2000 years afterwards, whenever a question about nature arose, Aristotle or Euclid was quoted, and accepted as fact, until a man named Galileo proved them wrong. Testing Aristotle’s theory that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, he supposedly climbed to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped a heavy and light sphere simultaneously. The sound of them hitting the ground at the same time shattered Aristotelian physics. While this tale is a fabrication, it was typical of his experimental methods – he was the first to conduct experiments and measure the results systemically. 

Galileo’s revolution elevated induction above deduction as the proven scientific method. Instead of building on axioms to determine generalizations, induction starts with observations, and builds generalizations from them. In addition, no generalization can stand unless repeatedly tested by newer experiments – a test of further induction. 

Isaac Newton further cemented induction as the basis of science, when he, based on the observations of Galileo, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, figured out not only the elliptical orbits of planets, but also through induction arrived not only at his three simple laws of motion but also his law of universal gravitation. 

This then is the cornerstone of modern science. No generalization or theorem can be considered completely and absolutely valid – even if a billion experiments confirm it, a single test that is inconsistent forces it to be modified to match the observations recorded. There is no certainty that the next test or observation will conform to the theorem or generalization – science makes no claim to ultimate truths not backed by observation. Even Newton’s law of universal gravitation had to make way for Einstein’s general theory of relativity, when his law did not match the observation of the perihelion precession of Mercury, but general relativity did. Modern science, therefore, is based around what can be observed, and what can be tested. If it cannot be observed, science cannot test it, and if a generalization cannot be tested, it is not a scientific theorem. 

During the time of Newton, though, it was still possible for an educated man to have knowledge of all scientific endeavours. But during the past two centuries, scientific knowledge has exploded, and become so specialized that only those in their respective fields can understand each other. These days, scientists have almost come to be regarded as wizards, and are feared instead of admired. 

But this need not be the case. Modern science has many science communicators that explain the work done in a field as simply as possible – if only people would take the time to listen. After all, to understand and appreciate the work done in science does not require you to have a complete understanding of it – no one feels that you must be a novelist to read a book, or a composer to appreciate music. It is thus possible to appreciate the work done in science without being a scientist!

After all, how can you feel at home in the modern world, with its problems and the possible solutions to those problems, without having a basic understanding of where science is taking us? Understanding science gives a great satisfaction in knowing how the natural world works – it fulfils that basic curiosity that drives the human mind. There is no better way to appreciate the achievements and future potential of the human race than to see what has been achieved already.