Sandra Blakeslee in the New York Times:

The theory argues that juvenile diabetes may have developed in ancestral people who lived in Northern Europe about 12,000 years ago when temperatures fell by 10 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few decades and an ice age arrived virtually overnight.

Archaeological evidence suggests countless people froze to death, while others fled south. But Dr. Sharon Moalem, an expert in evolutionary medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, believes that some people may have adapted to the extreme cold. High levels of blood glucose prevent cells and tissues from forming ice crystals, Dr. Moalem said. In other words, Type 1 diabetes would have prevented many of our ancestors from freezing to death.

The theory is described in the March 30 online edition of Medical Hypotheses, a journal devoted to publishing bold, even radical, biomedical theories that are potentially important to the development of medicine.

More here.  [Thanks to Timothy Don.]

Nicholas Lezard reviews David Luke’s book of translations of Goethe’s poetry, in The Guardian:

The immensity of Goethe’s achievements — he was one of the last men, it was said, to know everything — is perhaps beyond our grasp these days, but he was, above all, a poet. And the problem with foreign-language poets is, for us, what gets lost in the translation. In his introduction to this volume, David Luke writes: Goethe’s “poetry is the essence of German. Unfortunately for translators, and for readers of Goethe unfamiliar with German, the converse is also true: the poetry of the German language is of the essence of Goethe. There is not much to be done about this situation.”

This is engagingly self-deprecating. Luke has done a lot about this situation, having not only published a definitive English-language edition in prose translation in 1964, but worked on versifying them for today.

More here.

I happened to come across this story from the AP. Since one of the 3QD editors (Azra) happens to be a leading world authority on this disease, maybe she would like to comment on it (or add a new post about it). Marilyn Marchione of the AP wrote yesterday:

No one could have been more surprised than the doctors themselves. They were just hoping to relieve the symptoms of a deadly blood disorder — and ended up treating the disease itself. In nearly half of the people who took the experimental drug, the cancer became undetectable.

Specialists said Revlimid now looks like a breakthrough and the first effective treatment for many people with myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS, which is even more common than leukemia.

More here.

An analysis of partisanship–using network analysis and singular value decomposition, rather than talking head rancor and irritation–shows the strength of connections among House committees for the 107th Congress.

“Among other findings was that the Homeland Security Committee has very strong ties to the Rules Committee. It has very weak ties to the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and shared no members in common with its Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee . . .

‘We use a tool called network theory, which we borrow from other situations like studies of the World Wide Web or of people who sit together on the boards of more than one company,’ said Mason Porter, visiting assistant professor at Georgia Tech. ‘By looking at the number of members that pairs of committees and subcommittees share, we were able to determine the strengths of those connections.’

. . .

‘Every representative boils down to two numbers that you can put in a rectangle on a piece of paper. One represents how far they are on the extremes of the political spectrum – we called that partisanship – and the other represents how well they play with others,’ said Porter.

Current Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, along with Janice Schakowsky and James McGovern from Illinois were among the most partisan Democrats of the House. Among the most partisan Republicans were Thomas Tancredo from Colorado, John Shadegg from Arizona and Jim Ryun from Kansas. The least partisan members included Frank Lucas from Oklahoma, former congresswoman Constance Morella of Maryland and Ralph Hall from Texas.”

Via Brad Delong, Keynes’ 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is available free online–also here.  In brief,

This is generally regarded as probably the most influential social science treatise of the 20th Century, in that it quickly and permanently changed the way the world looked at the economy and the role of government in society.  No other single book, before or since, has had quite such an impact.

. . .

With the General Theory, as it became known, Keynes sought to develop an theory that could explain the determination of aggregate output – and as a consequence, employment. He posited that the determining factor to be aggregate demand. Among the revolutionary concepts initiated by Keynes was the concept of a demand-determined equilibrium wherein unemployment is possible, the ineffectiveness of price flexibility to cure unemployment, a unique theory of money based on ‘liquidity preference’, the introduction of radical uncertainty and expectations, the marginal efficiency of investment schedule breaking Say’s Law (and thus reversing the savings-investment causation), the possibility of using government fiscal and monetary policy to help eliminate recessions and control economic booms.  Indeed, with this book, he almost single-handedly constructed the fundamental relationships and ideas behind what became known as ‘macroeconomics’.”

Adam Przeworski once pointed out one way in which the Keynesian revolution was truly a revolution.  Prior to Keynes, the interests of investors appeared as universal interests, in so much as their investment decisions determined growth, distribution, and the real wage.  The interests of all depended on their choices.  Keynes turned that on its head by arguing that it is not the assets and decisions of the wealthy but the consumption and decisions of workers and the general populace that determine these things because they determine investment decisions. He thereby helped to make the interests of the middle and working classes appear to be universal interests.  In so doing, his work and specifically The General Theory became the core ideological weapon of the reformed social democratic movements of Europe and North America.

Via normblog, here’s a report from the World Economic Forum (the Davos crowd) on the comparative status of women.  Entitled “Women’s Empowerment: Measuring the Global Gender Gap,” the report looks at gender equality in 58 countries, comprising all 30 OECD states, and 28 emerging economies. 

The criteria for measurement:

“Five important dimensions of female empowerment and opportunity have been chosen for examination, based mainly on the findings of UNIFEM, concerning global patterns of inequality between men and women:

1. Economic participation

2.Economic opportunity

3. Political empowerment

4. Educational attainment

5. Health and well-being

The gender gap in each dimension is then quantified using two types of recent available data: a) published national statistics and data from international organizations, and b) survey data of a qualitative nature from the annual Executive Opinion Survey of the World Economic Forum.”

The rankings:

That the Scandinavians cluster on top and the Anglo-American states (Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Australia) follow was no surprise.  But I was struck by how high the Baltic states rank on the measure.

—————————-

Daniel Gross in Slate:

In recent years, economists have been drawn to the music industry like lawyers to a car wreck. Napster, Grokster, digital sampling, and Chinese piracy have thrown the industry into chaos. Economists have realized it’s the best place to study what happens when new technologies disrupt established industries. They have also realized it’s really fun.

Among the crowd rushing the stage is Alan Krueger, the Princeton labor economist who is an expert on the minimum wage and many other things. In a paper written with Marie Connolly, which managed to cite both singer Paul Simon and Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, Krueger set out to answer some fundamental questions of what he and Connolly call “rockonomics.” (This is not to be confused with Freakonomics, the book co-written by University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner.*) Why are Cher concerts so expensive? How have falling record sales and the rise of downloading affected big-name stars? And what’s the deal with scalping?

More here.

From The Guardian:

The year’s most unexpected indie hit in American cinemas – a film about quantum physics – is about to open here. But how are ordinary mortals to judge its assertions about the nature of matter, mind, and the universe? We asked some of Britain’s best scientific brains to give us their verdicts…

More here.

From Harvard University Gazette:

Harvard’s Task Forces on Women Faculty and on Women in Science and Engineering, appointed three months ago to address concerns of women faculty and women in science throughout the University, today released reports calling for large-scale changes in the way the University recruits faculty and supports women and underrepresented minorities pursuing academic careers.

Emphasizing the need for prompt, but sustained, action by the University, the Task Forces propose a series of reforms and enhancements to the way women pursuing science and engineering are treated at every point along the “pipeline” from undergraduates, to graduate students, to post-doctoral fellows, to the faculty ranks. In addition, they propose various measures to enhance the diversity of the faculty ranks at Harvard across all fields and to improve the climate and prospects for faculty once on campus. A centerpiece of the recommendations is the appointment of a Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development – a new position to be created in the University’s central administration to oversee faculty appointments processes, with a particular charge to increase the representation of women and other under-represented groups within Harvard.

More here.

From Wired News:

When David Yang recently looked for a new apartment in Chicago, he took an aerial tour of the city. As a 22-year-old on a limited budget, Yang couldn’t afford to hire a helicopter for his visual inspection of Chicago. Instead, he turned to HousingMaps, a hack that combines craigslist real estate listings with city maps from Google Maps. It lets users pinpoint locations, along with one-click access to photos and descriptions, of dozens of available apartments in more than 20 North American cities. “It’s like flying around the city looking at real estate,” said Yang, a consultant for Deloitte. “If I know where my friend lives, or I know where an El (train) stop is … I can just zoom in and see what’s convenient to me.”

HousingMaps, created by Paul Rademacher, a 3-D graphic artist from Santa Clara, California, is just one of several innovative hacks giving users new ways to use information since Google launched its maps service. Google Maps offers detailed maps of nearly anywhere in the United States or Canada on which users can quickly zoom in or out.

More here.

From The New Scientist:

MY ATTIC is a sad sight, a jumble of frayed carpet offcuts, half-empty cans of congealed paint, broken videos, dead computers and inoperative exercise bikes. Just the thought of dragging it all to the dump tires me out. Something similar is happening inside my body’s cells – at least according to a new theory about why we age. The rubbish is piling up, and while I could clear it all out, that would take a lot of effort. So my metabolic cleaning systems are set to “don’t bother”, and the result is that harmful garbage is accumulating.

Junk plays a central role in many theories of ageing. The “free radical” theory, for example, suggests that ageing is caused by highly reactive oxygen species that gradually turn DNA and proteins into toxic rubbish. But now there is a new take on junk, where it comes from, and how it causes us to get old. By analysing unusually long-lived variants of the tiny nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, David Gems and Josh McElwee of University College London’s Centre for Research on Ageing have found that free radicals are just one part of a much bigger story.

The story begins in 1993 when Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California, San Francisco, discovered that some strains of C. elegans with mutations in a gene called daf-2 lived more than twice as long as normal. This appeared to show that ageing was controlled by genes, contradicting the widespread view that it was largely the result of wear and tear inflicted by free radicals. Not surprisingly the results caused a stir. Many researchers were puzzled about how genes for ageing could evolve through natural selection.

More here.

Derek E.G. Briggs reviews On the Origin of Phyla by James W. Valentine, in American Scientist:

The recent surge in interest in the origins of multicellular animals (metazoans) is fueled by new evidence from three major sources: molecular sequencing, the study of evolutionary development and the discovery of exceptionally preserved fossils of Precambrian and Cambrian age, particularly from China. Genetic sequences provide a means of analyzing how the major animal groups are related and of estimating their time of origin (using the molecular clock)—a means that is independent of morphological data and the record of evolutionary events the fossils reveal. The study of developmental processes in an evolutionary framework (“evo-devo”) provides the link between genetics and morphology. These new approaches have prompted molecular biologists to join forces with paleontologists to focus on the sequence of events leading to the origin of body plans before and during the Cambrian Period (543 to 500 million years ago).

Few if any authors can embrace these fields with the experience and authority of James W. Valentine, professor emeritus of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been publishing novel and provocative ideas on the origin and nature of phyla for more than 30 years. His most recent book, On the Origin of Phyla, is an homage to the greatest biologist who ever lived by one of the greatest living paleobiologists.

More here.

A.S. Hamrah in The Boston Globe:

Does the apparent triumph of smoking bans from Boston to Bhutan — not to mention the ruinous cigarette taxes that have sent smokers to websites instructing them on how to buy cigarettes from out-of-state sources using untraceable money orders — prove that if the 20th century was a century of smoking, the 21st will end up smokeless? Will smoking become the bad habit of a few criminalized holdouts, or will this brand of prohibition re-glamorize a vice once seen as sophisticated and cool?

Inevitably, another public-health report will let us know. Until then, two recent books that investigate smoking and its place in society — one via photography, the other through the lens of cultural studies — show that for all the efforts of the anti-smoking movement, smoking has a hold on American culture that’s stronger than addiction and deeper than the pocketbook.

More here.

Ramchandra Guha looks at Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy and fallen reputation in the Economic and Political Weekly.

“Forty years after his death, Jawaharlal Nehru is a visible presence in our public and political life. His name is invoked often, but almost always in a negative sense, as an object of derision or abuse. . . Just before the general elections of 2004, the Delhi monthly National Review interviewed two stalwarts of the political firmament: Lal Krishna Advani, then home minister and deputy prime minister in the government of India, for many years now the leading ideologue of the Hindu right; and Ashok Mitra, the former finance minister of the government of West Bengal, and a still serving ideologue of the radical left. This, without first checking with one another, is what they said about Nehru’s practice of secularism:

Lal Krishna Advani: ‘We are opposed to Nehruvian secularism. We accept Gandhian secularism. Nehru started off with the assumption that all religions are wrong. For Gandhi, all religions are true, and they are different paths to the same goal. We thought many of Gandhi’s political policies were not sound, but we accepted his idea of secularism.’

Ashok Mitra: ‘Nehru turned the meaning of secularism upside down. Secularism, he thought, was embracing each religion with equal fervour. And which he exemplified by frequent visits to mandirs and mosques, to dargahs and gurdwaras, to churches and synagogues. But once you embark on this slippery path, you end up identifying the state’s activities with religious rituals such as bhumipuja and breaking coconut shells to float a boat built in a government workshop. This was inevitable because since Hindus constitute the majority of the state’s population, Hindu rituals came to assert their presence within state premises.’

Which of these assertions is correct? Did Nehru hate all religions equally, as Advani suggests? Or did he love all equally, as Mitra claims? Perhaps it does not really matter. Perhaps these statements tells us less about Nehru’s actual beliefs (or policies), and more about the political preferences of his contemporary critics.”

I’ve long been a fan of Göran Therborn’s work, ever since I came across his 1977 New Left Review piece on the rule of capital and the rise of democracy.  Perry Anderson reviews his latest book Between Sex and Power in this week’s The Nation.

“Surveying the world, Therborn distinguishes five major family systems: European (including New World and Pacific settlements), East Asian, sub-Saharan African, West Asian/North African and Subcontinental, with a further two more ‘interstitial’ ones, Southeast Asian and Creole American. Although each of the major systems is the heartland of a distinctive religious or ethical code–Christian, Confucian, Animist, Muslim, Hindu–and the interstitial ones are zones of overlapping codes, the systems themselves form many ‘geocultures’ in which elements of a common history can override contrasts of belief within them. . . Most striking of all, in a field so dominated by social or merely technical registers, is the political construction Therborn gives to the history of the family in the twentieth century.

What are the central propositions of the book? All traditional family systems, Therborn argues, have comprised three regimes: of patriarchy, marriage and fertility (crudely summarized–who calls the shots in the family, how people hitch up, how many kids result). Between Sex and Power sets out to trace the modern history of each.”

Jacqueline Bhabha argues for a more human-rights based approach to undocumented migration in the upcoming Boston Review:

“A more constructive, rights-based policy needs to make progress in two directions. It needs to look inward to protect all undocumented or irregular workers and their families living within the jurisdiction of the state. But it also needs to look outward, to take stock of circumstances in countries of origin and conditions of transit for irregular migrants, so that the exclusion, expulsion, and deportation policies recognize at least a minimum of rights for all, including irregular migrants with no apparent lawful immigration claim.

States must take into consideration the policies of the states to which irregular migrants would be deported. States are responsible for human-rights violations committed against those they have exported or expelled even once they are outside the borders; they are obligated to preempt reasonably foreseeable harm.”

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting review of Steven Johnson’s “Everything Bad is Good for You.” It’s another nail in the coffin for all those cultural conservatives on the Left and the Right who love to tell their grand stories about the decline of all things in our stupid modern age.

Johnson… imagine[s] what cultural critics might have said had video games been invented hundreds of years ago, and only recently had something called the book been marketed aggressively to children:               
Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. . . .        
Books are also tragically isolating. …
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you.

From The New York Times:

Some facts you had better get used to: you will never get to eavesdrop on Sartre and Genet at the Cafe de Flore, or watch Irving Howe and Philip Rahv getting worked up about Roth and Mailer at the Tip Toe Inn on the Upper West Side. And if you wander into Le Figaro Cafe you won’t find Kerouac and Ginsberg hollering at each other in holy ecstasy — just some N.Y.U. kids talking about relationships.

But the tradition of freestyle intellectual conversation lives on in Calcutta. The city (officially renamed Kolkata in 2001) has an oral culture as lively and cerebral as that of 1950’s New York or Paris. Bengalis love to talk, especially about exalted topics (the notion that some topics are exalted still holds currency there, even among postmodernists).

Talk is cheap: students of the University of Calcutta discuss topics like Dostoyevsky and demographics over samosas at an adda at Puttiram’s Cabin cafe (in the picture).

More here.