In the middle of last month a violent storm blew across Palestine and Israel, the worst in decades. The strongest winds were felt in the East, but Gaza also took a battering. Fifteen-foot waves swept up the coast and cleared the breakwater of the fishing port, wrecking boats and gear, while a sandy wind scoured the fields and greenhouses, uprooting fruit trees, polytunnels, beehives and animal shelters. Initial assessments put the damage around $3 million – not a huge figure, perhaps, but to put it in context it is more than the entire agriculture sector received in emergency assistance in 2010. The only small compensation was for the few lucky fishermen who know where ancient wrecks lie (and who guard those secrets closely): when the water cleared the seabed yielded its customary crop of coins and artefacts from this richest of historical palimpsests.

Of course, modern-day Gazans live in nothing like the splendour of their Bronze Age, Roman or Ayyubid counterparts, and farmers and fishermen are among the poorest. Despite fertile soils and a (usually) clement climate, they are handicapped by the continuing Israeli occupation of the coastal enclave. Free-fire zones on land and sea prevent farmers from reaching 35% of the remaining arable land and fishermen from accessing 85% of their fishing grounds. Until June, when the deaths of nine Turkish activists attempting to reach Gaza by sea sparked international outrage, Israel imposed a sanctions regime harsher than any in force anywhere else in the world, including Burma and North Korea. Three lost winters for cash crops (including Gaza’s famous strawberries) crippled the once-thriving export industry, while production for the domestic market foundered for the lack of basic inputs such as insect-proof mesh, water pumps and greenhouse plastic. Although the blockade has been partially eased, gaps are still being filled by imports through the tunnels along the Egyptian border, including of unvaccinated cattle originating in countries where diseases like East Coast fever are rife.

The shortage of water also causes animals to sicken, with kidney diseases in ruminants on the rise thanks to the salinisation of the aquifer. Abstraction of water stands at around 200% of the annual recharge capacity, leaving less than 10% of Gaza’s water potable. Cruelly, it barely rained at all during the recent storm: this is the fourth consecutive year of below average rainfall, and the worst so far. Winter vegetables may not be grown at all in some areas. Finally (if you haven’t yet switched off), mention must be made of the dreaded tomato leaf miner, tuta absoluta, which has been munching its way through Gaza’s tomatoes since arriving in the Strip in 2010, and which could move onto sweet peppers, chillies, aubergines and potatoes if it gets really hungry. The woeful state of Gaza’s greenhouses caused by blockade and bombardment allowed the infestation to take hold, and the storm means that at least 3,000 will need insect-proofing again.

I anticipate that readers may well have switched off by this stage, because the only thing that seems to come out of Gaza is bad news.

I could add to this litany of woes for several more paragraphs (although foolishly I signed up to these Monday Columns using my real name, so don’t expect too many pearls of wisdom about the UN, the Palestinian Authority or Hamas), but most people already know that life for the 1.6 million people of Gaza is tough. Over 70% are dependent on external assistance, and each square kilometre contains an average of around 4,400 people. (For comparison, if you moved the entire population of the world to Mexico, it would be 20% less densely populated. Now try feeding everybody…) However, other people’s problems are never as interesting as our own, especially if they have been going on for a long time, and in any case I already spend a good deal of time talking about Gaza’s woes to an increasingly-fatigued donor community.

What you may find interesting, however, are the small pinpricks of good news that I come across in the course of my work.

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Artificial neural networks are computational models inspired by the organization of neurons in the brain. They are used to model and analyze data, to implement algorithms and in attempts to understand the computational principles used by the brain. The popularity of neural networks in computer science, machine learning and cognitive science has varied wildly, both across time and between people. To an enthusiast, neural networks are seen as a revolutionary way of conceiving of computation; the entry point to robust, distributed, easily parallelizable processing; the means to build artificial intelligence systems that replicate the complexity of the brain; and a way to understand the computations that the brain carries out. To skeptics they are poorly understood and over-hyped, offering little insight into general computational principles either in computer science or in cognition. Neural networks are often called “the second best solution to any problem”. Depending on where you stand, this either means that they are often promising but never actually useful or that they are applicable to a range of problems and do almost as well as solutions explicitly tailored to the particular details of a problem (and only applicable to that particular problem).

Neural networks typically consist of a number of simple information processing units (the “neurons”). Each neuron combines a number of inputs (some or all of which come from other neurons) to give an output, which is then typically used as input to other neurons in the network. The connections between neurons normally have weights, which determine the strength of the effect of the neurons on each other. So, for example, a simple neuron could sum up all its inputs weighted by the connection strengths and give an output of 0 or 1 depending on whether this sum is below or above some threshold. This output then functions as an input to other neurons, with appropriate weights for each connection.

A computation involves transforming some stream of input into some stream of output. For example, the input stream might be a list of numbers that come into the network one by one, and the desired output stream might be the squares of those numbers. Some or all of the neurons receive the input through connections just like those between neurons. The output stream is taken to be the output of some particular set of neurons in the network. The network can be programmed to do a particular transformation (“trained”) by adjusting the strengths of connections between different neurons and between the inputs and the neurons. Typically this is done before the network is used to process the desired input, but sometimes the connection weights are changed according to some pre-determined rule as the network processes input.

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By Liam Heneghan

[This is the first in an occasional series of pieces on the philosophy of science.]

In the guestbook of a flower shop near my Evanston, Illinois home, a few blocks west of Lake Michigan – that body of water which serves as a sea for those born far from the brinier fluids of a true ocean – I observed the tiny carcass of an insect compressed upon the page, beneath a comment that read, “Yellow roses are the gift of cowards, Carl.” Intriguing. Its antennae were shaped like little Christmas trees, an anatomical curiosity permitting many people, I expect, to readily identify the fly as a chironomid midge, a fly hatched from a larva that lived in the lake’s proximate substrate, whose pupating body rose at some late life-stage and floated upon the surface of the waters, whose pupal exuvium sloughed off like the skin of a small but darkly-meated banana, and which then, as an adult, rose again to swarm as part of a male-only congregation waiting for a mate to flit along. Chironomid males, recall, have those telltale plumose antennae which act as a delicate sexual nose of sorts, to detect the presence of female flies. The ephemeral and outlandishly sexual nature of their adult lives is underscored by the fact that they do not feed, being equipped with a greatly reduced feeding apparatus. This much is well enough known; a well-informed school-child will elaborate on the matter. What drew me to this tiny creature flattened beneath the testy comment in the guest book, however, was neither its antennae nor its little head bereft of proper chompers; I was drawn to the curious genital structures of the tiny beast. I could see from the arrangement of it gonocoxites, apodemae, and sundry genital appendages that it was a Tanytarsus species. Now this, I grant you, is relatively arcane knowledge, the sort of knowledge that comes with expensive training, a scientific training. A word or two, therefore, on said training.

I qualified as a zoologist at University College Dublin, getting a master’s degree for work on chironmids that I collected in Irish National Parks in 1987, having completed my bachelor’s work the year before. I eventually earned my PhD there in 1994. A rigorous education. In our Irish system a young person shows up at university at seventeen or eighteen years of age, knowing, it is assumed, exactly what subject matters they expect to devote a lifetime of work to. Choosing, in my case, the natural sciences, I was educated in these sciences: all other domains of knowledge were excluded. I was taught (eclectically) across four science sub-disciplines in my first year, in my second specializing in three, in my third year, two, and yes in my last year I honed my skills as a zoologist taking a suite of specialist courses and undertaking a year-long research project on the systematics of a genus of chironomid midges, the Thienemannimyia group. The task: to unravel the phylogenetic (roughly evolutionary) relationships between the numerous species in the group.

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At the V&A until 20th February 2011
www.vam.ac.uk/shadowcatchers
Sponsored by Barclays Wealth

by Sue Hubbard

In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato’s chained prisoners, trapped in their subterranean world, mistook shadows cast on the wall for reality. When they spoke of the objects seen what was it they were speaking of; the object itself or its shadow? Such conundrums lie not only at the heart of western philosophical debate about the nature of reality but, also, of photography. The essence of photography involves an apparent magical ability to fix shadows on light sensitive surfaces. As far back as the second half of the eighth century, the Arab alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (c.721-c.815) recorded that silver nitrate – the significant element of the light-sensitive emulsion of photographs – darkened in the light. In the eighteenth century Thomas Wedgwood experimented with painting on glass placed in contact with paper and leather made chemically sensitive to the effects of light. Sadly the results remain unknown as Wedgwood lacked the know-how to fix his images.

From 1834 William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) created ‘sciagrphaphs’ (the depiction of shadows) and ‘photogenic drawings’ using botanical specimens and lace placed on sensitized paper. These spectral images implicitly posed questions about the nature of reality. The term for all such works is a ‘photogram’, though strictly speaking they do not depict shadows as they are caused by the blocking of light rather than by a cast shadow. The photogram was later usurped by the process of projecting negatives through an enlarger lens. In an increasingly mechanist age this new technology proved more seductive to the scientifically minded Victorians than camera-less photography, which became the idiosyncratic realm of those interested in exploring the subconscious and the so-called spirit world. The playwright August Strindberg took to leaving sheets of photographic paper in developer exposed to the night sky, believing that his resulting ‘celestographs’ were caused by this exposure to the heavens rather than to the more prosaic explanation of dust collecting on the surface of the paper. In 1895 the previously unwitnessed interior of the human body was revealed by Wilhelm Konrad von Röntgen’s newly discovered x-rays, mirroring a growing interest in the unconscious and the revelation of that which could not be seen by the naked eye.

During the 1920s the photogram was rediscovered by a number of modern artists, particularly the Dadaists. Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy were both attracted by its automatic qualities and the possible patterns of light that could be developed on sensitised paper without the use of any apparatus. László Moholy-Nagy wrote: “The photogram opens up perspectives of a hitherto wholly unknown morphosis governed by optical laws peculiar to itself. It is the most completely dematerialized medium which the new vision commands”. In 1937 his move to Chicago, to teach at the New Bauhaus, ensured that an interest in camera-less photography was transported across the Atlantic.

During the Second World War the role of documentary photography, with its ability to act as a witness to unpalatable truths and humanitarian concerns, became ever more important. In 1947 Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour – photographers who had all been very much affected by what they had witnessed during the conflict – began the photographic agency Magnum, leaving the more experimental practice of camera-less techniques to the fringes of fine art practice. Now the V&A have mounted an intriguing exhibition entitled Shadow Catchers , the first UK museum exhibition of the work by contemporary camera-less photographers that includes Pierre Cordier (Belgium), Floris Neusüss (Germany), Susan Derges and Garry Fabian Miller (UK) and Adam Fuss (UK/USA).

[Photo credit: Floris Neusüss, Untitled, (Körperfotogramm), Berlin, 1962, Collection Chistian Diener, Berlin, ©Courtesy of Floris Neusüss.]

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by Fred Zackel

Didja hear?

This February, NewSouth Books will publish “Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in a single volume, removing the “n” word and the word “injun” from the text. The word “slave” will replace the “n” word.

Mark Twain must be twirling in his grave.

Last year 2010 marked the 175th anniversary of his birth, the 100th anniversary of his death and the 125th anniversary of the American publication of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

This book “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is, as Lionel Trilling said, was “America's most eloquent argument against racism.”

If you never read it, don't wait for some instructor to force you.

As Twain himself said, “I never let schooling interfere with my education.”

But let’s look at what else we can “hear” from Twain, the First Great, Internationally Famous California Writer.

Oh yeah. Mark Twain was a California writer.

Listen to the Voice in this 1865 yarn, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” his earliest success.

“I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”

And later …

“I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.”

The Jumping Frog was the first California International Best-seller. It made Twain famous. The story was spawned in the Gold Country. It traveled the world.

The story is about a con man getting conned. And what could be more All American?

Mark Twain said about the American art …

“To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.”

Yes, he was the first great California writer. Hard to believe, yes.

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by Colin Marshall

“No good movie is too long,” Roger Ebert once wrote, “and no bad movie is short enough.” Oh, how my inner cinephile regrets bringing up the 201-minute length of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles so early in the discussion, it supports that dictum so well! Later revised to “All good films are the right length,” the line now applies to the film that much more directly. I'll sound higher-flown but surely even more accurate when I claim that the form of all good movies closely fits their substance. Here we have one of the closest form-substance matches ever made.

The title may have already given this away, but those three-and-change hours don't serve a labyrinthine plot, an ensemble of dozens, or any particular historical sweep; we get a widow, her son, three days in mid-1970s Brussels, and the preparations for those days' three dinners. Already we hit the fearsome wall this film raises against critics: having watched (and perhaps loved) it, you want to insist that, against the implication of all possible summaries, it's not boring. Yet that insistence sounds, to the rightfully skeptical reader, like too much protestation. What's more, you feel all the while that the very impulse to deliberately highlight non-boringness trivializes the many fascinating (and actually relevant) qualities of a picture so richly non-boring on every level. It's like making a big deal out of the fact that it was shot with a camera; sure, it's true, but it's also part of the work's very nature.

Generally speaking, no serious viewer considers boredom a function of length. After all, many boring movies clock in around 90 minutes, and often they're filled with event after tiresome event. Neither, then, can a serious viewer consider boredom a function of happenings. Let's not even start on all the turgid “epics” the annals of cinema history offer us. I would submit that boredom is actually the result of a form-substance mismatch; it's the unpleasant sensation of those two aspects of a film grinding away at one another, rattling, vibrating, putting out that awful burning-rubber smell. Hence the dullness of so many films adapted from other media — literature especially — as well as those conceived first and foremost as screenplays. When the material can't properly engage all the creative bandwidth cinema has to offer, something's bound to burn out. Usually, it's the audience.

Having said that, I'll tell you what happens in Jeanne Dielman. Bear with me. The titular widow's precisely scheduled days have her cooking breakfast, polishing shoes, buying ingredients, preparing impressively bland dinners out of those ingredients, eating those dinners in near-silence with her son Sylvain, reading letters from relatives in Canada, and unfolding and refolding the sofa bed. Each afternoon, she makes the time to let a different man in the front door, take him into the bedroom, and not come out until the sun sets. It's not altogether clear at first what's going on with that last bit, though Jeanne does drop a few bills into a jar on the dining table after each visit.

“A-ha,” you might say to yourself as the first day ends. “The loss of her husband has forced this poor single mother into prostitution!” To be sure, nothing in the film refutes that interpretation, but almost everything in the film hints at a deeper, stranger, far less identifiable depravity. If you're looking for indicators of homes in chaos, mothers selling sex would seem promising, yet Jeanne, whose face at certain angles looks like a death mask of domestic efficiency, could hardly have regimented her household further. Each weeknight has its dinner — Wednesdays are veal — from which there can be no deviation. Jeanne and Sylvain step out of the apartment and into town at the same time every evening. That cleanliness reigns goes without saying; even right after seeing a “client,” Jeanne takes a bath that would do an obsessive-compulsive proud.

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Why Do We Have Heads At All?
—on Daniel Lieberman’s The Evolution of the Human Head

“The head presents an evolutionary paradox,”
says Lieberman, “The roof of the orbits
is the floor of the brain.” And I imagine a room
in which a miracle sponge sits soaking up
what it means to be alive while other skulls
orbit this particular one which,
a la Ptolemy, imagines it’s a sun

This head’s tenant thinks it knows
something of the world. It sits in its domed room
sometimes as if it were a church in a cloister
somewhere emanating wishes. It wonders if
somehow it'll ever change its world. It hopes that
someday all sapient heads will in
some way plumb the paradox, lay it bare, and
sum up what they find in pithy words without in
any way diminishing the comfort of brain's appendages

“I’m not ready to ditch fossil fuels, and war's good for business,” says Id.
“Why does the head look the way it does,” asks Lieberman?
“Why do we have heads at all,” asks Jim?

by Jim Culleny, 1/9/11

In the third week of November in 2004, I dialed up to the Internet on a cellphone for the first time, then actively searched for blogs to read and bookmark. Though six years have passed, I clearly recall the first post I read through on 3quarksdaily.com. It was this one, a brief report after a trip to Karachi by Abbas Raza.

For disparate reasons (which might become clearer in future columns) the post struck some chords with me. I felt immediately sympathetic to the author and his viewpoint – a feeling since reinforced by years of devoted reading of this blog – and I was also immediately touched by his recollection of a lost “culturally diverse, tolerant, and progressive” Karachi.

Now, it is true that I have never been to Karachi. But bizarre as it may seem to many of you, large numbers of Goans cherish their connections to the city. This is because from 1850 or so, it was where we made good in numbers.

Meet May Cordeiro (b.1912), sitting with poise between her much-older siblings. She will describe herself all through her life as a Karachi girl, and will assume a lifelong posture of disdain towards everyone who comes from everywhere else.

The Cordeiro family came to Karachi from Saligao, a modest village in Goa which has never been reknowned for agriculture or natural beauty or anything similar. Instead, Saligao has distinguished itself by exporting people.

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