STEVEN PINKER: THE REAL RISK FACTORS FOR WAR

Steven Pinker in Edge.org:

Today the vast majority of the world's people do not have to worry about dying in war. Since 1945, wars between great powers and developed states have essentially vanished, and since 1991, wars in the rest of the world have become fewer and less deadly.

But how long will this trend last? Many people have assured me that it must be a momentary respite, and that a Big One is just around the corner.

Maybe they're right. The world has plenty of unknown unknowns, and perhaps some unfathomable cataclysm will wallop us out of the blue. But since by definition we have no idea what the unknown unknowns are, we can't constructively worry about them.

What, then, about the known unknowns? Are certain risk factors numbering our days of relative peace? In my view, most people are worrying about the wrong ones, or are worrying about them for the wrong reasons.

Resource shortages. Will nations go to war over the last dollop of oil, water, or strategic minerals? It's unlikely. First, resource shortages are self-limiting: as a resource becomes scarcer and thus more expensive, technologies for finding and extracting it improve, or substitutes are found. Also, wars are rarely fought over scarce physical resources (unless you subscribe to the unfalsifiable theory that allwars, regardless of stated motives, are really about resources: Vietnam was about tungsten; Iraq was about oil, and so on.) Physical resources can be divided or traded, so compromises are always available; not so for psychological motives such as glory, fear, revenge, or ideology.

Climate change. There are many reasons to worry about climate change, but major war is probably not among them. Most studies have failed to find a correlation between environmental degradation and war; environmental crises can cause local skirmishes, but a major war requires a political decision that a war would be advantageous. The 1930s Dust Bowl did not cause an American Civil war; when we did have a Civil War, its causes were very different.

More here.

THE DEATH OF AARON SWARTZ

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan in the NY Review of Books blog:

Since the sad death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, there has been a lot of discussion of the extent to which the criminal prosecution hanging over him contributed to his suicide. Some have pointed their fingers at MIT, suggesting that, by failing to waive its complaint against him for using its network to download files, the university bears some responsibility for his suicide. MIT has now set up an internal investigation. The prospect of a felony conviction and aprison sentence would be enough to make anyone think that his or her life is effectively over. For a young and exceptionally talented person who acted from noble motives, the idea of going to prison must have been even more shattering, and the depression from which he suffered would have magnified its impact in ways that those of us fortunate enough not to have experienced that condition cannot fully imagine.
The fact that JSTOR has made millions of documents freely available, after Swartz had downloaded them, shows that his actions have had what many people—perhaps to some extent even JSTOR, which after all is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing access to scholarly publications—believe to be a public benefit. Thousands of researchers are currently putting all of their downloaded PDF files online, often in breach of copyright, as a tribute to Swartz.
There is no doubt that we should improve access to scientific resources, and the Internet makes it almost inevitable that this will happen. The only question is when. As Lawrence Lessig argues, this is knowledge paid for in large part by our taxes. More important still, in the long run, will be raising the level of general access to information throughout the world. The price now asked for a single journal article is equivalent to a month’s earnings in many countries. The Internet makes the ancient dream of a universal library possible. Why should not everyone, anywhere in the world, be able to use, without charge, all the available knowledge that humans have created?

TEAM IDENTIFIES NEW 'SOCIAL' CHROMOSOME IN THE RED FIRE ANT

From PhysOrg:

The red fire ants live in two different types of colonies: some colonies strictly have a single queen while other colonies contain hundreds of queens. Publishing in the journal Nature, scientists have discovered that this difference in social organisation is determined by a chromosome that carries one of two variants of a 'supergene' containing more than 600 genes. The two variants, B and b, differ in structure but have evolved similarly to the X and Y chromosomes that determine the sex of humans. If the worker fire ants in a colony carry exclusively the B variant, they will accept a single BB queen, but a colony that includes worker fire ants with the b variant will accept multiple Bb queens. The scientists analysed the genomes of more than 500 red fire ants to understand this phenomenon. "This was a very surprising discovery - similar differences in chromosomal structure are linked to wing patterns in butterflies and to cancer in humans but this is the first supergene ever identified that determines social behaviour," explains co-author Dr Yannick Wurm, from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences. "We now understand that chromosomal variants determine social form in the fire ant and it's possible that special chromosomes also determine fundamental traits such as behaviour in other species."

During the reproductive season, young winged queens from both types of colonies emerge for their mating flights and are fertilised by males. Young queens destined to establish their own single-queen colonies disperse far and wide. This social form is highly successful at invading new territories. The other young queens join existing multiple-queen colonies close to their maternal colony. The multiple queens cooperating in such colonies are able to produce more workers than are found in a single-queen colony. This makes multiple queen colonies the more successful social form in busy environments.

More here.

林明雅: 美国信仰的新趋势

林明雅 
　 2013年1月15日《联合早报》一则新闻报道了“宗教信仰在中国呈燎原之势”，而笔者于2012年8月间，趁着在美国参加科罗拉多大学举办的第二届佛客会议（Buddhist Geeks Conference）之便，参访了一间佛教大学与两间纯美国人的禅修中心，发现佛教网站与禅修道场，也呈星星之火般地在美国各地点燃，成为美国信仰的新趋势。 
　 美国的垮掉一代从1950年代开始，前有著名诗人加里·史耐德，后有苹果企业创办人乔布斯等人，开始了拜师参禅，寻求真理的东方之行。新一代的美国禅修者抛开传统佛教师承的拘束，通过将佛教与科技相结合，开始了西方新型的禅修之路。 
　 会议的讲演者有大学教授、网站的创始人、佛教活动家及作家、公司总裁、瑜伽老师、静坐导师、科学家、哲学家等21人，课题从“佛教的未来”、冥想与脑神经科学，到静坐与现代赛博格（cyborg，即是机械化有机体）等，实为一席禅门盛宴。 
　 那时还见识了美国的脑状态调节仪，该仪器能够迅速诱导出α、β、θ、δ脑波，从而使人快速地集中专注力，帮助一些无法进入安静状态的禅修初学者，能够很快地进入状态。这种能将禅修量化的仪器，有助于揭开禅修的神秘面纱，增加修行者的信心。 
　 会议之前，笔者还依约拜访了丹佛禅修中心，接待笔者的卡琳禅师，是一名犹太裔佛教徒（Jubu），由于美国犹太裔的佛教徒日益增多，Jubu已经成为美国特有的一个族群。 
　 借着与犹太裔禅师当面交谈的宝贵机会，我们探讨了犹太人祖先希伯来人的圣经《塔纳赫》，这是目前西方诸宗教信仰的主要经典来源；以及为何会有日益增多的Jubu出现这一话题。 
　 丹佛禅修中心之前身为科罗拉多第四基督教堂，建立于1921年，由于越来越多的美国人已经不上教堂，这些不再上教堂的无神论者，还有一个可爱的称号“nones”，笔者把它译为“赧（读音为nǎn）者”。 
　 据《纽约时报》2012年12月22日引用美国最著名的舆论调查机构皮尤（Pew）研究中心资料显示，从2008年开始，美国“赧者”的人数已经从占美国人口的16%，上升到去年底的20%，以每年约300多万之数增长，成为继中国之后的第二大无神论国家。像这一类把教堂改为禅修中心的事例，在美国各地已经是屡见不鲜，最著名的有纽约市的蓋瑞森學院，原为圣洁玛琍修道院。 
　 带有佛教背景的科罗拉多州那洛巴大学（Naropa University）的芭芭拉教授认为，可能是由于全球化的原因，东方人热衷于西方宗教而西方人却向往于禅宗修行；西方脑神经科学以及科技的发达，使心灵的修行使心灵的修行更趋向科学化、科技化、现代化、自由化、可量化与可实现化，驱使西方人士对禅修趋之若鹜。
      中华的物质与精神文明曾引领世界千余年，但近两百年来，其经济发展却落后于西方；虽然今天中国的经济总量已经跃升为世界第二位，假如中华的精神文明，还沿着一百年来的文化批判老路，那很快将如物质文明那样，会被西方迎头赶上。 
　 笔者这一次见到的美国出家人，也像乔布斯一样，很多都是蓄发、娶妻、参禅、入世过世俗的生活，把生活佛化。乔布斯曾说：“禅对我的生活一直有很深的影响……如果你坐下来静静观察……你看事情会更加透彻，也更能感受现实的环境。你的心灵逐渐平静下来，你的视界会极大地延伸。你能看到之前看不到的东西。这是一种修行，你必须不断练习。” 
　 乔布斯能一而再地看到人们先前看不到的东西，并看得透彻，使视界极大地延伸，为疲惫的美国经济注入强针，使苹果产品的一再创新，屡创佳绩，我们不能不相信他所说的是得益于禅文化。 
　 美国人正通过静坐器材的辅助、脑神经科学家的科学研究、各著名大学自发地开展各类佛学教育课程、无数Jubu禅师的身体力行，把禅修当作新型的文化生活来实践；这正在冉冉升起的美式佛教，成为美国信仰的新趋势。 
　 近两千年来，中华文化主要是由儒释道三家所组成，只敬鬼神（古人认为鬼神均为祖先所化）而远之（即远离鬼神归宿之地狱与天堂），信仰的是觉、天、道，希望在世之时能自觉、觉他、觉行圆满，死后能与天道同寿；由于非常虔诚地敬鬼神（祖先），才会有中华文明的数千年历史。 
　 可惜现代的中国人把祭拜鬼神认为是迷信，不再祭拜祖先，造成中华文明未来香火延续堪忧；三家文化后来演变成现代的宗教，形成满天神佛，那是后话。综观上述西方新文化脱胎前的躁动，我们实在没有理由要对自己的文化信仰丧失信心。 
作者为新加坡佛教总会高级文化研究员 
本文仅代表个人意见 

联合早报 言论版 19012012

“政府学会了帮企业成功，但没学会帮企业破产” “这是一段教训深刻的历史”

新能源是过去十年中国经济的真实写照，其发展为世界瞩目，它享受着前所未有的“政策礼遇”，集各方利益诉求于一身，它的大起大落之间，尽...

“政府学会了帮企业成功，但没学会帮企业破产”
“这是一段教训深刻的历史”

《中国国际移民报告2012》综述

中国与全球化研究中心主任王辉耀：《中国国际移民报告2012》分析了影响中国国际移民的重大事件和热点问题，预测了中国国际移民发展的大趋势和面临的主要问题。

《中国国际移民报告2012》综述

刘再复、许纪霖谈莫言

中国作家莫言获得诺贝尔文学奖后，东西方学界的争议声不断。FT中文网采访了旅美华裔学者刘再复教授与中国学者许纪霖教授，从截然相反的两个视角畅谈“莫言现象”的争议所涉及的种种议题。

刘再复、许纪霖谈莫言

中国高等教育的“大跃进”

KEITH BRADSHER 报道 09:05

中国每年对高校投资约1.56万亿元，希望培养更多受教育者，从而升级发展模式，达到接近欧美劳动力多元化的阶段。其成效还有待观察，但很可能会对全球化经济产生深远影响。

中国高等教育的“大跃进”

印尼一城市禁止女性跨坐摩托车遭抗议

SARA SCHONHARDT 报道 08:53

苏门答腊岛亚齐省是印尼唯一执行伊斯兰法律的省份，位于该省的司马威新年提出禁令，称女人张开腿坐着“不合礼仪”，只能侧身偏坐。反对者认为这是在以宗教的名义危害女性的安全、侵犯她们的自由。

印尼一城市禁止女性跨坐摩托车遭抗议

性、谎言和中央编译局言情录

杰安迪 报道 11:41

女博士实名发表12万字长文，详述与中央编译局局长、马列研究专家衣俊卿长达一年的风流韵事。后者因“生活 作风问题”被免。

性、谎言和中央编译局言情录

Change The Structure of Your Brain! - Neuroplasticity | SUPER BRAIN

WATCHING FISH CLIMB DARWIN’S MOUNTAIN

Carl Zimmer in The Loom:

When biologists think about the evolution of life, they think about climbing mountains.

To understand their alpine frame of mind, imagine a biologist studying the fish in a lake. Each fish may be born big or small. Fish born at certain sizes may be more likely to survive and reproduce than others. Each fish may be aggressive or shy. Again, their aggressiveness may determine their odds of having babies.

To picture all of this, it’s very helpful to imagine a landscape. Each point on that landscape is a different combination of aggression and body size. They’re like the longitude and latitude on a map. Each combination leads to a particular level of reproductive success. Picture that success as the elevation of that point on the landscape. The more success, the higher the altitude.

The biology of those fish can give the landscape a topography. Perhaps it produces a single mountain. The peak is the combination of weight and aggression that produces the most possible babies. The landscape drops off in all directions, to combinations that make it more likely the fish will die, or fail to reproduce.

The actual fish in the actual lake might turn out to be clustered on one of the mountain’s flanks. The fish closer to the peak have more babies than the others further downhill. As a result, they’ll pass down more copies of their genes to the next generation. And that means that the population will climb up towards the peak. If a new mutation arises, natural selection will favor it if it helps the fish climb further. Eventually, the fish may reach the mountaintop. Once they plant their flag on the peak, they’ll be stuck. Natural selection won’t be able to nudge them off.

Now imagine that there are two peaks, not one. The fish sit on one mountaintop, while the second peak towers over them in the distance. They can’t get to that second peak, though, because natural selection can only nudge them uphill. They are stuck with a mediocre body.

More here.

SEMI-CHARMED LIFE: THE TWENTYSOMETHINGS ARE ALL RIGHT

Nathan Heller in The New Yorker:

Recently, many books have been written about the state of people in their twenties, and the question that tends to crop up in them, explicitly or not, is: Well, whose twenties? Few decades of experience command such dazzled interest (the teen-age years are usually written up in a spirit of damage control; the literature of fiftysomethings is a grim conspectus of temperate gatherings and winded adultery), and yet few comprise such varied kinds of life. Twentysomethings spend their days rearing children, living hand to mouth in Asia, and working sixty-hour weeks on Wall Street. They are moved by dreams of adult happiness, but the form of those dreams is as serendipitous as ripples in a dune of sand. Maybe your life gained its focus in college. Maybe a Wisconsin factory is where the route took shape. Or maybe your idea of adulthood got its polish on a feckless trip to Iceland. Where you start out—rich or poor, rustic or urbane—won’t determine where you end up, perhaps, but it will determine how you get there. The twenties are when we turn what Frank O’Hara called “sharp corners.”

Allowing for a selective, basically narrow frame of reference, then, it’s worth noting that much of what we know about the twentysomething years comes down to selective, basically narrow frames of reference. Able-bodied middle-class Americans in their twenties—the real subject of these books—are impressionable; they’re fickle, too. Confusion triumphs. Is it smart to spend this crucial period building up a stable life: a promising job, a reliable partner, and an admirable assortment of kitchenware? Or is the time best spent sowing one’s wild oats? Can people even have wild oats while carrying smartphones? One morning, you open the newspaper and read that today’s young people are an assiduous, Web-savvy master race trying to steal your job and drive up the price of your housing stock. The next day, they’re reported to be living in your basement, eating all your shredded wheat, and failing to be marginally employed, even at Wendy’s. For young people with the luxury of time and choice, these ambiguities give rise to a particular style of panic.

“F*ck! I’m in My Twenties” (Chronicle), a new cri de coeur by Emma Koenig, is a diary of these fretful years trimmed to postcard size.

More here.

ILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS ALSO FOUND IN BONOBOS

Sindya N. Bhanoo in the New York Times:

Bonobos will happily share their food with a stranger, and even give up their own meal — but only if the stranger offers them social interaction, evolutionary anthropologists at Duke University report in the journal PLoS One. The researchers, Jingzhi Tan and Brian Hare, say their findings may shed light on the origins of altruism in humans.

Along with chimpanzees, bonobos are among the closest primates to humans. Chimpanzees, however, do not display similar behavior toward strangers.

“If you only studied chimps you would think that humans evolved this trait of sharing with strangers later,” Mr. Tan said. “But now, given that bonobos do this, one scenario is that the common ancestor of chimps, humans and bonobos had this trait.”

The subjects were all orphaned bonobos at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In one phase of the study, bonobos were given a pile of food, then given the opportunity to release a stranger or a group mate (or both) from other rooms.

The bonobos chose to release strangers and share their food. Not only that, but the just-released bonobo would then release the third.

More here.

DARWIN WAS WRONG ABOUT DATING

Dan Slater in The New York Times:

BUT if evolution didn’t determine human behavior, what did? The most common explanation is the effect of cultural norms. That, for instance, society tends to view promiscuous men as normal and promiscuous women as troubled outliers, or that our “social script” requires men to approach women while the pickier women do the selecting. Over the past decade, sociocultural explanations have gained steam. Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).

In 2009, another long-assumed gender difference in mating — that women are choosier than men — also came under siege. In speed dating, as in life, the social norm instructs women to sit in one place, waiting to be approached, while the men rotate tables. But in one study of speed-dating behavior, the evolutionary psychologists Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick switched the “rotator” role. The men remained seated and the women rotated. By manipulating this component of the gender script, the researchers discovered that women became less selective — they behaved more like stereotypical men — while men were more selective and behaved more like stereotypical women. The mere act of physically approaching a potential romantic partner, they argued, engendered more favorable assessments of that person.

More here.

HAPPINESS IS...LEARNING TO LIVE WITH TINA

From Spiked:

The politics of happiness encourages us to accept our lot, breathing life back into the patronising idea that you can be ‘poor but happy’.

...There are many reasons why happiness, thus conceived, was widely embraced. Most significantly, many implicitly accept Margaret Thatcher’s famous mantra that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism (TINA). If we cannot hope to change society in real, material terms, then individual minds and behaviours become some of the few sites open to change. With the political outlook narrowed in this way, ideas like ‘rediscovering happiness’ as the ultimate goal of society can sound radical, utopian even. They also offer a way of bypassing uncertain political identities, connecting with people using the lowest common denominator. After all, who doesn’t want to be happy?

But constructing issues in such broadly agreeable terms makes it difficult to imagine how they might be challenged or opposed. Everyone seemingly agrees that ‘money can’t buy happiness’. The problem with the politics of happiness is that it abstracts this emotion from individual and social experience, and makes it into a flat, measurable policy objective. I have no idea what the future holds, in the same way that no one in 1800, if they had been handed a ‘happiness survey’, would have rated themselves less happy in the expectation of modern innovations like access to electricity. Each generation finds happiness in accordance with the world they take for granted. As a measure of ‘progress’, happiness defaults to an affirmation of the present as the best of all possible worlds.

More here.

THE SCIENCE OF WHY COMMENT TROLLS SUCK

Chris Mooney in Mother Jones:

In a recent study, a team of researchers from the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and several other institutions employed a survey of 1,183 Americans to get at the negative consequences of vituperative online comments for the public understanding of science. Participants were asked to read a blog post containing a balanced discussion of the risks and benefits of nanotechnology (which is already all around us and supports a $91 billion US industry). The text of the post was the same for all participants, but the tone of the comments varied. Sometimes, they were "civil"—e.g., no name calling or flaming. But sometimes they were more like this: "If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these products, you're an idiot."

The researchers were trying to find out what effect exposure to such rudeness had on public perceptions of nanotech risks. They found that it wasn't a good one. Rather, it polarized the audience: Those who already thought nanorisks were low tended to become more sure of themselves when exposed to name-calling, while those who thought nanorisks are high were more likely to move in their own favored direction. In other words, it appeared that pushing people's emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs.

More here.

艺术无用，代代流传

艺术无用，代代流传

焦元溥 2013-01-11

若学艺术乃出于算计，让小孩在校可以表演，客人拜访可以炫耀，申请入学可以加分，那多半只造成一批批学艺术又恨艺术的小孩。若艺术没有任何用处，请审慎思考艺术还需不需要去学。艺术无用，但除了艺术，世上还有什么东西，不能让人饱足，无法使人温暖，却能穿越时空代代流传？

也斯：香港文学的矿苗

廖伟棠为纽约时报中文网撰稿 10:34

香港诗人、作家也斯于1月5日去世，享年63岁。他是香港文化人中激进开拓者的代表，他著述丰硕，毕生都在追问“香港何为”，并孜孜不倦地书写和宣讲香港文化的独立性。

也斯：香港文学的矿苗

CONFESSIONS OF AN ANALYST

Stephen Grosz in The Telegraph:

I want to tell you a story about a patient who shocked me.

When I was first starting out as a psychoanalyst, I rented a small consulting room in Hampstead, on a wide leafy street called Fitzjohns Avenue. It was near a number of well-known psychoanalytic clinics and a few minutes’ walk from the Freud Museum. At the south end of Fitzjohns Avenue, there is a large bronze statue of Freud. My consulting room was quiet and spare. There was a desk just large enough for writing up notes and preparing my monthly bills, but no bookshelves or files – the room wasn’t for reading or research. As in most consulting rooms, the couch wasn’t a couch, but a firm single bed with a dark fitted cover. At the head of the bed was a goose-down cushion, and on top of that a white linen napkin that I changed between patients. The psychoanalyst who rented the room to me had hung one piece of African folk art on the walls many years before. She still used the room in the mornings, and I used it in the afternoons. For that reason it was impersonal, ascetic even. I was working part-time at the Portman Clinic, a forensic outpatient service. In general, patients referred to the Portman had broken the law; some had committed violent or sexual crimes. I saw patients of all ages and I wrote quite a few court reports. At the same time, I was building up my private practice. My plan was to reserve my mornings for clinic work; in the afternoons I hoped to see private patients who had less extreme or pressing problems.

More here.

中国新型城镇化六大命题

FT中文网特约撰稿人邵晨钟：新型城镇化的核心离不开“创新、和谐、公平、自由”，归根到底是人的城镇化。它能否托起“中国梦”，关键在于能否理清、解决六个问题。

中国新型城镇化六大命题

一份影响每个中国人钱包的方案 收入分配改革：“顶层设计”进行中

万众期待中，原本预计在2012年制订的收入分配改革方案再度延期。即使全社会对收入分配制度进行改革的呼声日高，国民收入问题已是高层...

一份影响每个中国人钱包的方案
收入分配改革：“顶层设计”进行中

一代宗师，还是一代理发师？ 王家卫的选择题

戏里说的人活一世，有的活成了“面子”，有的活成了“里子”，能耐是其次的，都是时势使然。但是其实更动人的是，很多人默默在做很多事情...

一代宗师，还是一代理发师？ 
王家卫的选择题

目前不宜放弃经济自由主义

FT专栏作家布里坦：虽然对金融市场而言，经济自由主义已被证明存在致命的缺陷，但与其批评市场失灵，不如解决政府校正不力的问题。

目前不宜放弃经济自由主义

美国流行文化垄断面临挑战

《旗帜周刊》高级编辑克里斯托弗•考德威尔：文化的背后是财富、影响力以及魅力。随着美国在这三个方面实力减弱，全世界的观众以后或许会偏爱首尔江南风胜过《西雅图夜未眠》。

美国流行文化垄断面临挑战

台湾或在亚洲率先承认同性婚姻

DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW 报道 04:35

台湾立法机构近期就同性婚姻首次举行听证会。不久前，围绕同性婚姻是否应当合法化，台湾高级法官已向司法院寻求宪法解释。

台湾或在亚洲率先承认同性婚姻

纪思道：中日都应搁置钓鱼岛之争

日本和中国在处理岛屿之争的问题上都有过错。日本应承认争议存在，并与中国对话避免武装冲突。中国如将问题诉诸国际法院，也有助局势降温。

纪思道：中日都应搁置钓鱼岛之争

GERMS ARE US

From The New Yorker:

Helicobacter pylori may be the most successful pathogen in human history. While not as deadly as the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, cholera, and the plague, it infects more people than all the others combined. H. pylori, which migrated out of Africa along with our ancestors, has been intertwined with our species for at least two hundred thousand years. Although the bacterium occupies half the stomachs on earth, its role in our lives was never clear. Then, in 1982, to the astonishment of the medical world, two scientists, Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren, discovered that H. pylori is the principal cause of gastritis and peptic ulcers; it has since been associated with an increased risk of stomach cancer as well. Until that discovery, for which the men shared a Nobel Prize, in 2005, stress, not an infection, was assumed to be the major cause of peptic ulcers. H. pylori is shaped like a corkscrew and is three microns long. (A grain of sand is about three hundred microns.) It is also one of the rare microbes that live comfortably in the brutally acidic surroundings of the stomach. Doctors realized that antibiotics could rid the body of the bacterium and cure the disease; treating ulcers this way has been so successful that there have been periodic discussions of trying to eradicate H. pylori altogether. The consensus was clear; as one prominent gastroenterologist wrote in 1997, “The only good Helicobacter pylori is a dead Helicobacter pylori.” Eradication proved complicated and expensive, however, and the effort never gained momentum. Yet few scientists questioned the goal. “Helicobacter was a cause of cancer and of ulcers,’’ Martin J. Blaser, the chairman of the Department of Medicine and a professor of microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine, told me recently. “It was bad for us. So the idea was to get it out of our bodies, as fast as we can. I don’t know of anyone who said, Gee, we better think about the consequences.”

No one was more eager to rout the organism from the human gut than Blaser, who has devoted most of his working life to the study of H. pylori. His laboratory at N.Y.U. developed the first standard blood tests to identify the microbe, and most of them are commonly in use today. But Blaser, a restless intellect who, in addition to his medical duties, helped start the Bellevue Literary Review, wondered how an organism as old as humans could survive if it caused nothing but harm. “That isn’t how evolution works,” he said. “H. pylori is an ancestral component of humanity.” By the nineteen-nineties, Blaser had begun to look more closely at the bacterium’s molecular behavior, and in 1998 he published a paper in the British Medical Journal suggesting, contrary to prevailing views, that it might not be so dangerous after all. The following year, he started the Foundation for Bacteriology, to help focus attention on the critical, and usually positive, role that these organisms play in human evolution.

More here.

THE WORLD UNTIL YESTERDAY

For most of our species’ history, all human beings lived surrounded by people they had known since childhood. Meeting strangers would have been rare and exciting; depending on local customs, newcomers would perhaps have been invited in for food and rest, or perhaps killed on the spot. But they would never, ever have been simply ignored. What is now normal in cities around the world actually runs deeply against our nature – which might explain both why my four-year-old daughter has a tendency to stop strangers in the street to say hello, and why many grown-ups who have learnt to suppress this instinct suffer from chronic loneliness. This is an example of how we might better understand ourselves by looking at our origins. Our experience as hunter-gatherers, herders and subsistence farmers has shaped us genetically and culturally, argues Jared Diamond in The World Until Yesterday. We must therefore understand these ways of life in order to solve modern problems such as loneliness, obesity or the unhappy condition of many elderly people.

more from Stephen Cave at the FT here.

THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

An existentialist, a modal realist, and an eliminative materialist walk into a bar; the bartender looks up at them and says, “Is this a joke?”  

It should come as no surprise that a discipline that was founded by an ancient Athenian urging us all to “know thyself!” should still be in the business of self-examination.  But one may be stunned to find that, perhaps more than ever, theprofession of Philosophy is fixed on questions of its existence.  Perhaps everyone agrees that philosophy, the everyday activity of trying to think clearly and critically about things that matter, is essential to a properly human life.  And maybe it’s not too controversial to say that we all should philosophize.  But, as Socrates shows, there could be philosophers without there being Philosophers; there could be clear and critical thinkers without there bring a profession of Philosophy. So, why does Philosophy – capital “P” – exist? 

This question comes in two related versions, institutional and internal.  The institutional question about Philosophy’s existence is about why there are, and should be, departments of Philosophy.  What is the curricular purpose of Philosophy?  What is the role of Philosophy within the Humanities (assuming that it belongs among the Humanities at all)?  Why do students need Philosophy courses?  Presumably students could learn philosophy outside of Philosophy, so why bother with Philosophy?  The institutional question is increasingly urgent: in an environment of severe fiscal uncertainty and shrinking academic budgets, Philosophy has been forced to confront its own institutional mortality.  These days, Philosophers are called upon to defend both philosophy and Philosophy to Deans, Provosts, and Boards of Trust.  The internal question, by contrast, is less about the fortunes of Philosophy within colleges and universities and more a matter of soul-searching among Philosophers: What is the point of being a Philosopher?  What are we Philosophers doing?  Should we encourage students to become Philosophers?  The dominant view seems to be that the answer to the institutional question depends upon the answer to the internal one.  Consequently, much of contemporary Philosophy is devoted, at least in part, to examining Philosophy itself.

Continue reading "The Problems of Philosophy"

西方主导地位为何下降？

FT专栏作家布里坦：真正需要解释的，不是西方地位为何不可避免地下降，而是西方为何暂时占据优势。哥伦布完成航海的1500年，中国和印度GDP据估计均高于西欧，而人均GDP只是略低于西欧。向早期常态的回归已经开始'

西方主导地位为何下降？

健康源自于积少成多

GRETCHEN REYNOLDS 报道 08:14

积少成多的理念是2012年运动科学主题的最强音。这一年，最鼓舞人的研究发现是：每天运动10分钟能让人增两年寿，最骇人的发现是：每在电视机前消磨一小时，预期寿命减少21.8分钟。

健康源自于积少成多

吃的真相，你知道多少？

JANE E. BRODY 报道 08:16

反式脂肪一定不能吃？有机食品必然更有营养更安全？三文鱼野生更好？新年伊始，让我们以科学为立足点，谈谈那些常见的营养传闻.

吃的真相，你知道多少？

2012年度中文书推荐

纽约时报中文网编辑部 08:32

这是2012年度值得关注的中文出版物推荐名单。推荐范围除了是在2012年出版的中文书籍，不限繁体或简体，不限虚构或非虚构，不限译作或中文作家著作。

2012年度中文书推荐

CHRIS LYDON’S “LETTERMAN LIST” OF INTERVIEWING TIPS

Christopher Lydon in Transom.org:

Basic starting point: imagine in an interview you’re on a flight (90-minutes or so) to Chicago… You fasten your seatbelt and, to your amazement, find you’re sitting next to this person you’ve been wanting to interview…Magic Johnson, or Jane Austen or Paul Revere. Your mind is jumping to the moment when you can call home and say: you’ll never believe who I just talked with, heart to heart, no kidding.

Try these on the person in the next seat on the flight….

10. You have a definition of victory before you say hello. You’ve got an idea of what you’d like to phone home.

9. But: You’re ready for something entirely different. Jane Austen wants to talk about God, Paul Revere about sex… Somebody says: I know this isn’t what you’re interested in, but… and you know you’re launched.

8. The assignment is essentially about getting people to laugh, or cry. Or gasp. The novelist Alexander Theroux once told a prison writing class I was teaching that Buddy Hackett had it right about comedians and writers: the job is to go out there on stage, bang a nail into the wall, and then pull it out with your backside. I think with pleasure about interviewing Harold Evans about his book The American Century and intuiting from the book that the key moment was Harry Hopkins’ arrival in London with the Lend-Lease promise in 1940, or ’41. Harold Evans was 13 at the time, scared that his country (starting with mum and dad) was going down. I asked him just to talk about Harry Hopkins and sure enough he got to the moment when Hopkins recited from the Book of Ruth to Churchill and his Cabinet: “Whither thou goest, I will go… to the end.” And dear Mr. Evans cried like a baby. Bingo! He said Hopkins made Churchill cry, too.

More here.

HUNGER GAMES: THE NEW SCIENCE OF FASTING

Emma Young in The Ledger:

In 1908, Linda Hazzard, an American with some training as a nurse, published "Fasting for the Cure of Disease," which claimed that minimal food was the route to recovery from a variety of illnesses, including cancer. Hazzard was jailed after one of her patients died of starvation. But what if she was, at least partly, right?

A new surge of interest in fasting suggests that it might indeed help people with cancer. It might also reduce the risk of developing cancer, guard against diabetes and heart disease, help control asthma and even stave off Parkinson's disease and dementia.

"We know from animal models," says Mark Mattson at the National Institute on Aging, "that if we start an intermittent fasting diet at what would be the equivalent of middle age in people, we can delay the onset of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's."

Until recently, most studies linking diet with health and longevity focused on calorie restriction. They have had some impressive results, with the life span of various lab animals lengthened by up to 50 percent after their caloric intake was cut in half. But these effects do not seem to extend to primates.

More here.

科学: 研究认为古文《尚书》系后人伪作

《尚书》是中国现存最早的史书，为儒家五经之一。《尚书》又分成古文《尚书》与今文《尚书》，其中古文《尚书》的真伪长期受到争论。2008年，清华大学自海外校友手中获赠一批战国竹简，其总数约为2500枚，有许多经、史一类的文献。至今，清华大学共发表了三篇整理成果，清华大学藏战国竹简(壹)、貳（部分内容）和叁。第三篇于昨天发布，历史学家李学勤称，有三篇战国竹简的内容与东晋时期出现的古文《尚书》的《说命》篇完全不同，它再一次证明，传世的古文《尚书》确系后人伪作.

阅读更多... 

中国财税改革的真实挑战

中国经济学家华生教授近些年在公共场所频频谈及财税问题，在这篇演讲中，华生系统解析了中国财政体制现存的三大问题，并区别了“新”“旧”两种城市化。他认为未来突破口首先应在于土地财政问题。

中国财税改革的真实挑战

我们为什么需要人文经济学？

中国经济学家茅于轼：为什么要推广经济学？就是要培养一种理性的思维、一种符合逻辑的思维。只有经济学能最恰当地把人们的生活经验和逻辑思维结合起来。

我们为什么需要人文经济学？

以人文经济学开启新启蒙运动

中国经济学家张维迎：我希望人文经济学会的成立是新的启蒙运动的开始。其实中国在三十年前就开启过一次启蒙运动，但很快就中断了。

以人文经济学开启新启蒙运动

克鲁格曼：财政悬崖大战基本上是一场阶级斗争

民主党想保证全民享有基本医疗，共和党想大幅削减富人税赋。这基本上是一场阶级斗争，财政悬崖之争只是其中一战，虽以民主党战术性胜利告终，但是否为更大的失败埋下伏笔？

克鲁格曼：财政悬崖大战基本上是一场阶级斗争

美国全球影响式微？

财政法案的通过并未使质疑减少

DAVID E. SANGER 报道 06:22

刚刚通过的财税法案并未真正解决美国的长期债务问题，甚至可能使情况更糟。军事和外交专家因此担心美国正在冒险虚掷自己的全球影响力。而中国正乐见其成.

美国全球影响式微？

中国移民在西班牙逆势成功

Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

24岁的王佳佳（音译）在巴塞罗那，她的父母在20世纪90年代到这里，不会说一句西班牙语，每天在一家餐馆工作12小时。

DAN BILEFSKY 报道 06:10

西班牙有17万中国移民。在西班牙人受经济危机重创，试图保住工作和住房的同时，巴塞罗那和马德里的中国移民却在创业，低价购置西班牙房产。中国移民的成功为中国更多投资创造了条件，也为萧条的西班牙经济注入了一些生机.

中国移民在西班牙逆势成功

2013年不提“压力”

FT专栏作家凯拉韦：我建议，通过禁用“压力”一词来轻而易举地消除压力，这样可以强迫人们更准确地找到困扰他们的问题是什么。

2013年不提“压力”

2013年全球大势预测

英国经济会三次探底吗？发达国家会提高干预利率吗？火星上存在生命的确切证据会被发现吗？一如往年，FT记者、编辑和专栏作家以自己名声为赌注，靠着知识和直觉，再加上一点冒险，对今年全球大势做出各自的预测。

2013年全球大势预测

AMNESIA AND THE SELF THAT REMAINS WHEN MEMORY IS LOST

Daniel Levitin in The Atlantic:

Tom was one of those people we all have in our lives -- someone to go out to lunch with in a large group, but not someone I ever spent time with one-on-one. We had some classes together in college and even worked in the same cognitive psychology lab for a while. But I didn't really know him. Even so, when I heard that he had brain cancer that would kill him in four months, it stopped me cold.

I was 19 when I first saw him -- in a class taught by a famous neuropsychologist, Karl Pribram. I'd see Tom at the coffee house, the library, and around campus. He seemed perennially enthusiastic, and had an exaggerated way of moving that made him seem unusually focused. I found it uncomfortable to make eye contact with him, not because he seemed threatening, but because his gaze was so intense.

Once Tom and I were sitting next to each other when Pribram told the class about a colleague of his who had just died a few days earlier. Pribram paused to look out over the classroom and told us that his colleague had been one of the greatest neuropsychologists of all time. Pribram then lowered his head and stared at the floor for such a long time I thought he might have discovered something there. Without lifting his head, he told us that his colleague had been a close friend, and had telephoned a month earlier to say he had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor growing in his temporal lobe. The doctors said that he would gradually lose his memory -- not his ability to form new memories, but his ability to retrieve old ones ... in short, to understand who he was.

More here.

STUDY SUGGESTS LOWER MORTALITY RISK FOR PEOPLE DEEMED TO BE OVERWEIGHT

Pam Belluck in the New York Times:

The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.

The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.

But don’t scrap those New Year’s weight-loss resolutions and start gorging on fried Belgian waffles or triple cheeseburgers.

Experts not involved in the research said it suggested that overweight people need not panic unless they have other indicators of poor health and that depending on where fat is in the body, it might be protective or even nutritional for older or sicker people. But over all, piling on pounds and becoming more than slightly obese remains dangerous.

More here.

REPORTING POVERTY

Emily Brennan interviews Katherine Boo in Guernica:

Guernica: After reporting on issues of poverty in the United States for so long, what drew you to write about India?
Katherine Boo: I met my husband, who is from India, in 2001. When I first started going to India, I’d be at these dinner tables where people, claiming a posture of great authority, talked about what was going on in these historically poor communities. They always seemed to fall into two schools of thought: everything had changed with the country’s increasing prosperity, or nothing had changed in the lives of low-income people. I wasn’t a subscriber to either. In fact, I was familiar with these arguments from my experience of writing about the poor in the United States. Most of the people who do the talking about what it’s like for the very poor don’t spend much time with them. That circumstance transcends borders.
It was my husband, who had watched my reporting and fact-checking process, the way I use official documents and taped interviews to be quite precise, who first said to me, “Well, this might be something you can do in India.” And at first, I thought, “I can’t do it. I’m not Indian. If I did write anything, I would just be some stupid white woman writing a stupid thing.” But there were people around me who were saying, “If you do it well, then who you are becomes less important.” My husband and these others were interested in issues of social equality and fairness in India and thought it would be valuable to know what it was like for low-income people there, know it with a little more depth. There was plenty of reporting going on in India, but specifically what I do—follow people over long periods of time—there wasn’t much of that in India. (There are some people in the United States who do it, and do it very well, but there are not a lot of them here, either.) In my kind of work, you don’t parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It’s the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals’ lives?

THE RED AND THE BLACK

Over at Jacobin, Seth Ackerman proposes this era's version of the Meidner Plan or John Roemer's A Future for Socialism, in Jacobin:

If a deterministic story about free markets generating optimal prices, leading to maximum output was no longer viable, then the failure of planned economies could hardly be attributed to the absence of those features. As Communist systems were collapsing in Eastern Europe, economists who had lost faith in the neoclassical narrative began to argue that an alternative explanation was needed. The most prominent theorist in this group was Joseph Stiglitz, who had become famous for his work on the economics of information. His arguments dovetailed with those of other dissenters from the neoclassical approach, like the eminent Hungarian scholar of planned economies, János Kornai, and evolutionary economists like Peter Murrell.
They all pointed to a number of characteristics, largely ignored by the neoclassical school, that better accounted for the ability of market economies to avoid the problems plaguing centrally planned systems. The aspects they emphasized were disparate, but they all tended to arise from a single, rather simple fact:in market systems firms are autonomous.
That means that within the limits of the law, a firm may enter a market; choose its products and production methods; interact with other firms and individuals; and must close down if it cannot get by on its own resources. As a textbook on central planning put it, in market systems the presumption is “that an activity may be undertaken unless it is expressly prohibited,” whereas in planned systems “the prevailing presumption in most areas of economic life is that an activity may not be undertaken unless permission has been obtained from the appropriate authority.” The neoclassical fixation with ensuring that firms exercised this autonomy in a laissez-faire environment – that restrictions on voluntary exchange be minimized or eliminated — was essentially beside the point.