Dave Demerjian in Wired:

Aspiring scientists from the Zurich School of Applied Sciences have built a video simulation that displays the flight path of every commercial flight in the world over a 24-hour period. There isn't much of an application for it, but it sure is cool to look at.

While the map may look complex, Dr. Karl Rege tells us he and his team found it surprisingly simple to assemble using data readily available on the internet.

“We used a commercial website called FlightStats to gather global flight and schedule information,” he says. “So there was no need to contact the different airlines.”

The team mined FlightStats for the departure and arrival times of every commercial flight in the world, then plugged it all into a computer to assemble their simulation. For the sake of simplicity, they assumed every plane traveled at the same speed and every flight took the most direct route to its destination. Then every flight was assigned a position on a Miller cylindrical projection, which is similar to a Mercator Projection but doesn't distort the poles so much.

More here.

From Time:

More here.

Clifford Adelman in Inside Higher Ed:

Indeed, they don’t, and one doesn’t need more than 4th grade math to see the problems with population ratios, particularly in the matter of the U.S., which is, by far, the most populous country among the 30 OECD member states.

None of our domestic reports using OECD data bothers to recognize the relative size of our country, or the relative diversity of races, ethnicities, nativities, religions, and native languages — and the cultures that come with these — that characterize our 310 million residents. Though it takes a lot to move a big ship with a motley crew, these reports all would blithely compare our educational landscape with that of Denmark, for example, a country of 5.4 million, where 91 percent of the inhabitants are of Danish descent, and 82 percent belong to the same church.

For an analogous common sense case, Japan and South Korea don’t worry about students from second language backgrounds in their educational systems. Yes, France, the UK, and Germany are both much larger and more culturally diverse than Denmark, but offer nowhere near the concentration of diversities found in the U.S. It’s not that we shouldn’t compare our records to theirs; it’s just that population ratios are not the way to do it.

Keith Gessen in bookforum:

Edward Said and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, dissident heroes of two sharply divergent political traditions, had a surprising amount in common. Both came from cultures that had been violently uprooted and dislocated; both were exiled, their lives threatened; both found refuge eventually in the United States—and became outspoken critics of this country. Both fought the regimes they opposed with words and the application of counternarrative. Both wrote famous accusatory tomes—Orientalism (1978), The Gulag Archipelago (1973)—that, through the sheer accrual of evidence, fundamentally altered the worlds they described.

Most interesting of all, both lived to see their political projects succeed to a degree they could never have anticipated. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; Israel acknowledged the existence of the Palestinian people, and their right to a state, in the 1993 Oslo Accords. And both writers were, immediately and thoroughly, critical of what had once seemed their fondest wishes: While the West celebrated the Yeltsin regime, Solzhenitsyn warned that it was in irresponsible free fall; at almost the same moment, Said denounced Oslo as “a Palestinian Versailles.” Both, sadly, were right.

Two new books give us a sense of where the legacies of these men stand. The Soul and Barbed Wire, an overview of Solzhenitsyn’s life and works by two American scholars, is pure hagiography. While quasi-academic in form and published by a quasi-academic press, the book is willing to acknowledge that Solzhenitsyn had his critics only to label their criticisms “manifestly unfair.” The most relevant thing, claim Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Alexis Klimoff, is that Solzhenitsyn is the equal of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. You might have predicted, if you were a sociologist of academe, that two Solzhenitsyn specialists would say approximately that.

Joseph Stiglitz in Project Syndicate:

Keynes was worried about a liquidity trap – the inability of monetary authorities to induce an increase in the supply of credit in order to raise the level of economic activity. US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has tried hard to avoid having the blame fall on the Fed for deepening this downturn in the way that it is blamed for the Great Depression, famously associated with a contraction of the money supply and the collapse of banks.

And yet one should read history and theory carefully: preserving financial institutions is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. It is the flow of credit that is important, and the reason that the failure of banks during the Great Depression was important is that they were involved in determining creditworthiness; they were the repositories of information necessary for the maintenance of the flow of credit.

But America’s financial system has changed dramatically since the 1930’s. Many of America’s big banks moved out of the “lending” business and into the “moving business.” They focused on buying assets, repackaging them, and selling them, while establishing a record of incompetence in assessing risk and screening for creditworthiness. Hundreds of billions have been spent to preserve these dysfunctional institutions. Nothing has been done even to address their perverse incentive structures, which encourage short-sighted behavior and excessive risk taking. With private rewards so markedly different from social returns, it is no surprise that the pursuit of self-interest (greed) led to such socially destructive consequences. Not even the interests of their own shareholders have been served well.

Meanwhile, too little is being done to help banks that actually do what banks are supposed to do – lend money and assess creditworthiness.

more from Boing Boing here.

I still believe in Christmas. It is the one time of the year that I believe the world will stay upright, that people are inherently good and kind, and that slow drivers aren’t out to deter me from getting to my destination as fast as possible. I believe in the Christmas spirit, the idea that it’s infectious and that smiles and “thank yous” are a direct symptom of catching it. I believe in Santa and flying reindeer and unexpected gifts. I believe in macaroni and cheese with a nicely crusted top. I believe in getting a tree and trimming it, even if the wallet is tight. I believe in the power of Christmas music, which is why I keep a Christmas mix in my car at all times; it is the one thing that can make me feel like a child instantly. Christmas music is my yoga. It is the only music that doesn’t discriminate by age or race. A Christmas mix is just as likely to have Ol’ Blue Eyes next to ODB. So, I give you Christmas.

more from The Root here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

“When you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

At a panel discussion Monday at the Harvard Kennedy School, Maleeha Lodhi evoked Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat to describe the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. The title of the event that Lodhi, formerly the Pakistani ambassador to the United States and currently a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, was taking part in was, “Is Afghanistan Lost?” Neither she nor any of her fellow panelists answered that exact question in the affirmative. But they each made a strong case that American policy has lost its way in Afghanistan.

“The war is going on almost on autopilot” is how another panelist, Barnett Rubin of the Center for International Conflict at New York University, put it. “The U.S. and NATO have, I would say, lost sight of their original objectives.” Moreover, the international presence in Afghanistan, from which Rubin has just returned in recent weeks, is undercutting the country as a sovereign state — not least because of the way visiting foreigners provide for their own security. They turn to private contractors like Blackwater, that in turn subcontract with former warlords now active as security guards for hire. The subcontractors end up with more money, prestige, and firepower than the official Afghan national forces. This is true not only in the case of the U.S. military, Rubin said, drawing chuckles from his audience with a reference to the “Soprano-like figure” who heads the team protecting the Bagram Air Base. It’s true of aid organizations as well.

More here.

From Scientific American:

We were talking about politics. My housemate, an English professor, opined that certain politicians were thinking with their reptilian brains when they threatened military action against Iran. Many people believe that a component of the human brain inherited from reptilian ancestors is responsible for our species’ aggression, ritual behaviors and territoriality.

One of the most common misconceptions about brain evolution is that it represents a linear process culminating in the amazing cognitive powers of humans, with the brains of other modern species representing previous stages. Such ideas have even influenced the thinking of neuroscientists and psychologists who compare the brains of different species used in biomedical research. Over the past 30 years, however, research in comparative neuroanatomy clearly has shown that complex brains—and sophisticated cognition—have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages, or evolutionarily related groups: in mollusks such as octopuses, squid and cuttlefish; in bony fishes such as goldfish and, separately again, in cartilaginous fishes such as sharks and manta rays; and in reptiles and birds. Nonmammals have demonstrated advanced abilities such as learning by copying the behavior of others, finding their way in complicated spatial environments, manufacturing and using tools, and even conducting mental time travel (remembering specific past episodes or anticipating unique future events). Collectively, these findings are helping scientists to understand how intelligence can arise—and to appreciate the many forms it can take.

More here.

The interview is in six parts, which should follow each other automatically:

From ItvNews:

Combining a double natural “magnifying glass” with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinised the inner parts of the disc around a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the disc with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such discs.

The team of astronomers from Europe and the US studied the “Einstein Cross“, a famous cosmic mirage. This cross-shaped configuration consists of four images of a single very distant source. The multiple images are a result of gravitational lensing by a foreground galaxy, an effect that was predicted by Albert Einstein as a consequence of his theory of general relativity. The light source in the Einstein Cross is a quasar approximately ten billion light-years away, whereas the foreground lensing galaxy is ten times closer. The light from the quasar is bent in its path and magnified by the gravitational field of the lensing galaxy.

This magnification effect, known as “macrolensing“, in which a galaxy plays the role of a cosmic magnifying glass or a natural telescope, proves very useful in astronomy as it allows us to observe distant objects that would otherwise be too faint to explore using currently available telescopes. “The combination of this natural magnification with the use of a big telescope provides us with the sharpest details ever obtained,” explains Frédéric Courbin, leader of the programme studying the Einstein Cross with ESO's Very Large Telescope.

More here.

Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith in Truthout:

As Americans respond to President-elect Obama's call for town hall meetings on reform of the American health care system, an understanding of how that system came to be the way it is can be crucial for figuring out how to fix it. The American health care system is unique because, for most of us, it is tied to our jobs rather than to our government. For many Americans, the system seems natural, but few know that it originated not as a well-thought-out plan to provide for Americans' health, but as a way to circumvent a quirk in wartime wage regulations that had nothing to do with health.

As far back as the 1920's, a few big employers had offered health insurance plans to some of their workers. But only a few: By 1935, only about two million people were covered by private health insurance, and on the eve of World War II, there were only 48 job-based health plans in the entire country.

The rise of unions in the 1930's and 1940's led to the first great expansion of health care for Americans. But ironically, it did not produce a national plan providing health care to all, like those in virtually all other developed countries. Instead, the special conditions of World War II produced the system of job-based health benefits we know today.

In 1942, the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering “fringe benefits” – notably, health insurance. The fringe benefits created a huge tax subsidy; they were treated as tax-deductible expenses for corporations, but not as taxable income for workers.

The result was revolutionary.

More here. [Thanks to Zara Houshmand.]

From Democracy Now:

The response to the election was interesting and instructive. It kept pretty much to the soaring rhetoric, to borrow the cliché, that was the major theme of the election. The election was described as an extraordinary display of democracy, a miracle that could only happen in America, and on and on. Much more extreme in Europe even than here. There’s some accuracy in that, if we keep to the West. So if we keep to the West, yes, it’s probably true that it couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Europe is much more racist than the United States, and you wouldn’t expect anything like that to happen. On the other hand, if we look at the world, it’s not that remarkable.

So, let’s take, say, the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere: Haiti and Bolivia. In Haiti, there was an election in 1990, which really was an extraordinary display of democracy, much more so than this. In Haiti, there were grassroots movements, popular movements that developed in the slums and in the hills, which nobody was paying any attention to. And they managed, even without any resources, to sweep into power their own candidate, a populist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That’s a victory for democracy, when popular movements can organize and set programs and pick their candidate and put him into office, which is not what happened here, of course. I mean, Obama did organize a great large number of people and many enthusiastic people, what’s called in the press “Obama’s Army.” But the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, to introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That’s critical.

More here.

Over at the TPMCafe Book Club, Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Dean Baker, Robert Reich, Mark Thoma and Dana Chasin discuss Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. Krugman:

This is a heavily revised new edition of The Return of Depression Economics, originally published 9 years ago. When I wrote the original version, I had Asia on my mind. Some people looked at the crisis that swept Southeast Asia and at Japan's monetary trap, and saw them as proof of the superiority of the American system. I looked at the same things and saw them as omens. I worried that similar things could happen to us. And now they have.

Right now the world economy is in a nosedive, and understanding what I call “depression economics” — the weird world you get into when even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, and a messed-up financial system is dragging down the real economy — is essential if we're going to avoid the worst.

Response at the book club.

Jon Friedman in 23/6:

1. Shouldn’t you have jumped in front of that shoe?
2. Shouldn’t you have jumped in front of that second shoe?
3. Second shoe = the one thrown after being removed from foot after first shoe was thrown.
4. Let’s say people had three feet. Would you have allowed a third shoe to fly unimpeded?
5. While the shoe was in the air, were you like, “Oh, its just a shoe.”
6. Same question about the second shoe.
7. Do you think this is funny, “Throw a shoe at me once, shame on–you. Throw a shoe–you throw a shoe, you can’t throw a shoe again.”
8. Is there not “protection training” for lunatics launching objects?
9. Let’s say there isn’t training for that–but do they tell you that if someone does throw (or shoot) something to be on the alert in case they want to repeat this behavior?
10. Where were you?

BONUS QUESTION: Do you think the Iraqis want us there? (Hint: their journalists are throwing their shoes at Bush)

Amitava Kumar in the Boston Review:

In May this year, a fourteen-year-old girl named Aarushi Talwar was found murdered in her parents’ house outside Delhi. The teen’s parents were both dentists. The main suspect in the killing was the servant employed by the Talwars, a forty-five-year-old Nepalese migrant named Hemraj. Most servants in a large city like Delhi are the poor who have arrived from impoverished eastern states, mostly Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Orissa.

In India, even an ordinary middle-class person can employ domestic help. You provide a poor young man or woman space to sleep, leftover food, and old clothes, and you are likely to get away with paying as little as fifty dollars a month. A hundred maximum.

Delhi is a city of seventeen million people, and six were robbed or murdered by their servants last year. This is not a very high number, but a large part of the urban middle-class mythology is built around the fear of being robbed, and even killed, by domestic servants. As it turned out, in the Aarushi murder case, the police had been inept. They had simply concluded that Hemraj was guilty because he was missing. Not only were no photographs taken of the crime scene, but even the trail of blood leading to a staircase was not investigated. A day later, a retired police officer broke the lock on the door leading to the terrace above and found the servant’s corpse already decomposing in the heat. The search for a new suspect was underway.

The case took a sensational turn when the police arrested Aarushi’s father. There was no clear evidence to suggest that the dentist had committed the murders, but the police provided the media with lurid speculations. There were stories about the father’s alleged affair with a fellow doctor. The police said that the daughter had come to know of this and confronted him. Officers also openly alleged that Aarushi was involved in a relationship with Hemraj, and the enraged doctor killed the ill-suited lovers.

None of this turned out to be based in fact.

More here.

Salman Hameed in Science:

Early in 2007, biologists and anthropologists at universities across the United States received an unsolicited gift of an 850-page, colored Atlas of Creation, produced by a Muslim creationist, Adnan Oktar, who goes by the pen name of Harun Yahya (Science, 16 February 2007, p. 925). The atlas was a timely notice that, although the last couple of decades have seen an increasing confrontation over the teaching of evolution in the United States, the next major battle over evolution is likely to take place in the Muslim world (i.e., predominantly Islamic countries, as well as in countries where there are large Muslim populations). Relatively poor education standards, in combination with frequent misinformation about evolutionary ideas, make the Muslim world a fertile ground for rejection of the theory. In addition, there already exists a growing and highly influential Islamic creationist movement (1). Biological evolution is still a relatively new concept for a majority of Muslims, and a serious debate over its religious compatibility has not yet taken place. It is likely that public opinion on this issue will be shaped in the next decade or so because of rising education levels in the Muslim world and the increasing importance of biological sciences.

More here. And related to this, again Salman Hameed in The Guardian this time:

How should scientists respond to the rising challenge of creationism in the Muslim world? Despite surveys showing hostility towards evolution, there is also an overwhelmingly pro-science attitude. This is particularly true for sciences that have practical and technological benefits. The message about evolution in the Islamic world therefore needs to be framed in a way that emphasises practical applications and shows that it is the bedrock of modern biology. This is the approach advocated in the US in the recent National Academy of Sciences publication Science, Evolution, and Creationism.

The arguments for evolution will have to be framed differently in each country. The national academies of Muslim countries can tailor the specifics of the message according to the political and cultural realities of their respective communities. For example, while evolution is included in the high school curricula of both Turkey and Pakistan, the challenges faced by schools in secular Turkey are very different from those in highly religious Pakistan.

Crucially, if a link between evolution and atheism is stressed, as some prominent scientists in the west have been advocating, this will undoubtedly cut short the dialogue and the vast majority of people in the Muslim world will choose religion over evolution. Muslim creationists know this and they have been stressing this link in their anti-evolution works.

More here.