From The New York Times:

Scientists have been trying to determine why people need sleep for more than 100 years. They have not learned much more than what every new parent quickly finds out: sleep loss makes you more reckless, more emotionally fragile, less able to concentrate and almost certainly more vulnerable to infection. They know, too, that some people get by on as few as three hours a night, even less, and that there are hearty souls who have stayed up for more than week without significant health problems.

Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggest that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking — a new way to solve a math or Easter egg problem, even an unseen pattern causing stress in a marriage.

More here.

Michael Shermer and Dinesh D’Souza debate the issue:

(Via richarddawkins.net)

NatureNews’ Declan Butler looks at the innovative Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab:

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is pioneering the concept of randomized trials, more commonly associated with drug safety tests, to assess what works and what doesn’t in development and poverty interventions. The strategy has inspired the World Bank, which in December will choose winning proposals in a €10.4-million (US$14.9-million), 3-year programme that will use randomized trials to study the fight against poverty.

Based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, J-PAL was founded in 2003 and this year has more than 60 projects on the go in 21 countries. Esther Duflo, one of the lab’s founders, says she set it up to help rigorously test the many programmes that are meant to aid the poor. “Whereas one would not dream of putting a new drug on the market without a randomized trial,” she says, “such evaluations were, and to a certain extent still are, very rare for social programmes.”

Although young, J-PAL has already notched up some successes. One of its first studies, involving more than 30,000 youngsters in rural Kenya, found that deworming children reduced the number of days taken off school by 25% (E. Miguel and M. Kremer Econometrica 72, 159-217 ; 2004). Another study, in India, showed that hiring young local women to help at schools with underperforming students significantly increased test scores, and was six times cheaper than the computer-assisted learning already being tested (A. Banerjee et al . Q. J. Econ. 122, 1235-1264 ; 2007). “J-PAL’s results in education are solid and important,” says Nilima Gulrajani, an expert in aid management at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Over at Conversations with History, Harry Kreisler talks to the philosopher Thomas Scanlon:

[Kreisler] What did you come to see as the important dimensions of freedom of expression? We’re in the realm of political philosophy where we’re talking about people’s relations with their institutions.

[Scanlon] In this first article I wrote, I was very taken with the idea of individual autonomy. It’s important for citizens not only to be able to make up their own minds about important questions about life and politics, but also to have their relations with each other, and with government, defined by the idea that they are autonomous. I thought that recognizing other people’s autonomy, recognizing citizens’ autonomy, drew a sharp line. It’s incompatible with seeing citizens as autonomous for government to decide this can’t be published because it might lead them to draw some false conclusion. Whether the conclusion is false is up to them to decide. That’s what it means to treat them as autonomous.

Later on, I came to think that the restriction on the way speech could be restricted was too tight and one should adopt a more — I don’t know if I want to say practical, but a more instrumental view. The main reason why government can’t have unlimited power to restrict speech has to do with the dangerousness of giving governments that power. We’re properly more willing to allow governments to restrict some kinds of false advertising than we are to allow them to restrict what they take to be false political speech. Government is — one might assume, although this isn’t always true — somewhat less partisan, less untrustworthy and less likely to abuse its power in the realm of false advertising about products (about how dangerous your lawnmower is, or how long your car’s going to last) than it is in the realm of deciding what answers to the basic political questions of our time are true.

Also in The New Yorker, a profile of David Simon, the creator of my favorite television show of all time, The Wire.

The show’s title referred to the wiretap that a unit of the Baltimore police force was using to keep a local drug organization under surveillance. Ultimately, the term suggested more—the way that the show allowed viewers to eavesdrop on various recondite power plays, and the way that poverty, politics, and policing were interconnected in a struggling post-industrial city. In Simon’s view, “The Wire” was never “a cop show. We were always planning to move further and further out, to build a whole city.”

Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. “ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” He also likes to say that “The Wire” is a story about the “decline of the American empire.” Simon’s belief in the show is a formidable thing, and it leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not. Recently, he spoke at Loyola College, in Baltimore; he described the show in lofty terms that left many of the students in the audience puzzled—at least, those who had come hoping to hear how they might get a job in Hollywood. In creating “The Wire,” Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”

In The New Yorker, a short story by Andrei Platonov (translated by Robert Chandler):

In the gloom of nature, a man with a hunting rifle was walking through sparse forest. The hunter’s face was a little pockmarked, but he was handsome and, for the time being, still young. At this time of year, a whiff of mist hung in the forest—from the warmth and moisture of the air, the breath of developing plants, and the decay of leaves that had perished long ago. It was difficult to see anything, but it was good to walk alone, to think without meaning, or to do the opposite—to stop thinking altogether and just droop. The forest grew on the slope of a low hill; large boulders lay between the small thin birches, and the soil was infertile and poor—clay here, gray earth there—but the trees and grass had got used to these conditions, and they lived in this land as best they could.

Sometimes the hunter would stop for a moment; then he would hear the many-voiced drone of the life of midges, small birds, worms, and ants, and the rustle of the lumps of earth that this population harried and shifted about, so as to feed itself and stay active. The forest was like a crowded city—not that the hunter had ever been to a city, but he had been trying to imagine one for a long time. Once, he had passed through Petrozavodsk, but even that had been only in passing. Screeches, squeaks, and a faint muttering filled the forest, perhaps indicating bliss and satisfaction, perhaps indicating that someone had perished. Moist birch leaves shone in the mist with the green inner light of their lives; invisible insects were rocking them in the steamy damp rising from the earth. Some far-off small animal began to whimper meekly in its hiding place; no one was doing it any harm there, but it was trembling from the fear of its own existence, not daring to surrender to its own heart’s joy in the loveliness of the world, afraid to make use of the rare and brief chance of inadvertent life, because it might be discovered and eaten. But then the animal should not really even have been whimpering: predators might notice and devour it.

Carlos Jacanamijoy. No Solo Como Diversion. 1993.

Painting and drawing.

More on this Colombian artist here and here.

Thanks to Dr. Luis Felipe Uriza for introducing this artist to me.

Rodolfo Hernandez-Corchado

In 2006, after attending a conference, Louis met Mikhail for the first time in a cold Berlin afternoon. After a brief chat, the two men got into a car, the same one in which Mikhail was later photographed. Mikhail, was nicely dressed: a black suit and a coat, blue tie and a grey scarf. Louis appeared, as always: timeless. After more than a century, both of them were finally together. Louis was born in 1821 in Jura, France and Mikhail was born in Privolnoye, Russia in 1931.

There is not much information about what happened when Louis and Mikhail got into the car. Only one photograph was taken of Mikhail (his stain in the forehead is almost unnoticeable) sitting in the back seat of the car and staring through the right window, grasping firmly the interior right door handle with his hand. But where is Louis?

What they talked about? After waiting more than a century to be together, it is hard to believe that both of them were together for such brief time, with not so much to talk about it. Did Louis get off the vehicle?
Did Louis say something to upset Mikhail? Who knows? The fact is that at the end of the day, Mikhail Gorbachev rode alone with a Keepall 60 travel bag, designed by the Louis Vuitton Company. Perhaps Louis forgot it, or was it a gift? I imagine Louis saying: “Mikhail, look at this, do you mind if we take a photograph of you?

Needless to say Mikhail accepted to model with the travel bag, and that is why we have this photograph, as part of the Louis Vuitton 2007 campaign that includes among others the French actress Catherine Denuve and the tennis player Andre Agassi. This is not the first time that we have the opportunity to see Mr. Gorbachev participating in an advertising campaign. In 1997, he appeared in a spot for the fast food chain Pizza Hut with his granddaughter Anastasia.

When asked about his participation, Mr. Gorbachev argued about his economic needs: “I am in the process of creating a library and a Perestroika archive, and this project requires certain funds”. That statement certainly informs us about the terrible impacts that the economic reforms and liberalization policies (“shock therapy”) had during the early 1990s in the former USSR: private savings coming to nothing as a consequence of the inflation, sixty percent of the population under the poverty line, late wages, cutbacks in education and health care, a drop of the 50% of the industrial and agricultural production. In the midst of the economical and political turmoil, even the former president had to deal with corporate capitalism in order to survive.

But we should not misinterpret Gorbachev’s actions as selfish and greedy. Probably his goal was not only to promote consumption and market expansion in the former USSR, and get some money for his library. “It is not only consumption, it is also socializing”, Mr. Gorbachev explained why he participated in a pizza advertising campaign and not in another type of advertisement. That 1997 spot, ended with the slogan “Have you been to the edge?”

Well, sixteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Louis and Mikhail went to the edge, or to the remains of the geographical frontiers of the Cold war. They rode along the physical limits between the socialist camp or the real socialism and capitalism: the Berlin Wall. Hard to believe Mr. Gorbachev? Not long gone are the years when Mr. Gorbachev defended the notion that Socialism and the market were not only compatible, but also indivisible in substance.

Was the place of the photography casual? I imagine, Louis saying to the car driver: “turn to the right, I want to show something to Mikhail”. My guess is that traveling to the historical frontier that symbolizes the end of what the English historian Eric Hobsbawm (1994) called the Short Twentieth Century, which began with the First World War in 1914 and ended in 1991, Louis wanted to tell Mikhail and to us about the ephemeral condition of all things, persons, social structures, institutions, nation-states, and about history.
“All that is solid melts into the air”, said Marx and Engels referring to the destructive and revolutionary capacity of capitalism more than a century ago in 1848 when Louis was only 27 years old. When the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961, the travel bag carried by Mr. Gorbachev had been moving around the planet for 31 years. Now the Berlin Wall has gone, but the Louis Vuitton travel bag, a harmless and delicate bag, and expensive too, is still here. Is that why it is advertised as “recognized the world over for its timeless shape”?

If the Short Twentieth Century ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Socialist camp in Easter Europe, the Keepall 60 carried by Gorbachev is the statement of the power of the commodity and the social relations embedded in it as timeless: the only possibility to transcend is through the commodity. Perhaps the Soviet Union is gone but the Keepall bag deigned in 1930 is still sold in 130 stores all over the world -including Russia and China.

While Mikhail and his bag with the worldwide famous monogram “LV” moves along is trying to persuade us that past doesn’t dominate the present. In the photograph, the Berlin wall is seen in the background trough the window of the car. As the car moves, Mikhail and Louis leave the Short Twentieth Century behind. Behind them are two World Wars, Stalinism, the Gulag, Nazism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Cold War, US military interventions in Latin America, and its collection of dictatorships: the Batistas, the Banzers, the Galtieris, the Pinochetts, the Videlas, the Stroesners.

But for Louis and Mikhail the only reality is the present and the future embedded in that bag. Yes, both of them are making a historical statement, but maybe just one of them is conscious about it, and the other one cannot resist the impulse. Do they really move to the future? Mikhail dares to ask Louis: “Louis, will I see you for the 2008 campaign?” Dear, I suspect that after all you have not understood anything. We are not going to need you next year. I am the only future. But keep the bag, it is yours.

Last spring, Martha Nussbaum made the case against academic boycotts (specifically in the wake of the movement to culturally boycott Israel) in Dissent.

I MUST COMMENT on one very alarming rationale that has been offered in this context. In some of the defenses of the boycotts, the wrongdoing alleged is failure to dismiss scholars who take political positions that the group of boycotters does not like. Here the principle of academic freedom becomes relevant in the most urgent manner. Surely the institutions in question should protect these people, unless they do something that counts as hate speech targeted at individuals, or some other form of criminal conduct. We all know what happened in the McCarthy era, when scholars were fired for political positions that a dominant group didn’t like. As someone whose hiring, along with that of other “leftists,” has been criticized on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (in a way that my dean, at least, took as tantamount to a McCarthyite call for my firing), I believe that if this principle is once breached, it will hurt most those whose positions go most against the dominant currents of governmental power: feminists, advocates of gay rights, whatever.

In the current issue of Logos, Lawrence Davidson makes the case for a boycott:

The boycott’s impingement on the academic freedom of Israeli scholars has been repeatedly condemned. It has been called “contemptible,” “ hypocritical,” and “an unacceptable breakdown in the norms of intellectual freedom” (these terms have not been applied by these same critics to the destruction of Palestinian academic freedom). For simplicity sake, let us work from the statement of Dena S. Davis, a law professor at Cleveland State University, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on April 18, 2003. Davis writes that “Academic boycotts undermine the basic premise of intellectual life that ideas make a difference, and the corollary that intellectual exchanges across cultures can open minds.”12 Unfortunately, there is nothing necessary about the assumption that the “difference” ideas make results in a more humane world or more humane outlooks. Thus, it is not only positive ideas that can make a difference.

In The Guardian, Steven Poole reviews Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com 2.0:

n this revised edition of his 2001 book, Sunstein sticks to his paternalist view that the internet allows you, via blogs or feeds or personalised news services, to filter out unsolicited facts or viewpoints, so that you can end up conversing entirely within a partisan “echo chamber”. For democracy to flourish, Sunstein thinks, “people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance”, which he argues was more likely to happen with old media. Of course, people were never obliged to read newspapers or watch the TV news either, and ignoring what is going on around you is an age-old preference for some. Sunstein never provides any evidence that ignoring what is going on in the world is somehow easier or more likely thanks to the internet, which can after all allow you to find out more about what is going on in the world, if you are so inclined. He wants to regulate the functioning of a communications network, but what he is really annoyed about is people’s desire, or lack of it, for self-education.

Here is a Q&A with Sunstein, and here is Chapter 1 of the book.

From a while ago in the Fall/Winter 2004 issue of Letterspace, but worth a read:

By the mid-1940s, long after Art Deco had left, Neuland’s use in African-American texts remained. Famous African-American books such as Richard Wright’s Native Son and Wulf Sachs’ Black Anger (Plate 20) use Neuland on their covers. Critic Ellen Lupton notes, “Neuland has appeared…on the covers of numerous books…about the literature and anthropology of Africa and African-Americans” (37). Even today, books that fit into the category that Lupton outlines bear Neuland or Lithos on their covers (Plates 21). While the stereotypes associated with the fonts have remained, their applications have, in fact, increased in the present day beyond just book publishing. Neuland has found its way into Hollywood, used in such films as Jurassic Park, Tarzan, and Jumanji. Subaru used Lithos prominently in the logo for their new car, the Outback. Both fonts appear frequently on all sorts of extreme sports paraphernalia. These uses seem to indicate that in addition to Neuland and Lithos’ prior associations with informality, ineptitude, ugliness, cheapness, and unusability, they have since acquired qualities that suggest “jungle,” “safari,” and “adventure”—in short, Africa. Moreover, “stereotypography”—the stereotyping of cultures through typefaces associated with them—has been increasing as graphic design becomes a greater cultural force: just this year, House Industries, a type foundry in New Jersey, released a family of typefaces called “Tiki Type,” which is meant to signify Polynesia (Plate 22); at the same time, Abercrombie & Fitch, a clothing store catering to twentysomethings, created shirts with meaningless Chinese ideograms on them, meant to look as if they came directly from New York’s predominantly Chinese garment district.

[H/t: Linta Varghese]

He believes humanity is near that 1% moment in technological growth. By 2027, he predicts, computers will surpass humans in intelligence; by 2045 or so, we will reach the Singularity, a moment when technology is advancing so rapidly that “strictly biological” humans will be unable to comprehend it.

He has plenty more ideas that may seem Woody Allen – wacky in a Sleeper kind of way (virtual sex as good as or better than the real thing) and occasionally downright disturbing à la 2001: A Space Odyssey (computers will achieve consciousness in about 20 years). But a number of his predictions have had a funny way of coming true.

Back in the 1980s he predicted that a computer would beat the world chess champion in 1998 (it happened in 1997) and that some kind of worldwide computer network would arise and facilitate communication and entertainment (still happening).

His current vision goes way, way past the web, of course. But at least give the guy a hearing. “We are the species that goes beyond our potential,” he says. “Merging with our technology is the next stage in our evolution.”

more from The Spirit of here.

Machu Picchu, or old mountain in Quechua, the primary indigenous language of Peru, has only been a tourist destination for about seventy years. Before it was a postcard, before it was one of the most recognizable archeological sites in the world, reaching the Inca sanctuary took days by mule. The roads were remote and the forest ridge was imposing, even for the most intrepid explorers. The inaccessible land changed hands many times in the colonial period, and were eventually donated to an order of Bethlemite monks, who held onto the property for many decades. The monks left during the 19th century, and a family of Cusco landowners, the Nadals, took over the land as their own through the recently inaugurated Public Registry of Cusco. When, in 1905, Roxanna Abrill’s great-grandfather bought the land from the Nadals, no one suspected he had also gained a priceless treasure. This new owner was a lucky man. His name was Mariano Ignacio Ferro, and when the explorer Hiram Bingham arrived in Cusco in 1911, it was Ferro who offered the American help.

more from VQR here.

More from Cosma on the measurement of intelligence and heritability.

Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid question of what, if anything, g, the supposed general factor of intelligence, tells us about these matters. By calling g a “statistical myth” before, I made clear my conclusion, but none of my reasoning. This topic being what it is, I hardly expect this will change anyone’s mind, but I feel a duty to explain myself.

To summarize what follows below (“shorter sloth”, as it were), the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can’t tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn’t distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.

And Cosma’s valuable sociological insight:

In primitive societies, or so Malinowski taught, myths serve as the legitimating charters of practices and institutions. Just so here: the myth of g legitimates a vast enterprise of intelligence testing and theorizing. There should be no dispute that, when we lack specialized and valid instruments, general IQ tests can be better than nothing. Claims that they are anything more than such stop-gaps — that they are triumphs of psychological science, illuminating the workings of the mind; keys to the fates of individuals and peoples; sources of harsh truths which only a courageous few have the strength to bear; etc., etc., — such claims are at present entirely unjustified, though not, perhaps, unmotivated. They are supported only by the myth, and acceptance of the myth itself rests on what I can only call an astonishing methodological backwardness.

The bottom line is: The sooner we stop paying attention to g, the sooner we can devote our energies to understanding the mind.

The poet William Matthews once said of his classical counterparts that they are “kept alive by a process of continual translation, an enterprise that grows on itself like a coral colony.” Translation is not one act; it is a continuing gesture. There is no such thing as a definitive translation — in fact, there’s nothing definitive in the whole business, not even the dictionaries.

Two new versions of “War and Peace” have emerged this fall, the fruits of tremendous effort on the parts of the prolific translators Andrew Bromfield, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Both are immense gestures.

more from the LA Times here.

From The London Times:

The Museum of Forensic Medicine, where this elephantiasis-swollen body part is to be found, is hidden in a back block of the Siriraj Hospital. Built principally for the education of medical students, it’s actually six museums that were united in August 2004 into a low-budget palace of the macabre. But it’s the exhibits to be found in the parasitology, pathology and forensic departments that will revisit you in your dreams. Here you’ll find chain saws, guns and kitchen knives used in murders, along with the bloodstained clothing of the victims; diseased livers and legs; lungs with stab wounds; and heads that have been dissected and suspended in formaldehyde so you can see where the bullet went through.

Because these exhibits are housed in a converted office block, it feels less like a museum and more like a repository for the private collection of an insane millionaire. And, for what is ostensibly supposed to be a place of education, there’s a surprising lack of actual information. Mostly, it’s display cabinets marked by a simple label.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

One of three successful candidates from Latin America, Machu Picchu is a 15th-century mountain settlement in the Amazon region of Peru.

The ruined city is among the best known remnants of the Inca civilization, which flourished in the Andes region of western South America. The city is thought to have been abandoned following an outbreak of deadly smallpox, a disease introduced in the 1500s by invading Spanish forces.

More here.   (For Ga via Akbi).

Steven Poole reviews the book in The Guardian:

Cameron argues persuasively that the Mars and Venus myth does threaten women. Consistently, as she shows, aspects of the way our society is currently structured are taken to be clues to some basic difference in the nature of men and women, which always turns out to be to women’s disadvantage, a “natural” reason to keep them in lower-status roles. Cameron discusses Simon Baron-Cohen’s book, The Essential Difference, which posits a distinction between the male and female brains and concludes that “people with the female brain”, supposedly more empathetic, are better at jobs such as nursing (just as Rosalind’s notion of “Women’s gentle brain” would predict), and the male-brained, supposedly more analytical, make better lawyers. Cameron comments aptly that nurses also need to be analytical and lawyers need people skills: “These categorisations are not based on a dispassionate analysis of the demands made by the two jobs. They are based on the everyday common-sense knowledge that most nurses are women and most lawyers are men.”

Some gender differences do exist: for example “Men are more aggressive and can throw things further.” But even then, there is as much if not more variability within the groups as between them. Your correspondent cannot throw anything as far as Tessa Sanderson threw her javelins. Ethnographic studies of young girls in LA or male university students, meanwhile, show the girls acting confrontationally and the boys gossiping. Nor does the inherently “speculative” nature of evolutionary psychology inspire Cameron’s confidence. Where there do seem to be empirically attested variations between women’s and men’s language use, such as that women use more “tag questions” (“It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”), Cameron argues that this, again, is owed to the present gender-biased distribution of social roles. That men and women habitually “miscommunicate” owing to some notion of direct versus indirect speech-habits is also, as she shows, a useful get-out clause for men, as well as being highly implausible. Cameron cites a rape case in which the accused claimed he didn’t know the woman was not consenting, and ripostes: “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that someone who feigns unconsciousness while in bed with you probably doesn’t want to have sex.”

From the Introduction:

It is significant that we have reached a point in human history at which further attempts to make the world a better place will have to include not only changes to the world, but also changes to humanity, perhaps with the consequence that we, or our descendants, will cease to be human in the sense in which we now understand that idea. This possibility of a new phase of evolution in which Darwinian evolution, by natural selection, will be replaced by a deliberately chosen process of selection, the results of which, instead of having to wait the millions of years over which Darwinian evolutionary change has taken place, will be seen and felt almost immediately. This new process of evolutionary change will replace natural selection with deliberate selection, Darwinian evolution with “enhancement evolution.”

One of the ways in which philosophy can contribute to a better world is to help clear away the bad arguments that stand as much in the way of human progress and human happiness as do reactionary forces of a political and even of a military kind. When new technologies are announced, the first reaction is often either “wow—this is amazing!” or “yuck—this is sick!” This book is about the reasons and arguments that underlie both reactions, and about how it can sometimes be rational to move from “yuck!” to “wow!”