From In-Sight:

1. How was your youth? How did you come to this point?

Pretty normal, but rather short on social life: I had no brothers or sisters (or indeed any family other than my mother), and I wasn’t particularly outgoing until I was about 15. I was always reasonably high-achieving academically and I immersed myself in that. When I discovered programming, and found I was fairly good at it, I decided to study computer science, and pretty quickly I decided to pursue a career in artificial intelligence research because I felt it was where I could make the most humanitarian difference to the world. At around 30, I started to realise that aging was a criminally neglected problem and that, maybe, I could make even more of a difference there. So I switched fields.

2. Where did you acquire your education? What education do you currently pursue?

I went to school at Harrow, a top UK boarding school, and then university at Cambridge. These days my education comes from my colleagues, via their papers and my interactions at conferences.

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Joseph Akel in The Paris Review:

My first encounter with artist Hayal Pozanti was the lucky happenstance of a predetermined seating arrangement: she was placed across the table from me at a dinner celebrating Jessica Silverman Gallery, which represents Pozanti on West Coast. We spent the evening in deep discussion on the finer points of photographic theory and discovered a shared interest in the writings of Freidrich Kittler. Agreeing to stay in touch, I found myself in New York for Frieze Art Fair and decided to pay a visit to Pozanti’s studio in Queens. She was born in Istanbul in 1983 and moved to New York in 2009. In a small partitioned space with views looking over the East River toward midtown Manhattan, we talked about her current body of work, which will be exhibited later this year at the Prospect New Orleans biennial and at the Parisian iteration of the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain.

With my recent paintings, I’ve been thinking a lot about Ken Price, Philip Guston, and Allan McCollum. And, of course, I always come back to Giorgio Morandi—I think about him regularly. I find that a common ground for all of these artists was the ability to create, through figurative abstraction, a world parallel to the one we live in. As a Turkish immigrant who has moved from place to place, who speaks several languages, I’m intrigued by the possibility of creating a universal language to unite my cross-cultural experiences. When I think back to my childhood in Istanbul—even during my time as a young professional there—I was always concerned with the question of acceptance and with the idea of unifying people. My early paintings were very figural—I was looking at Turkish miniatures and thinking about the Abrahamic religions I was in contact with daily. While getting my M.F.A at Yale and studying with Peter Halley, my practice was based on images that I would collect from the Internet. I was really engrossed in that culture of image collecting, collaging. But I realized that I couldn’t propose something new by appropriating things. I wanted to step away from the computer, because I was spending so much time in front of the screen, sitting there staring at something with dozens of tabs open.

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From Phy.Org:

A pair of researchers has found that if people in a large crowd identify socially with other members, they tend to feel safe, even as the density goes up. Hani Alnabulsia and John Drury of the University of Sussex, and Umm Al-Qura University respectively conducted a survey of people attending the annual Hajj in Mecca in 2012 regarding their feelings of safety, and also counted members in the crowd to establish density—they've published their results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Crowds can be dangerous places, examples of what can happen appear regularly in the news—from trampling to suffocation to violence, masses of people often spell trouble. For these reasons, many people find themselves feeling scared when in a crowd—particularly when suddenly noticing that their fate is no longer in their own hands. But, as Alnabulsia and Drury note in their paper, that may not always be the case.

One of the danger elements in crowds is perception of fear. If the people in the crowd are afraid something bad is going to happen, they might take actions that wind up causing it to happen. In this new study, the research duo sought to find out if it might be possible in some instances, to feel perfectly safe, despite being in the midst of a horde of other people. To find out, they spoke to 1,194 pilgrims at the Hajj in Mecca in 2012, site of one the largest annual gatherings of people in the world—attendance is close to three million people each year. The researchers also noted crowd density as it applied to those being queried about their feelings regarding their safety—they found at times it approached 8 people per square meter, which is of course, quite packed.

More here.

Adam Mann in Wired (Alan M Turing and colleagues working on the Ferranti Mark I Computer in 1951. Photo: SSPL/Getty Images):

Over the weekend, a group of programmers claimed they built a program that passed the famous Turing Test, in which a computer tries to trick judges into believing that it is a human. According to news reports,this is a historic accomplishment. But is it really? And what does it mean for artificial intelligence?

The Turing Test has long been held as a landmark in machine learning. Its creator, British computer scientist Alan Turing, thought it would represent a point when computers would have brains nearly as capable as our own. But the value of the Turing Test in modern day computer science is questionable. And the actual accomplishments of the test-winning chatbot are not all that impressive.

The Turing Test 2014 competition was organized to mark the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death and included several celebrity judges, including actor Robert Llewellyn of the British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. The winner was a program named Eugene Goostman, which managed to convince 10 out of 30 judges that it was a real boy. Goostman is the work of computer engineering team led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko.

The program had a few built-in advantages, such as the fact that he was claimed to be a 13-year-old non-native English speaker from Ukraine. It also only tricked the judges about 30 percent of the time (an F minus, or so). For many artificial intelligence experts, this is less than exciting.

More here.

Andrew J. Nathan and Hua Ze in The New Republic:

It is unlikely that anyone outside of China who watched the massacre of peaceful protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on live TV 25 years ago will ever forget the events of that horrible day.

The Chinese regime argues that the shooting of unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators laid the groundwork for political stability and China’s miraculous economic growth. Yet the continuous intensification of repression since then tells another story. Most recently, in early May, the regime “disappeared” a dozen rights activists merely for meeting in a private apartment to commemorate June 4, 1989 and formally detained one of them, human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

This was just the latest in a series of harsh repressions. Five years ago, Tiananmen activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo was handed an eleven-year prison sentence for advocating civil rights and constitutionalism. Earlier this year, human rights activist Xu Zhiyong was sentenced to four years in prison for opposing corruption and abuse of power. The National Endowment for Democracy, with which we are both affiliated, honored Liu and Xu on May 29 in the U.S. Congress in an effort to raise awareness of their cases in advance of the Tiananmen anniversary—and through their cases, to bring awareness to the estimated 4,800 political prisoners in Chinese jails and camps.

The need to sustain and progressively intensify repression is a sign that the June 4 crackdown did not solve China’s problems; it exacerbated them.

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Margaret Somers and Fred Block in Dissent [Karl Polanyi teaching at the Workers' Educational Association, c. 1939. Sketch by William Townsend.]:

Karl Polanyi’s ideas took form in Vienna in the 1920s in direct opposition to the free-market orthodoxy of Ludwig von Mises, the contemporaneous avatar of market fundamentalism. Both thinkers were deeply influenced by the “Vienna experiment,” the post–First World War period of democratic, worker-led municipal socialism. While Polanyi saw in the experiment the very best that socialism had to offer, it motivated von Mises’s lifelong effort to prove that socialism and “planning” were economically disastrous and morally corrupt.

Von Mises had little success in the short term, and most thinkers on the left simply dismissed him as a reactionary apologist for big business. But a half century later, his more famous student—Friedrich von Hayek—became the inspiration for both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as market fundamentalism and neoliberalism became the ruling ideas of our time. Fortunately, Karl Polanyi did take von Mises’s ideas seriously. In fact, The Great Transformation is an analysis of the enormously destructive and seductive nature of the market fundamentalist worldview that has been so influential over the last three decades.

Right from the start of the book, Polanyi attacks market liberalism for what he calls its “stark Utopia.” Conservatives had long deployed the “utopianism” epithet to discredit movements of the left, but Polanyi was determined to turn the tables by showing that the vision of a global self-regulating market system was the real utopian fantasy. Polanyi’s central argument is that a self-regulating economic system is a completely imaginary construction; as such, it is completely impossible to achieve or maintain. Just as Marx and Engels had talked of the “withering away of the state,” so market liberals and libertarians imagine a world in which the realm of politics would diminish dramatically. At the same time, Polanyi recognizes why this vision of stateless autonomous market governance is so seductive. Because politics is tainted by a history of coercion, the idea that most of the important questions would be resolved through the allegedly impartial and objective mechanism of choice-driven, free-market competition has great appeal.

Polanyi’s critique is that the appeal has no basis in reality. Government action is not some kind of “interference” in the autonomous sphere of economic activity; there simply is no economy without government. It is not just that society depends on roads, schools, a justice system, and other public goods that only government can provide. It is that all of the key inputs into the economy—land, labor, and money—are only created and sustained through continuous government action.

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Richard Marshall interviews John Martin Fischer [Photo: Stefan Klatt]:

3:AM: Most people hold themselves and others morally responsible. and you think we need a philosophical foundation for this. Others might say that its just biology, or culture, or education or psychological biases or a supernatural element underwritten by a deity that makes us do this and that there’s not space for a philosophical foundation. How do you think we should answer this mix of challenges?

JMF: In some ways it can be helpful to have an explanation of our responsibility practices. Perhaps in the end they are just “brute” or unexplained by deeper philosophical ideas, but I think it can be fruitful at least to explore ways in which our responsibility practices can be explained by simpler, more basic ideas (where these are distinctively philosophical ideas). If we have such an explanation, we can (perhaps, at least) answer certain moral responsibility skeptics, and we might be able to provide answers to questions about moral responsibility in “hard cases”, such as psychopathy and other disordered agents. After all, our actual responsibility practices can (and should) be called into question, and they don’t in themselves answer questions about certain contentious or difficult cases. Can a severely depressed individual be deemed morally responsible? An individual suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease? How about an individual with unusual or atypical brain structures (suggestive of a higher probability of violent behavior)?

Similarly, I think it is desirable to have a way of engaging more productively with the moral responsibility skeptics. That is, we want to take their worries very seriously, and seek to address them as much as possible on their own terms. This is perhaps a way in which I differ from the approach taken by Peter Strawson (although we both think that moral responsibility should be sequestered from certain metaphysical issues). I believe in a moderate sequestration of metaphysics, whereas Peter Strawson argues for a more extreme sequestration of metaphysics. Here (as elsewhere) I prefer the path of moderation.

More here.

Justin Smith over at his website:

I knew another of my periodic retreats from the public expression of political opinions had arrived when, contacted by a certain French media outlet for my views on the recent electoral victories of the Front National, I muttered something about how I've been busy writing about animals recently, and then quoted Kropotkin to the effect that the animals, unlike us, seem to get by just fine without holding elections at all.

The name I've just invoked should serve as a guide to the sort of 'deviations' I am about to express, relative to what is increasingly a party-line view among young metropolitan leftists and their hangers-on in fashion and lifestyle.

Well, it's hard to really talk about 'views' in the age of memes. Surely you've seen it by now: the ironized, memified representation of the guillotine, often accompanied by slogans announcing that this is the fate awaiting the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, that 'the French knew how to deal with the 1%', etc. Likely the most iconic representation of that execution device in the past few years is the one presented on the cover of the Spring, 2013, issue of Jacobin Magazine, showing it as the 'Giljotin': an IKEA-bought, home-assembled, mass-produced piece of furniture.

I am not an admirer of the original Jacobins, and for this reason I cannot support any media venture that derives its name from that movement. The magazine has on occasion shown itself to be a lucid defender of truth and justice, as for example in a recent defense of serious social-scientific critique of capitalism, against the frivolous academic-blogger culture's displacement of our attention to the all-pervasiveness of gender, and that same culture's vain dream of fixing the associated problems by compelling everyone, pretty much, to just watch their language, and to make regular public performances of preparedness for privilege-checking, of 'radical humility'. “Give me a card-carrying brocialist over one of these oily 'allies' any day” is surely among the most refreshingly exasperated pleas from the left I've read in a long, long time.

But still, shame on Jacobin for helping to turn a murder weapon into an icon of urban radical fashion. I understand that from a certain point of view it is the same desire for 'realness' that motivates them both to publish lovely screeds against silly liberal moralizing and dead-end identity-mongering, on the one hand, and on the other hand to insist that what they are really pushing for is revolution, and that revolution means heads are going to roll, etc. But in truth I strongly suspect that most educated urban twenty-somethings who flirt with the symbol do so in the secret hope and expectation that it is never in fact going to come to that, that they will never be called on to pull the lever on a Goldman Sachs CEO, or on the small child of a Goldman Sachs CEO (nipping inheritance structures in the bud), or on a former comrade now accused of harboring too many deviations.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

Suicide is written mostly in the second person. Sometimes, though, the narrator refers to himself, and Suicide toggles back and forth between these two pronouns: the “I” of the narrator and “you,” the friend who committed suicide. This makes it feel like a letter, a letter from one childhood friend to another, regarding the latter’s suicide at the age of 25, twenty years ago. The separation between “I” and “you” often blurs. Each friend becomes a double, is defined by the other and, in turn, reflects the other. We learn that “you” died young. You studied economics; your childhood home was a chateau. You took photographs and read the dictionary. You were a virtuoso on the drums, playing solos in your basement for hours. You felt yourself ill adapted to the world, surprised that the world had produced a being who lives in it as a foreigner. You traveled to “taste the pleasures of being a stranger in a strange town.” You liked to be anonymous, a silent listener, a mobile voyeur. Eventually, you stopped traveling, preferring to be at home.

You were fascinated by the destitute and the morbidly old. Perhaps this is what you feared — to become the living dead, to commit suicide in slow motion. “You were a perfectionist,” the narrator writes.

You were such a perfectionist that you wanted to perfect perfecting. But how can one judge whether perfection has been attained? … Your taste for the perfect bordered on madness…

more here.

James Longenbach at The Nation:

In 1946, a precocious student at the University of Toronto wanted to read the library’s copy of James Joyce’sUlysses. He was informed that he needed first to submit two letters, one from a clergyman and the other from a doctor. The Canadian ban on Ulysses would not be lifted until 1949, so the young man headed south, to Yale University, where after some wrangling he was permitted to write his PhD dissertation on Joyce, and in 1956 it was published as Dublin’s Joyce, one of the first large-scale examinations of Joyce’s career. Even then, twenty-three years after the US ban against Ulysses had been lifted, Joyce’s book was more often talked about than read—it was dirty, immoral, impossible. Today, Ulysses is still more often talked about than read. What’s the most overrated book you’ve never finished? “Joyce’s Ulysses,” says the novelist Richard Ford in the pages of The New York Times Book Review. “Hands down.”

The author of Dublin’s Joyce was the inimitable Hugh Kenner, who had no patience for such literary chatter. When I heard him lecture on Joyce in the mid-1980s, he spoke without a prepared text, producing sentences that were small syntactical dramas, as suspenseful as they were incisive. Every century produces its signature epic, Kenner began. The seventeenth century had Milton’s Paradise Lost, the eighteenth century had Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the nineteenth century had—dramatic pause—theOxford English Dictionary. The OED’s entry on the word “and” is longer than Paradise Lost, said Kenner. Who would read it?

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Daniel Mendelsohn at The New York Review of Books:

In The Broken Road, we get many of the things we love in Leigh Fermor. Here again, he goggles and zigzags, flirts and pontificates. There are the vivid descriptions and the donnish asides; a touching near romance with a Greek girl—his first exposure to the people who would capture his imagination later—and a fantastical encounter with dancing fishermen in a cave, which affords the elderly author a chance to discourse on Greek folk choreography in a way his younger self couldn’t possibly have done. (“The other great dancers of the hasapiko and the tzeibekiko, as the two forms of rebetiko dances are severally called…”)

Still, one of the most interesting revelations afforded by the new book is that the high style of later years was already more or less fully formed by the end of his great walking tour. This is clear from reading the latter part of the book—the original entries from the journal he was keeping during his voyage to Mount Athos after he left Istanbul. (Ironically, all we have of the long-awaited sojourn in the historic capital city are terse and colorless notes.)

more here.

From Edge.org:

Writing is inherently a topic in psychology. It's a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind. The medium by which we share complex ideas, namely language, has been studied intensively for more than half a century. And so if all that work is of any use it ought to be of use in crafting more stylish and transparent prose. From a scientific perspective, the starting point must be different from that of traditional manuals, which are lists of dos and don'ts that are presented mechanically and often followed robotically. Many writers have been the victims of inept copyeditors who follow guidelines from style manuals unthinkingly, never understanding their rationale. For example, everyone knows that scientists overuse the passive voice. It's one of the signatures of academese: “the experiment was performed” instead of “I performed the experiment.” But if you follow the guideline, “Change every passive sentence into an active sentence,” you don't improve the prose, because there's no way the passive construction could have survived in the English language for millennia if it hadn't served some purpose.

The problem with any given construction, like the passive voice, isn't that people use it, but that they use it too much or in the wrong circumstances. Active and passive sentences express the same underlying content (who did what to whom) while varying the topic, focus, and linear order of the participants, all of which have cognitive ramifications. The passive is a better construction than the active when the affected entity (the thing that has moved or changed) is the topic of the preceding discourse, and should therefore come early in the sentence to connect with what came before; when the affected entity is shorter or grammatically simpler than the agent of the action, so expressing it early relieves the reader's memory load; and when the agent is irrelevant to the story, and is best omitted altogether (which the passive, but not the active, allows you to do). To give good advice on how to write, you have to understand what the passive can accomplish, and therefore you should not blue-pencil every passive sentence into an active one (as one of my copyeditors once did).

More here.

Kate Murphy in The New York Times:

PITTSBURGH — Trauma patients arriving at an emergency room here after sustaining a gunshot or knife wound may find themselves enrolled in a startling medical experiment. Surgeons will drain their blood and replace it with freezing saltwater. Without heartbeat and brain activity, the patients will be clinically dead. And then the surgeons will try to save their lives. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have begun a clinical trial that pushes the boundaries of conventional surgery — and, some say, medical ethics. By inducing hypothermia and slowing metabolism in dying patients, doctors hope to buy valuable time in which to mend the victims’ wounds.

But scientists have never tried anything like this in humans, and the unconscious patients will not be able to consent to the procedure. Indeed, the medical center has been providing free bracelets to be worn by skittish citizens here who do not want to participate should they somehow wind up in the E.R. “This is ‘Star Wars’ stuff,” said Dr. Thomas M. Scalea, a trauma specialist at the University of Maryland. “If you told people we would be doing this a few years ago, they’d tell you to stop smoking whatever you’re smoking, because you’ve clearly lost your mind.”

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Rebecca Morales. Eco Lux. 2006.

Gouache, watercolor, ink & pastel on calf vellum.

More here, here, and here.