On an August night in 1981, the German band Kraftwerk played at the Ritz, on East Eleventh Street in Manhattan, in support of its latest album, “Computer World.” The only instruments onstage were actually machines: reel-to-reel tape recorders, synthesizers, keyboards, and a calculator. All four members of the group had short hair and dressed identically, in black button-down shirts, black pants, and shiny shoes, which made them look more like valets than like musicians. That didn’t bother them, as they didn’t like the idea of being a band—or even musicians—and often referred to themselves as “operators.” For the song “Pocket Calculator,” one member triggered percussion with a drumstick. Another used a Stylophone, a metal keyboard played with a small stylus. Florian Schneider, a founding member, played the calculator, which was wired into the sound system, so that pressing the keys made audible beeps. His partner, Ralf Hütter, who is the only remaining original member of Kraftwerk, sang the lyrics of the song in a monotone—an approach that he calls Sprechgesang, or “spoken singing”—and played a small Mattel keyboard. “By pressing down a special key / it plays a little melody,” he intoned. Schneider responded by playing something sort of like a melody with the calculator. At one point, Hütter bent down and let the audience play the keyboard. Recently, Hütter said, “I wanted to show them that anyone could make electronic music.”

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

Justin E. H. Smith at his own blog:

On April 23, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lilian Radovac aptly described the past few months of upheaval across Quebec as “the biggest student uprising you've never heard of.” This movement, which began building from early February of this year, has at its peak involved over 300,000 students across the province. A demonstration on March 22 attracted over 200,000 participants to the streets of Montreal. There have been scores of arrests.

The official reason for the movement is student opposition to the announcement from the government of provincial prime minister Jean Charest of its intention to raise university tuition around 75% over the next five years, to a little under $4000 per year. At the end of this period, Quebec tuition will still be the lowest of all Canadian universities, which are in turn much less expensive than all American public universities.

In spite of what many outside of the province consider a deal too good to complain about, one frequent demand of the demonstrators is for something even better than what Quebec students had before the hikes: free university education for all. This is of course a tall order, and that it can be made at all has much to do with the unique place of Quebec in North American society, and with the sense of many in this province that it is a society based on a different set of values, and a different set of choices, than those of the rest of the continent. As Sameer Zuberi wrote recently in the Huffington Post, “Quebecers have made a societal choice to keep education accessible to all, regardless of income.”

One question right now is whether Quebec will in fact be able to hold out against the consumer model of education that is sweeping the world around it.

More here.

Maria Streshinsky in Pacific Standard:

Question: You have said it is contemptible “to stay home and invent the exotic, as Saul Bellow did, conjuring up an Africa he had never seen.” Since a strong theme in your new book is the damage nongovernmental organizations have inflicted over the years, how often have you returned?

Answer: My novel is, among other things, an adventure story, a sort of descent by an unsuspecting American into the unknown, and into a trap. It’s an ordeal — my favorite kind of narrative, whether fiction or travel. I have been back to Africa and to Malawi many times. Teaching in Malawi was my first job, from 1963 to 1965, and then I spent four years in Uganda as a teacher. This seems a long time ago! Our mission was pretty simple: start schools, educate the students, and help create a system that would be self-sustaining. The students would become teachers and our role would be phased out. There were many students and enough aid to see them through. And the students were, on the whole, conscientious. But something changed. What was supposed to happen, didn’t happen.

On my repeated trips back, I saw the pattern I have described — foreign teachers, African students, and now, almost 50 years later, there are still not enough African teachers. The Peace Corps is still at it! It seems an endless cycle, and worse, a deteriorating educational system. So what happened — or, rather, what didn’t happen? I think that the foreign teachers, with the best of motives, unintentionally subverted the system. Malawians don’t want to be teachers — it’s an underpaid and underappreciated profession; and though there is now a medical school in Malawi, few graduates have stayed to be doctors in Malawi, where there is an average of two physicians for every 100,000 people.

Development seemed logical back in the 1960s, but did not take into account political tyranny, corruption, and the simple expedient of emigration. The main character in my book, for whom Africa was an Eden, has to confront this and much else.

More here.

Brandon Keim in Wired:

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.

A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study.

“It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases,” wrote Keysar’s team.

Psychologists say human reasoning is shaped by two distinct modes of thought: one that’s systematic, analytical and cognition-intensive, and another that’s fast, unconscious and emotionally charged.

In light of this, it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation.

Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.

More here.

Waleed Abu Alkhair in the Washington Post:

Hamza Kashgari visited me several times before he wrote the ill-fated tweets that led to his arrest in February and then to solitary confinement in a Riyadh prison. We discussed social, political and philosophical issues, including some that are taboo in Saudi Arabia. I warned him that his thoughts, if expressed publicly, would lead religious hard-liners to call for his blood.

I find it outrageous that in the 21st century one person could threaten another with death merely for embracing ideas other than religion, God and the prophet Muhammad. But that is exactly what happened at a weekly salon that focuses on political, religious and human rights issues. I named the salon “samood,” a richly textured Arabic word meaning “resistance” or “steadfastness.”

Every week, I am host to several dozen people at my home, most of them politically engaged Saudi youth. I started the salon after government and religious authorities clamped down on gatherings of liberal youth in cafes and bookstores in the wake of Hamza’s arrest, severely constricting the space for free expression in this city. The oppressive trend has accelerated as religious hard-liners have mounted a vicious campaign to cleanse society of what they deem “unbelief” and “deviant thought”: in reality, any ideology different from their own.

More here. [Waleed Abu Alkhair, in photo above, is a human rights activist in Saudi Arabia.]

More problematic is the reality that the human genome is still a vast catalogue of the unknown and scarcely known. The Human Genome Project’s most startling finding was that human genes, as currently defined, make up less than 2 percent of all the DNA on the genome, and that the total number of genes is relatively small. Scientists had predicted there might be 80,000 to 140,000 human genes, but the current tally is fewer than 25,000 — as one scientific paper put it, somewhere between that of a chicken and a grape. The remaining 98 percent of our DNA, once dismissed as “junk DNA,” is now taken more seriously. Researchers have focused on introns, in the gaps between the coding segments of genes, which may play a crucial role in regulating gene expression, by switching them on and off in response to environmental stimuli. Gene regulation, whether by introns or by regulator genes, forms one aspect of the burgeoning field of epigenetics, which concerns itself with the process of differential gene expression. In a classic study published in 2004, biologists at McGill University in Montreal identified a regulatory sequence in rat pups that lowered stress hormone production when the mother groomed them; their production of the hormone stayed low throughout their lives. Moreover, the researchers could adjust the gene in healthy adults to increase their stress, and in agitated adults to lower it. Though not their intention, the study provided the genetic evidence to prove Freud right: what happens in childhood has a lasting, though theoretically reversible, biological effect on adult behaviour.

more from Mark Czarnecki at The Walrus here.

Two Jews and an Englishman are crossing the ocean on a ship. The Jews, who can’t swim, start arguing with each other about what they should do if it sinks. As they argue, they gesticulate with such vigor that the Englishman backs away to avoid injury. Suddenly, the boat begins to sink. All the passengers except for the Jews, who are too wrapped up in their argument to notice, jump overboard. After a long, exhausting swim, the Englishman finally reaches the shore. He is amazed to find the two Jews there, happily waving him in. Astonished, he asks them how they got there. “We have no idea,” says one of them. “We just kept on talking in the water.” A version of this joke appears in a 1941 dissertation on “the gestural behavior of eastern Jews and southern Italians in New York City, living under similar as well as different environmental conditions.” The study was written by David Efron, who grew up in an orthodox Jewish home in Argentina and arrived in New York for graduate study in the 1930s. By his own account, when he spoke Spanish, he gestured with “the effervescence and fluidity of those of a good many Argentinians.” When he spoke Yiddish, his gestures were more “tense, jerky, and confined.” He sometimes combined the two styles, as when “discussing a Jewish matter in Spanish, and vice versa.” After living in the United States for a few years, he found his gestures becoming “in general less expansive, even when speaking in his native tongue.”

more from Arika Okrent at Lapham’s Quarterly here.

It is a brave man these days who rallies to the flag of finance. Robert J. Shiller, who teaches Economics at Yale, is one of the few academic commentators who can find a good thing to say about finance theory and financial engineering, and who is even disposed to defend the extravagant sums bankers are paid (one hesitates to say “earn”). He maintains that the financial sector is a crucial component of the infrastructure we need for a “Good Society”, and we should be reinforcing its skills, and extending its reach, rather than cutting it down to size. In so arguing, he is swimming against a strong tide. The Masters of the Universe are having a bad decade. In the 1980s they shrugged off an imaginative assault from Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities. The ugly and rapacious villain Gordon Gekko, in the film Wall Street, became a cult hero. In 1990, Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, a racy tale of debt and duplicity, did little to dent the reputations of the dramatis personae, who continue to run one of the most successful private equity funds. No matter how unsavoury the story, it failed to change the public mood.

more from Howard Davies at the TLS here.

James Fallon has lectured worldwide on neurolaw and the brains of psychopathic killers and dictators. Through a series of chance and serendipitous events, this led to a disturbing revelation in his own family, and in his own life.

Fallon is professor emeritus of anatomy and neurobiology and professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California, Irvine’s School of Medicine.

Jalees Rehman in Scientific American:

The idea of open science goes beyond merely providing public access to published scientific articles because it also includes offering access to the original research data. This would permit fellow researchers to help evaluate and analyze the results, so that the broader scientific community as well as the public can weigh in on the interpretation of the scientific findings. This aspect of open science likely does qualify for being a true paradigm shift, because it will require that we think of ourselves as part of research communities and usher in “networked discovery”, as has been described in a recent book by Michael Nielson and discussed by Bora Zivkovic.

There are still many obstacles that need to be addressed before “open science” becomes generally accepted. Academic publishers currently reap significant profits from selling high-priced annual subscriptions to academic institutions, and they would lose this income if scientists started publishing their results in open-access journals that freely provide articles to readers without charging for subscriptions or per-article fees. Furthermore, academic institutions and individual scientists may be concerned about how they would apply for patents, if the discovery process is networked and involves score sof collaborating scientists.

More here.

We Did Not Make Ourselves

We did not make ourselves is one thing
I keep singing into my hands
while falling
asleep

for just a second

before I have to get up and turn on all the lights in the house, one
after the other, like opening
an Advent calendar

My brain opening
the chemical miracles in my brain
switching on

I can hear

dogs barking
some trees
last stars

You think you’ll be missed
It won’t last long
I promise

*

I’m not dead but I am
standing very still
in the backyard
staring up at the maple
thirty years ago
a tiny kid waiting on the ground
alone in heaven
in the world
in white sneakers

I’m having a good time humming along to everything I can still
remember back there

How we’re born

Made to look up at everything we didn’t make

We didn’t
make grass, mosquitoes
or breast cancer

We didn’t make yellow jackets

or sunlight

either

*

I didn’t make my brain
but I’m helping
to finish it

Carefully stacking up everything I made next to everything I ruined
in broad daylight in bright
brainlight

This morning I killed a fly
and didn’t lie down
next to the body
as we’re supposed to

We’re supposed to

Soon I’m going to wake up

Dogs
Trees
Stars

There is only this world and this world

What a relief
created

over and over

by Michael Dickman
from The End of the West
Copper Canyon Press, 2009

From PhysOrg:

You wouldn't know it from appearances, but a metal cube the size of a toaster, created at the University of Alberta, is capable of performing the same genetic tests as most fully equipped modern laboratories—and in a fraction of the time. At its core is a small plastic chip developed with nanotechnology that holds the key to determining whether a patient is resistant to cancer drugs or has viruses like malaria. The chip can also pinpoint infectious diseases in a herd of cattle.

Talk about thinking outside the box. Dubbed the Domino, the technology—developed by a U of A research team—has the potential to revolutionize point-of-care medicine. The innovation has also earned Aquila Diagnostic Systems, the Edmonton-based nano startup that licensed the technology, a shot at $175,000 as a finalist for the TEC NanoVenturePrize award. “We’re basically replacing millions of dollars of equipment that would be in a conventional, consolidated lab with something that costs pennies to produce and is field portable so you can take it where needed. That’s where this technology shines,” said Jason Acker, an associate professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the U of A and chief technology officer with Aquila.

More here.

Massimo Pigliucci in Rationally Speaking:

“Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, ‘those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.' And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever. … they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn’t.”

Okay, to begin with, it is fair to point out that the only people who read works in theoretical physics are theoretical physicists, so by Krauss’ own reasoning both fields are largely irrelevant to everybody else (they aren’t, of course). Second, once again, the business of philosophy (of science, in particular) is not to solve scientific problems — we’ve got science for that (Julia and I explain what philosophers of science do here). To see how absurd Krauss’ complaint is just think of what it would sound like if he had said that historians of science haven’t solved a single puzzle in theoretical physics. That’s because historians do history, not science. When was the last time a theoretical physicist solved a problem in history, pray?

And then of course there is the old time favorite theme of philosophy not making progress. I have debunked that one too, but the crucial point is that progress in philosophy is not and should not be measured by the standards of science, just like the word “progress” has to be interpreted in any field according to that field’s issues and methods, not according to science’s issues and methods.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

I’m currently hard at work writing The Particle At the End of the Universe, a popular-level book on the Large Hadron Collider and the search for the Higgs boson. If all goes well, it should appear in bookstores at the end of this year or beginning of next. (Ideally, it will go on sale the same day they announce the discovery of the Higgs. I’m trying to bribe the right people to make that happen.) The title is somewhat tentative, so it might change at some point.

This will be a somewhat different book than From Eternity to Here. While both are aimed at a general audience, FETH was a rather lengthy tome that made a careful argument in a hopefully novel way. Anyone could read it, but to get the most out of it you have to really sit and think about certain ideas. Particle, on the other hand, aims to be a fun and narratively gripping page-turner — a book that makes you eager to move quickly to the next chapter, rather than taking a few minutes to let the last one sink into your head. A bodice-ripper, if you will. It will be full of stories and fun anecdotes about the human beings who made the LHC happen and have devoted their lives to searching for the Higgs and particles beyond the Standard Model. A book you would be happy to give to your Grandmom in order to convey some of the excitement of modern physics. (Unless your Grandmom is a particle physicist, in which case she might think it’s at too low a level.)

At the same time, of course, I’m going to try to illuminate the central ideas of the Standard Model in as clear a fashion as I can manage. It won’t just be a list of particles; I’ll cover field theory, gauge bosons, and spontaneous symmetry breaking. All in fine bodice-ripping style. (Maybe get Fabio for the cover?)

More here. [Photo: by Jennifer Oulette.]

Hartosh Singh Bal in the International Herald Tribune:

Narendra Modi, the leading figure of India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), didn’t make Time magazine’s list of the 100 most powerful people in the world this year. Midway through the online polling, after Modi’s stock had started to surge, liberals in India organized a counter-campaign. In the end, 256,792 votes were cast for him and 266,684 votes against.

Too bad for Modi: it’s an election year in the state of Gujarat, where he is chief minister, and he is known to be eyeing the country’s prime minister slot. But I, for one, am relieved: finally a defeat for Modi’s formidable PR team, which routinely manages to whitewash his responsibility for fueling sectarian strife and oversells his economic accomplishments, especially to Western journalists.

More here.

Keeping with today's theme, Nilanjana Roy in the NYT (with accompanying Mughal era image from wikipedia):

For more than a decade, Muslim women’s organizations in India have been fighting for changes in the body of Islamic law that governs marriage, divorce and the property rights of women. But as the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board held its annual convention in Mumbai last week, the battle lines had never been so starkly drawn. Although the Indian Constitution guarantees equal rights to all citizens irrespective of their religion, Muslims are governed by the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937. Attempts to apply a common civil code have often been viewed as interference in the practices of India’s largest religious minority.

The Personal Law Board is one of the country’s more influential Muslim groups. Its chiefly male membership of clerics and scholars has rejected proposals to change Muslim personal law, and is opposing a demand by women’s groups that marriages be legally registered, as is mandatory for non-Muslims.

Zeenat Shaukat Ali, a professor of Islamic Studies at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai and the author of “Marriage and Divorce in Islam,” is blunt in her assessment of the current situation.

“We are asking for codification of the legal system within the framework of Koranic law,” she said. “The Koran does not support a system that is controlled by the patriarchy, and the government has to treat this matter on a war footing if they truly mean to bring about gender justice.”

The changes that women’s organizations have been discussing for more than a decade — with major meetings held across India over the last three years — include the compulsory registration of marriages with the state, the abolition of the triple talaq on the grounds that violates the Koran and the establishment of a more reliable system of financial support for wives.

“There is no political will to change this law even though we are a secular democratic republic,” said Ms. Ali. “Politicians refuse to move ahead because some males have objected.”

Over at Opinionated:

Samhita [Mukhopadhyay] and Amanda [Marcotte] discuss Mona Eltahawy's powerful and complex piece on misogyny in Muslim nations. In their version of lightening the mood, they also discuss our comical shock troops for ladies who hate ladies, specifically Lila Rose and S.E. Cupp. For this week's #femquery, they take on the question of post-feminism, that slippery beast.

UPDATE: Another response in the Guardian by Nesrine Malik:

Reading the article I found myself bristling, yet simultaneously felt guilty for doing so. For who can deny the serious, endemic discrimination from which women in the Middle East suffer? Reading on I tried to convince myself that it was the author's sensational style that was bothering me, and that this shouldn't obscure the message, or that the title and imagery were unfortunate, but the problems they were attempting to illustrate were real.

Yet to my dismay I found, as I read on that instead of unravelling and unpicking the usual stereotypes which pepper the plethora of commentary on Arab women and exposing missing nuances, the author simply reinforced a monolithic view – holding the argument together using rhetoric, personal anecdotes and a rhythmic punctuation with her main theme – that all Arab men hate Arab women. It did not help that with every page scroll, a different iteration of an unbelievably misguided shot of a naked woman, posed and blacked out in paint to expose only her eyes, assaulted one's sensibilities. A lazy effort at controversy, equating women with sex, and jettisoning the whole point of the edition, by ironically, reducing women to the stereotype Eltahawy dismisses as “headscarves and hymens”.

I grew up in Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and in personal and professional dealings have had to grapple with most of the problems highlighted in the piece. They are very real. But there is a fine line to tread when writing about the status of Arab or Muslim women. For to do anything but condemn outright, and expose the real suffering we go through feels like shirking a responsibility and wasting an opportunity. And the problem with rejecting generalisations around women's oppression is that it is easy to misunderstand this rejection as a denial of the problem. Who could quibble with highlighting child marriage, female genital mutilation, or legally protected domestic abuse? Only a Stockholm syndrome-suffering apologist for patriarchy and moral relativism. How can one truly call for equivocation when we have a war on women on our hands?

The offences mentioned in the article are undeniable. We should not be distracted by the west's reduction of Muslim women to pawns in culture wars or military campaigns. Nor should we be distracted by ad hominem attacks on Eltahawy herself, or complain at the idea of airing of dirty laundry. But these offences are not just because men hate women. Or, as I fear the article suggests, that Arab men hate Arab women. This is not a disease men are born with, or contract from the Arab atmosphere. Even Eltahawy herself, attributes it to “a toxic mix of religion and culture”. And to this I would add the political oppression and stasis that enabled these structures to become de facto governance, where entrenched tribal allegiances, pre-Islamic mores and social tradition trumped weak political culture. A general retardation that extends not just to women but to every aspect of personal freedom and civic rights.

From The Root:

If there's any doubt that the economic crisis persists, consider the takeaways from recent headlines: The official unemployment rate remains 8.2 percent. One in six Americans — nearly 52 million people — receives food stamps, even as Republican legislators in Washington and state capitals push austere cuts to social programs.

In a Gallup survey released Monday, two-thirds of Americans say they know someone who has been laid off in the last six months — the highest share in the venerable polling firm's history. But the biggest takeaway is this: The gap between the rich and poor in the United States is not only worsening; it's also greater than those in many other countries. Few people are connecting the dots. Enter The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto — a richly insightful, slightly academic book released this month by talk-show host Tavis Smiley and professor Cornel West. The two men have been friends for 25 years. The current book project was born last summer during the duo's 18-city Poverty Tour, which extended from a Native American reservation in Minnesota to Appalachia and Washington, D.C. The tour came just as the Congressional Black Caucus launched a series of job fairs.

More here.

On Chickasaw Road

I.

“You can’t go feed cows without any britches,”
he tells the boy in the diaper
clinging to the fridge for support,
warily walking along the kitchen floor.
Gospel truth: It’s hot outside for February
but a boy can’t just ride a tractor in a diaper
so I grab him a pair of pants
from the laundry pile.

Both mother and grandmother kiss the boy
and I walk out the back door
behind my father-in-law
who wears a plaid shirt worn thin,
holds his grandson in his arms,
holds the door for my two dogs
that smell like wet roots reaching
from the mossy creek bank
where they’ve been playing.

We leave them in the mudroom
so they won’t run the cows
and head out through the gray-green grass
to the open shed where rusted machinery rests
among scattered piles of junk and brittle tangles
of blackberry bramble awaiting the fullness
of the green breath of spring
we can feel on our necks.

My father-in law steps up to take
his seat on the Massey Ferguson,
chipped and flaked as an old turtle’s shell,
faded red as a tail feather shed
by a hawk. I hold my child up
to his grandfather who takes the boy
in his lap, and I watch them ride on
while I walk behind
to open the gate.

Read more »