我的维吾尔“民族主义”是怎样形成的
张哲为纽约时报中文网撰稿 07:45
艾尔肯在新疆长大，生于一个党员干部家庭，后来留学美国。他的讲述相当坦诚：大到宗教信仰，小到“新疆小偷”，甚至自己纠结的跨民族恋爱故事。他既抨击体制与中国现行民族政策，同时也对维吾尔人的自身问题有诸多反思。
2014年7月3日星期四
2013年11月21日星期四
An Unremarkable Terrorist
An Unremarkable Terrorist
A Cold War Fought by Women
John Tierney in The New York Times:
The existence of female competition may seem obvious to anyone who has been in a high-school cafeteria or a singles bar, but analyzing it has been difficult because it tends be more subtle and indirect (and a lot less violent) than the male variety. Now that researchers have been looking more closely, they say that this “intrasexual competition” is the most important factor explaining the pressures that young women feel to meet standards of sexual conduct and physical appearance. The old doubts about female competitiveness derived partly from an evolutionary analysis of the reproductive odds in ancient polygynous societies in which some men were left single because dominant males had multiple wives. So men had to compete to have a chance of reproducing, whereas virtually all women were assured of it. But even in those societies, women were not passive trophies for victorious males. They had their own incentives to compete with one another for more desirable partners and more resources for their children. And now that most people live in monogamous societies, most women face the same odds as men. In fact, they face tougher odds in some places, like the many college campuses with more women than men.
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The existence of female competition may seem obvious to anyone who has been in a high-school cafeteria or a singles bar, but analyzing it has been difficult because it tends be more subtle and indirect (and a lot less violent) than the male variety. Now that researchers have been looking more closely, they say that this “intrasexual competition” is the most important factor explaining the pressures that young women feel to meet standards of sexual conduct and physical appearance. The old doubts about female competitiveness derived partly from an evolutionary analysis of the reproductive odds in ancient polygynous societies in which some men were left single because dominant males had multiple wives. So men had to compete to have a chance of reproducing, whereas virtually all women were assured of it. But even in those societies, women were not passive trophies for victorious males. They had their own incentives to compete with one another for more desirable partners and more resources for their children. And now that most people live in monogamous societies, most women face the same odds as men. In fact, they face tougher odds in some places, like the many college campuses with more women than men.
To see how female students react to a rival, researchers brought pairs of them into a laboratory at McMaster University for what was ostensibly a discussion about female friendships. But the real experiment began when another young woman entered the room asking where to find one of the researchers. This woman had been chosen by the researchers, Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma, because she “embodied qualities considered attractive from an evolutionary perspective,” meaning a “low waist-to-hip ratio, clear skin, large breasts.” Sometimes, she wore a T-shirt and jeans, other times a tightfitting, low-cut blouse and short skirt. In jeans, she attracted little notice and no negative comments from the students, whose reactions were being secretly recorded during the encounter and after the woman left the room. But when she wore the other outfit, virtually all the students reacted with hostility. They stared at her, looked her up and down, rolled their eyes and sometimes showed outright anger. One asked her in disgust, “What the [expletive] is that?”
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The Insanity of Our Food Policy
Joseph E. Stiglitz in the New York Times:
American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries. Meanwhile, millions of Americans live tenuously close to hunger, which is barely kept at bay by a food stamp program that gives most beneficiaries just a little more than $4 a day.
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American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries. Meanwhile, millions of Americans live tenuously close to hunger, which is barely kept at bay by a food stamp program that gives most beneficiaries just a little more than $4 a day.
So it’s almost too absurd to believe that House Republicans are asking for a farm bill that would make all of these problems worse. For the putative purpose of balancing the country’s books, the measures that the House Republican caucus is pushing for in negotiations with the Senate, as Congress attempts to pass a long-stalled extension of the farm bill, would cut back the meager aid to our country’s most vulnerable and use the proceeds to continue fattening up a small number of wealthy American farmers.
The House has proposed cutting food stamp benefits by $40 billion over 10 years — that’s on top of $5 billion in cuts that already came into effect this month with the expiration of increases to the food stamp program that were included in the 2009 stimulus law. Meanwhile, House Republicans appear satisfied to allow farm subsidies, which totaled some $14.9 billion last year, to continue apace.
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reviewing jared diamond's new book
James C. Scott at The London Review of Books:
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What were our ancestors like before the domestication of plants and animals, before sedentary village life, before the earliest towns and states? That is the question Diamond sets himself to answer. In doing so, he faces nearly insurmountable obstacles. Until quite recently, archaeology recorded our history as a species in relation to the concentration of debris (middens, building rubble, traces of irrigation canals, walls, fossilised faeces etc) we left behind. Hunter-gatherers were typically mobile and spread their largely biodegradable debris widely; we don’t often find their temporary habitats, which were often in caves or beside rivers or the sea, and the vast majority of such sites have been lost to history. When we do find them, they can tell us something about their inhabitants’ diet, cooking methods, bodily adornment, trade goods, weapons, diseases, local climate and occasionally even causes of death, but not much else. How to infer from this scant evidence our ancestors’ family structure and social organisation, their patterns of co-operation and conflict, let alone their ethics and cosmology.
It is here that Diamond makes his fundamental mistake. He imagines he can triangulate his way to the deep past by assuming that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are ‘our living ancestors’, that they show what we were like before we discovered crops, towns and government. This assumption rests on the indefensible premise that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are survivals, museum exhibits of the way life was lived for the entirety of human history ‘until yesterday’ – preserved in amber for our examination.
more here.
Chilly lab mice skew cancer studies
Heidi Ledford in Nature:
Standard temperatures for housing laboratory mice affect the experimental results that often form the foundation for cancer-drug development. International guidelines call for laboratory mice to be kept at room temperature. Yet the rodents find that range — 20–26 °C — uncomfortably chilly, says immunologist Elizabeth Repasky of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. Mice, she notes, lose body heat more rapidly than humans, and, when given a choice, prefer to reside at a balmy 30 °C. At stake might be more than just creature comforts. In a study published today by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, Repasky and her colleagues report that in mice housed at room temperature, tumour growth was faster than in those housed at 30 °C, and immune responses to cancer were suppressed.
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Standard temperatures for housing laboratory mice affect the experimental results that often form the foundation for cancer-drug development. International guidelines call for laboratory mice to be kept at room temperature. Yet the rodents find that range — 20–26 °C — uncomfortably chilly, says immunologist Elizabeth Repasky of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. Mice, she notes, lose body heat more rapidly than humans, and, when given a choice, prefer to reside at a balmy 30 °C. At stake might be more than just creature comforts. In a study published today by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, Repasky and her colleagues report that in mice housed at room temperature, tumour growth was faster than in those housed at 30 °C, and immune responses to cancer were suppressed.
For physiologist Ajay Chawla of the University of California, San Francisco, the results cause little surprise. Mice living at room temperature have to work overtime to maintain their body temperature, and have high heart and metabolic rates, he says. “This study addresses an important issue that I think most of us have ignored,” says Chawla. “I tell my colleagues, 'You’re modelling human disease and pathology in an organism that is like somebody who is on speed'.”
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The Scientific Study of Positive Emotion
June Gruber in Edge:
What I'm really interested in is the science of human emotion. In particular, what's captivated my field and my interest the most is trying to understand positive emotions. Not only the ways in which perhaps we think they're beneficial for us or confer some sort of adaptive value, but actually the ways in which they may signal dysfunction and may not actually, in all circumstances and in all intensities, be good for us.
What I'm really interested in is the science of human emotion. In particular, what's captivated my field and my interest the most is trying to understand positive emotions. Not only the ways in which perhaps we think they're beneficial for us or confer some sort of adaptive value, but actually the ways in which they may signal dysfunction and may not actually, in all circumstances and in all intensities, be good for us.
I thought I'd first start briefly with a tale of positive emotion. It's a really interesting state because in many ways it's one of the most powerful things that evolution has built for us. If we look at early writings of Charles Darwin, he prominently features these feelings of love, admiration, laughter. So early on we see observations of them, and have some sense that they're really critical for our survival, but when you look at the subsequent scientific study of emotion, it lagged far behind. Indeed, most of the research in human emotion really began with studying negative emotions, trying to build taxonomies, understand cognitive appraisals, physiological signatures, and things like anger, and fear, and disgust. For good reason, we wanted to understand human suffering and hopefully try to ameliorate it.
More here.
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2013年11月14日星期四
Something Very Big Is Coming
Stephen Wolfram in his Blog:
Computational knowledge. Symbolic programming. Algorithm automation. Dynamic interactivity. Natural language. Computable documents. The cloud. Connected devices. Symbolic ontology. Algorithm discovery. These are all things we’ve been energetically working on—mostly for years—in the context of Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, CDF and so on.
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Computational knowledge. Symbolic programming. Algorithm automation. Dynamic interactivity. Natural language. Computable documents. The cloud. Connected devices. Symbolic ontology. Algorithm discovery. These are all things we’ve been energetically working on—mostly for years—in the context of Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, CDF and so on.
But recently something amazing has happened. We’ve figured out how to take all these threads, and all the technology we’ve built, to create something at a whole different level. The power of what is emerging continues to surprise me. But already I think it’s clear that it’s going to be profoundly important in the technological world, and beyond. At some level it’s a vast unified web of technology that builds on what we’ve created over the past quarter century. At some level it’s an intellectual structure that actualizes a new computational view of the world. And at some level it’s a practical system and framework that’s going to be a fount of incredibly useful new services and products. I have to admit I didn’t entirely see it coming. For years I have gradually understood more and more about what the paradigms we’ve created make possible. But what snuck up on me is a breathtaking new level of unification—that lets one begin to see that all the things we’ve achieved in the past 25+ years are just steps on a path to something much bigger and more important.
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The Trouble With Democracy
The Trouble With Democracy
More And Better Nuclear Power
More And Better Nuclear Power
Screen Shot 2013-11-12 at 12.19.20
Despite Fukushima, nuclear power is coming back. China is adding 32 reactors, Russia 10, India seven. Nuclear stations generate large blocks of power without producing carbon dioxide — and they don’t have to be dangerous. The current industry standard, the light-water reactor using solid uranium fuel, is a “terrible mistake” in engineering terms. Liquid thorium fuel is cheap, plentiful, and far less toxic (Metered paywall
Screen Shot 2013-11-12 at 12.19.20
Despite Fukushima, nuclear power is coming back. China is adding 32 reactors, Russia 10, India seven. Nuclear stations generate large blocks of power without producing carbon dioxide — and they don’t have to be dangerous. The current industry standard, the light-water reactor using solid uranium fuel, is a “terrible mistake” in engineering terms. Liquid thorium fuel is cheap, plentiful, and far less toxic (Metered paywall
Washing Machines For Dirty Money
Washing Machines For Dirty Money
克鲁格曼：下调法国信用评级是政治阴谋
克鲁格曼：下调法国信用评级是政治阴谋
标准普尔下调法国信用评级反映了欧美崇尚紧缩的政治氛围。法国的赤字大幅降低，生产力高于德国，降级是冲着法国高收税高福利的政策。
专题：三中全会与中国改革
媒体札记：累觉不爱 
FT中文网专栏作家徐达内：官方媒体加入三中全会解读潮，宣传机器全力开动强调决心，市场化媒体则跟进具体领域，但股市的下跌与宣传高潮形成鲜明对比。
“勿对中国土地改革期望过高”
中共十八届三中全会呼吁建立“城乡统一的建设用地市场”，并“赋予农民更多财产权利”，但一些中国专家警告称，不能对三中全会的土地改革抱有太多的期待。
中国开启“六位一体”改革
中国东方证券首席经济学家邵宇：三中全会对全面深化改革做了“六位一体”的总体布局。这将开启一个全新的进步时代，要给市场以人的价值，而不是给人以市场价值。
“非常政治”下的改革需要权威
中国天则研究所秋风：中央改革领导小组和国家安全委员会的设立，引发对集权的担忧。但在“非常政治”状态下的中国，要重建制度，改革机构必需部分处于法律之外。
2013年11月6日星期三
You Can't Learn About Morality from Brain Scans
Thomas Nagel in TNR:
Joshua Greene... asks how our moral beliefs and attitudes should be affected by these psychological findings. Greene began his training and research as a doctoral student in philosophy, so he is familiar from the inside with the enterprise of ethical theory conceived not as a part of empirical psychology but as a direct first-order investigation of moral questions, and a quest for systematic answers to them. His book is intended as a radical challenge to the assumptions of that philosophical enterprise. It benefits from his familiarity with the field, even if his grasp of the views that he discusses is not always accurate.
The book is framed as the search for a solution to a global problem that cannot be solved by the kinds of moral standards that command intuitive assent and work well within particular communities. Greene calls this problem the “tragedy of commonsense morality.” In a nutshell, it is the tragedy that moralities that help members of particular communities to cooperate peacefully do not foster a comparable harmony among members of different communities.
Morality evolved to enable cooperation, but this conclusion comes with an important caveat. Biologically speaking, humans were designed for cooperation, but only with some people. Our moral brains evolved for cooperation within groups, and perhaps only within the context of personal relationships. Our moral brains did not evolve for cooperation between groups (at least not all groups).... As with the evolution of faster carnivores, competition is essential for the evolution of cooperation.
The tragedy of commonsense morality is conceived by analogy with the familiar tragedy of the commons, to which commonsense morality does provide a solution. In the tragedy of the commons, the pursuit of private self-interest leads a collection of individuals to a result that is contrary to the interest of all of them (like over-grazing the commons or over-fishing the ocean). If they learn to limit their individual self-interest by agreeing to follow certain rules and sticking to them, the commons will not be destroyed and they will all do well. As Greene puts it, commonsense morality requires that we sometimes put Us ahead of Me; but the same disposition also leads us to put Us ahead of Them.
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改革就是改变游戏规则
改革就是改变游戏规则
香港经纶国际经济研究院肖耿：中共十八届三中全会之所以引起全球关注，就是因为中国已是世界第二大经济体，同时也是最有活力、潜力及不确定性的大国。中国改革的核心就是改掉导致租值耗散的坏制度，而非革命。
克鲁格曼：共和党为什么向穷人宣战
最近，共和党人、俄亥俄州长约翰·卡西奇(John Kasich)做了些让人意外的事情。首先，他绕过自己党派控制的州议会，去推动扩大联邦医疗补助(Medicaid)计划的覆盖范围——这项计划由联邦政府出资，是奥巴马医改(Obamacare)的重要组成部分。之后，在为自己的行为辩解的时候，他又对自己的政治同盟毫不留情，声称，“我关心这样一个事实，即有人像是要对穷人开战。他们说，如果你处于贫穷状态，那么你肯定是没志气，又懒惰。”
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