From James Fieser's ([email protected]) Hume Archives, over at Brad DeLong's blog:

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Jennifer L. Roberts in Harvard Magazine:

I‘m not sure there is such a thing as teaching in general, or that there is truly any essential teaching strategy that can be abstracted from the various contexts in which it is practiced. So that we not lose sight of the disciplinary texture that defines all teaching, I want to offer my comments today in the context of art history—and in a form that will occasionally feel like an art-history lesson. During the past few years, I have begun to feel that I need to take a more active role in shaping the temporal experiences of the students in my courses; that in the process of designing a syllabus I need not only to select readings, choose topics, and organize the sequence of material, but also to engineer, in a conscientious and explicit way, the pace and tempo of the learning experiences. When will students work quickly? When slowly? When will they be expected to offer spontaneous responses, and when will they be expected to spend time in deeper contemplation?

I want to focus today on the slow end of this tempo spectrum, on creating opportunities for students to engage in deceleration, patience, and immersive attention. I would argue that these are the kind of practices that now most need to be actively engineered by faculty, because they simply are no longer available “in nature,” as it were. Every external pressure, social and technological, is pushing students in the other direction, toward immediacy, rapidity, and spontaneity—and against this other kind of opportunity. I want to give them the permission and the structures to slow down.

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Erika Check Hayden in Nature:

Regulators in the United States are considering whether to permit trials of a controversial assisted-reproduction technique intended to help women to avoid passing certain genetic defects on to their children. On 22 October, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is scheduled to meet in Silver Spring, Maryland, to discuss a method that could prevent transmission of defects in mitochondria — cellular components that contain a small amount of DNA — from mother to child. The defects, which can cause fatal developmental conditions, affect as many as 4,000 US births a year. The technique places nuclear DNA from the egg of a woman with a mitochondrial defect into a donated egg that has had its nuclear DNA removed, but contains healthy mitochondrial DNA. Once the egg is fertilized, the resulting embryo would, in a sense, have three parents, because the donor mitochondrial DNA is passed down along with the mother and father’s nuclear DNA.

The FDA was asked to look into the issue by developmental biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov at Oregon Health and Science University in Beaverton, who last year created early human embryos with the technique (see Nature http://doi.org/n76; 2012). When the manipulated eggs were fertilized, genetic abnormalities were detected in half of them — but seemingly normal embryonic stem-cell lines could be extracted from 38% of the rest. Trying to obtain stem cells from unmanipulated eggs results in a similar success rate. Mitalipov had used the same technique in 2009 to create apparently healthy rhesus monkeys. Now he wants to begin a clinical trial in humans.

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The Nut of Knowledge
—Tao te Ching, V. 14

it won’t be seen when you look
won’t be grasped when you reach
won’t be heard when you turn an ear
it’s not bright above nor dark below

seamless and un-namable
it is from and goes to no-thing
the no-form form-source
subtle and without image
preceding conception
passing beyond

trace it to its no-beginning
track it to its no-end
it can’t be known
only lived as ease in your own life

to understand where you’re from
is the nut of knowledge
.

from the Tao te Ching or Lao Tzu

Adam Mann in Wired:

Tell your film buff friends they’re right: the most creative period in cinema history was probably the 1960s. At least that’s the takeaway from a detailed data analysis of novel and unique elements in movies throughout much of the 20th century.

How do you objectively measure creativity in movies? Though there’s probably no perfect way, the recent research mined keywords generated by users of the website the Internet Movie Database(IMDb), which contains descriptions of more than 2 million films. When summarizing plots, people on the site are prompted to use keywords that have been used to describe previous movies, yielding tags that characterize particular genres (cult-film), locations (manhattan-new-york), or story elements (tied-to-a-chair).

Each keyword was given a score based on its rarity when compared to previous work. If some particular plot point – like, say, beautiful-woman – had appeared in many movies that preceded a particular film, it was given a low novelty value. But a new element – perhaps martial-arts, which appeared infrequently in films before the ’60s – was given a high novelty score when it first showed up. The scores ranged from zero to one, with the least novel being zero. Lining up the scores chronologically showed the evolution of film culture and plots over time. The results appeared Sept. 26 in Nature Scientific Reports.

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Michael P. Lynch in the New York Times:

Even if the immediate crises — the partial shutdown and the looming debt default — are resolved, we will still be living in a dangerous political moment. The danger in question is because of the recent emergence of a political philosophy — and I mean that in the loosest sense — which threatens to unravel our joint commitment to a common democratic enterprise.

What is the “political philosophy” I have in mind? The conservative writer John Tamny at Forbes.computs it this way: “It quite simply must be asked,” he writes, “what the point of the Republican Party is if it’s not regularly shutting down the federal government?” No point at all, Tamny seems to think, suggesting that “shutdown should be a part of the G.O.P.’s readily unsheathed arsenal of weapons meant to always be shrinking the size and scope of our economy-asphyxiating federal government.”

It is tempting to call this “crazy talk” and unserious bluster. But it isserious, and it shows that some people are thinking about what happens next. It is a plan that represents the logical limit of the views now being entertained on the radical right, not just in the dark corners of the Internet, but in the sunlight of mainstream forums.

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Jess Cotton in Prospect:

When Auden died in 1973, forty years ago last week, it would have been hard to imagine how popular he would become in the ensuing decades. Morose and solitary, he described himself, in a poem of the early 1960s, as a “sulky 56,” who had “grown far too crotchety” and found a “change of meal-time utter hell.” In those later years, Auden seemed a shadow of his former self: his reputation had been tainted by some rather unforgiving reviews. Philip Larkin, for one, had dismissed his “rambling intellectual stew;” Randall Jarrell painted a sorry picture of a man “turned into a rhetoric mill, grinding away at the bottom of Limbo.” Jilted by his handsome younger lover, Chester Kallman, Auden took leave of all worldly pleasures, living out his last few years in a small town near Vienna. The obituaries of the enfant terrible of poetry were detailed but rarely strayed from reflecting on his much-anthologised poems of the 1930s, “As I walked out one evening” and “Lullaby.”

Auden has always seemed ripe for quotation. One of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign ads included the signature line “We must love one another or die” from Auden’s poem “September I, 1939.” Two decades later, Auden’s lyric “Stop all the clocks” became the signature elegy of the AIDS era, and later made a cameo appearance in the 1994 romcom Four Weddings and a Funeral. Faber and Faber immediately cashed in withTell me the truth about love, a pamphlet which sold a reputed 275,000 copies. Auden’s lines are quoted, misquoted, appropriated, parodied, often without any attribution to the poet himself. Our language is peppered with his neologisms, not least the “Age of Anxiety,” defined in the OED as “a catch-phrase of any period characterised by anxiety or danger.”

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Robert Kuttner in the Huffington Post:

I know it looks just terrible for us right now. Our caucus is badly split, we are getting killed in the polls, we have had to drop the demand to defund Obamacare, all the corporate leadership is mad at us for playing roulette with the debt, and there are even some likely primary challenges from mainstream business Republicans to our Tea Party incumbents.

But fear not. We may lose a battle, but we will win this war. Why? Barack Obama will save us. He always does.

In the end game, we will agree to reopen with government with a continuing resolution and we will allow an extension of the debt for several months. But in return, President Obama will finally put on the table a version of the Grand Bargain for deeper cuts in social spending.

That means cuts in Social Security and Medicare and in other domestic programs. Obama has already put the so-called chain-weighted CPI, a disguised cut in Social Security, in his own budget. So that is the starting point for our negotiations. And of course we will steadfastly refuse to raise taxes.

On domestic discretionary spending, the current spending budget that Obama has acceptedis already below the level of the Paul Ryan budget!

With these negotiations, the next budget will be even lower.

For now, we are getting something of a black eye in the press, but our long-term strategy is working.

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Rebecca Sacks at The Millions:

The cockroaches in Tel Aviv are nuclear-apocalypse huge. How adorable, how terribly petite the roaches of New York seem to me now. In a million years, the spacemen who descend to this place will find only styrofoam cups and the hard-shelled family living under my sink. I am a coward. Afraid to get close, I kill them with a chemical spray. They fall from the wall or garbage bin, thud. They heave madly in tortured circles, stopped by convulsions that come at smaller and smaller increments, cramming themselves into the ground as if to disappear. Their stomachs bulge and seep out. After they die — or as they are dying — their feelers twitch, twitch, twitch.

This was the month for gas masks in Israel. Fearing that Assad might use his sarin-bearing rockets on Israel next, those who did not yet have gas masks picked one up at the post office. Every outlet reported it, and every lede was the same: “Long lines and high tensions in Israel today as civilians obtain gas masks from local distribution centers…” I don’t have a gas mask. I’m not a citizen, and therefore not eligible for a free gas mask from the post office. I can buy one for — 400 sheckels — a bit over $100 from a war profiteer.

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Shane Berry at the Dublin Review of Books:

In his surprisingly thoughtful bagatelle How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard challenges the binary division of books into those we have read and those we haven’t. He suggests a more nuanced approach, reflecting how we really experience literature. To buttress his argument, Bayard throws out the concept of the collective library, “the larger set of books on which our culture depends at that moment”. Anyone acquainted with the collective library is granted a degree of latitude:

To a cultivated or curious person, even the slightest glance at a book’s title or cover calls up a series of images and impressions quick to coalesce into an initial opinion. […] For the non-reader, therefore, even the most fleeting encounter with a book may be the beginning of an authentic personal appropriation.

The work of Henry James would seem to merit at least a shelf in Bayard’s hypothetical repository.

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Daniel Albert at n+1:

The American “love affair” with the automobile is often mistaken for a love affair with driving. We think driver distraction arose with the smartphone, but truth be told most Americans never liked driving much. When Oldsmobile debuted Motoring’s Magic Carpet on the eve of World War II, it lamented the struggles of the little lady with a standard transmission: “After nineteen distinct manual operations, she’s finally ready to drive.” Relief came from the Hydra-Matic drive, the original automatic transmission. Times have changed but the dream has not. Today, Mercedes promises a “flying carpet” ride from its laser-guided Magic Body Control active suspension system. Let them wrestle with their overtaxed motors among the dark satanic mills of Europe. Americans invented power steering. Come to think of it, flying carpets don’t even need steering wheels, do they?⁴

Those who read robot news may think I’m on about the Google Car, the result of Pentagon funding, Stanford computer genius Sebastian Thrun, and of course money from all those little internet adverts. The origin of Google’s small self-driving fleet—each with sixty-four spinning laser beams mounted to its roof and hacker wires running down to the wheels—dates to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, where Stanley, Stanford’s VW SUV (now on display at the Smithsonian), beat twenty-three other teams in a race through the desert.

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Gillian Tett in FT Magazine:

Born in Boston to a Bessarabian Jewish family, Diamond toiled in relative obscurity in the first few decades of his career as a physiologist at Cambridge university and UCLA. “For decades I was the world’s expert on the gall bladder,” he explains matter-of-factly, without any hint of modesty. “The gall bladder is a simple organ that absorbs salt and water – and that means you can study it with a minimum of equipment, which I like.” But even as he obsessively observed gall­bladders, Diamond developed a second passion: birds. In his twenties he started to visit Papua New Guinea and used the material gathered to write academic papers in the field of ornithology. That led him into yet more – seemingly unlikely – areas of intellectual inquiry such as environmental geography, followed by physical and cultural anthropology (or the study of human evolution and culture). “My study of New Guinea was initially motivated by birds but you cannot do anything there without dealing with local people,” he explains. “And once you have spent time dealing with local people, you realise that humans are similar all around the world in some respects – but different in others.”

This led Diamond to produce his first bestseller, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which endeavoured to explain why the Eurasian people of North America and Europe displaced other native Indian American and Asian cultures by highlighting differences in ecology. It was a controversial thesis. But it turned him into something of a cult hero: 16 years after the book, when I tell friends that I am interviewing Diamond, one remarks that “Guns, Germs, and Steel changed how I thought.” In 2002, Diamond abandoned gall bladders, ending his career in physiology, to devote himself to writing. In 2005 he published another sweeping analysis, Collapse, which explained why some societies fail and others flourish. Then last year he published The World Until Yesterday , which describes how humans live in societies which are not “WEIRD”, or “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic”. This is a fun, lively read that sets out to illustrate two simple points: humans can live their lives in numerous, different ways; and the WEIRD approach is not always best. On the contrary, America and Europe could sometimes improve their own cultures and lives by looking at how other, more traditional cultures live.

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John Schwartz in The New York Times:

Joseph Levy was preparing for a season of scientific research in Antarctica last week when he got the call: Stand down. Dr. Levy,a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics, is studying the climate history of the dry valleys of Antarctica by analyzing buried ice sheets that have been frozen since the last ice age and are beginning to thaw. The research season in Antarctica typically starts around now, when things warm up enough to be merely frigid and scientists from around the world flock far south to conduct studies that affect our understanding of climate change, volcanoes, the family life of Weddell seals and much more. But with the United States government partly shut down, federally financed research has come to a halt for Dr. Levy and hundreds of other Americans. Even if a budget deal is struck, these scientists will have less time on the ice, and some will lose a full year’s worth of work as the narrow window of productive time closes. “It’s like a biography of the earth with a couple of pages in the middle torn out,” Dr. Levy said. “Nature will have taken its course, and we will have not been there to see it.”

The shutdown in Washington is being felt acutely at the ends of the earth. Some 3,000 Americans work through the Antarctic summer, including scientists and support staff from the private sector and from federal agencies like the Defense and Energy Departments, NASA and the United States Geological Survey. Amid the battle over the country’s spending and debt limit, the National Science Foundation, which coordinates the Antarctic program, has ordered it into “caretaker status,” which means skeleton staffing. “All field and research activities not essential to human safety and preservation of property will be suspended,” the agency said in a statement last week.

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