3quarksdaily

The DRC: Volcanoes, rebel attacks and tense elections all in one day

3QD friend Edward B. Rackley in his blog, Across the Divide:

What other country can boast such diverse forms of crippling instability, all occuring simultaneously? If the Bemba fanatics in Kinshasa dont lynch you for speaking Swahili and supporting Kabila, Nkunda's men around Goma will gladly terminate you on suspicion of 'oppressing Tutsis'. And don't go seeking refuge in the wilds around Goma, as you're sure to get cooked by fresh lava flows from Mt. Nyamuragira, which erupted last night just outside of town.

Official election results were announced last night by Supreme Court officials in Kinshasa. They spoke under heavy armed guard from their temporary digs in the Ministry of the Interior, following last week's incendiary ravaging of the Supreme Court building by rabid Bemba supporters. Never has the thirst for lawlessness been more accurately expressed. Dont care for rule of law? Just burn down the Supreme Court.

In any other country, tanks would have flooded the streets in retaliation, and martial law immediately declared. In Kinshasa, police forces stood agape for a few reflective moments before the ravenous crowd of assailants, and promptly fled. UN peacekeepers arrived after the fact. The national army did not respond.

More here.

Shahzia Sikander, Global Artist

Saleem H. Ali in Pakistan's Daily Times:

Every year, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation provides a generous award of US$500,000 each “to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits”. The MacArthur fellows are free to use the funds as they please over five years without any ‘strings attached’. Some might pay off a mortgage, while others invest in a scholarship or finance a sabbatical. The recipients range in their expertise from neuroscience to carpentry, and are selected through a rather opaque but rigorous nomination and review process conducted by the foundation under utmost secrecy. Among the twenty-five recipients this year is an artist of Pakistani lineage, Shahzia Sikander, who was recognised for “merging the traditional South Asian art of miniature painting with contemporary forms and styles to create visually compelling, resonant works on multiple scales and in a dazzling array of media”.

Traditionally, visual art has been a culturally reductive form of human expression, whereby communities, tribes, cities and countries have defined their identity. We have been quick to label art as ‘eastern or western’, ‘indigenous or foreign’, ‘Christian or Islamic’, and so the list goes on as galleries define their areas of specialty. However, artists such as Shahzia Sikander are transcending such categorisations and resent being exoticised as simply Asian or Pakistani.

More here.

Sam Harris/Dennis Prager debate

From Jewcy:

Earlier this year, Newsweek religion columnist Marc Gellman confessed that atheists had lately befuddled him: “What I simply do not understand is why they are often so angry,” Gellman lamented. “I just don’t get it.”

Why are atheists so angry? Sam Harris and Dennis Prager inaugurate Jewcy’s “Big Question” series by arguing this very question. In the Big Question, passionate thinkers will debate the weightiest, most contentious issues of the day via e-mail.

Author of the thundering anti-theist polemics The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris may just be the Thomas Paine of an emerging movement to wrench religion out of American life. Prager is a nationally syndicated talk radio host who trumpets the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

More here.  [Thanks to Beajerry of Cosmic Watercooler.]

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About

From thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com:

Nothing keeps a relationship on its toes so much as lively debate. Fortunate, then, that my girlfriend and I agree on absolutely nothing. At all.

Combine utter, polar disagreement on everything, ever, with the fact that I am a text-book Only Child, and she is a violent psychopath, and we're warming up. Then factor in my being English while she is German, which not only makes each one of us personally and absolutely responsible for the history, and the social and cultural mores of our respective countries, but also opens up a whole field of sub-arguments grounded in grammatical and semantic disputes and, well, just try saying anything and walking away.

Examples? Okey-dokey. We have argued about:

• The way one should cut a Kiwi Fruit in half (along its length or across the middle).
• Leaving the kitchen door open (three times a day that one, minimum).
• The best way to hang up washing.
• Those little toothpaste speckles you make when you brush your teeth in front of the mirror.
• I eat two-fingered Kit-Kats like I'd eat any other chocolate bars of that size, i.e., without feeling the need to snap them into two individual fingers first. Margret accused me of doing this, 'deliberately to annoy her'.
• Which way - the distances were identical - to drive round a circular bypass (this resulted in her kicking me in the head from the back seat as I drove along).
• Which type of iron to buy (price wasn't an issue, it was the principle, damnit).
• Margret enters the room. The television is showing Baywatch. Margret says, 'Uh-huh, you're watching Baywatch again.' I say, 'I'm not watching, it's just on.' Repeat. For the duration of the programme.
• She wants to paint the living room yellow. I have not the words.

More more here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Is a little economics a dangerous thing?

Christopher Hayes in In These Times:

Allen Sanderson, 62, has been teaching the intro macro and micro courses at the university for the last 18 years and though he initially appears somewhat grave and understated, it is quickly apparent that he is a master of technique. His lectures skip along, propelled by a series of wry, contrarian quips, each punctuated with a visual rimshot: a slight pause and a thrust jaw. “When you hear, ‘The economics department at U. of C.,’ one’s free association is ‘pro-business, greedy bastards,’” says Sanderson (pause, jaw thrust) in the first lecture. “I tend to think that’s not the case. Greedy bastards we may be, but we’re not pro-business. Republicans tend to be very pro-business. It’s a genetic defect of Republicans. Democrats tend to be anti-business, another genetic defect. We are not anti-business; we are not pro-business. We are pro-choice in the ultimate sense of pro-market. Based on empirical work, macro and micro solutions are probably better worked out by private markets than government intervention.”

His second lecture begins with a thought experiment. Noting that there are only 26 spots left in the class for the 52 students who would still like to enroll, he asks, “How should we figure out who gets to go into the class?” The students—eager, studious and serious—shoot their hands up and offer a variety of ideas: Seniority? First-come, first-serve? Ask prospective students to write an essay? It takes about a minute for a confident young man to give the answer Sanderson’s looking for: “auction by price.”

More here.  [Thanks to David Giles.]

Uncrewed aerial vehicles: no pilot, no problem?

Paul Marks in New Scientist:

The promise is fantastic: new generations of remote-controlled aircraft could soon be flying in civilian airspace, performing all sorts of useful tasks. They could monitor flood defences, keep criminal suspects under surveillance, give firefighters a bird's-eye view of blazes, search for people lost at sea, or provide wireless networks from on high.

The reality is that a lack of radio frequencies to control the planes and serious concerns over their safety are going to keep them grounded for years to come.

Surprisingly, given the commercial hopes it has for civil unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the aviation industry has failed to obtain the radio frequencies it needs to control them - and it will be 2011 before it can even begin to lobby for space on the radio spectrum. What's more, none of the world's aviation authorities will allow civil UAVs to fly in their airspace without a reliable system for avoiding other aircraft - and the industry has not yet even begun developing such a system. Experts say this could take up to seven years.

More here.

Republicans give a bigger share of their incomes to charity

Ben Gose in the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

In Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (Basic Books), Arthur C. Brooks finds that religious conservatives are far more charitable than secular liberals, and that those who support the idea that government should redistribute income are among the least likely to dig into their own wallets to help others.

Some of his findings have been touched on elsewhere by other scholars, but Mr. Brooks, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University, breaks new ground in amassing information from 15 sets of data in a slim 184-page book (not including the appendix) that he proudly describes as "a polemic."

"If liberals persist in their antipathy to religion," Mr. Brooks writes, "the Democrats will become not only the party of secularism, but also the party of uncharity."

More here.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known

Babara Mink at the Light in Winter Festival in Ithaca, NY:

Our 2007 festival features "connections" between us and the world we live in: music and art, engineering and sound, the smallest components of matter and the visible world, physics and movement, our actions and their effect on our planet, the brain and the senses, and animal whispers and film sound.

Long-time Ithaca resident Carl Sagan once said: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." During the Festival weekend, you will get to embrace the excitement of discovery and celebrate the connections between science and the arts. Join us for an entertaining and educational winter festival that will inspire your own curiosity and creativity.

Among the many and varied program events:

Warped Passages
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m., Statler Auditorium, Cornell University campus
Sponsored by Sprague and Janowsky, Accountants and the Cornell Department of Physics
Presenters Lisa Randall & Stephen Andrew Taylor take us on an incredible journey inside the world of quantum physics, where particles too small to imagine violate our expectations. Randall is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Harvard and an expert in string theory, a topic she explores in her book, Warped Passages. Taylor is a professor of composition at the University of Illinois who says, "I was inspired to compose Seven Microworlds by learning about string theory...In my piece, the electronics are intended to act as a bridge between the 'real world' of the flute and guitar and these hidden microworlds that permeate us all." With Wendy Mehne and Pablo Cohen.

More information about the festival here.

Freud's Will to Power

From The New York Sun:

Legend has it that Freud, although educated in the philosophies of his day, studiously avoided the work of Nietzsche to preserve the originality of his ideas against external influence. Nietzsche's analysis of the human psyche, how values were supposedly projections of people's unspoken jealousies and fears, ran dangerously close to Freud's idea (still a work in progress at the end of the 19th century) that the roots of conscious behavior lay in unconscious desires.

But after reading Dr. Peter Kramer's outstanding new biography of Freud, one wonders if Freud feared something else, not influence but self-knowledge, for Dr. Kramer's Freud is practically the living embodiment of Nietzsche's will to power. It's not simply that Freud was incredibly ambitious. (At age four, after soiling a chair, he reassured his mother that he would grow up to be a great man and buy her another.) Rather, it was Freud's determination to systematize the world, to bring order to chaos, and to impose his theory of life on life itself — a determination so intense that one of Freud's colleagues called it a "psychical need."

More here.

Forensic Traces of War

From Lens Culture:

Simon Norfolk is a very talented driven young photographer who is pursuing one of life’s big questions with intensity and focused intention. He is studying war, and its effects on many things: the physical shape of our cities and natural environments, social memory, the psychology of societies, and more.

He is examining genocide; imperialism; the interconnectedness of war, land and military space; and how wars are being fought at the same time with supercomputers, satellites, outdated weapons and equipment, people on the ground, intercepted communications, and manipulated and manipulating media.

More here.

KILLING HABEAS CORPUS

Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker:

Since the Middle Ages, habeas corpus—“You should have the body”—has been the principal means in Anglo-American jurisprudence by which prisoners can challenge their incarceration. In habeas-corpus proceedings, the government is required to bring a prisoner—the body—before a judge and provide a legal rationale for his continued imprisonment. The concept was so well established at the time of the founding of the American Republic that the framers of the Constitution allowed suspensions of the right only under narrow circumstances. Article I, Section 9, states, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” Such suspensions have been rare in American history. The most recent occasion was in 1871, when President Ulysses S. Grant sent federal troops to South Carolina to stop attacks by the Ku Klux Klan against newly emancipated black citizens. This fall, however, Congress passed, and President Bush signed, a new law banning the four hundred and thirty detainees held at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, and other enemy combatants, from filing writs of habeas corpus.

More here.

Possessed: Parasite Video and Powerpoint

Carl Zimmer at his blog, The Loom:

Well, the talk at Cornell last week went very well. Thanks to everyone who came. If you want to hear me wax rhapsodic about parasite manipulations (and explain how scientists study their evolution), you're in luck. Cornell has put the video of the talk online. The image is pretty small on the screen, so I decided to post the slide show on my web site here. I suggest opening two screens and advancing the slides as the talk progresses.

At first the sound is a little scratchy on the video and the light balance takes a while to get properly adjusted. But don't give up--it evens out. You may also hear a baby gurgling from time to time.

Near the end, when I talk about cuckoo birds as parasites, I refer to their host in one of the pictures as a cowbird. I should have said a reed warbler.

And if you are curious to find out more, check out my book, Parasite Rex.

Update: Apparently the video doesn't work for some readers. I am at a loss.

A tantalizing theory of consciousness

John Clark in Bookslut:

Can you define “consciousness"? Most of us understand the word in context and can use it properly in a sentence. But asked to define it, we are suddenly rendered mute or at best unintelligible. It’s a word that is both vague (cannot be precisely measured) and ambiguous (having multiple meanings). No wonder scientists, philosophers and religious scholars have debated the source, meaning and nature of consciousness for all of recorded history. The argument continues, but a fascinating new book, Second Nature, Brain Science and Human Knowledge may bring us one step closer to resolution.

Nobel laureate Dr. Gerald M. Edelman offers a tantalizing theory of consciousness aimed at satisfying both the scientist and philosopher alike, but also appealing to the reader, like me, who is neither. There isn’t much here for the fundamentalist though. By naming his theory Neural Darwinism, and invoking evolution throughout, I suspect believers in the literal truth of religious texts will summarily reject the book before they get through the preface. Deeper into the book, Edelman does cleverly use the word GOD as an acronym for “Generator of Diversity.” Who can argue with that?

The title, Second Nature, is intended to distinguish human nature from nature in general. It calls “…attention to the fact that our thoughts often float free of our realistic descriptions of observed nature.” Edelman aims to communicate his proposed theory of consciousness without resorting to complex technical detail.  Even so, it is not for the faint of heart in terms of vocabulary.

More here.

Global Health into 2030

In PLoS Medicine, Colin Mathers and Dejan Loncar's projections of global mortality and disease through 2030.

We project that life expectancy will increase around the world for all three scenarios, fewer children younger than 5 y will die (a 50% decline under the baseline scenario), and the proportion of people dying from non-communicable diseases will increase (from 59% in 2002 to 69% in 2030 under the baseline scenario). Although deaths from infectious diseases will decrease overall, HIV/AIDS deaths will continue to increase; the exact magnitude of the increase will depend to a limited extent on how many people have access to antiretroviral drugs and much more on whether there are increased prevention efforts. Although a projected 6.5 million people will die from HIV/AIDS under the 2030 baseline projection, an even larger number will die from disease attributable to tobacco smoking (8.3 million). By 2030, the three leading causes of burden of disease will be HIV/AIDS, depression, and ischaemic heart disease in the baseline and pessimistic scenarios. Road traffic accidents are the fourth leading cause in the baseline scenario, and the third leading cause ahead of ischaemic heart disease in the optimistic scenario.

These updated projections of mortality and burden of disease have been prepared using a similar methodology to that of the original GBD study, but with some changes described above and with updated inputs and an updated base set of estimates for 2002. We have incorporated a number of methodological improvements and changes. These include carrying out the projections at country rather than regional level, use of separate regression equations for low-income countries, incorporation of information from death registration datasets on recent observed trends for selected causes, and calibration of the regression equations through a comparison of back-projections with observed child mortality trends from 1990 to 2002.

The Imperial Impulse of the Puritans

In the Globalist, Robert Kagan looks at Puritan culture and American expansionism:

The picture of Puritan America as a pious Greta Garbo, wanting only to be left alone in her self-contained world, is misleading.For one thing, Winthrop’s Puritans were not isolationists.

They were global revolutionaries. They escaped persecution in the Old World to establish the ideal religious commonwealth in America, their “new Jerusalem.” But unlike the biblical Jews, they looked forward to the day, they hoped not far off, when they might return to a reformed Egypt.

Far from seeking permanent separation from the Old World, the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness” aimed to establish a base from which to launch a counteroffensive across the Atlantic.

Their special covenant with God was not tied to the soil of the North American continent. America was not the Puritans’ promised land, but a temporary refuge. God had “peopled New England in order that the reformation of England and Scotland may be hastened.”

The Massachusetts Bay colonists neither sought isolation from the Old World nor considered themselves isolated. The Puritan leaders did not even believe they were establishing a “new” world distinct from the old. In their minds New England and Old England were the same world, spiritually if not geographically.

A 2,000 Year Old Computer

In The New York Times:

A computer in antiquity would seem to be an anachronism, like Athena ordering takeout on her cellphone.

But a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world’s first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. A team of British, Greek and American researchers was able to decipher many inscriptions and reconstruct the gear functions, revealing, they said, “an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period.”

The researchers, led by Tony Freeth and Mike G. Edmunds, both of the University of Cardiff, Wales, are reporting the results of their study in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

They said their findings showed that the inscriptions related to lunar-solar motions and the gears were a mechanical representation of the irregularities of the Moon’s orbital course across the sky, as theorized by the astronomer Hipparchos. They established the date of the mechanism at 150-100 B.C.

Mahfouz’s grave, Arab liberalism’s deathbed

"The Arab world's passage from progressive secularism to conservative religiosity in the last fifty years is illuminated by the work of Egypt’s greatest writer."

Tarek Osman in openDemocracy.net:

The death on 30 August 2006 of the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz - the sole Arab writer to receive the Nobel prize in literature - was marked around the world, and by many of those unable to read a word of his work in its original language. This universal moment, however, was primarily an Egyptian and Arab one, and for more even than the loss of a great writer. For Naguib Mahfouz's death is also a symbol of the demise of Arab liberalism. It is a century's story, and the "Dostoyevsky of Cairo" was the one whose books embodied it.

A century ago, the west was not worryingly eyeing the Arab world, with a fear of suicide-bombers and plane hijackers. It was colonising the Arab world - for a number of reasons: the strategic location, the Suez canal, securing trade routes, access to the Indian subcontinent, protection of minorities, exploitation of economic resources, building empires, civilising the savage Saracens.

In resisting the colonists, the Arabs were broadly divided into two camps: the rejectionists and the integrationists.

The rejectionists were predominately Islamists and Salafis: the group that saw the Arab world's humiliation and defeat as a consequence of its abandonment of the righteous path prescribed in the Qu'ran and the Prophet Mohammed's sunna.

The integrationists, on the other side of the intellectual spectrum, saw the Arabs' defeat as a consequence of their lagging behind in all aspects of modern thinking; they saw a dire need for the integration of western modernity into the traditional Arabic/Islamic culture. As one notable integrationist - Taha Hussein, the legendary Egyptian education minister in the early 20th century - put it: "it's the enlightenment".

More here.

Trained bees sniff out bombs

From Cosmos Magazine:

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA, said they trained honeybees to stick out their proboscis - the tube they use to feed on nectar - when they smell explosives in anything from cars and roadside bombs to belts similar to those used by suicide bombers.

"Scientists have long marveled at the honey bee's phenomenal sense of smell, which rivals that of dogs," said Tim Haarmann, who led the research, dubbed the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project. "But previous attempts to harness and understand this ability were scientifically unproven. With more knowledge, our team thought we could make use of this ability."

Using Pavlovian training techniques in which bees were exposed to the odour of explosives followed by a sugar water reward, researchers said they had trained bees to recognise substances ranging from dynamite and C-4 plastic explosives to the Howitzer propellant grains used in improvised explosive devices in Iraq.

More here.

Ask a Nobel Laureate

From Scientific American:

The Nobel Prize is the highest award in science. Its recipients include nearly every member of the pantheon of secular gods we revere--from Albert Einstein to Marie Curie, along with more recent notables such as James Watson and Francis Crick.

Every December, the current year's crop of new science Laureates travel to Stockholm to receive their Prizes. While they are there, Nobelprize.org, t he official website of the Nobel Foundation, interviews them for the archives. This year, Nobelprize.org is offering visitors to Scientific American.com the chance to pose questions to the Laureates.

More here.

Does everyone smell different?

From Nature:

There are many good reasons to believe that we all have our own unique smell. Dogs, for example — as pets or police sniffers — seem to be able to distinguish individuals by their smell. And the mother-baby bond is cemented by their own distinctive odours. Now a large and systematic study led by Dustin Penn from the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology in Vienna, Austria, has provided stronger support for the notion that your smell might distinguish you from others — maybe even as much as your face. The researchers further suggest that profiles of individual odours may also fall into two groups according to gender — men more commonly have some smelly compounds, women more commonly others.

The researchers took samples of armpit sweat, urine and spit from 197 adults. Each subject was sampled five times over a ten-week collecting period. They extracted thousands of volatile chemicals from the samples — the type of compound most likely to have an odour — and identified them by chromatography and mass spectrometry. The team found many more different volatile chemicals in sweat than in urine or saliva, it reports in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. This could be because humans have a reason to be able to distinguish themselves by general body odour, more than by marking territory as many other animals do.

More here.

Getting Development Right

In Foreign Affairs, Nancy Birdsall, Dani Rodrik, and Arvind Subramanian on economic devlopment:

The contrasting experiences of eastern Asia, China, and India suggest that the secret of poverty-reducing growth lies in creating business opportunities for domestic investors, including the poor, through institutional innovations that are tailored to local political and institutional realities. Ignoring these realities carries the risk that pro-poor policies, even when they are part of apparently sound and well-intentioned IMF and World Bank programs, will be captured by local elites.

Wealthy nations and international development organizations thus should not operate as if the right policies and institutional arrangements are the same across time and space. Yet current WTO rules on subsidies, foreign investment, and patents preclude some of the policy choices made, for example, by South Korea and Taiwan in the past, when rules under the WTO's predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, were more permissive. What is more, new WTO members typically confront demands to conform their trade and industrial policies to standards that go well beyond existing WTO agreements. The new Basle II international banking standards, better fitted to banks in industrialized nations, risk making it more difficult for banks in developing countries to compete.

To be sure, not all internationally imposed economic discipline is harmful. The principle of transparency, enshrined in international trade agreements and many global financial codes, is fully consistent with policy independence, as long as governments are provided leeway with respect to actual policy content. A well-functioning international economic system does need rules. But international rules should regulate the interface between different policies and institutional regimes, not erase them.

Bruce Robbins on Bérubé

Bruce Robbins in the Valve on Michael Bérubé and liberalism.

Could I try out one view of Michael Berubé’s book I haven’t heard mentioned? Sure, he’s speaking for academics in the humanities and social sciences whom non-liberals would properly see as liberal. And sure, these people (myself included) are a majority in our departments. But do they see themselves as liberal? Maybe on the phone at home, when reluctantly answering some pollster’s questions in a tongue they know to be alien. But at work, I don’t think so. In literature departments (I teach in one) “liberal” is more often than not a dirty word.

For example, Berubé’s liberalism means secularism. But secularism is by no means English department dogma. On the contrary, the big fashion these days is to declare oneself post-secular; it’s everywhere. This unbending to religion should not be a surprise. After all, the critique of Enlightenment rationality is what English departments were founded on. You can still get more or less automatic assent, if not necessarily wild cheering or a reputation for originality, by rising to denounce any of that rationality’s assumptions or moving parts. Remember, Nietzsche is still the biggest philosopher in this neighborhood. Not a democrat, and not a liberal.

No, I’m not crazy about this. But there are sides of the deep anti-liberal bias in English departments that I have more time for. The active discussion about Burkean conservatism where I live–and you should know that there is one– centers on whether Burke wasn’t after all the true leftist, given that the people to his left never had the qualms he had about British imperialism and that his version of agricultural organicism, though it didn’t stop him from welcoming enclosures, certainly offered a better defense of India than anything else in the British public sphere.

the ghost in the machine

ONE OF THE great broken promises of the 20th-century view of the future, right up there with personal jet-packs, was the promise of artificial intelligence. AI was supposed to lead to computers that wouldn't just calculate and organize, but reason and analyze; computers that could really think, like HAL in "2001" or KITT on the 1980s TV show "Knight Rider." (Of course, HAL turned out to be a homicidal psychopath and KITT was a smug know-it-all, but still, it seemed like a good idea.)

Recent efforts to realize the promise of AI have centered on teaching computers to better deduce meaning from the vast content of the Web, but there's still a long way to go. In the meantime, however, there's an alternative type of computerized system that is actually making big strides toward getting computers to think like humans. Publisher Tim O'Reilly calls it intelligence augmentation (IA for short), and it uses a very clever technique. It cheats.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

alternative modernity

The ruins of Shanghai come as a surprise in a city so defiantly modern. Demolished low-rise houses lie in downtown streets next to luxury condominiums with names such as ‘Rich Gate’, the wreckage reflected in the glass façades of tall office buildings. In Dongjiadu, Shanghai’s oldest quarter, bulldozers were expected within the fortnight, the old women squatting silently in the cramped alleys helpless before them.

But you can’t get too sentimental about Shanghai, a place built, like Bombay, in the 19th century on the back of the opium trade. An axis of gangsters, politicians and foreign businessmen ruled the city until the Communist takeover in 1949. Those decades of semi-colonial occupation, when Shanghai came to be known as the ‘Whore of Asia’, glow with old-fashioned glamour in Chinese cinema, in Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad, or Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon. But the corpses of thousands of the poor were collected every year from the pavements of the International Settlement.

more from the LRB here.

a not entirely disagreeable claustrophobia and a few flashes of light

So there are three more-or-less mutually exclusive spheres of influence at play in “Magritte and Contemporary Art”: those displaying formal visual correspondences with the Belgian’s paintings (Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins), those exploring strictly language-based paradoxes in their art (Mel Bochner, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth), and those dealing with Magritte’s legacy of pop-culture market saturation (Douglas Huebler, Jim Shaw, Sherrie Levine). In terms of the works assembled for the exhibition, the last category predictably gets the short shrift, although Pierce Brosnan gives plenty of audio-tour airtime to Shaw’s deliciously prole reading of Magritte’s significance.

But overwhelming that token populist concession, overwhelming the gift shop with its bowler hats and “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” ashtrays —overwhelming everything else when it comes right down to it — is the dazzling, absurd installation designed by John Baldessari. Alongside subtler homages (the security guards wearing bowler hats), Baldessari has carpeted the entire first floor of the Ahmanson with cloud-patterned wall-to-wall and paneled the ceiling with aerial photos of an L.A. freeway interchange, creating a sandwich of disorientation from which Magritte’s cheese emerges triumphant. It’s a courageous and unexpected elevation of Magritte’s stigmatic kitsch-cred to a transcendent and domineering immersiveness. The ridiculous has seldom looked so sublime.

more from the LA Weekly here.

Weekly Review

From Harper's:

Senator John McCain said that American troops in Iraq were “fighting and dying for a failed policy”; Henry Kissinger said that he didn't believe a military victory in Iraq is possible;[The New York Times] and Army Specialist James Barker admitted that he had raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and helped murder her family in March 2006.[BBC News] Tony Blair told Al Jazeera that western intervention in Iraq had been “pretty much of a disaster,”[Times Online] and 40 firefighters in the United Kingdom carried out a two-hour rescue operation to bring a sheep down from a ledge.[Sky News] Syria's foreign minister visited Iraq to discuss renewing diplomatic relations between the two nations,[Al Jazeera] and a researcher in Germany claimed that the swords of Damascus, which were made from a type of steel known as wootz, have a microstructure of carbon nanotubes.[Nature] Economist Milton Friedman died[The New York Times] and the price of oil stabilized;[BBC News] football coach Bo Schembechler died and Ohio State beat Michigan 42-39.

More here.

Hawaii Survey Yields Many New Species

From The National Geographic:

With its conspicuous blue eyes and shiny orange claws, this colorful crab seems hard to miss. But it's one of many species that had likely never been seen until scientists went exploring in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument this fall.

An international team of biologists made the discoveries in October during a three-week survey of a remote coral atoll called French Frigate Shoals.

More here.

The Future of Science is Open, Part 2: Open Science

In Part 1 of this essay, I gave an outline of the scholarly publishing practice/philosophy known as Open Access; here I want to examine ways in which the central concept of OA, the "open" part, is being expanded to encompass all of science.

Terms
Though I am adopting the term "Open Science", there are an number of similar and related terms and no clear overriding consensus as to which should prevail.  This year's iCommons Summit saw the conception and initiation of the Rio Framework for Open Science.   Hosted on the iCommons wiki, the Framework is presently an outline consisting mainly of a useful collection of links and does not offer a formal definition.  In a 2003 essay, Stephen Maurer noted that:

Open science is variously defined, but tends to connote (a) full, frank, and timely publication of results, (b) absence of intellectual property restrictions, and (c) radically increased pre- and post-publication transparency of data, activities, and deliberations within research groups.

Jamais Cascio and WorldChanging have been talking about open source science, making a direct analogy to open source software, for some time.  Chemists Without Borders follow Cascio's definition in their position statement:

Research already in progress is opened up to allow labs anywhere in the world to contribute experiments. The deeply networked nature of modern laboratories, and the brief down-time that all labs have between projects, make this concept quite feasible. Moreover, such distributed-collaborative research spreads new ideas and discoveries even faster, ultimately accelerating the scientific process.

Richard Jefferson, founder and CEO of CAMBIA, uses the term BiOS (either "Biological Innovation for Open Society" or "Biological Open Source"), and the Intentional Biology group at The Molecular Biosciences Institute talks about Open Source Biology.   Peter Murray-Rust has recently put together a Wikipedia page on Open Data; he writes:

Open Data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data are freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.

Though Science Commons, which grew out of Creative Commons, doesn't use the term "Open Data", they have a "data project" and the concept is clearly central to their efforts.  Best and most open of all (in my opinion), Jean-Claude Bradley has coined the term Open Notebook Science, by which he means:

...there [exists] a URL to a laboratory notebook (like this) that is freely available and indexed on common search engines. It does not necessarily have to look like a paper notebook but it is essential that all of the information available to the researchers to make their conclusions is equally available to the rest of the world. Basically, no insider information.

Conditions
For what I am calling Open Science to work, there are (I think) at least two further requirements: open standards, and open licensing.

In his introduction to the chemistry-focused Blue Obelisk (group? movement?), Peter Murray-Rust refers to Open Standards as "visible community mechanisms which act as agreed protocols for communicating information".   What he is talking about is metadata and a semantic web for science.  To see this idea in action, consider the following citation:

Hooker CW, Harrich D.  The first strand transfer reaction of HIV-1 reverse transcription is more efficient in infected cells than in cell-free natural endogenous reverse transcription reactions.  Journal of Clinical Virology vol 26 pp.229-38 (2003)

You can read that, but a computer cannot do anything really useful with the text string as given: it has no idea which part of the string means me and which means Dave, where the title begins and ends, which numbers are page numbers and which are a date, and so on.  Now remember that PubMed, the database from which I got it, contains millions of such citations (and abstracts, and links between papers that cite each other, and so on).  Stored as text strings, they would be impossibly clumsy, but with the addition of a little simple metadata:

Author/s: Hooker CW, Harrich D.
Title: The first strand transfer reaction of HIV-1 reverse transcription is more efficient in infected cells than in cell-free natural endogenous reverse transcription reactions.
Journal: Journal of Clinical Virology
Volume: 26
Pages: 229-238
Year: 2003

the citation is broken down into meaningful fields, each of which can be searched or otherwise manipulated separately.  The computer can now treat each string after "Author/s:" as a series of substrings (author names) separated by commas and ended with a period, the numbers after "Pages:" as a numerical range, and so on and on -- which means you can ask the database useful questions, like "show me all the papers written by Hooker, CW between the years 2000 and 2006 and published in J Virol".  There you have (a very simple example of) the two pillars of a semantic web: metadata and standards.  Examples abound: the Proteomics Standards Initiative, MIAPE, MIAME, Flow Cytometry Standards, SBML, CML, another CML, the Open Microscopy Environment and dozens of others.  Metadata and associated standards are going to be increasingly necessary to scientific communication and analysis as more and more of it takes place online and as datasets grow ever larger and more complex.  Science commons makes the point using the tumor suppressor TP53:

There are 39,136 papers in PubMed on P53. There are almost 9,000 gene sequences [...] 3,800 protein sequences [and] 68,000 data sets available. This is just too much for any one human brain to comprehend.

Quite apart from lack of brainspace, there are answers in those datasets to questions that their creators never thought to ask.  In the same way that Open Access accelerates the research cycle and facilitates collaboration, so too does Open Data -- and Open Standards is the infrastructure that makes it possible.

In a similar vein, Open Licensing also provides a kind of infrastructure -- in this case, for dealing with intellectual property issues.  It's fine to simply put your product on the web and let the world do as it will, but many people prefer (or, depending on where they work, are legally required) to retain some control over what others do with their work.  In particular, if you are concerned with openness you may want to ensure that the original and all derivative works remain part of the commons (e.g. copyleft rather than copyright). That means reserving at least some rights, which is where licensing comes in. 

As with Open Access, the original model comes from software licenses.  The Free Software Foundation publishes three licenses designed to provide and protect end-user freedoms and maintains a list of other software licenses classified according to compatibility with FSF licenses.  The Open Source Initiative also maintains a list of approved licenses which meet their (slightly less restrictive) standards for Open Source.  If you are looking for a publishing license (for audio, video, images, text and/or software), Creative Commons is the place to go: they offer six main licenses which provide varying degrees of freedom to end-users, a think-before-you-license guide and a handy tool for choosing which license suits you best.  They also offer a number of more specialized licenses and the FSF GPL and LGPL software licenses.  Every CC license is provided in three formats: legal code that will stand up in court, a plain-language summary and a machine-readable version (built-in Open Standards!) that CC-savvy search engines can use to filter results by CC end-user freedoms.  As with the copyleft protections in the GPL, CC offers "share-alike" licenses that maintain end-user freedoms throughout derivative works.  The example that impresses me most strongly with the power of CC licenses is that Public Library of Science journals, collectively the flagship of Open Access publishing, are all released under a CC attribution license.  If you find yourself dealing with someone else's license -- for instance, a publishing company -- and you want to provide Open Access, you can use the SPARC author addendum: simply attach a completed copy of the addendum to the publishing agreement and bring the publisher's attention to it; more than 90% of journal editors will comply.  You can also get an author addendum from Science Commons, who are working with SPARC and will soon offer plain-language and machine-readable versions like those that accompany CC licenses, as well as a web-based tool for choosing and preparing the appropriate addendum.

That covers copyright-based licensing, pretty much; but patenting is a whole different headache for Open practices.  Copyright inheres automatically (though there is a registry) in "original works of authorship" as soon as they are created, but patents are granted for inventions by way of a drawn-out administrative process and on a more complex basis than "who made this?".  There are also important differences between patent laws in different countries.  The primary test-bed for open licensing approaches has been biotechnology and especially genomics, with particular emphasis on specific gene sequence data and databases .  The concern is that too much patent protection, combined with patents of too broad a scope, will stifle research and in particular exacerbate the difficulties faced by poorer nations in trying to establish research and development infrastructure.

One possible soution, at least for database information, is offered by the HapMap Project's "click-wrap" license.  Rather than assigning property rights, this is an end-user agreement that specifically disallows the patenting of genetic information from the database, unless such claims do not restrict others' free access to the database.  This license has since been abandoned by the HapMap project, however, in order to allow integration of HapMap data into other public databases such as GenBank. 

Other solutions focus on assigning property rights in such a way as to permit Open practices.  Yochai Benkler suggests what he calls publicly minded licencing for universities and academic institutions.  This form of licensing would consist primarily of an "open research license", whereby the institutions would reserve the right "to use and nonexclusively sublicense its technology for research and education", and would require a reciprocal license to research such that any (sub)licensee must "grant back a nonexclusive license to the university to use and sublicense all technology that the licensee develops based on university technology, again, for research and education only".  There is a model for this sort of scheme in PIPRA, a collaboration among public sector agricultural research institutions which employs licensing language that aims to protect humanitarian use.  In a similar vein, Benkler also suggests a second variety of licence, a "developing country license", which would extend the open protections through development and manufacture to end-products such as drugs, so long as distribution was limited to developing countries.  Noting that University revenues from government research grants and contracts are at least an order of magnitude greater than those derived from patents, Benkler points out that the loss of certain licensing revenue would be minor at most.  The loss of the small possibility of a "gold-mine" patent would be more than compensated by gains in research efficiency and public perception of universities as public interest organizations rather than puppets of big business.

Science Commons has a more specific focus with its biological materials transfer project, which is aimed at retooling materials transfer agreements.  These are the contracts under which research laboratories exchange the physical objects of research -- DNA, proteins, chemicals, whole organisms, and so on.  There is no standard format, since even the NIH Office of Technology Transfer's Uniform Biological Materials Transfer Agreement (UBMTA), despite wide support, does not cover all eventualities and is frequently modified or replaced with institution-specific MTAs.  I can tell you from experience that these things can be a nightmare.  The one I remember most clearly came from a large pharmaceutical firm which shall remain nameless; they were willing to send us some of their antiretroviral in pure form, provided we signed over our firstborn children and their children unto the seventh generation.  (I exaggerate, but you get the idea.  In the end we crushed up pills supplied by friendly clinicians, and the damn drug did nothing in our assay anyway.)  Science Commons' efforts in this field have yet to bear fruit (that I know of), but given the Science Commons/Creative Commons track record I have high hopes.

There is also a more fully-developed model available.  The international nonprofit organization CAMBIA offers two BiOS licences designed to create and protect a "research commons" (the Plant Enabling Techology License and the Genetic Resource Technology license) and is currently drafting a third license for health-related technology.  The essence of these licenses is a reciprocality agreement similar in concept to copyleft or "share-alike", such that

...licensees cannot appropriate the fundamental "kernel" of the technology and improvements exclusively for themselves.  The base technology remains the property of whatever entity developed it, but improvements can be shared with others that support the development of a protected commons around the technology, and all those who agree to the same terms of sharing obtain access to improvements, and other information, such as regulatory and biosafety data, shared by others who have agreed.

To maintain legal access to the technology, in other words, you must agree not to prevent others who have agreed to the same terms from using the technology and any improvements in the development of different products.

In addition to the licenses, CAMBIA maintains BioForge, an open-source platform for research collaboration on which the licenses and other open practices can be, as it were, field-tested.

Definition
I think "Open Science" is the banner under which the various Open X clans might most profitably assemble.  It is punchy, fairly self-explanatory and does not carry any of the potential confusion with related movements in software that might plague "Open Source Science".  (Nor, for that matter, will it give rise to daft analogies about what exactly is science's "source code".)  Moreover, it seems a natural counterpart to the established term Open Access, and is apparently the term of choice for Science Commons/iCommons, which puts the considerable weight of the Creative Commons behind it.  My personal favourite (term and practice) is Open Notebook Science, but this seems better suited to being the name of the most open subset of Open Science practices since, as with Open Access, it is likely that a range of applications will co-exist and co-evolve.

A formal definition will have to wait for future conferences at which scientists and their allies can hammer out the Open Science equivalent of the BBB Declarations.  For now, I think the Wikipedia Open Science stub has the right idea in propounding a sort of meta-definition: "a general term representing the application of various Open approaches... to scientific endeavour".  Andrés Guadamuz González ventures "the application of open source licensing principles and clauses to protect and distribute the fruits of scientific research".   In a recent paper (sorry, subscription only; see how useful OA is?) Ibanez et al. put it this way:

The Open Science movement advances the idea that the results of scientific research must be made available as public resource. Limiting access to scientific information hinders innovation, complicates validation, and wastes valuable socio-economic resources. Open Science is an effective way of overcoming the nearsightedness of the contemporary obsession with intellectual property. The practice of Open Science is based on three pillars: Open Access, Open Data, and Open Source.

It seems to me that Access and Data are crucial by definition; you could do Open Science which relied on proprietary software, provided you made the raw data and your publications openly accessible.  It is, of course, more efficient to use software that is available to everyone without intellectual property or cost barriers.  Similarly, open standards and open licensing might not be fundamental to the practice of Open Science, but both make possible such vast increases in efficiency that I would argue for their inclusion in any comprehensive definition or declaration.

In short, Open (Access + Data + Source + Standards + Licensing) = Open Science.

Coda
Once again, this is an enormous topic and I have given only a brief overview; if you spot anything I have missed or got wrong, please leave a comment.  (I am a scientist, after all; I am thoroughly inured to being wrong in public.)  This was supposed to be the second of two essays on the future of science, but I have run out of room and time so there will now be a third instalment.  In that piece I will try to show what Open Science looks like now, in its infancy, and to sketch some of the directions in which it might grow.

Update: part 3 is here.

....

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

PERCEPTIONS: masterly skills

Vincent Desiderio. Woman in White Dress. 2003.

Oil on linen.

More on this talented American artist here and here.

Monday Musing: Some Random Thoughts on the Trial of Saddam Hussein

On November 5, one year and 17 days after his trial began, Saddam Hussein was found guilty. Predictably, the trial was subject to criticism and questions of legitimacy before it began, and from quite different sides of the issue no less.

In the lead up to the war but especially in the wake of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime was used to justify the invasion. Over his reign, Saddam’s attacks on his own civilian populations left nearly a few hundred thousand corpses, even by conservative estimates. If we hold him responsible for the Iran-Iraq War, we can add an additional 1 million killed or wounded.

Against this backdrop, the decision to try him for the massacre in the village of Dujail of 150 Shi’a men and boys following an assassination attempt was a surprise. Images of the weirdly named Anfal massacre of at least 50,000 Kurds (other estimates range into 100,000 to 180,000), especially of the chemical weapons attack on the village of Halabja, had been played regularly in the build up to the war. What the Dujail massacre had going for it was that it was straightforward and the great powers weren’t complicit. The trial thus already began with sweeping the dirt of the great powers, East and West, under the rug.

From the outset, questions of whether a government set up by foreign victors could legitimately try Saddam Hussein loomed over the trial. Mahathir Mohammed, Ahmed Ben Bella, Roland Dumas, and Ramsey Clark (now, there’s an interesting set) all moved to set up a joint committee to insure a fair trial. Respectable organizations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch questioned the independence and impartiality of the court and raise concerns about the trials fairness.

The trial itself saw assassinations, the resignation of judges, death threats against defense attorneys—all of which leads to questions of not whether Saddam did it, but whether the trial process itself was fair. It certainly wasn’t orderly.

I only sporadically followed the trial. I was skeptical that it would achieve much in terms of personal or political justice. Moreover, I was doubtful that it would do much in establishing the political legitimacy of the new Iraqi government. All of which just lead to me cringe or sigh as the reports came in on the trial’s progress.

I couldn’t really imagine anything other than a death sentence, rumors of Rumsfeld’s offer of leniency in exchange for Saddam’s calling on insurgents to disarm and surrender notwithstanding. The task for and before Iraq was its own transformation. Given the regime’s treatment of Shi’as and Kurds, and de facto Kurdish independence in the northern Iraq, it had to reconstitute itself as a polity if it was, is going to stay together. It was also to transition to a democracy. Against this backdrop, Saddam’s execution would have to be something like Cadmus’ slaughter of the cow to the gods in order to establish Thebes or the execution of Louis XVI, that is, something of a foundational sacrifice.

The trial, verdict and execution would be truth and reconciliation, memory and a break with the past, and the legitimation of the new political order and the nation, all of which would have to be achieved in the midst of occupation and civil war, as well as the patronage of the some of the more incompetent political figures in recent and even not so recent history.

Maybe it was the constant invocation of the Nazis as an analog for Saddam, but part of me was hoping that out of the coverage of the trial would come the sort of reportage that Hannah Arendt filled the pages of The New Yorker with during the trial of Adolph Eichmann, pieces which became the basis of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

There were enough parallel issues: the legitimacy of the court trying Saddam; the attempt to have the horrors of Iraqi Ba’athism become the foundation myth (in the sense of mythic, not in the sense of false or not true) which would create a continuity between the peoples of Iraq and a new Iraqi polity; the issue of complicity of Shi’a and Kurdish leaders, the West, the East bloc, China, the rest of the Arab world; the Pontius Pilate like reaction of much of the world to the trial; the nature of international law, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Moreover, there is a tale to be told of the hope and tragic descent into corruption and brutality of much of the post-colonial experience, a trajectory and narrative captured only on occasion and waiting to be captured in the form of the political theory-cum-reportage that Arendt deployed so well. Eichmann in Jerusalem, whatever its limitations, help us to understand something about modernity, the officialese of modern bureaucracy and ethics.

In Saddam Hussein and the experience of Ba’athism in Iraq, I imagine a similar tale could be told of the colonial aftermath, the Cold War, and the devolutions into thuggery.

I thought of Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem at the outset of the trial, but was strongly reminded of it after the verdict was read. Arendt famously writes of Eichmann as he goes to the gallows:

He begun by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: "After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them". In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory ... It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had thought us--the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Right after the verdict was delivered, Saddam’s lawyer delivered a message from the convicted dictator.

"The message from President Saddam to his people came during a meeting in Baghdad this morning, just before the so-called Iraqi court issued its verdict in his trial," Khalil al-Dulaimi told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Baghdad.

"His message to the Iraqi people was 'pardon and do not take revenge on the invading nations and their people'," al-Dulaimi said, quoting Saddam.

"The president also asked his countrymen to 'unify in the face of sectarian strife'," the lawyer added.

If in the original idea of the war crimes and at the same time political trial, verdict and execution were to pave the road for the creation a new democratic, and unified Iraq, then Saddam was clearly attempting to steal the thunder and make his death the founding of a new Iraq in a different way. He would go off to the gallows like a patriarch whose last request of his children is to be more decent and united. It echoed a bad Bollywood movie. But if he was acting like a patriarch whose dying request of his children was to be generous, tolerant, and forgiving, it was more as a patriarch who had molested and brutalized them through out his life. Needless to say, the pleas weren’t being heard.

I avoided watching or following the trial because it was, despite its attempts at uncovering the crimes of Saddam Hussein in Dujail, an exercise in self-deception for all parties involved, and not because it was a victor’s justice. Self-deception, as the late political and moral philosopher Bernard Williams liked to point out, involves a conspiracy between the deceiver and the deceived. The idea that the choice of the Dujail massacre was anything other than a political choice, that the court was really interested in truthfulness, or even the creation of a new Iraq was the deception that all but a few purchased. If the trial of Saddam Hussein was to be one of the first attempts to address the new Iraq responsibly, then it has failed miserably. And we’ve lied to ourselves in thinking so.

Back to back, the self-delusions of Saddam Hussein and the self-deception of the coalition forces do offer lessons. But these seem hard to articulate. The trial, the verdict and the response itself seem to be lessons in (and the inversion has been used before) the evil of banality, of what happens when the quest for deeper political truth and the pressing political concerns of the community are subsumed to the interests of narrow parties. Let’s hope the Anfal trial fares better and that Iraq, its past, and future are more responsibly addressed.

WHY THE US SHOULD SPRING FOR A NEW PARTICLE ACCELERATOR

"The US must develop a compelling bid to host the International Linear Collider in order to safeguard American science."

Harold T. Shapiro in Seed Magazine:

Physics in the United States is at a crossroads. There are scientific discoveries just within reach whose impact is likely to transform and even transcend the field. Yet US particle physics facilities are being closed or converted to other uses, federal investments are stagnating, and the intellectual center of gravity is moving overseas with the construction of new facilities in Europe and Japan.

These were the conclusions of the committee for the National Academy of Sciences, which I had the honor of chairing. Our mandate was to examine the current state, and make recommendations regarding the future shape, of a US particle physics program that has yielded innumerable discoveries and played a defining role in American scientific leadership.

More here.

Can blackface be far behind?

Rashod D. Ollison in the Baltimore Sun:

Free of irony or tongue-in-cheek cleverness, so-called "minstrel rap" appears to be a throwback to the days when performers (some black, some white) rubbed burnt cork on their faces and depicted African-Americans as buffoons. Excluding Ms. Peachez, these new millennium minstrel rappers don't sport painted faces. But the music, dances and images in the videos are clearly reminiscent of the era when pop culture reduced blacks to caricatures: lazy "coons," grinning "pickaninnies," sexually super-charged "bucks."

"Minstrelsy has never died. It has evolved," says Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, associate professor of theater at Virginia Commonwealth University. Through The Conciliation Project, a nonprofit arts organization she oversees, Pettiford-Wates uses old minstrelsy to spark open dialogue about racism in modern America. "My problem with minstrel hip-hop is that it exploits the images but doesn't put them in any context. You just get these images and no desire to unmask or interrogate them."

More here.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Gets Underway

Daniel Clery in ScienceNOW Daily News:

A $12 billion worldwide attempt to generate power from nuclear fusion was signed into existence today by ministers from the project's seven international partners--China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project has been 2 decades in the making, and with today's signing, construction of the reactor in southern France can begin next year.

Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the sun and stars. It happens when atomic nuclei slam together with such force that they fuse together into a larger nucleus, releasing a small portion of the mass of the original nuclei as a tremendous amount of energy. In ITER, the nuclei used will be deuterium and tritium--isotopes of hydrogen--which can be extracted in almost limitless quantities from seawater. Running a fusion reactor creates a small amount of short-lived radioactive waste that decays away in around a century; high-level waste from traditional nuclear reactors can stick around for thousands of years.

But fusion is no easy matter: The nuclei must be heated to 100 million degrees, and the resulting ionized gas, or plasma, held in place with huge and powerful superconducting electromagnets to prevent it from touching the sides of the vessel, a doughnut-shaped steel enclosure called a tokamak. It takes a huge amount of energy to get the plasma into this state, and the goal for ITER researchers is to demonstrate that they can control the fusion reaction and generate 10 times as much power as the reactor consumes.

Hu Jintao Moves to Consolidate Power

In Asia Times Online:

An intensified campaign to crack down on official corruption is sweeping across China, with public attention focused on which big fish will be netted next after the Communist Party's announcement last month of the dismissal of Chen Liangyu as its Shanghai chief.

Chen, who was also one of the 24 members of the politburo - the power core of China - is alleged to have been involved in the embezzlement of social-security funds in Shanghai worth millions of US dollars.

The anti-corruption drive has won the wholehearted support of the general public, with the growing expectation that President Hu Jintao will restore some social justice by fighting corrupt officials.

Official corruption is so rampant that there is a saying in China that if all officials were lined up and shot, some innocent ones might be killed. But if every other one was shot, many who were corrupt would be spared.

In this situation, it is easy and convenient for Chinese leaders to use anti-graft campaigns as a weapon to purge political rivals. This is not a new ploy - Chinese emperors often used crackdowns on corruption to get rid of officials they did not like.

Michael Moore and the Future of the Left

From Washington Monthly:

Jesse Larner is a learned writer of an unquestionably intellectual bent who has contributed articles to the Nation and appears on NPR and the BBC. He has just written a solid, thoroughly researched, amply annoted book called Forgive Us Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the American Left, in which he examines Moore as a person, writer, filmmaker, and thinker, and in all respects finds him wanting. Larner portrays Moore as an influential political figure who commands a large audience, but whose work is fatally flawed by methodological liberties that the arrogant, narcissistic Moore felt free to take. In addition, Larner says that Moore promulgates political positions that lack nuance and insight and which are not only wrong but which are also ultimately counterproductive to the causes Moore seemingly supports. "That Moore is so profoundly unsatisfying when it comes to taking on these vital issues in the real world, as opposed to the playground world of entertainment and the emotionally satisfying world of incitement," writes Lerner, "is a measure of his ultimate failure to offer a stable and effective pole of attraction in American politics." Nor has he figured out the secrets of cold fusion, Larner may as well have added.

Gosh, call me naïve, but if this isn't a case of hunting flies with a howitzer, I haven't seen one. You can say Moore isn't funny, you can say he's wrong, you can say, as Larner convincingly does, that Moore is a cheater, you can say, as Bernard Goldberg does, that Moore ranks first among the 110 people who are screwing up America, but it's hard to blame Moore for failing to offer a stable and effective pole of attraction in American politics, a goal that has recently eluded Al Gore, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and many, many more. A bit outside his job description, eh?

More here.

The Iraqi Civil War, a View from the Ground

Nir Rosen in the Boston Review:

On April 7, 2006, the third anniversary of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I drove south with Shia pilgrims from Baghdad to the shrine city of Najaf. The day before, on the same route, a minibus like ours had taken machine-gun fire in the Sunni town of Iskandariyah. Five pilgrims were killed.

My companions—a young man named Ahmed, his mother, and their friend Iskander, a driver—came from Sadr City, the Shia bastion in Baghdad named for Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr, a popular and politically ambitious Shia cleric slain in 1999. They wanted to hear a sermon by Sadr’s son, Muqtada, who after the war had become the single most important person in Iraq and the only one capable of sustaining the fragile alliance between Shias and Sunnis. His power had only grown, although hopes for that alliance were now gone.

It was Friday, and like my companions, I was going to the Friday prayers. I had been following this practice since I arrived in Iraq in April 2003, when it became clear that clerics were filling the power vacuum created by the war. After the fall of Saddam and his Baath Party, looting and anarchy gave way to forces of more organized violence: men with guns, some wearing the turbans of clerics, some the scarves of the resistance, and many belonging to criminal gangs. Despite American intentions to create a secular, democratic Iraq, clerics were quickly replacing Baathists, and in the absence of anything else the mosque would become Iraq’s most influential institution.

This should not have come as a surprise. Many complex factors influence life in the Muslim world, most of them secular and mundane, but the mosque plays a central role in the community, in religious, social, and political life.

The Plotters Against America

From The Washington Post:

Two new books disagree sharply about how big a threat Osama bin Laden and his allies pose.

We should strike the term "terrorist group" from the lexicon of those charged with beating Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and its allies. Although "insurgent" is not a perfect fit either, the term far better describes al-Qaeda and the other Islamists attacking America. These zealous groups are large, multi-functional, media-savvy, well-funded, superbly led and religiously motivated. Their focus is on winning, not strutting on the world stage. Numerous No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 leaders of al-Qaeda are gone, but the organization's threat remains. Most important, al-Qaeda and its ilk -- unlike traditional terrorist and insurgent groups -- have no return address; they are not confined to one state or reliant upon its patronage. Islamist groups can hit America with impunity and high confidence that U.S. military forces cannot annihilate them in response. Al-Qaeda is many things, including a proliferating ideology and a unique, multi-ethnic insurgent organization. It is also a growing threat to U.S. security, in part because our leaders do not accept these realities. Abdel Bari Atwan fully grasps the foregoing in his excellent, very personal book, The Secret History of al Qaeda.

One can only hope that Louise Richardson's What Terrorists Want will prove the last shriek from the academy's antiquated terrorism experts, who are reluctant to admit that al-Qaeda poses a unique menace.

More here.

The secret is to do a thing badly

David Shrigley's work has become enormously popular. There are Shrigley books, Shrigley greeting cards and postcards, Shrigley LPs, CDs and 7in singles. There are probably people doing Shrigley imitations and dissertations. Should we take Shrigley seriously? What does "serious" mean?

All sorts of inflated claims have been made for Shrigley. His voice has been likened to that of early Thomas Pynchon, and his drawings have been likened to those of serial killer Denis Nilson (you can thank Will Self for the second comparison). Shrigley himself has said he admires the novels of Donald Barthelme and Joseph Conrad, and the art of Philip Guston. His own art manages to be both clever and moronic, relentlessly stupid and occasionally profound. Somehow, he seduces many of us into thinking of him as a major talent.

more from The Guardian here.

At least in Brezhnev's time you knew where you stood

At least in Brezhnev's time you knew where you stood. We had no illusions. Public life was black and white. Censorship was overwhelming. Journalists wrote under instruction and according to the social and political orders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Now, in the new Russia of sushi bars and oligarchs, the situation is more shameful and rotten than it was then. The attempted assassination of Alexander Litvinenko might not be all that it seems, and yet it does fit a pattern. It follows only a few weeks after the murder of my good friend, the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya. There have since been other, less publicised, cases. Another investigative reporter, Fatima Tlisova, was poisoned two weeks ago in north Caucasus; on 18 November the former head of security in Chechnya, who had fallen out with the region's prime minister, was gunned down in the centre of Moscow in broad daylight by Chechen and Russian police. And then this . . . the mysterious poisoning of Litvinenko (in a sushi restaurant, naturally), but this time in the centre of Russia's second city, London.

more from The New Statesman here.

as much alchemist as conman

As long as reputable sovereign and financial entities have issued value-bearing notes, disreputable personages have attempted to imitate them for nefarious purposes. At times the counterfeiters have been nearly as productive as the legitimate mints. In the mid-nineteenth century, some forty percent of all American currency was fake. But "fake" here is a relative term. With literally thousands of currencies circulating at the time, legal tender in Cincinnati might be little more than tinder-box fodder in Columbus. National currencies, too, often ended up stoking the auto-da-fé; those of the French Bank Royale, the Continental Congress, and the Confederate States are only the most notorious examples. Under such turbulent circumstances, the difference between value and valuelessness, between "real money" and ornate scrap paper, does not admit of definite boundaries.

Perhaps no one has challenged this distinction more effectively than the forgotten Portuguese entrepreneur and swindler Arturo Alves Reis. The latter epithet, though certainly apt, fails to capture the true essence of his crimes, which were both outlandishly reckless and touchingly devoid of malice.

more from Cabinet here.

Word Freak

Charles McGrath in the New York Times Magazine:

For some reason, Northern Ireland produces poets the way the Dominican Republic does baseball players. The M.V.P., the Pedro Martínez, is of course Seamus Heaney — or Famous Seamus, as he became known after winning the Nobel Prize in 1995. In the next generation there are a number of up-and-coming stars, including Frank Ormsby, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian and the poet most likely to inherit Heaney’s mantle, if he hasn’t already, Paul Muldoon. The first meeting of Heaney and Muldoon, at a county museum in Armagh in the late 60s, has been embroidered in some accounts into a mystical laying on of hands and a landmark of Irish literary legend — an occasion as momentous in its way as the first meeting of James Joyce and the 21-year-old Samuel Beckett.

More here.

Why people think that rivals are better looking than they really are

From The Economist:

If you have ever sat alone in a bar, depressed by how good-looking everybody else seems to be, take comfort—it may be evolution playing a trick on you. A study just published in Evolution and Human Behavior by Sarah Hill, a psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin, shows that people of both sexes reckon the sexual competition they face is stronger than it really is. She thinks that is useful: it makes people try harder to attract or keep a mate.

Dr Hill showed heterosexual men and women photographs of people. She asked them to rate both how attractive those of their own sex would be to the opposite sex, and how attractive the members of the opposite sex were. She then compared the scores for the former with the scores for the latter, seen from the other side. Men thought that the men they were shown were more attractive to women than they really were, and women thought the same of the women.

Dr Hill had predicted this outcome, thanks to error-management theory—the idea that when people (or, indeed, other animals) make errors of judgment, they tend to make the error that is least costly. The notion was first proposed by Martie Haselton and David Buss, two of Dr Hill's colleagues, to explain a puzzling quirk in male psychology.

More here.  [Photo shows average looking schmo Paul Newman, who I once stupidly believed is better looking than me.]

Iraq: The War of the Imagination

Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books:

Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn. In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power—enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world. In State of Denial, Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush's chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war:

"Because Afghanistan wasn't enough," Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them." The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate—on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, "in order to make a point that we're not going to live in this world that they want for us."

Though to anyone familiar with Kissinger's "realist" rhetoric of power and credibility his analysis will come as no surprise, Gerson, the deeply religious idealist who composed Bush's most soaring music about "ending tyranny" and "ridding the world of evil," seems mildly disappointed: Kissinger "viewed Iraq purely in the context of power politics. It was not idealism. He didn't seem to connect with Bush's goal of promoting democracy."

More here.

Best baby breakdancer?

Anita Bath at Say No to Crack:

This kid is easily the best baby breakdancer I’ve seen. OK, so he’s the only baby breakdancer I’ve seen, but still … my son is almost the same age and has trouble climbing onto the couch, so in comparison this kid is just amazing:

More here.

Science, Religion, Reason and Survival

Beyond Belief, via Edge.org:

Just 40 years after a famous TIME magazine cover asked "Is God Dead?" the answer appears to be a resounding "No!" According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, "God is Winning". Religions are increasingly a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. Fundamentalist movements - some violent in the extreme - are growing. Science and religion are at odds in the classrooms and courtrooms. And a return to religious values is widely touted as an antidote to the alleged decline in public morality. After two centuries, could this be twilight for the Enlightenment project and the beginning of a new age of unreason? Will faith and dogma trump rational inquiry, or will it be possible to reconcile religious and scientific worldviews? Can evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuroscience help us to better understand how we construct beliefs, and experience empathy, fear and awe? Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we treat religion as a natural phenomenon? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what? This is a critical moment in the human situation, and The Science Network in association with the Crick-Jacobs Center brought together an extraordinary group of scientists and philosophers to explore answers to these questions. The conversation took place at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA from November 5-7, 2006. QuickTime Streaming Video Sunday, November 5, 2006 Session 1 (watch) Steven Weinberg, LawrenceKrauss, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer Session 2 (watch) Neil deGrasse Tyson; Discussion: Tyson, Weinberg, Krauss, Harris, Shermer Session 3 (watch) Joan Roughgarden, Richard Dawkins, Francisco Ayala, Carolyn Porco Session 4 (watch) Stuart Hameroff, V.S. Ramachandran Monday, November 6, 2006 Session 5 (watch) Paul Davies, Steven Nadler, Patricia Churchland Session 6 (watch) Susan Neiman, Loyal Rue, Elizabeth Loftus Session 7 (watch) Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Dawkins, Scott Atran Session 8 (watch) Scott Atran, Sir Harold Kroto, Charles Harper, Ann Druyan Tuesday, November 7, 2006 Session 9 (watch) Sam Harris, Jim Woodward, Melvin Konner; Discussion: Harris, Woodward, Konner, Dawkins, Paul Churchland Session 10 (watch) Richard Sloan, V.S. Ramachandran, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Terry Sejnowski

Our appetite for literary gossip

Bryan Appleyard in The Times of London:

Jane Austen had a lesbian affair with her older sister, Cassandra. It’s obvious, really. There was “the passionate nature of the sibling bond” so evident in the letters. There were her descriptions of women, betraying “a kind of homophilic fascination”. And, of course, there was her fascination with the “underlying eros of the sister-sister bond”. Case closed, I’d say.

Well, no. All these quotations come from a 1995 article in the London Review of Books by Terry Castle, an American academic. Castle was simply noting certain important preoccupations in her writing. An eager subeditor, however, had other ideas. “Was Jane Austen Gay?” was the headline. The LRB had barely hit the newsstands when Newsnight went on air with an earnest discussion of the sexual proclivities of one of our greatest novelists. Good grief! Was Mr Darcy really a woman, the bulge in his breeches a clumsy prosthetic? We had to know. But why? Literary biography is one of the dominant forms of our time. Almost weekly, big fat books emerge to reveal new truths about our greatest writers. Among the current fatties are Zachary Leader’s The Life of Kingsley Amis and the second volume of John Haffenden’s life of William Empson. The first has drunkenness and promiscuity; the second a bisexual fascination with troilism. And, yes, Austen is in for another doing-over, as a film released next year, Becoming Jane, about “a little-known but true love affair with the brilliant, roguish and attractive young Irishman Tom Lefroy”. One way or another, it seems, we shall just have to accept the awful, the incredible truth: Jane Austen had sex. Gosh.

More here.

sorrows of bao ninh

It was a soldier's story, set in battlefields of rotted corpses and the tortured soul of a young teenager who went off to serve his country, and when the novel was published in 1991 it brought Bao Ninh the closest thing in Vietnam to instant literary celebrity.

Ninh never published again - although he is believed to have finished another novel about the war, called Steppe, that he has hesitated to submit for publication.
'I stopped myself. I kept holding myself back,' Ninh told The Observer in a rare interview at his home in a section of central Hanoi favoured by middle-ranking officials. 'I compared everything I wrote to everything I wrote in the past, and it's not natural like it was before.'

more from The Guardian here.

Take a leaf out of their books

From Guardian: It has been a good year for polemics on the war in Iraq, poetry, graphic novels and a late 18th-century wood engraver. Writers and critics make their picks of 2006.

Monica Ali
I've spent far too much time this year reading kitchen books. One that I particularly enjoyed was Anthony Bourdain's collection, The Nasty Bits (Bloomsbury), especially his commentaries on his own essays in which he tends to say: "I think I had my head up my ass when I wrote this thing." Another was Molecular Gastronomy by Hervé This (Columbia University Press), which brings the instruments and experimental techniques of the laboratory into the kitchen. In fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (Fourth Estate) was outstanding.

Tariq Ali
Patrick Cockburn's The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso) is an excellent account of a disastrous imperial war and should be required reading for the newly elected Democrats in the US Senate and House of Representatives. America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier by Robert Vitalis (Stanford University Press) is a devastating critique of the oil giant Aramco and how strike-breaking and racism cemented the US-Saudi relationship. Atiq Rahimi's exquisitely crafted novel, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear (Chatto & Windus), describes two days in Kabul. The native communist regime is crumbling and the Soviet Union is about to invade. Rahimi's prose poem evokes the terror of the period, which would lead to endless war and destruction.

More here.

Dream Maps

From The New York Times:

IN “Against the Day,” his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more than 40 years. But this time his fevered reveries and brilliant streams of words, his fantastical plots and encrypted references, are bound together by a clear message that others can unscramble without mental meltdown. Its import emerges only gradually, camouflaged by the sprawling absurdist jumble of themes that can only be described as Pynchonesque, over the only time frame Pynchon recognizes as real: the hours (that stretch into days) it takes to relay one of his sweeping narratives, hours that do “not so much elapse as grow less relevant.”

In “Against the Day,” Pynchon’s voice seems uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print. One of the novel’s idées fixes is that mysterious agents are trying to send messages to individuals and to humanity at large in surprising ways: through bloody detonations of shells or dynamite I.E.D.’s (think of this as percussive Morse code that explodes into shrapnel as it’s received); a tornado nicknamed Thorvald that students attempt to communicate with by telegraph; garrulous whirls of ball lightning; coal gas (people wear special headsets to interpret the fumes and hang upside down to inhale messages through their stoves); and massive explosions on the level of the Tunguska Event or Hiroshima, which may be the footprints of angels, communicating through murder on a cataclysmic scale. In a singularly disturbing imaginative leap, he seems to make a ghoulish association with the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

More here.

Make Your Own Pollock

It took me about 30 seconds to do this one:

Go here to make your own. (Just move the mouse around, click to change color.)