by Samir Chopra

One fine morning, as I walked along a Brooklyn sidewalk to my gym, heading for my 8AM workout, I saw a young woman walking straight at me, her face turned away, attending to some matter of interest. She might have been paying attention to a smartphone, but it might have been kids or pets; the precise details of this encounter have slipped my mind. Unwilling to be run over, clothes-lined, or head-butted by this rapidly approaching freight train, one insensible to my presence, I nimbly stepped aside, infuriated that yet again, on a New York sidewalk, I had been subjected to the tyranny of the inattentive pedestrian.

At that moment of induced irritation, my thoughts were not inchoate, not just an incoherent mess of unresolved frustration; instead, they seemed to arrange themselves into a sentence-long expression of aggravation immediately comprehensible to some imaginary intended audience: “My least favorite pedestrian is the kind that walks in one direction with his attention diverted elsewhere, whether it’s smartphones, kids, or pets.” Or perhaps, “That’s quite all right; you should barge ahead on this sidewalk, your head down, unseeing and uncaring.” This reaction was instinctive; I did not stop to deliberate and compose my verbal reaction in sentence form; my brain responded like a trained machine, a well-primed one; a species of Pavlovian instinctive reaction had taken over my mind. It was not the first time that I had, on encountering something entirely weekday or quotidian, and yet, not unworthy of a mental response, suffered a brief emotional tic and found myself formulating such a summation of my feelings at that instant. The verbal expression of my thoughts did not suggest it was the starting point of a letter to a newspaper or an essay; it had to be concise and succinct.

This was not your garden-variety introspection; it was clearly intended for future public consumption, for a pithy display of my thoughts about a matter of personal interest to those who might be interested. I sensed my audience would be sympathetic; some would chime in with empathetic responses; yet others would add embellishments in their comments and annotations. I did not think this sentiment of mine would be greeted with disapproval; I anticipated approval. Indeed, that is why I indulged in that little bout of composition and drafting in my mind, framing the written expression of my thought to make it appropriately irate or ironic. Maybe the ensuing conversation would feature some cantankerous rants about the smartphone generation, about over-indulgent parents and pet-owners, all too busy texting, fretting over children and dogs and cats; perhaps some of my interlocutors would add witty tales of how, one day, in a urban encounter for the ages, they had stopped one of these offenders, and told them off with an artful blend of the scornful and witty. Perhaps someone would add a ‘horror story’ about how coffee had been spilled on them by someone just like the young woman; and more outrage would ensue. A little chat corner would have developed.

I had been drafting a Facebook status, a tweet.

The folks at Facebook and Twitter have achieved something remarkable: they have made their users regard the world as staging ground for inputs to their products. The world and its events and relations are, so to speak, so much raw material to be submitted to the formulation and framing of Facebook statuses and tweets. The world is not the world tout court, it is the provisioner of ‘content’ for our social media reports.

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by Ali Minai

A few years ago, while introducing my class of electrical engineering students to information theory, I said that we lived today in a world created by Faraday, Maxwell, and Shannon. Even as I said this, I was aware that, in my zeal for effect, I was omitting the names of many who had made seminal contributions in the fields of electrical engineering and telecommunications, but one name that did not occur to me then was that of Oliver Heaviside. Basil Mahon’s book, ‘The Forgotten Genius of Oliver Heaviside: A Maverick of Electrical Science’, is a valiant – and, one hopes, successful – attempt to remedy this situation where even those immersed in the field of electrical engineering do not know the achievements of one of its founding figures. To be sure, Heaviside’s name does live on in the simple but surprisingly important Heaviside step function H(x), which takes value 0 if x is less than 0 and 1 if it greater. This function, along with Dirac’s delta function, allows the calculus of discrete variables to be unified with the classical calculus of continuous ones – a fact of great utility in an age where everything is increasingly digital and thus discrete. Forgotten in all this is the fact that Heaviside invented the step function as part of a larger enterprise: An operational calculus that sought to solve the problems of calculus in a purely algebraic form. Though that calculus has left its imprint on many methods used by engineers to solve mathematical problems today, it is not taught explicitly in any curriculum and its name has mostly been forgotten by practitioners – a situation symbolic of the fate that has befallen Oliver Heaviside himself.

A vivid portrait of Heaviside emerges from the book. We see a brilliant and curmudgeonly character – willful but not unkind, except to those who challenge his well-founded theories with half-baked notions. After rather brief coverage of Heaviside’s background and childhood, the book moves to the beginning of his professional career as a technician in the telegraph service. Lacking a formal advanced education, Heaviside was fortunate to get this opportunity, in part through the efforts of his brother, Arthur, who was already employed in the service and – very importantly – the recommendation of the great inventor, Sir Charles Wheatstone, who was Heaviside’s uncle by marriage. For all the struggles that Heaviside had to go through to gain recognition of his genius, he was fortunate in one thing: He got into the field of electrical communication – the telegraph – at exactly the right time for a person of his aptitude. It was then a new technology, but had already established its utility. The desire to connect the world through telegraph was a major effort into which private investors and governments were willing to sink resources. And yet, everything in the field was being done through trial and error, without the benefit of established theory. The field was dominated by technicians rather than scientists, and the leading engineers of the time – such as Heaviside’s nemesis, William Preece – saw theoreticians as little more than ivory tower wonks with little to contribute to engineering practice. Heaviside was the first person to bridge this divide.

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by Thomas R. Wells

A natural disaster is a disaster because it involves a lot of human suffering, not because the event itself is especially big or spectacular. The destruction of an uninhabited island by a volcano is not a natural disaster, because it doesn't really matter to humans. A landslide doesn't matter, however enormous, unless there is a town at the bottom of it.

So what does the word ‘natural' add? We use it to demarcate the edges of responsibility. We don't use it very well.

Man-made disasters, like Chernobyl or Deepwater Horizon or Bhopal or Grenfell Tower, are ones acknowledged to have been brought about by human decisions. These disasters could have been avoided if certain people had made different choices. The suffering of a man-made disaster is therefore the responsibility of particular persons and institutions. They can be held answerable for their decisions: required to justify them and judged – and punished – if they cannot. For example, the investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire will scrutinise in forensic detail the reasoning behind the key decisions that permitted a containable danger to be transformed into mass death; such as the installation of a flammable cladding, the absence of sprinklers; and refuge in place instructions for residents. Some decision-makers may face criminal charges for negligence. They will certainly be vilified in the tabloid press and hate-mobbed on social media. Organisations like the local council and the company running the building will likely receive an official shaming, fines, and compulsory reorganisation or dissolution.

In contrast natural disasters are supposed to have been caused entirely by forces outside human control. They were inevitable. No one can be held responsible.

However, very few disasters these days meet the requirements for a natural disaster. It's not enough that a natural event was necessary to the disaster, i.e. that the disaster wouldn't have happened without it; that all those people couldn't have been killed by falling buildings if the ground hadn't been violently shaking. The natural event must also have been sufficient to bring about the disaster.

To understand the idea of a sufficient cause, it may help to think about imaginary but plausible worlds besides our own actual one. These are worlds in which everything operates by the same laws of physics, but particular histories may be different. For example, Hillary may be president instead. For one event to be the necessary cause of another, there must be no possible worlds in which event B (e.g. thousands of schools collapse) occurs without event A (e.g. magnitude 8.0 earthquake in Sichuan) also occurring. For one event to be the sufficient cause of another, it has to be the case that there must be no possible worlds in which event A (8.0 earthquake) occurs without event B (school collapses) also occurring. Only if it is true that in all possible worlds, if event A happens then event B also happens, is the language of inevitability justified.

Let's put that abstract point in the context of a real disaster. If the earthquake in Haiti had been the sufficient cause of the 200,000 deaths and vast infrastructure destruction that would mean that in any possible world in which an earthquake of that size had struck at that time and place, such massive destruction of human life would always occur.

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by Syed Tasnim Raza

Syed Tasnim Raza & Richard Harry Adler

It was late October 1971. My brother-in-law, Dr. Tariq Khan and I were interviewing together for residency training positions in Surgery. We finished our interview at the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn at 7:30 PM one night and then drove to Syracuse in heavy rain. We arrived at a friend's house at 2 AM and after sleeping a couple of hours we drove to our next interview at the Buffalo General Hospital in Buffalo, New York. There was heavy fog with very poor visibility, but we had to be at the Buffalo General before 9, so we sped west in the fog and made it there just in time.

The person to interview us first that morning was the acting director of the residency program in Buffalo, Dr. Richard H. Adler, a general Thoracic Surgeon. He had an angelic face and a lovely soft smile, and his presence immediately made us comfortable. The first question he asked us was why our eyes were bloodshot. We explained the all-night driving session after our interview finished later than expected in Brooklyn. He seemed impressed. After reviewing our application and reference letters he sent us to meet two other young faculty members, Dr. Jack Cudmore and Dr. Roger Dayer. And then we were given a tour of the hospital by Dr. Robert Milch, then the senior resident in surgery. After lunch, we met Dr. Adler again, for the closing interview, where he offered both of us the first-year residency position in surgery. This was a pyramidal program, so that there would be 15 first year residents, but these would be reduced to only six in the second year. Both Tariq and I were so excited we accepted the offer on the spot. We would join the program in July 1972. Thus, began my relationship with Dr. Adler, who would become my teacher, mentor and friend for the next 45 years.

Even though there were many Thoracic surgeons in Buffalo during the years Dr. Adler was active, he was the thoracic surgeon and did over 80% of all thoracic surgery at the Buffalo General Hospital. He was Professor of Surgery and eventually Director of the Thoracic Surgery Residency program until his retirement in 1990. He was one of the best thoracic surgeons both in the operating room, and also in his fund of knowledge about thoracic disease, which he always kept updated and current. Dr. Adler was trained at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor under Dr. Herbert Sloan, one of the eminent thoracic surgeons of his time, who also was the Editor of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. After his training, Dr. Adler came home to Buffalo and joined the Surgical faculty at the Buffalo General Hospital under Dr. John Payne, the Chairman of Surgery. During the next decade, Dr. Adler spent a year of further training in England in one of the foremost thoracic surgery clinics. While in London, Dr. Adler was exposed to Norman Barrett, one of the premier thoracic surgeons, who described the mucosal changes in the lower esophagus due to chronic reflux of acid from the stomach, now commonly known as Barrett's esophagus. On his return to Buffalo, Dr. Adler started methodically collecting patients with hiatal hernia and acid reflux and did mucosal biopsies of the lower esophagus. When Dr. Adler presented the results of his studies at a Thoracic Surgical meeting, Norman Barrett was in the audience. He discussed the paper and congratulated Dr. Adler for presenting the largest series of well documented cases of Barrett's esophagitis reported until then. Dr. Adler had similarly large series of case-studies, where he performed talc pleurodesis for malignant pleural effusion or patients with post-pneumonectomy space and others.

His attention to detail and very methodical follow-up of any given thoracic disease was remarkable. I always enjoyed assisting him at the smallest procedure, because he made it into an art form.

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bby Richard King

When the writer Paul Mason was booked to appear at the annual conference of Progress earlier this year, he was more or less assured a rough reception. Progress, after all, is a Blairite "ginger group" within the British Labour Party – formed in 1996, one year before their boy won power – and Mason the quasi-Marxist author of the excellent Postcapitalism and a strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. But I doubt he was prepared for just how bitter and self-pitying the right wing of the party has become since Corbyn set about transforming Labour into a genuinely social democratic movement with broad appeal amongst the young and the poor. Referring to anti-Blairite tweets Mason had sent in the wake of the May election, one audience member complained how "intimidated" she now felt at Labour Party meetings. Another demanded Mason apologise. (He didn't.) But things got really interesting when the panel chair suggested that Mason had "entered the Labour Party behind Jeremy Corbyn" – a not-so-veiled reference to the Trotskyist tactic of "entryism" whereby radical groups affix themselves to larger mainstream organisations in order to influence policy. Mason reminded the assembled comrades that he'd joined the Labour Party at nineteen years of age, and that his grandfather was of the generation who'd founded the party in 1900. He then invited the Progress faithful to consider whether they wanted to remain in Corbyn's Labour Party at all. As he put it, to boos and jeers from the floor:

In case you're misunderstanding me, just listen. If you want a centrist party, this is not going to be it for the next ten years. If it's really important to you to have a pro-Remain party that is in favour of illegal war, in favour of privatisation, form your own party and get on with it!

There weren't many takers for that last proposition, and to an outsider Mason's peroration might sound like a triumphalist taunt. But the notion that a new party could emerge in the wake of the Brexit referendum is not entirely fanciful. Inspired by the example of Emmanuel Macron, Tony Blair himself has established an entity called the Institute for Global Change, a "policy platform" that aims to refill "the wide-open space in the middle of politics", while Paddy Ashdown, one-time leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, has helped establish More United, a "political start-up" that raises funds for politicians of a centrist, pro-EU persuasion, regardless of party affiliation. Furthermore, in August, former Tory aide and political editor of the Daily Mail, James Chapman, suggested that a number of Conservative MPs had responded warmly to his idea for a new centrist party called The Democrats. "They are not saying they are going to quit their parties," Chapman told the BBC; "but they are saying they understand that there is an enormous gap in the centre now of British politics."

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