Congratulations to my sister Azra!

From the event invitation:

We would like to extend to you a warm invitation to Developments in Literacy’s 2016 Gala. The event will be held on Friday, October 28th, 2016 at Cipriani on 42nd in New York, honoring our Chief Guest, Dr. Azra Raza. We are honored that Dr. Raza has chosen to support DIL’s mission in educating and empowering underprivileged children in Pakistan.

Developments in Literacy (DIL) is a section 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that was launched in 1998. DIL has educated more than 23,000 students at 124 schools situated in some of the most underserved regions of Pakistan. DIL provides high quality teacher training; innovative, low cost teaching resources and maintains strong relationships with school communities. DIL has been awarded a prestigious 4-star rating for 6 years in a row by Charity Navigator. DIL’s work was recently highlighted in USAID’s Frontline Magazine, calling the Mobile Learning Project a “game changer” in educating teachers in inaccessible, remote areas of the country through videos delivered on their mobile phones.

Previous honorees include Christiane Amanpour, Ted Turner, Nicholas Kristof, Mira Nair, Nandita Das, Maleeha Lodhi and Shahzia Sikander. Below is Azra’s acceptance speech.

by Azra Raza

Thank you Shaila, thank you DIL. I am deeply, deeply honored.

When my daughter Sheherzad was 5, she came home after the first week of kindergarten and announced to us, “I am just wasting my time. I can’t read. I can’t write. And they won’t let me talk.” Well, we told her, this pretty much summarizes the state of most girls all over the world. They can’t read, they can’t write and they are not allowed to speak.

I am a scientist, but we called my mother a Rocket Scientist. Her life epitomized the prevailing ethos and traditions of a sharifzadi being raised in the Aligarh of 1930s where high culture was defined by an attitude of extreme gentleness…particularly, in the men, overt hyper-masculinity was tantamount to hyper-vulgarity. Sadly, it was also a time when older women in the family had to smuggle a female tutor to enter the zanan-khana secretly to teach the young girls how to read and write. Basically, my very gentle and civilized grandfather’s attitude was why should the girls be taught to read and write? So they can shake hands with the English men?

After the death of the family patriarch, as the British tightened their hold over the natives, my mother’s family suddenly found themselves bereft of their possessions and with no practical skills to survive. For my mother, this traumatic experience underscored the importance of education as the only means of individual empowerment and thus ignited an intense desire in her to educate not only her own children, especially the girls, but to fight hard for the education of all the children in her community.

I remember one evening last year when I was telling some friends about my mother and how she taught everyone around her to read and write. So much so that our driver who was from the North West Frontier Provinces not only became literate, started reading the Urdu newspapers religiously but then became so obsessed with the written word that he ended up writing his autobiography. When I told this story, one of my unnamed and very famous writer friends responded, “Azra, what else would a driver write but an AUTO-biography? And now I have the name of his next book: BUS!!” [Editor’s note: “bus” means “enough” in Urdu, and “dil” means “heart”.]

Read more »

Ian Ground at the TLS:

De Waal’s thesis is that our attitudes and ideas about other animal minds are at last changing. In the past twenty years or so, largely as a result of exhausting ourselves trying to defend philosophical presuppositions against the empirical discoveries of those who have taken a genuinely scientific perspective, the sense that we are the only genuinely minded creatures on the planet has begun to fade. We have moved from an age in which it was taboo for scientists to name their animals to one in which we recognize that dolphins use something akin to names among themselves. The answer to the question of the book’s mischievous title is: Yes. We are smart enough to learn how smart animals are. But you wouldn’t think so from looking at our history of trying.

Across chapters examining communication, problem solving, the experience of time and social skills, De Waal documents the ways in which we systematically underestimate animal complexity. Primates are an obvious central example, and attention is also given to the more recent stars of animal studies, especially corvids and parrots. But there are plenty of less familiar examples: from zebra fish and moray eels to the stupendous intelligence of the honey badger.

more here.

A new analysis shows a surprisingly simple relationship between the way galaxies move, and the distribution of ordinary matter within them. Unexpectedly this seems to hold however much mysterious dark matter they contain. That’s funny.

John Butterworth in The Guardian:

On 25 August 2003, a Delta II rocket launched the Spitzer Space Telescope into a orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It went into orbit trailing the Earth around the Sun, and began making precise observations of hundreds of galaxies. More than 13 years later, on 19 September 2016, an intriguing analysis of some of these observations was posted by three astrophysicists, Stacy McGaugh and Federico Lelli from Case Western reserve University, and Jim Schombery from the University of Oregon. The analysis seems to be telling us something surprising.

Galaxies are made up of three components. Stars, which we can see. Gas, which we can also see, although much of what we ‘see’ is infrared light with a wavelength too long for our eyes but which we can nevertheless measure. And most elusive of all, ‘Dark Matter’, which we can’t see at all. We deduce its presence from its gravitational influences – on the way galaxies move and the way light bends as it passes by them. We don’t know what Dark Matter is made of, a situation which especially annoys and intrigues particle physicists like me, who want to know what everything is made of.

Key to the analysis is the measurement of rotation curves of galaxies. This is the way the average speed of the stars orbiting in galaxies changes as they get further from the centre. To measure this you need a good spatial resolution (to distinguish the distance from the centre) and a measurement of the wavelength of the light, because the wavelength tells us the speed – from the ‘Doppler Shift’, similar to the way the pitch of a horn is higher for an approaching train and lower as it recedes. McGaugh, Lelli and Schmobery have analysed 2693 measurements in 153 galaxies studied by Spitzer.

More here.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New York Times:

For years, the issue was whether black people were fit to be more than slaves. “Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” The connection between humanity and history was central to this debate, and in the estimation of some Enlightenment thinkers, blacks were without history and thus lacked humanity. The German philosopher Hegel argued that human beings are “human” in part because they have memory. History is written or collective memory. Written history is reliable, repeatable memory, and confers value. Without such texts, civilization cannot exist. “At this point we leave Africa,” he pontificated, “not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Black people, of course, would fight back against these aspersions by writing histories about the African-American experience. In the 1880s, George Washington Williams, whom the historian John Hope Franklin called “the first serious historian of his race,” published the “History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880”; he confessed that part of his motivation was “to call the attention to the absurd charge that the Negro does not belong to the human family.”

About a decade later, W.E.B. Du Bois became the first black person to earn a Ph.D. (in history) at Harvard, followed by Carter G. Woodson, a founder of Negro History Week, who wanted to make history by writing it. “If a race has no history,” he wrote, “it stands in danger of being exterminated.” Arthur A. Schomburg, the famous bibliophile, posited a solution: “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” History “must restore what slavery took away.”

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout February will be in honor of Black History Month)