Science vs. the Humanities, Round III

In TNR, Steven Pinker, on one side:

In his commentary on my essay “Science is Not your Enemy,” Leon Wieseltier writes, “It is not for science to say whether science belongs in morality and politics and art.”  I reply: It is not for Leon Wieseltier to say where science belongs. Good ideas can come from any source, and they must be evaluated on their cogency, not on the occupational clique of the people who originated them.

Wieseltier’s insistence that science should stay inside a box he has built for it and leave the weighty questions to philosophy is based on a fallacy. Yes, certain propositions are empirical, others logical or conceptual or normative; they should not be confused. But propositions are not academic disciplines. Science is not a listing of empirical facts, nor has philosophy ever confined itself to the non-empirical.

Why should either discipline stay inside Wieseltier’s sterile rooms? Does morality have nothing to do with the facts of human well-being, or with the source of human moral intuitions? Does political theory have nothing to learn from a better understanding of people’s inclinations to cooperate, aggress, hoard, share, work, empathize, or submit to authority? Is art really independent of language, perception, memory, emotion? If not, and if scientists have made discoveries about these faculties which go beyond received wisdom, why isn’t it for them to say that these ideas belong in any sophisticated discussion of these topics?

And Leon Wieseltier on the other:

What Pinker cannot bring himself to accept is that his beloved sciences, even when they do shed some light on aspects of art and literature, may shed little light and—for the purpose of understanding meaning (Pinker’s scare quotes around “meaning” may indicate a scare)—unexciting or inconsequential light. I gave the examples of the chemical analysis of a Chardin painting and the linguistic analysis of a Baudelaire poem. Many other examples could be given. “The theory of parent-offspring conflict”—I hope the grants for that particular breakthrough were not too large—is quite superfluous for the explication of Turgenev or Gosse. Nothing in the physical world, in the world of the senses, in the world of experience, can be immune from or indifferent to the categories of the sciences; but there are contexts in which scientific analysis may be trivial. That is not to say that science is trivial, obviously. But the belief that science is supreme in all the contexts, or that it has the last word on all the contexts, or that all the contexts await the attentions of science to be properly understood—that is an idolatry of science, or scientism. Pinker is wrong: I am not censoring scientists. They can say anything they want. But everything they say may not be met with grateful jubilation. So let the scientists in—they are already swarming in—to the humanities, but not as saviors or as superiors. And those swaggering scientists about whose intentions Pinker wants humanists to “relax”: they had better prepare themselves for a mixed reception over here, because over here the gold they bring may be dross. 

More here. (Also see Daniel Dennett's comments on the earlier round of Pinker v. Wieseltier over at Edge.)
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What are the rules of polygamy?

Julia Layton in How Stuff Works:

Plural marriage is as old as the Bible. Abraham and Jacob each had more than one wife. King David had six. King Solomon had 700 (not to mention 300 concubines). Solomon lost God's favor when he married women who did not give up idolatry, David when he sent a woman's husband to the front lines so he could marry her. Whether ancient or modern, polygamous or monogamous, marriage has rules. There may be ages and genders to consider. In early America, there were races to consider. Often, those considerations draw on religious beliefs: The Quran allows a man to take up to four wives. In Fundamentalist Mormonism, there is no set limit to the number of wives in one marriage. Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet who first delivered God's directive that Mormons practice plural marriage, ultimately took dozens of wives.

More here.

Making Juries Better: Some Ideas from Neuroeconomics

Virginia Hughes over at the National Geographic's Only Human:

We Americans love jury trials, in which an accused person is judged by a group of peers from the community. Every citizen, when called, must sit on a jury. For anyone who finds this civic duty a painful chore: Go watch12 Angry Men, A Few Good Men, or any episode of Law & Order. You’ll feel all warm and fuzzy with the knowledge that, though juries don’t always make the right call, they’re our best hope for carrying out justice.

But…what if they aren’t? Juries are made of people. And people, as psychologists and social scientists have reported for decades, come into a decision with pre-existing biases. We tend to weigh evidence that confirms our bias more heavily than evidence that contradicts it.

Here’s a hypothetical (and pretty callous) example, which I plucked from one of those psych studies. Consider an elementary school teacher who is trying to suss out which of two new students, Mary and Bob, is smarter. The teacher may think of them as equally smart, at first. Then Mary gets a perfect score on a vocabulary quiz, say, leading the teacher to hypothesize that Mary is smarter. Sometime after that, Mary says something mildly clever. Objectively, that one utterance shouldn’t say much about Mary’s intelligence. But because of the earlier evidence from the quiz, the teacher is primed to see this new event in a more impressive light, bolstering the emerging theory that Mary is smarter than Bob. This goes on and on, until the teacher firmly believes in Mary’s genius.

Even more concerning than confirmation bias itself is the fact that the more bias we have, the more confident we are in our decision.

All of that research means, ironically, that if you start with a group of individuals who have differing beliefs, and present them all with the same evidence, they’re more likely to diverge, rather than converge, on a decision.

More here.

Counter-Counter-Revolution

David Runciman reviews Christian Caryl's Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, in the LRB:

What was the most significant year of the 20th century? There are three plausible candidates. The first is 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution and America’s entry into the First World War, which set in train a century of superpower conflict. The second is 1918, the year that saw Russia’s exit from the war and the defeat of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, which set the stage for the triumph of democracy. The third is 1919, the year of the Weimar constitution and the Paris Peace Conference, which ensured that the triumph would be squandered. What this means is that it was the dénouement of the First World War that changed everything: a messy, sprawling, disorderly event that spilled out across all attempts to contain it. Its momentous qualities cannot be made to fit into the timeframe defined by a single year. History rarely can.

That is the problem with Christian Caryl’s fascinating and frustrating book, which identifies 1979 as the year that gave birth to the 21st century. Caryl builds his case around five overlapping stories, four about individuals and one about a country. The people are Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Ayatollah Khomeini and Pope John Paul II. The place is Afghanistan. The year 1979 mattered to all of them. It was the year Thatcher won her first general election. The year Deng embarked on the economic reforms that would transform China. The year the Iranian Revolution swept Khomeini to power. The year the new pope visited his Polish homeland, sparking vast public outpourings of support in defiance of the communist regime. The year Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviets. These were all momentous events. Caryl weaves them together into a single narrative that tags 1979 as the year that the myth of 20th-century secular progress started to unravel. What joins the different bits of the story together is that each one represents the revenge of two forces that the 20th century was supposed to have seen off, or at least got under control: markets and religion.

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The Real Reason for the Fight over the Debt Limit

Mark Thoma in The Fiscal Times:

We have lost something important as a society as inequality has grown over the last several decades, our sense that we are all in this together. Social insurance is a way of sharing the risks that our economic system imposes upon us. As with other types of insurance, e.g. fire insurance, we all put our money into a common pool and the few of us unlucky enough to experience a “fire” – the loss of a job, health problems that wipe out retirement funds, disability, and so on – use the insurance to avoid financial disaster and rebuild as best we can.  

But growing inequality has allowed one strata of society to be largely free of these risks while the other is very much exposed to them. As that has happened, as one group in society has had fewer and fewer worries about paying for college education, has first-rate health insurance, ample funds for retirement, and little or no chance of losing a home and ending up on the street if a job suddenly disappears in a recession, support among the politically powerful elite for the risk sharing that makes social insurance work has declined.

Rising inequality and differential exposure to economic risk has caused one group to see themselves as the “makers” in society who provide for the rest and pay most of the bills, and the other group as “takers” who get all the benefits. The upper strata wonders, “Why should we pay for social insurance when we get little or none of the benefits?” and this leads to an attack on these programs.

More here.
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Probing the Unconscious Mind

Christof Koch in Scientific American:

Sigmund Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. Because this aspect of mind is, by definition, not accessible to introspection, it has proved difficult to investigate. Today the domain of the unconscious—described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness—is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis. Let me tell you about two experiments that reveal some of the capabilities of the unconscious mind. Both depend on “masking,” as it is called in the jargon, or hiding things from view. Subjects look but don’t see.

More here.

Phenomenology Never Goes Out of Date

Richard Marshall interviews Susanna Siegel in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You talk about cases where prior mental states interfere with perception. Can you talk about this idea and why this might lead to what you call an epistemic downgrade?

SS: Suppose you are afraid that I am angry at you, and your fear makes me look angry to you when you see me. Do you get any reason from your experience to believe that I’m angry at you? There’s something fishy and even perverse about the idea that your fears can get confirmed by fear-induced experience. I focus on the general notion of rationality. I am interested in the epistemic status of the type of “top-down” influences on perception from fears and desires. If you could confirm your fears through such fear-influenced experiences, rational confirmation of fears would be too cheap.

Here’s another example. In the early days of microscopes, the true theory of mammalian reproduction was still unknown. Some early users of microscopes were preformationists: they believed that mammals including people grew like plants, from seeds that were placed in a nutritive environment. Suppose their preformationism made them experience an embryo in a spermcell when they looked under the microscope. (It is probably apocryphal, but this was reported to have happened and is discussed in histories of embryology, such as Pinto- Correira’s excellent book The Ovary of Eve, Chicago, 1998). If favoring preformationism influenced your perceptual experience, that experience could not turn around and provide support for preformationism.

More here. - 

Thomas Jefferson’s Quran: How Islam Shaped the Founders

Richard B. Bernstein in The Daily Beast:

One of the nastiest aspects of modern culture wars is the controversy raging over the place of Islam and Muslims in Western society. Too many Americans say things about Islam and Muslims that would horrify and offend them if they heard such things said about Christianity or Judaism, Christians or Jews. Unfortunately, those people won’t open Denise A. Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders. This enlightening book might cause them to rethink what they’re saying.

Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an examines the intersection during the nation’s founding era of two contentious themes in the culture wars—the relationship of Islam to America, and the proper relationship between church and state. The story that it tells ought to be familiar to most Americans, and is familiar to historians of the nation’s founding. And yet, by using Islam as her book’s touchstone, Spellberg brings illuminating freshness to an oft-told tale.

Spellberg, associate professor of history and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, seeks to understand the role of Islam in the American struggle to protect religious liberty. She asks how Muslims and their religion fit into eighteenth-century Americans’ models of religious freedom. While conceding that many Americans in that era viewed Islam with suspicion, classifying Muslims as dangerous and unworthy of inclusion within the American experiment, she also shows that such leading figures as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington spurned exclusionary arguments, arguing that America should be open to Muslim citizens, office-holders, and even presidents. Spellberg’s point is that, contrary to those today who would dismiss Islam and Muslims as essentially and irretrievably alien to the American experiment and its religious mix, key figures in the era of the nation’s founding argued that that American church-state calculus both could and should make room for Islam and for believing Muslims.

More here.

美伊应该抓住谈判机遇

FT社评：美伊应该抓住谈判机遇伊朗核危机依然可以通过外交途径而不是武力来解决。伊朗现在的姿态在一年前局势最紧张时是无法想象的。美国应做出回应。

• 制裁伊朗没有用

奥巴马与鲁哈尼举行历史性电话会谈

奥巴马与鲁哈尼举行历史性电话会谈这是1979年以来美国和伊朗两国总统的首次直接沟通，也是一周来美伊外交接触的高潮

• 奥巴马支持外交解决伊核问题新努力
• 伊朗新总统：愿认真投入核谈判

以开放倒逼改革的自贸区

以开放倒逼改革的自贸区 

FT中文网专栏作家徐瑾：上海自贸区面貌最终水落石出，其用意无疑是服务于中国新一届政府“以开放倒逼改革”的策略，甚至有望成为地方政府转变的重要契机。

上海自贸区能否向全国推广？

星展银行梁兆基、卢明俐：上海自贸区的启动不应被视为刺激短期经济增长的手段，其最终目标是向全国推广；目前最严峻的挑战是如何为自贸区划定一个有效的金融边界。

上海自贸区：改革试验场

上海自贸区究竟意味着什么？最初地方官员仅把它视为一个有利于物流行业的项目，但如今人们渐渐悟出，原来这里是总理李克强选择的金融改革试验场。

中国公布上海自贸区总体方案

方案提出自贸区的总体目标是积极推进服务业扩大开放和外商投资管理体制改革

共和党逼政府关门

• 共和党逼政府关门

  要医改推迟一年否则切断联邦财政

  JONATHAN WEISMAN, JEREMY W. PETERS16:11

  众议院共和党提出强硬条件，要求将奥巴马医改推迟一年，否则将不考虑批准任何关于联邦经费的法案。鉴于民主党坚持推行医改，两党对峙很可能导致联邦政府因拨款断绝而关门。

上海自贸区：改革试验场

上海自贸区：改革试验场

上海出现了“自贸区效应”：周边房产热卖，沪企股价飙升。但上海自贸区究竟意味着什么？最初地方官员仅把它视为一个有利于物流行业的项目，但如今人们渐渐悟出，原来这里是总理李克强选择的金融改革试验场。

Arguing about Argument

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
One fascinating thing about logic is that it is common property.  We all reason from what we already believe to new conclusions.  Sometimes logic helps us to make up our minds; by thinking through the implications of an idea, we can weigh its merits against others.  To think at all is to employ logic; as Aristotle noted, even to question logic is to deploy it.  Logic is inescapable. 
Logic's inescapability explains its grip on us.  Exposing a logical error is always a winning argumentative strategy.  And that's because no matter how deeply people might otherwise disagree about other important matters, we all embrace the strictures of logic and the standards of good reasoning that they supply.  Oddly, the universality of logic also explains why logic is so often misapplied.  As Charles Peirce observed, few actually study logic because everyone thinks himself an expert.  Consequently we all strive to be rational; yet there is a lot of poor reasoning around.
A complicating feature is that our powers of logic are frequently exercised within interpersonal contexts of disagreement with others.  In these contexts, extra-rational factors -- social standing, good manners, pressures to conform, and so on -- can infiltrate our logical activities and lead us astray.  And yet it is undeniable that reasoning is a collective endeavor.  In order to reason well, we must reason with others.  But reasoning with others forces us to confront disagreement.  Accordingly, the study of logic leads us to the study of argumentation, the processes of interpersonal reasoning within contexts of disagreement.
There are at least two tracks upon which argumentation theory travels.  One is explored in our forthcoming book Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement (Routledge 2013).  An alternative is suggested by the pseudonymous author ("Protagoras") of the first installment in a series at The Guardian about "How to Argue."  (Interestingly, Protagoras's opening column is titled "Why We Argue— And How To Do It Properly"-- further evidence that the subject matter is common property).  The historical Protagoras held that "man is the measure of all things," and we suspect that this is the inspiration for the current Protagoras's proposal that we argue because we find ourselves needing to convince others to agree with us.  Note that the need here is practical; disagreement obstructs plans for action.  Successful argument, then, removes or dissolves such obstacles by convincing others to share one's view.  Protagoras hence associates proper argument with the "art of rhetoric," the skill of bringing others in line with one's own thoughts.  It should be mentioned that this art is not as manipulative as it might appear, for the aim is not simply to compel agreement, but to actually convince others of one's view.  As it turns out, the artful rhetorician must take careful account of the reasons and commitments of his or her audience; the rhetorician must attempt not only toreason with the audience, but reason from the audience's own premises to the rhetorician's preferred conclusion.

Continue reading "Arguing about Argument"

Arribes: An Interview with Zev Robinson, Painter and Filmmaker

by Elatia Harris

Zev Robinson, an Anglo-Canadian filmmaker and painter whose award-winning work in several media goes back to the 1980s, will present his documentary, Arribes: Everything Else is Noise, in Marbella, on October 5, 2013. If you are reading from Spain, join him -- see link below. Arribes focuses on a traditonal way of life and its relationship to agriculture, food, and sustainability in the Arribes, Sayago and Abadengo regions in northwest Spain, along the Duero River. Natives to this region are about 80-90% self-sufficient. What have they to teach us?  

All photos, including stills from Arribes: Everything Else Is Noise,  

are used with permission of Zev Robinson and/or Albertina Torres. To make inquiries as to further use of these materials, write to the artists, contact info below.

Elatia Harris: Zev, you are one of the ultimate city boys. How likely a story is this? That you would come to live in a rural Spanish village, and then spend years creating an intimate portrait of an even more isolated and distant region of Spain?

Zev Robinson: It was a long process of discovery. The last place I thought I’d end up, after living in several large cities including New York and London, was a Spanish village of fewer than 800 people, where my wife is from, and where my father-in-law works and harvests his vineyards.
When we lived in London, I remember looking at a bottle of wine in a supermarket that originated from this region, and thinking how few people understood all that went into its making. After we moved here, I was taking a walk through the vineyards one day, and got the idea of making a short film about how the grape gets from the vines here to bottles in the UK.
EH: Are you a wine connoisseur -- in a big way?
ZR: I knew nothing about wine at the beginning of all this, but am always interested in processes, the history that brings an object into being.

Continue reading "Arribes: An Interview with Zev Robinson, Painter and Filmmaker"

The New Dark Ages, Part I: From Religion to Ethnic Nationalism and Back Again

by Akim Reinhardt
European Historians have long eschewed the term "Dark Ages."  Few of them still use it, and many of them shiver when they encounter it in popular culture.  Scholars rightly point out that the term, popularly understood as connoting a time of death, ignorance, stasis, and low quality of life, is prejudiced and misleading.

And so my apologies to them as I drag this troublesome phrase to center stage yet again, offering a new variation on its meaning.

In this essay I am taking the liberty of modifying the tem "Dark Ages" and applying to a modern as well as a historical context.  I use it to refer to a general culture of fundamentalism permeating societies, old and new.  By "Dark Age" I mean to describe any large scale effort to dim human understanding by submerging it under a blanket of fundamentalist dogma.  And far from Europe of 1,500 years ago, my main purpose is to talk about far more recent matters around the world.

Life is, of course, a multi-faceted affair.  The complex relationships among individuals and between individuals and societies produce a host of economic, cultural, political, and social manifestations.  But one of the defining characteristics of the European Dark Ages, as I am now using the term, was the degree to which those multi-faceted aspects of the world were flattened by religious theology and dogma.  As the Catholic Church grew in power and spread across Europe from roughly 500-1500, it was able, at least to some degree, to sublimate political, cultural, social, and economic understanding and action under its dogmatic authority.  In many realms of life far beyond religion, forms of knowledge and action were subject to theological sanction.

Those who take pride in Western civilization, or even those like myself who don't necessarily, but who simply acknowledge its various achievements alongside its various shortcomings, recognize a series of factors that led to those achievements.  Some of those factors, such as colonialism, are horrific.  Some, like the growth of secular thought, are more admirable.

Not that secular thought in and of itself is intrinsically laudable; maybe it is, though I don't think so.  But rather, that the rise of secular thought enabled Europe, over the course of centuries, to throw off it's own self-imposed yoke of religious absolutism.  And that freeing itself in this way was one of the factors spurring Europe's many impressive achievements over the last half-millennium.

Most denizens of what was once known as the Christian world, including various colonial offshoots such as the United States and Australia, now accept and even take for granted a multi-faceted conception of life and human interaction.  For most of them, including many of the religious ones, it is a given that moving away from a world view flattened by religion, at the very least, facilitated the development of things like science and the modern explosion of wealth.  Of course the move from a medieval to a modern mind set also unleashed a variety of problems; but on balance, relatively few Westerners would willingly return to any version of medieval Christian theocracy.¹

Continue reading "The New Dark Ages, Part I: From Religion to Ethnic Nationalism and Back Again"

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International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance

From Necessary and Proportionate:

As technologies that facilitate State surveillance of communications advance, States are failing to ensure that laws and regulations related to communications surveillance adhere to international human rights and adequately protect the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. This document attempts to explain how international human rights law applies in the current digital environment, particularly in light of the increase in and changes to communications surveillance technologies and techniques. These principles can provide civil society groups, industry, States and others with a framework to evaluate whether current or proposed surveillance laws and practices are consistent with human rights.

These principles are the outcome of a global consultation with civil society groups, industry and international experts in communications surveillance law, policy and technology.

Privacy is a fundamental human right, and is central to the maintenance of democratic societies. It is essential to human dignity and it reinforces other rights, such as freedom of expression and information, and freedom of association, and is recognised under international human rights law.[1] Activities that restrict the right to privacy, including communications surveillance, can only be justified when they are prescribed by law, they are necessary to achieve a legitimate aim, and are proportionate to the aim pursued.

Before public adoption of the Internet, well-established legal principles and logistical burdens inherent in monitoring communications created limits to State communications surveillance. In recent decades, those logistical barriers to surveillance have decreased and the application of legal principles in new technological contexts has become unclear.

More here.

Darwin, God, Alvin Plantinga, and Evolution

by Paul Braterman

Watercolour, Darwin after return from The Beagle, by George Richmond

Charles Darwin regarded our minds, like our bodies, as the products of undirected evolution. He therefore considered them unreliable on topics vastly more abstruse than the experiences that had shaped them. Alvin Plantinga claims that minds produced by undirected evolution could not even be trusted to interpret day-to-day experience. From this he infers that undirected evolution is false, and belief in it self-contradictory. Darwin doubts our capacity to think sensibly about whether or not there is a God, while Plantinga regards the fact that we can think about reality at all as proof of His existence. In Part II of this essay, I will discuss Plantinga's views in more detail, and show that they arise, not so much from anything unusual in his epistemology, as in a profound misunderstanding of the workings of evolution.
Darwin's correspondence includes extensive discussion of religious matters, but it could be argued that what he says there is tempered to his audience. However, his private Autobiography includes a short but revealing chapter on religious belief, and that is what I mainly drawn on here. The family regarded this as so contentious that it was not made public in full until 1958, and I see no reason to regard it as anything less than a full and open account. In less than four thousand words, he traces his progress from rigid orthodoxy to a principled rejection of all dogmatic positions. In the process, he lays out with admirable brevity the standard arguments against religion, using language so clear and striking that one hears echoes of it today, even, perhaps unwittingly, in the arguments used by his opponents. 
Darwin initially contemplated becoming a clergyman. He tells us that he "did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible", and was much impressed by Paley's argument from the perfection of individual organisms to the existence of an intelligent creator. He was still quite orthodox while on the Beagle, but in the two years after his return he reconsidered his position, and gradually came to reject orthodox religion for many reasons. Old Testament history is manifestly false (he cites the Tower of Babel, and the rainbow as a sign given to Noah), and describes its God as having the feelings of "a revengeful tyrant." As for the New Testament, the beauty of its morality may be due to selective interpretation. The New Testament miracles (and here I think he includes the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection) beggar belief in a more scientific age, and the Gospels describing them are mutually contradictory, and written long after the events they claim to describe. For a while, he hoped that new archaeological discoveries would confirm the Gospel story, but gradually he moved towards total rejection on moral, as well as historical and logical, grounds.

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How We Learn To See Faces

Virginia Hughes in National Geographic:

Two eyes, aligned horizontally, above a nose, above a mouth. These are the basic elements of a face, as your brain knows quite well. Within about 200 milliseconds of seeing a picture, the brain can decide whether it’s a face or some other object. It can detect subtle differences between faces, too — walking around at my family reunion, for example, many faces look similar, and yet I can easily distinguish Sue from Ann from Pam.

Our fascination with faces exists, to some extent, on the day we’re born. Studies of newborn babies have shown that they prefer to look at face-like pictures. A 1999 studyshowed, for example, that babies prefer a crude drawing of a lightbulb “head” with squares for its eyes and nose compared with the same drawing with the nose above the eyes. “I believe the youngest we tested was seven minutes old,” says Cathy Mondloch, professor of psychology at Brock University in Ontario, who worked on that study. “So it’s there right from the get-go.”

These innate predilections for faces change and intensify over the first year of life (and after that, too) as we encounter more and more faces and learn to rely on the emotional and social information they convey. Scientists have studied this process by looking mostly at babies’ abilities as they age. But how, exactly, our brains develop facial expertise — that is, how it is encoded in neurons and circuits — is in large part a mystery.

Two new studies tried to get at this brain biology with the help of a rare group of participants: children who were born with dense cataracts in their eyes, preventing them from receiving early visual input, and who then, years later, underwent corrective surgery.

More here.
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Naps Nurture Growing Brains

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel in Science:

Few features of child-rearing occupy as much parental brain space as sleep, and with it the timeless question: Is my child getting enough? Despite the craving among many parents for more sleep in their offspring (and, by extension, themselves), the purpose that sleep serves in young kids remains something of a mystery—especially when it comes to daytime naps. Do they help children retain information, as overnight sleep has been found to do in adults? A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the first evidence that daytime sleep is critical for effective learning in young children.

Psychologist Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts (UMass), Amherst, had more than a passing interest in the subject: Her daughters were 3 and 5 when she began chasing answers to these questions. She also wondered about growing enthusiasm for universal public preschool, where teachers don’t necessarily place much emphasis on naps. “There is a lot of science” about the best curriculum for preschool classrooms, “but nothing to protect the nap,” Spencer says. Still, data to support a nap’s usefulness were scarce: Studies in adults have found that sleep helps consolidate memories and learning, but whether the same is true of brief naps in the preschool set was unknown. So Spencer approached the first preschool she could think of that might help her find out: her daughters’. She later added other local preschools to her sample, for a total of 40 children ranging from nearly 3 to less than 6 years old. The goal of Spencer, her graduate student Laura Kurdziel, and undergraduate Kasey Duclos of Commonwealth Honors College at UMass, was to compare each child against him or herself: How well did a child learn when she napped, and what happened when she didn’t?
To test this, the trio first taught the children a variant of the popular game Memory or Concentration. They were shown a series of cards with pictures on them, such as a cat or umbrella. The cards were then flipped over, hiding the pictures. Each child was offered another picture card and asked to recall where in the matrix its match lay. Then, about 2 hours later, it was naptime—or nap-free time, depending. Kurdziel and Duclos developed various “nap promotion” techniques, resting a hand on a child’s back, rubbing their feet (this was surprisingly effective), or simply sitting next to them. “If they know that someone’s got their eye on them then they can’t wiggle around as much,” Spencer says. The average nap was about an hour and 15 minutes. Soon after the children woke up, the memory game was repeated. On a different day, they learned the game in the morning, were deprived of a nap, and then tested again. All participants repeated the memory game the next morning, too. A nap made a notable difference in how the preschoolers performed, especially among those who were used to getting one.

More here.

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Human Nature and the Moral Economy

Economics is inextricably tied to moral behavior, though few economists will say that. It’s time someone did.
Eric Michael Johnson in Scientific American:

In every financial transaction–whether you’re selling a car, paying employees, or repackaging commodity futures as financial derivatives–there are ethical calculations that influence economic activity beyond the price. Sure, you can cheat a potential buyer and not mention that your 1996 Ford Mustang GT has a cracked engine block, in the same way that your boss can stiff you on overtime. If you get away with it you will succeed in making a short-term gain or see a bump in the next quarterly earnings report. But, if you eventually develop the reputation as someone who consistently defrauds the people you do business with, there is a good chance that the value of your net worth will be as negative as the moral values you embraced.

But why is it that businesses that are “too big to fail” don’t seem bound by the same moral economy as the rest of us? It turns out that anthropologists may have some insight, not only on this question, but also how we might integrate our economic and moral values that so often appear at odds. Researchers have found that the interconnection between economics and morality is seen most clearly in small communities where everybody knows each other, everyone has a free choice in who they deal with, and gossip can make or break reputations. This is even the case forsocieties that look very different from our own.

More here.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: HOW TO TRAVEL

From Esquire:

I never, ever try to weasel upgrades. I'm one of those people who feel really embarrassed about wheedling. I never haggle over price. I sort of wander away out of shame when someone does that. I'm socially nonfunctional in those situations. 

I don't get jet lag as long as I get my sleep. As tempting as it is to get really drunk on the plane, I avoid that. If you take a long flight and get off hungover and dehydrated, it's a bad way to be. I'll usually get on the plane, take a sleeping pill, and sleep through the whole flight. Then I'll land and whatever's necessary for me to sleep at bedtime in the new time zone, I'll do that. 

There's almost never a good reason to eat on a plane. You'll never feel better after airplane food than before it. I don't understand people who will accept every single meal on a long flight. I'm convinced it's about breaking up the boredom. You're much better off avoiding it. Much better to show up in a new place and be hungry and eat at even a little street stall than arrive gassy and bloated, full, flatulent, hungover. So I just avoid airplane food. It's in no way helpful.

More here.

The Meanings of Life

Roy F Baumeister in Aeon:

The difference between meaningfulness and happiness was the focus of an investigation I worked on with my fellow social psychologists Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky, published in theJournal of Positive Psychology this August. We carried out a survey of nearly 400 US citizens, ranging in age from 18 to 78. The survey posed questions about the extent to which people thought their lives were happy and the extent to which they thought they were meaningful. We did not supply a definition of happiness or meaning, so our subjects responded using their own understanding of those words. By asking a large number of other questions, we were able to see which factors went with happiness and which went with meaningfulness.

As you might expect, the two states turned out to overlap substantially. Almost half of the variation in meaningfulness was explained by happiness, and vice versa. Nevertheless, using statistical controls we were able to tease two apart, isolating the ‘pure’ effects of each one that were not based on the other. We narrowed our search to look for factors that had opposite effects on happiness and meaning, or at least, factors that had a positive correlation with one and not even a hint of a positive correlation with the other (negative or zero correlations were fine). Using this method, we found five sets of major differences between happiness and meaningfulness, five areas where different versions of the good life parted company.

The first had to do with getting what you want and need. Not surprisingly, satisfaction of desires was a reliable source of happiness. But it had nothing — maybe even less than nothing ­— to add to a sense of meaning. People are happier to the extent that they find their lives easy rather than difficult. Happy people say they have enough money to buy the things they want and the things they need. Good health is a factor that contributes to happiness but not to meaningfulness. Healthy people are happier than sick people, but the lives of sick people do not lack meaning. The more often people feel good — a feeling that can arise from getting what one wants or needs — the happier they are. The less often they feel bad, the happier they are. But the frequency of good and bad feelings turns out to be irrelevant to meaning, which can flourish even in very forbidding conditions.

The second set of differences involved time frame. Meaning and happiness are apparently experienced quite differently in time. Happiness is about the present; meaning is about the future, or, more precisely, about linking past, present and future. The more time people spent thinking about the future or the past, the more meaningful, and less happy, their lives were.

More here. - See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/#sthash.ES6vkoNr.dpuf

核废料变燃料，比尔·盖茨的新梦想

核废料变燃料，比尔·盖茨的新梦想

MATTHEW L. WALD 20:53

比尔·盖茨旗下创业公司正在研制一种新型核反应堆，把核废料变作燃料，满足美国未来800年的所有电力需求，且有望减少核武器扩散的风险。他们希望在中国建示范工厂。

娱乐的力量

• 约瑟夫：娱乐的力量

  
  科技扶贫项目往往太重实用，忽略了娱乐在社会改造方面的力量。印度的事实告诉我们，当人们开始追求快乐，很多好东西会随之而来。

薄熙来被判刑

专题：薄熙来被判刑

媒体札记：困兽犹斗 FT中文网专栏作家徐达内：一代枭雄薄熙来已被判无期徒刑，世纪审判第一季完结。中国人现在急需的新答案是，他会不会上诉？或者说，会不会被允许上诉？

薄熙来：看谁笑到最后？中国历史学家章立凡：薄熙来的冷笑，向支持者表达了另一种信号：他之所以敢冒重判的风险否认所有控罪，就是不相信自己会坐牢到老死。

薄熙来案背后的博弈美国前助理国务卿坎贝尔：在薄熙来案的幕后，还有更多的戏剧性情节。真正的故事可能隐藏在针对其他权势人物展开的行动中。

陈有西：对薄熙来判得不重中国刑辩律师陈有西在薄熙来案一审宣判后表示，从程序上看薄熙来受到了公开、公正的审判，但此案呈现出中国司法体制中的诸多问题，薄案带给中国社会的危险仍存。

出门去，月底回

头发也得抗衰老了

头发也得抗衰老了抗衰老护发产品成为美发市场的新生力量，它们旨在增加头发厚度、防止头发无序生长和干涩。但是，有必要像保护脸蛋一样保护头发吗？

中国将继续持续发展之路

中国将继续持续发展之路

中国总理李克强为FT和FT中文网撰文：大连“夏季达沃斯”开幕在即，人们想知道中国经济是否会硬着陆，改革是否会因为社会问题而脱轨，我的回答是，中国经济将保持持续健康增长，中国将坚持改革开放。

COGNITION, BRAINS AND RIEMANN

Joselle DiNunzio Kehoe in Plus magazine:

By the nineteenth century mathematicians struggled with the meaning and implications of their ideas and tried to shore up the foundation of mathematics, fearing perhaps that the weightlessness of the purely abstract could threaten the integrity of their discipline. They reflected on, and argued about, the meaning of their work — what it could address, and how. What was a function? Was "infinity" simply shorthand for an unending process, or was it something? In 1829 the legendary mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote, "mathematics has for its object all extensive quantities." Other kinds of quantities could be considered "only to the extent that they depend on the extensive." By extensive quantities Gauss meant lines that are described by length, surfaces, solid bodies and angles, as well as time and number. The non-extensive quantities he allowed included speed, density, hardness, height, the depth and strength of tones, the depth and strength of light, and probability. But he also provided an important qualification, "One quantity in itself cannot be the object of a mathematical investigation: mathematics considers quantities only in their relation to one another." Here, quantities and their measures are considered together, and they can each be thought of as magnitudes.
Gauss's student Bernhard Riemann brought a definitive clarification to the meaning of measure. He acknowledged in the introduction to his famous lecture On the hypotheses which lie at the bases of geometry that this was influenced, not only by Gauss, but also by ideas of the philosopher John Friedrich Herbart, who pioneered early studies of perception and learning. Herbart's work played a significant role in debates centered on how the mind brings structure to sensation.
Like cognitive scientists today, Herbart broke down the world of appearances into the subjective impressions that build it. He rejected the idea that space was the thing that contained the physical world. For him spatial forms were mental images derived from relationships among any number of things we experience. They arise in our conception of time (the future being ahead of us and the past behind us), as well as number, and are applied to all aspects of the physical world. Herbart accepted that any perceived object could be thought of as a collection of properties bound together. 

THE JEWS

In The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000BCE – 1492CE, Simon Schama has done a splendid job in challenging the stereotypes. His spirited, immensely enjoyable and wide-ranging account – the first of two projected volumes – takes us from the time when we can begin to talk about the Jews as a people and a religious community up to the traumatic moment of their expulsion from Spain, the land where they had seemed most secure and had risen to the greatest heights in scholarship and even government. Towards the end Schama does pile up the woes, and his graphic portrayal of the deterioration in Spain needs to be balanced by the story of Jewish settlement in Italy, Poland and parts of Germany. Sometimes he lets the stereotypes prevail: interfering Jewish mothers; people who kvetch (a Yiddish word for constantly complaining). But as he says, the Jews of early medieval Cairo, about whom we know an enormous amount because a massive rubbish heap of their letters and sacred documents has survived, “were not a people who went around with their heads bowed, austerely dressed”. Still less was that the case for Joseph ibn Naghrela, a vizier of 11-century Granada, who possibly created the first luxurious palace on the Alhambra hill, or Samuel Abulafia, whose 14th-century Tránsito synagogue is covered with inscriptions glorifying him and the king of Castile whom he served as treasurer (and who before long had him executed).

more from David Abulafia at the FT here

INTERPRETING IDENTITIES: SHAHZIA SIKANDER IN CONVERSATION

From ArtAsiaPacific:

In June, the Pakistan-born, New York-based artist Shahzia Sikander and Vishakha N. Desai, president emerita of Asia Society and Asian art scholar, met at Sikander’s studio in Midtown, New York, to mark her participation in Sharjah Biennial 11, the 5th Auckland Triennial and the 13th Istanbul Biennial. Their discussion focused on the transnational nature of Sikander’s work, complexities around the questions of her identity, and her role in the rise of contemporary miniature painting in Pakistan and its reception around the world. 

Vishakha N. Desai: So let’s begin with the Sharjah Biennial, as your latest project, Parallax (2013), was unveiled there and will go on to the Istanbul Biennial in September with some modifications. Parallax is an amazingly nuanced installation—an immense three-channeled video projection—but of course you began your career as a miniature artist. So please, could you tell us about the relationship of this new work and its scale to your original training, and describe your experience of working in Sharjah?

Shahzia Sikander: Miniature painting for me has always been heroic in scope and not limited by its scale—it is a space to unleash one’s imagination. Parallax is in fact a compact, varied, multilayered, expandable projection created from hundreds of small drawings. It came about as a result of my visits to Sharjah, and in particular from driving in and around the emirate, across its deserts and up and down its coasts. There is no better activity than driving to get a sense of a space in a car culture, and I picked up a great sense of the topography of the land. Parallax examines Sharjah’s position beside the Strait of Hormuz, and its role as a stopover for the old Imperial Airways. This proximity to water, sand and oil, and of course the historical power tensions surrounding maritime trade, all became fodder for visual play between solid and liquid representations in the work. All of the liquid states in the animation are made up of millions of silhouettes of hair that have been culled from images of gopis—female worshippers of Krishna often portrayed in Indian miniatures. These transform into large swaths of static noise that hover between multiple representations, ranging from oceans, water and oil, to flocks of birds and patterns of human migration.

By isolating the gopi hair from its source, I emphasized its potential to cultivate new associations. Similarly, there is no fixed viewing point in the film. It is simultaneously aerial and internal. For me, even the Arabic recitation in the score doesn’t need a translation, as the emotional range in the delivery is vast and inclusive. This is also a reference to the non-Arabic-speaking Muslim cultures such as Pakistan, where Arabic is primarily aural. I see Parallax as immersive and limitless in scale. Scaled up using certain projectors it could defy all sorts of architectural boundaries, and scaled down it could even be a sort of “Sharjahnama” illuminated manuscript.

More here.

PEPPER, CONSIDERED SEPARATELY

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

There is undeniably something troubling about the way we use pepper. Pepper is among the most classical of spices, with a history of trade and culinary use that dates back several thousand years. And this history is laden with vast sums of money, world-spanning trade routes, once great empires and much culinary and cultural theorizing. Pepper is also among the most distinctive of flavors, rarely retreating into the background, sharp, pungent, spicy and characteristic of the tropics (where the proximity to the sun brings forth exuberant aggressive flavors in everything). And yet pepper has now been thoroughly domesticated and normalized, so that we keep it on the table alongside salt (very obviously a basic background flavor), and use it in most of the food we eat. Given that pepper is not native to much of the world and that it has particularly difficult and distinctive flavors, this ubiquity seems unnatural and puzzling. Harold McGee reports that the Greeks used to keep cumin on the table and used it much as we do pepper. This seems strange, and the theoretical problem raised is similar to that precipitated by our use of pepper.

Pepper is used ubiquitously but, unsurprisingly given its intensity, it tends to be used in small quantities. This has lead to it becoming invisible. Recipes that use pepper as a primary note are rare and, correspondingly, are interesting both theoretically and aesthetically. The South Indians have a number of such recipes, probably because South India is part of the ancestral home of pepper. The recipe below is copied from watching my Malayali friend Raghavan cook (the Malabar coast has historically been one of the most important sources of pepper, and pepper has been used there for thousands of years). It is a revelation if you're not used to thinking about pepper as a particular and distinctive spice rather than as a background seasoning.

To my mind, the most interesting aspect of this template is the structural role that pepper plays. Unlike in many Indian recipes, there is little chili here and pepper occupies the same place and seems to perform a similar function to chili. Interestingly, pepper has been used in India for thousands of years before chili made its European-mediated appearance in the Old World. It is tempting to speculate that these recipes give us a glimpse into pre-chili antiquity in South Asia and gesture at the structural role that chili found itself stepping into upon its arrival. It would be fascinating to analyze the role that chili plays in South and South-East Asia and contrast it with older Mexican recipes, though this would require time and money. But, of course, the point is that pepper is not chili, and the differences are striking; at the least, pepper is warmer, woodier and more citrusy.

Continue reading "Pepper, considered separately"

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF GENES

Your DNA is not a blueprint. Day by day, week by week, your genes are in a conversation with your surroundings. Your neighbors, your family, your feelings of loneliness: They don’t just get under your skin, they get into the control rooms of your cells. Inside the new social science of genetics.

David Dobbs in Pacific Standard:

A few years ago, Gene Robinson, of Urbana, Illinois, asked some associates in southern Mexico to help him kidnap some 1,000 newborns. For their victims they chose bees. Half were European honeybees, Apis mellifera ligustica, the sweet-tempered kind most beekeepers raise. The other half were ligustica’s genetically close cousins, Apis mellifera scutellata, the African strain better known as killer bees. Though the two subspecies are nearly indistinguishable, the latter defend territory far more aggressively. Kick a European honeybee hive and perhaps a hundred bees will attack you. Kick a killer bee hive and you may suffer a thousand stings or more. Two thousand will kill you.

Working carefully, Robinson’s conspirators—researchers at Mexico’s National Center for Research in Animal Physiology, in the high resort town of Ixtapan de la Sal—jiggled loose the lids from two African hives and two European hives, pulled free a few honeycomb racks, plucked off about 250 of the youngest bees from each hive, and painted marks on the bees’ tiny backs. Then they switched each set of newborns into the hive of the other subspecies.

Robinson, back in his office at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Entomology, did not fret about the bees’ safety. He knew that if you move bees to a new colony in their first day, the colony accepts them as its own. Nevertheless, Robinson did expect the bees would be changed by their adoptive homes: He expected the killer bees to take on the European bees’ moderate ways and the European bees to assume the killer bees’ more violent temperament. Robinson had discovered this in prior experiments. But he hadn’t yet figured out how it happened.

More here.http://www.psmag.com/health/the-social-life-of-genes-64616/

                                                      this isn't happiness™ Peteski

                                           25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1z3kiZbwM1qz6f9yo1_500.jpg

宮崎駿隱退：人生有逆風，但永不放棄希...

宮崎駿隱退：人生有逆風，但永不放棄希...

日本動畫大師宮崎駿宣布退休，不再創作長篇作品，今天（9/6）將召開記者會交代退休事宜。長達四十年的動畫生涯中，宮崎...