Links - 14th January 2020 (1)

Alipay launches international e-wallet, giving foreigners access to mobile payment platform in first for China - "Without a Chinese bank account and a local mobile phone line, foreigners have found it difficult, if not impossible, to find any smartphone app to pay for online purchases in China. That hurdle will be now removed under a pioneering effort by Alipay.Ant Financial Services Group, which operates one of China’s two dominant e-payment platforms, will give foreign visitors to the mainland access to its mobile payment platform from Tuesday, according to a statement. It will allow visitors up to 90 days’ usage of its smartphone application without requiring a local bank account or mobile phone number, it added... the 90-day prepaid card can be reloaded using their international debit or credit cards. The minimum top-up is 100 yuan, with the balance capped at 2,000 yuan. Users can top up “multiple times” and Alipay has set an undisclosed but “reasonable” ceiling, it said. Alipay competes with Tencent Holdings’ WeChat Pay for dominance in China’s cashless economy. Both operators have more than 90 per cent penetration rate among internet users, according to a 2018 report on China’s third-party mobile payments market by research firm Ipsos. Alipay, together with its local e-wallet partners across Asia, serves more than 1.2 billion users on its platform"

Dinner with the Drug Reps : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘These drug reps are fairly attractive. They were nice guys in their early 20s, probably when they were drug reps. And one of them told us how he was trying to get a physician to come and attend an information seminar on a medication that he was promoting. And she was reluctant to do it. And then finally he persuaded her to do it by agreeing to escort her to one of her ballroom dance classes, which I thought was strange... this physician had flat out asked, probably a much younger, male pharmaceutical representative to basically take her out on a date. And if he did that, then she would listen to his spiel, and maybe prescribe his medication.'…
'The device reps were really, that was very disturbing because their involvement in actual patient care. I mean, the fact that we had a device rep that was selling gynecological devices, and he was in operating rooms, with surgeons operating on women's reproductive organs, unbeknownst probably to the patient.'"

Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell - Wikipedia - "Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, shortened W.I.T.C.H., was the name of several related but independent feminist groups active in the United States as part of the women's liberation movement during the late 1960s... The group's inaugural action took place on Halloween 1968, as WITCH members dressed as witches and marched down Wall Street in order to place a "hex" on New York's financial district... Morgan stated that the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined sharply the next day"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Letters From an Astrophysicist - "[Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson] ‘You were the first African American to run the planetarium in New York. People write to you about that. And I was struck that when one parent wrote to you and suggested you were a role model for their child, you said, well, I don't want to be a role model because of my skin color.’
‘I have unorthodox views of role models, I think the concept is overrated. And had I required a role model, I would have never been an astrophysicist. That would have meant that I, growing up in the Bronx, New York, would have needed another black person who grew up in the Bronx or in an inner city, who then came up and became an astrophysicist for me to then become an astrophysicist. Well, that in the 60s was unrealistic. And had I required a role model I would have never been an astrophysicist. So instead, I assembled my role models a la carte. So I found people who did struggle in ways that I saw my struggles but didn't necessarily become an astrophysicist. I found people who were great educators. And that was a different person from the scientist who had such command of cosmology and the universe and planets in space. Staple it all together. And that's how I did it. And skin color is a very small part of that. You don't want to limit yourself in any way when you have ambitions.’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, John Le Carre's new spy novel - "‘People instinctively and properly, feel an enormous relief about what happened in the Second World War. And at the D Day commemorations for example, people were profoundly moved by the stories of men who had suffered on the beaches and thought about those who didn't come back. How do you avoid that very natural and deeply felt commitment turning into the thing that you don't like?’
‘I think it's already turned into things I don't like. I mean, I saw, for instance, the film Dunkirk. And I thought it was consciously or otherwise an offensive piece of propaganda. It excluded for instance, all the last guards who went across in the boat and it pretended that the small boats rescued everybody from Dunkirk. Didn't, the Royal Navy did. And so on. It was itself a piece of reconstructed nostalgia of something that didn't quite happen that way. The rest is something I can hardly bear. The wallowing in 39, 45 experience, we’re back to the Blitz. For heaven's sake, how long ago was that? You know, I just remember the Blitz, I'm 88. And it's somehow the notion that we were all behind it all the time. That we won single handed. Who remembered watching all those D Day celebrations that 30 million Russians died, that the Russians got to Berlin before we did. And that there was a second front, which coincided with D day in Russia, launched by the Russians, with connivance, with the Western allies, which was an enormously successful and absorbed a huge amount of, of Nazi troops.'"
Presumably John le Carré's books are 100% accurate and do not make any concessions for the flow of the story or dramatic effect, and are not problematic at all

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "Shareholder democracy as it was originally created in 1702, assumed that the end investor was the primary regulator of companies. And of course over the last few hundred years with the intermediation, the end investor can't really see what they own anymore. People should use their voice and their vote and encourage their fund managers to do that for them. Definitely...
‘Where does all our fish come from, the fish that we buy in supermarkets?’
‘Well, we have something that I term the supply paradox: that we import most of what we eat, and we export most of what we catch… the species that we traditionally eat: the so-called white fish species, cod, haddock and so on, have always come from places like Iceland, Norway, and so on. People may remember the cod wars. That was all about our access to fish in waters outside our own waters and outside EU waters. And in fact for the case of cod, we actually consume in the UK somewhere between two and three times the total available catch of cod in EU waters.’
‘So what about the fish that we catch here then? If it's not being eaten domestically, where is it going?’
‘Well, here's the irony. That is being exported and mainly to Europe. So roughly 80% of what we catch gets exported, and that mainly goes to Europe. The reason for that is that it's mainly species which are not habitually consumed by people in the UK, things like mackerel, herring, various types of shellfish, for which there isn't a great demand here, but there is a bigger demand in Europe.’"

Historian James Walvin On Slave Revolts | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘The relationship between religion and slavery is a complicated one. When I was younger, I used to think that religion acted as a kind of force for pacification, you know, that slaves were encouraged to be, to adopt the white man's religion because this would keep them in their place. But I think that's really quite wrong now. What to my mind has become clear is that the rise of Christianity, of certain kinds of Christianity, certain kinds of dissent, and nonconformity, gives slaves the organization and the language to actually resist slavery. The language of the Bible, the Old Testament, crossing the Jordan, freedom, the promised land, Heaven, salvation, all of these images, all of those images speak not just to the slaves theologically but to the world here and now. Religion, Christianity gives slaves an alternative to the world of the plantation. And when you have black preachers emerging, you then have leaders emerging. Black preachers who are very powerful charismatic men and women, but men mainly. People that spring from the slave communities and who are listened to and followed by slaves, congregations, large groups of people meeting away from a plantation. What you're looking at is an alternative to the world of plantations.’
‘And what did slave owners think about this missionary zeal?’
‘It varies. In the British Caribbean, they're not keen on it. The British Caribbean planters resist the coming of Christianity in a way that is not true in Brazil initially, and is not true actually in large parts of the American South. But the idea there is that if planters and slave owners can encourage slaves to listen to their master and render unto Caesar what is Caesar, then this will actually encourage them to be pacific, to be obedient, etc. The difficulty is once you make people literate and once you give people the Bible, once you give them the message and once you give them preachers, there's no way of knowing which way that will go. And whilst it may seem, on the one hand, a good idea to help keep them in their place, it can actually turn against you.’"

Secret listeners during WW2 | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "[On interrogating Nazi soldiers] ‘The type of methods that the British employed because they weren't just relying on interrogation were they?’
‘They weren't. No, in fact, sometimes the interrogations are sort of phony and I love this because you get this real life and colour emerging in this story. And the prisoners we know from the transcripts that survive in the National Archives. That the prisoners thought we were stupid and incompetent because we didn't know how to interrogate. But of course, that was part of the whole deception. After interrogation the prisoner go back to his room, obviously, with his cellmate and he would boast to his cellmate what he hadn't told the interrogators. And what they didn't realize, of course, were that there were hidden microphones in the light fittings and the fireplaces.'"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Down on the farm: Suicide, stress and farmers - "Australia, a major global agricultural producer. More than half of the country's land is used for farming. And around 300,000 people work in the sector. Of those around 70% of men, as statistics show that these male farmers are significantly more likely to take their own lives and people in the general population and men who live in rural areas but don't farm...
Some farms in Australia are so big, they're the size of a small country"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Ken Hom: My life in five dishes - "‘When you're in school, you learn very, very fast, because children can taunt you, make fun of you. Some kids said to me, go back to where you came from. Wow.’
‘Where did you feel you came from? Did you feel like an American?’
‘Well, I didn't know what being American was because I didn't speak English. And obviously, I felt a sort of a hair in the soup. I felt out of place. But, you know, when you're young, you can adjust really quickly. You'd be surprised how fast you learn. I always had the pleasure of bringing lunch that my mom made. It was a sort of a Chinese meal that she stir fried, and she put on top of rice in a thermos. And Chicago was very cold in the winter. And everybody had all these cold sandwiches and I would open my thermos and all this warm, you know, cooked home cooked food would waffle through the rest of the classroom.’
‘And this is something that brought you closer together with the other kids. Is there something that they thought smelt nice too?’
‘What was interesting, I was doing a thriving business of getting favors. They being nice to me, I would trade them, you know. Except I didn't like their sandwiches.’
‘But an entrepreneur right from the start then’...
‘We had very little meat because meat was the most expensive. We would eat a lot of fish. Because we're talking about the 50s when fish was very cheap’...
‘It was interesting doing my first series, that instead of a stir fry dish or wok dish, the producer and I decided to do Peking duck. It was probably China's most famous dish. So we decide to launch the first program with it, it was a very dicey gamble. Because either people be switched off of it or-’
‘Because they were squeamish about eating a duck?’
‘Yes, about cooking it, etc. Because the real Peking duck, how it's done, I couldn't do it on screen, where I would have the duck with the head and the neck and the feet and everything. And there’d be a cut in the neck. And I would take the duck and literally blow it up with a tire pump. Not to say you can't do that on BBC. So I discovered that actually, I could cut that step out and it’d be fine. What you do with the duck is give it a bath. And so what does that mean? Oh my gosh, you’re giving a duck a bath. And it would be a combination of honey because the Chinese use malt sugar, lemon for some citrusy flavor, with hot water and soy sauce and you would bathe the duck in this hot mixture, then you would dry the duck in front of a fan so that the skin can dry, so that when it roast, the skin will actually separate from the fat. So you will have crispy skin. And then you know of course you roast it and it's so that's something that the British knew how to do. The upshot of the whole thing was, there was a run on ducks all over the supermarkets. And it caused this sensation. And also for the first time it dawn upon me the power of television.’
‘What was it like to feel so popular?’
‘It was very odd because I, because I didn't live in the UK. So every time I would come back in the UK, people from the security at the airport, you know, would say: you got a wok in there?’"

'The devil's excrement': How did oil become so important? - "Drake had been hoping to find "rock oil", a brownish unrefined "crude" oil that sometimes bubbled near the surface of western Pennsylvania. He planned to refine it into kerosene, for lamps - a substitute for increasingly expensive whale oil.There would also be less useful by-products, such as gasoline, but if he couldn't find a buyer for that he could always pour it away... Some countries did well. Saudi Arabia is one of the richest on the planet, thanks to its large oil reserves.  Its state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, is worth more than Apple or Google or Amazon... oil has so far stubbornly resisted giving way to batteries. This is because machines that move around need to carry their own source of power with them - the lighter the better.  A kilogram of petrol stores as much energy as 60kg of batteries, and has the convenient property of disappearing after use. Empty batteries, alas, are just as heavy as full ones... There was a time when it seemed as though oil might simply start to run out - "peak oil" was the phrase - pushing prices ever higher, and giving us the impetus to move to a clean, renewable economy.In fact, oil is being discovered far more quickly than it is being consumed.This is partly thanks to the rapid growth of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", a controversial process in which water, sand and chemicals are pumped underground under high pressure to release oil and gas...  the Permian Basin - home of the US fracking industry - already produces more oil than the 14 members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) group, apart from Saudi Arabia and Iraq."