Brad Plumer in Vox:

The world's plant and animal species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than they did before humans came along. If that continues, we could lose one-third to half of all species by the end of the century. A variety of birds, frogs, fish, mammals — gone.

Those grim statistics come from a big recent study inScience, led by Duke University biologist Stuart Pimm. The paper was the most comprehensive attempt yet to calculate a “death rate” for the world's species — an update on work first begun in 1995.

It's not an easy calculation to make: We still haven't fully tallied all the current species on Earth, for instance. So the researchers had to make estimates on how many species there are likely to be, how many are dying off, and what that “death rate” likely was before humans ever arrived on the scene.

Based on updated research, Pimm and his colleagues estimated that roughly 0.1 out of 1 million species went extinct each year before humans showed up. That's the “background rate.” But nowadays, thanks to deforestation, habitat loss, and other factors, the “death rate” has increased to an estimated 100 to 1,000 extinctions per million species-years.

That's a big deal. And, not surprisingly, many of the media reports on Pimm's paper underscored that the Earth is now facing a “sixth extinction” comparable to the five earlier mass extinctions in history.

More here.

Amy Davidson in The New Yorker:

George Will is a victim: a victim of a particular thing he calls “victimhood,” which comes with “privileges,” nice things that George Will, or people like George Will, don’t get to have. And this thought, in a column that Will published this past weekend in the Washington Post, is not just attached to a standard rant about, say, affirmative action. Colleges and universities have now learned, he writes, “that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate”; he sees this quite plainly in “the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. ‘sexual assault.’ ” Students and educators, in Will’s world, are being swarmed by covetous young women.

Why might one covet the “status” of a survivor of sexual assault, and what are these “privileges” that Will sees? Does he worry that he will be asked to give up his seat for some eighteen-year-old girl who has reported a rape? Or is it that she will be allowed to go to the front of the line in the dining hall at her college, or be deferred to in a way that strikes him as unseemly? Perhaps what he calls a privilege is a young woman such as that being listened to by her elders and having her story taken seriously. That counts as a privilege—an extra benefit—only if a girl, in the normal course of things, wouldn’t and needn’t be heard. “Privilege” suggests puzzlement with the very idea of a voice like that mattering, and, potentially, changing the life of a young man. The image Will is conjuring up is of deceptive or “hypersensitive, even delusional” women clamoring for attention, and deliriously pleased to have found a way to get it.

More here.

The voting round of our politics and social science prize (details here) is over. Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

So here they are, the top 20, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. View from Elephant Hills: Trophies 101: a year of books and bookstores
2. The Millions: The Fictional Lives of High School Teachers
3. 3 Quarks Daily: On Reading Emerson as a Fourteen-Year-Old Girl
4. Medium: The Death of the Urdu Script
5. 3 Quarks Daily: European Crime Fiction – Mini Reviews
6. 3 Quarks Daily: San Francisco and the Storm of Progress
7. Gilded Birds: Michael Rosen
8. 3 Quarks Daily: Mental Illness, the Identity Thief
9. Gilded Birds: Kwame Anthony Appiah
10. 3 Quarks Daily: Industrial Township-ness or How I learnt to be Bourgeois
11. Paris Review: Drinking in the Golden Age
12. 3 Quarks Daily: Haiku and Landays in Science
13. 3 Quarks Daily: Digging Up Bones or, The Labyrinths beneath Our Feet
14. Los Angeles Review of Books: How Auden Was Modified in the Guts of the Living
15. Northeast Review: Mofussil Junction
16. The Nation: Breaking the Cycle of Anger
17. Writing Without Paper: Metastatic ~ A Cento (Poem)
18. 3:AM Magazine: Honest work: an experimental review of an experimental translation
19. 3 Quarks Daily: The Short Bus *
20. n + 1: Everywhere and Nowhere *
21. New Savanna: What's Photography About Anyhow? *

* There is a three-way tie for last place, hence there are 21 entries.

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Mohsin Hamid for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists here on this coming Monday, June 16, 2014.

Jane Hu in Slate:

Once upon a time, weird fish ruled the world. The oceans teemed with primitive vertebrates that lacked eyes, ears, and even fins. Fish ate by sucking up water and debris from the ocean floor, filtering out the goodies, and then releasing the rest through their gills. Once fish evolved jaws, they began to chomp on more complex plants and animals. Scientists announced today in Nature that Metaspriggina, a primitive fish that lived roughly 505 million years ago, played a key role in the origin of jaws.

Like other fish, Metaspriggina had bones called gill arches to support its gills. But while more primitive fish had seven individual gill arches, scientists found that Metaspriggina had seven pairs of gill arches. This fish did not have full-fledged jaws, but its gill arches, with paired separate bones rather than continuous single bones, were “a staging post in the evolutionary story of vertebrates,” says paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, the study’s lead author. Morris and his co-author, Jean-Bernard Caron, propose that the pair of gill arches closest to the head evolved into the upper and lower jaw bones.Paleontologists have long predicted such a creature, but Metaspriggina is the first fossil evidence that supports the prediction. “Everyone said it should have existed, but it’s never been found,” Morris said. “It looks remarkably like the hypothetical animal that we’d talked about.”

More here.

Joe Fassler in The Atlantic:

Last week, Stuart Dybek, one of America’s living masters of the short story, published two new, and very different collections. The nine pieces in Paper Lantern: Love Stories are fairly conventional—they’re stories with drawn characters, and clear conflicts, that reach a certain length. Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories is more focused on the evocative power of language itself—as the strange, musical pairing of words in its title suggests. In offerings that range in length from two lines to nearly 10 pages, from narrative to wholly impressionistic, Dybek uses fragments, koans, and brief lyric flights to capture whole worlds in miniature. In our conversation for this series, Dybek discussed the troubled label “flash fiction” (which was also the topic, and title, of Nathanael Rich’s review in this month’s Atlantic magazine), a form without a solid definition.

Stuart Dybek: It goes way back. From high school on, I wrote these strange, varied, and very short prose pieces that didn’t seem to fit into any established genre. I didn’t have any literary pretensions about what I was doing—it was just one way I liked to work. I thought I was writing stories, but I learned quickly that I’d taken on a form without an easy category. At the time, you could only publish very short prose works, something editors uniformly regarded as “prose poems,” in poetry magazines. So I sent my stuff out that way—because there was no other outlet for it—even though, deep down, I felt I was fudging.

More here.

Bolshevescent

You stand far from the crowd, adjacent to power.
You consider the edge as well as the frame.
You consider beauty, depth of field, lighting
to understand the field, the crowd.
Late into the day, the atmosphere explodes
and revolution, well, revolution is everything.
You begin to see for the first time
everything is just like the last thing
only its opposite and only for a moment.
When a revolution completes its orbit
the objects return only different
for having stayed the same throughout.
To continue is not what you imagined.
But what you imagined was to change
and so you have and so has the crowd.

by Peter Gizzi
from The Outernationale
publisher: Wesleyan, Middletown, CT, 2007

From Kurtweil's blog:

Two days ago, on June 8, 2014, the University of Reading announced that a computer program “has passed the Turing test for the first time.”

University of Reading Professor Kevin Warwick described it this way:

“Some will claim that the test has already been passed. The words ‘Turing test’ have been applied to similar competitions around the world. However, this event involved more simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially, the conversations were unrestricted. A true Turing test does not set the questions or topics prior to the conversations. We are therefore proud to declare that Alan Turing’s test was passed for the first time on Saturday.” — Kevin Warwick, PhD

I have had a long-term wager with Mitch Kapor in which I predicted that a computer program would pass the Turing test by 2029 and he predicted that this would not happen, see links below.

This was the first long-term wager on the “Long Now” website. The bet called for $20,000 to be donated from us to the charity of the winner’s choice.

As a result, messages have been streaming in from around the world congratulating me for having won the bet.

However, I think this is premature. I am disappointed that Professor Warwick, with whom I agree on many things, would make this statement. There are several problems that I describe below, including a transcript of a conversation that I had with Eugene Goostman, the chatbot in question.

More here.

John Gray at Literary Review:

Headhunters is a mind-opening exploration of the lives, careers and ideas of four leading figures who believed themselves pioneers in a new branch of knowledge: the anthropologist and psychiatrist William Rivers (1864-1922), Rivers's pupil the physician and psychologist Charles Myers (1873-1946), the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith (1871-1937) and the social psychologist William McDougall (1871-1938). The origins of this arrestingly original and beautifully written book are themselves an interesting story. They go back to 1963, when as a teenager Shephard read Siegfried Sassoon's Sherston's Progress, in which Rivers appears as the doctor who treated Sassoon for shell shock. Reinforced by studies of the traumas experienced by servicemen as a result of the Vietnam War, Shephard's concern with the psychological aftermath of warfare led to an interest in military psychiatry, which eventually resulted in his writing War of Nerves (2000). All of the thinkers examined here, Shephard discovered, were involved in one way or another in the treatment of psychologically damaged soldiers. Rivers's pupil Myers coined the term 'shell shock' when serving in the army in France; McDougall – another pupil of Rivers – had written an account of the patients whom he had treated back in England; while Elliot Smith had published a wartime polemic on shell shock.

Shephard writes that he has 'tried to give some idea of how science actually works: the passions, the irrational flashes, the moments of insight – the big ideas that work and the big ideas that are plain wrong'. He does this, in part, by giving us a flavour of the personalities of his four protagonists.

more here.

Hilton Als at The New Yorker:

W. H. Auden, in his very honest 1947 essay about “Macbeth,” said that it is “difficult to say anything particularly new or revealing about” the play. And I would agree, given the lengths that many directors go to to make the piece “new,” including building sets like Oram’s. At first, the spooky and delightful weird sisters—Shakespeare’s poetry always extended beautifully to the supernatural—feel like the “new” thing here, given their arresting choreography. But pretty soon that’s dropped, and we’re in the same old “Macbeth” territory of war and conquest and all those crimes against God eventually smiting the hubris of man.

Still, Richard Coyle’s depiction of MacDuff, the lord who commits regicide at the end of the play, is original; he finds substance and emotional conflict in a role that is generally passed over in favor of all those vengeful ghosts. So doing, Coyle brings an enlivening spirit to a piece that many directors, including Ashford and Branagh, try to claim as their own by layering it with ideas about culture, about history, about marriage, which have less to do with reality than with their failure to even approach what Shakespeare was able to achieve through his imagination: dramatic truth, the freedom of the born storyteller.

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

In a corner of the Paris Jardin des Plantes, tucked between the greenhouses and the cultivated rows of bright dahlias of this vast park on the Left Bank of the Seine, we find La Ménagerie, as it is still called, home to over 1100 animals of various sizes, lineages, and provenances: panthers, wallabies, pheasants. It is held to be one of the oldest zoos in the world, having been established in 1793 by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre from the transplanted remnants of the former royal menagerie at Versailles.

The Ménagerie has been immortalized in innumerable works of French literature and cinema, from the satirical fiction of Honoré de Balzac to Chris Marker’s 1962 masterpiece, La Jetée (later the inspiration for the Bruce Willis vehicle, 12 Monkeys). Balzac, in a curious novella of 1841 entitled A Guide for Animals Looking to Move Up in the World, relates the schemes of a man named Adam Marmus, the not-so-proud owner of a humble donkey. He conceives a plot to paint his donkey with stripes, like those familiar specimens in novelty photos from Tijuana, but white on black rather than black on white. As a peculiar new variety of zebra, the donkey will be the hit of the menagerie, and will bring his owner fame and fortune.

More here.

Marko Ahtisaari in his blog:

Ruska is the Finish word for the turning of the leaves in the fall. “Ruska occurs,” writes designer and pamphleteer Dan Hill, “when birch, larch and rowan trees explode into russet tones of richly saturated purples, reds, yellows and oranges, before shivering off their leaves for winter. It's an extraordinary vivid and life-affirming cycle.” Ruska is an apt metaphor for replenishment and renewal, of both organizations and the individual. And while there is so much talk these days about leading others, leading change or changing the world, I'd like to address something more close to home, changing oneself.

How do you lead the creative self? How do you create the physical, cognitive and social conditions for creative work? I'm not talking about the designing itself (of which there is much to say) but rather enabling the everyday conditions to make creative breakthroughs as we've done and you’ll continue to do in the studio.

I want to share with you some of the simple techniques I've used to stay creative, sane and productive. To be clear, I don't mean to be didactic. It's not as if I've figured it all out. I've barely figured anything out. This said, most everything I have learned about leading myself has been by modeling other people I respect. So I offer these thoughts as models and patterns, for you to consider, prototype, or tweak in your own everyday. I’ll do this under three broad headings: your week, your energy and your habits.

More here.

Elissa Bassist & Cheryl Strayed in Creative Nonfiction:

In August 2010, a young writer named Elissa Bassist moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn to start working on an MFA in creative nonfiction. After living in New York for just two weeks, she wrote a letter to The Rumpus’s popular online advice columnist “Sugar,” expressing her frustrations about her writing: “I write about my lady life experiences, and that usually comes out as unfiltered emotion, unrequited love, and eventual discussion of my vagina as metaphor. … I am sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude, to write well, with intelligence and heart and lengthiness.” She asked, finally, “How does a woman get up and become the writer she wishes she’d be?”

Sugar—who last February revealed herself to be Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild—replied: “Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig. You need to do the same. … So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.”

The quote—“Write Like a Motherfucker”—has been emblazoned on a T-shirt and a coffee mug; the letter also appears in Tiny Beautiful Things, Strayed’s bestselling collection of Sugar columns, published last summer by Vintage.

Over the past two years, Bassist says, she has taken every word of Sugar’s/Cheryl’s advice to heart—and she’s not alone.

More here.

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.

More here.

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.

More here.

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.

More here.

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.

More here.