Pervez Hoodbhoy in Newsweek:

When Riazuddin—that was his full name—died in September at age 82 in Islamabad, international science organizations extolled his contributions to high-energy physics. But in Pakistan, except for a few newspaper lines and a small reference held a month later at Quaid-e-Azam University, where he had taught for decades, his passing was little noticed. In fact, very few Pakistanis have heard of the self-effacing and modest scientist who drove the early design and development of Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Riazuddin never laid any claim to fathering the bomb—a job that requires the efforts of many—and after setting the nuclear ball rolling, he stepped aside. But without his theoretical work, Pakistan’s much celebrated bomb makers, who knew little of the sophisticated physics critically needed to understand a fission explosion, would have been shooting in the dark.

A bomb maker and peacenik, conformist and rebel, quiet but firm, religious yet liberal, Riazuddin was one of a kind. Mentored by Dr. Abdus Salam, his seminal role in designing the bomb is known to none except a select few.

More here.

From the MIT Technology Review:

The term “filter bubble” entered the public domain back in 2011when the internet activist Eli Pariser coined it to refer to the way recommendation engines shield people from certain aspects of the real world.

Pariser used the example of two people who googled the term “BP”. One received links to investment news about BP while the other received links to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, presumably as a result of some recommendation algorithm.

This is an insidious problem. Much social research shows that people prefer to receive information that they agree with instead of information that challenges their beliefs. This problem is compounded when social networks recommend content based on what users already like and on what people similar to them also like.

This the filter bubble—being surrounded only by people you like and content that you agree with.

And the danger is that it can polarise populations creating potentially harmful divisions in society.

Today, Eduardo Graells-Garrido at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona as well as Mounia Lalmas and Daniel Quercia, both at Yahoo Labs, say they’ve hit on a way to burst the filter bubble. Their idea that although people may have opposing views on sensitive topics, they may also share interests in other areas. And they’ve built a recommendation engine that points these kinds of people towards each other based on their own preferences.

More here.

Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain in 3:AM Magazine:

In physics our knowledge exceeds our understanding. In economics the reverse is true. Seeing why helps us make sense of both of these disciplines.

In physics we’ve reached the point where we know the nature of things to twelve decimal places. We reached that point by starting with common sense and correcting its predictions until we arrived at quantum mechanics—a theory that we literally can’t understand, despite the fact that we know it to be as close to the truth as any theory we have in any science. It took about 350 years—from Newtonian gravity to Schrödinger’s cat—to get to the point where knowledge exceeds understanding in physics.

Economics is harder than physics. It must be. It’s not much younger a science, having gotten its start with Adam Smith in 1776, a good 83 years before Darwin was able to put biology on a scientific footing. If economics were as easy as physics, it would have made more progress by now.

As far back as John Stuart Mill philosophers of science have been trying to figure out exactly why economics is harder than physics. They have given a variety of answers.

We think a large part of the reason is that unlike the physicists, the economists have been unwilling or unable to let go of the notion that their understanding of economic affairs counts as knowledge about economic behavior. Like physics, economics starts with common sense—in this case firm convictions about how we are driven to make choices by our desires and our beliefs, which the economists label preferences and expectations.

Giving up firmly held convictions isn’t just a problem for economics. Physics had the same problems: humans have difficulty relinquishing the conviction that motion requires force, that there is a preferred direction in space, that every event has a cause. But progress—as measured by prediction—required relinquishing our sense that we already know how things work. In the social sciences, it’s been almost impossible to give up trying to explain things by making sense of them in the form of stories we understand.

More here.

Thomas Laqueur reviews Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, in the LRB:

Fifty years ago, Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller The Guns of August taught a generation of Americans about the origins of the First World War: the war, she wrote, was unnecessary, meaningless and stupid, begun by overwhelmed, misguided and occasionally mendacious statesmen and diplomats who stumbled into a catastrophe whose horrors they couldn’t begin to imagine – ‘home before the leaves fall,’ they thought. It was in many ways a book for its time.

Tuchman’s story begins with Edward VII’s funeral on 20 May 1910. The king’s sister-in-law, the empress consort of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, was there. So was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was Edward’s least favourite nephew, Wilhelm II of Germany. Wilhelm loved and admired the British and they loved the kaiser: to him, the Timessaid, belongs ‘the first place among all the foreign mourners’; even when relations were ‘strained’, he ‘never lost his popularity amongst us’. Four years before Armageddon the German emperor was decidedly not the antichrist he would become. The book ends with the Battle of the Marne – ‘one of the decisive battles of the war’ – which ended the German hope for a quick victory and set the stage for four years of deadlock and misery.

Tuchman says nothing about Austria-Hungary and Serbia on the eve of the war, and nothing about the Russo-Austrian and Serbo-Austrian fronts once it began. ‘The inexhaustible problem of the Balkans divides itself naturally from the rest of the war,’ she thinks, and in any case nothing much happened there in the period she covers. More surprising is that in the first third of the book there isn’t a word about Serbia. The assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 goes by in two sentences, one of which, a quotation from the oracular Bismarck, may be all she needs: ‘some damn foolish thing in the Balkans’ would ignite the next war.

Why was this story so compelling in the 1960s? I think because at the height of the Cold War the world needed and embraced a morality tale of the sort Tuchman offered.

More here.

Via io9:

There Will Be Blood / Through Numbers from Ali Shirazi on Vimeo.

Huma Yusuf in The New York Times:

LONDON — Upon first moving here from Pakistan two years ago, I was inundated with restaurant recommendations: Tayyabs and Lahore Kebab House, Daawat and Brilliant. I spent many weekends sampling curries and kebabs in the east and halwa in the south. In the end, I settled on a Drummond Street standby. For members of the South Asian diaspora, having a favorite curry restaurant is like belonging to a tribe: It requires absolute loyalty and the occasional sacrificial ritual, like waiting in line for a table for two hours in cold, wet weather. But the appeal extends far beyond homesick immigrants. London now has more curry shops than Mumbai. Across Britain, some 10,000 restaurants and takeout joints serve kormas, vindaloos and other variants. At the British Curry Awards this week more than 40,000 nominations poured in from fans. (Among the winners, Karma, in Whitburn, for Best Spice Restaurant Scotland, and Shampan 4 at the Spinning Wheel, in Westerham, Kent, for Best Newcomer.) Prime Minister David Cameron took the stage between choreographed dance sequences and declared the foreign dish now central to British identity: “To all those who think being British depends on your skin color, wake up and smell the curry!”

But now curry is under threat, both from the state and the market. Cameron’s favorite curry house in Oxfordshire was raided by border officials last month, and three Bangladeshis suspected of immigration infractions were arrested. Stringent laws have made it nearly impossible for restaurants to bring chefs from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, creating a shortfall of qualified talent. Acknowledging the scale of the problem at the curry awards ceremony, the prime minister pledged to help: “So let me promise you this: We will work through this together. We’ll continue to help you get the skilled Asian chefs you need.”

More here.

Regina Nuzzo in Nature:

The gut may know better than the head whether a marriage will be smooth sailing or will hit the rocks after the honeymoon fades, according to research published today in Science¹. Researchers have long known that new love can be blind, and that those in the midst of it can harbour positive illusions about their sweetheart and their future. Studies show that new couples rate their partner particularly generously, forgetting his or her bad qualities, and generally view their relationship as more likely to succeed than average². But newlyweds are also under a lot of conscious pressure to be happy — or, at least, to think they are. Now a four-year study of 135 young couples has found that split-second, 'visceral' reactions about their partner are important, too. The results show that these automatic attitudes, which aren’t nearly as rosy as the more deliberate ones, can predict eventual changes in people’s marital happiness, perhaps even more so than the details that people consciously admit.

The researchers, led by psychologist James McNulty of Florida State University in Tallahassee, tapped into these implicit attitudes by seeing how fast newlyweds could correctly classify positively and negatively themed words after being primed by a photo of their spouse for a fraction of a second. If seeing a blink-of-the-eye flash of a partner’s face conjures up immediate, positive gut-level associations, for example, the participant will be quicker to report that 'awesome' is a positive word and slower to report that 'awful' is a negative one. Researchers used the difference between these two reaction times as a measurement of a participant’s automatic reaction.

More here.