From KurzweilAI:

The science-fiction movie Elysium opens in theaters and IMAX in the U.S. on Friday, August 9. The ostensible bionics (exoskeleton technology) and special effects for this film are mesmerizing. The folk who live on the space station Elysium appear to have eliminated poverty, war, illness (including cancer), and possibly death. The unfortunate folk who remain on Earth have all of these problems in spades and worse. Recall the Los Angeles dystopia in the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner with Harrison Ford, in which the wealthy work for the Tyrell Corporation and live the good life.

In the year 2154 (well past our presumed “Singularity”), the very-wealthy and privileged classes live on Elysium, a toroidal high-tech space station governed by President Patel (Faran Tahir), in a utopian setting that includes access to private medical machines that offer instant cures, while everyone else lives below on an overpopulated, disease-ridden, ruined Earth. Los Angeles has become a third-world slum. Those who maintain Elysium will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve their citizens’ lifestyle, even destroying ships that attempt to arrive there.

More here.

Timur Kuran in Project Syndicate:

This year, Islamist politics has faced massive setbacks in two major predominantly Muslim countries: Egypt and Turkey. But it is too soon to write political Islam off as a capable participant – even a leading force – in a pluralist democracy.

Just one year after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi became Egypt’s first elected president, millions of Egyptians took to the street, triggering the military coup that ousted him. Morsi’s political incompetence and lack of vision in the face of economic collapse would have been enough to diminish support for his government. But his rejection of pluralism and pursuit of an Islamic dictatorship, exemplified by his efforts to centralize power in the hands of the Brothers and place himself beyond the review of Egypt’s judiciary, proved to be his undoing.

Similarly, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), has taken to governing in a way that is unraveling a decade of progress, one marked by economic dynamism, rapid growth, and the subordination of the armed forces to civilian control. The Erdoğan government’s recent brutal crackdown on popular protests against planned construction in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park made Turkey look like a one-party dictatorship. To make things worse, Erdoğan then spent weeks subverting pluralism through polarizing speeches that stigmatized Turks who do not share his social conservatism or subscribe to his particular interpretation of Islam.

Given that Egypt and Turkey are two of the three most populous countries of Islam’s historic core (the third is theocratic Iran), one might infer that their ongoing difficulties have destroyed any prospect of reconciling political Islam with pluralist democracy. But the two countries’ situations include fundamental differences, as do political Islam’s prospects for renewal.

Martin Wolf reviews Mariana Mazzucato's Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths, in the FT:

Growth of output per head determines living standards. Innovation determines the growth of output per head. But what determines innovation?

Conventional economics offers abstract models; conventional wisdom insists the answer lies with private entrepreneurship. In this brilliant book, Mariana Mazzucato, a Sussex university professor of economics who specialises in science and technology, argues that the former is useless and the latter incomplete. Yes, innovation depends on bold entrepreneurship. But the entity that takes the boldest risks and achieves the biggest breakthroughs is not the private sector; it is the much-maligned state.

Mazzucato notes that “75 per cent of the new molecular entities [approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 1993 and 2004] trace their research … to publicly funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) labs in the US”. The UK’s Medical Research Council discovered monoclonal antibodies, which are the foundation of biotechnology. Such discoveries are then handed cheaply to private companies that reap huge profits.

A perhaps even more potent example is the information and communications revolution. The US National Science Foundation funded the algorithm that drove Google’s search engine. Early funding for Apple came from the US government’s Small Business Investment Company. Moreover, “All the technologies which make the iPhone ‘smart’ are also state-funded … the internet, wireless networks, the global positioning system, microelectronics, touchscreen displays and the latest voice-activated SIRI personal assistant.” Apple put this together, brilliantly. But it was gathering the fruit of seven decades of state-supported innovation.

Why is the state’s role so important? The answer lies in the huge uncertainties, time spans and costs associated with fundamental, science-based innovation.

Oscar Wilde on the topic, in Berfrois:

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely any one at all escapes.

Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand “under the shelter of the wall,” as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

Vivian Gornick on Camus's Alegerian chronicles, in Boston Review:

Sixty years ago, in the decade following the Second World War, the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus was an international cultural hero. The Nazis and the atomic bomb had destroyed the historic illusion that there were limits to the damage civilized human beings could or would inflict on one another. Humanity, as an enterprise, had never seemed a more desolating proposition than at this moment. Postwar Europe produced a multitude of writers who reflected the mood of the times, but none spoke more directly to it than Camus.

He was born into an uneducated, working-class family in French Algeria in 1913 and grew up in near-poverty. Due to the efforts of a perceptive grade school teacher, the young Albert made it to the lycée and went on to study at the University of Algiers, from which he emerged a man of the left, intent on the dismaying conditions of life that the colonial regime had visited upon his native land. He joined the Communist Party in 1935, was associated with a number of revolutionary groups, and for a few years wrote for left-wing newspapers. At 25, having been blacklisted because of his anti-colonial journalism, Camus left Algeria for France against his will, and all the years he lived there felt himself to be in exile. Yet when the Germans marched into Paris, he joined the Resistance and soon became the editor of Combat, one of its clandestine newspapers.

From Mercury News:

Or a soda. Or, regrettably, that telltale soupcon of fat that makes a burger actually taste like a burger. It does, however, come with a heaping side of bragging rights. Making its debut Monday at a tasting event at a London restaurant, the world's first manufactured beef patty was created in a laboratory from a living cow's stem cells, funded by the deep pockets of Google's quixotic co-founder. The burger's backers say cultured meat could help alleviate animal cruelty while combating climate change, with lab-grown meat easing the environmental burdens of livestock production.

And while those who tried it said the patty bordered dangerously close to being tasteless, its mere existence pleased animal-rights activists, stem-cell pioneers and food fetishists everywhere, not to mention millions of cows eyeing a new lease on life. “We're trying to create the first cultured beef hamburger,” Brin said in a videotaped message released Monday, as the world learned for the first time about his role in the project. “From there, I'm optimistic we can really scale up by leaps and bounds.” Already known for firing off “moonshots,” the call-me-crazy projects like Google Glass, the driverless car and personal genome analysis, the 39-year-old Brin can now add the test-tube burger to his résumé. This moonshot, Brin said, was driven by his concerns for animal welfare. In the video, he said the way animals are treated is “something I'm not comfortable with.” And he said creating alternatives like in-vitro meat makes more sense than expecting everyone to become vegetarian.

More here.

From The New York Times:

By comparing decades of personality test results, Dr. Twenge has concluded, over and over again, that younger generations are increasingly entitled, self-obsessed and unprepared for the realities of adult life. And the blame, she says, falls squarely on America’s culture of self-esteem, in which parents praise every child as “special,” and feelings of self-worth are considered a prerequisite to success, rather than a result of it. “There’s a common perception that self-esteem is key to success, but it turns out it isn’t,” she said. Nonetheless, “young people are just completely convinced that in order to succeed they have to believe in themselves or go all the way to being narcissistic.” The message has hit a nerve. Since the 2006 publication of her first book on the subject, “Generation Me,” which sold more than 100,000 copies, Dr. Twenge (pronounced TWANG-ee) has become something of a celebrity psychologist, appearing on the “Today” show, “Good Morning America” and MSNBC, among others, to comment on topics as varied as Facebook and the rise in plastic surgery.

…But as her media profile has risen, so has the volume of criticism from her colleagues. “I think she is vastly misinterpreting or over-interpreting the data, and I think it’s destructive,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a research professor in psychology at Clark University. “She is inviting ridicule for a group of people about which there are already negative stereotypes.” Critics like Dr. Arnett see a number of problems with Dr. Twenge’s work. They say the test on which much of her research is based, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, is inherently flawed — better designed to measure feelings of confidence and self-worth than actual narcissism. They also accuse her of focusing too much of her work on students at research universities, who they say are not representative of their generation.

More here.

Chaos
.
A Venetian critic named Bruno Alfieri saw:
(in Jackson Pollocks work)

—chaos
—absolute lack of harmony
—complete lack of structural organization
—total absence of technique, however rudimentary
—once again, chaos
……… from Art in America, February 1994

1. Chaos
.
Being true to what we are, what is,
frayed around the edges, perhaps, and growing wierd.
Born in NYC, and from there, no movement.
It is our own terror, our own making,
abandoned in the high-rise night
like an impotent frog.

2. Absolute lack of harmony
.
There are times when you can't illuminate nothing, man.
Don't open that door, they say, don't even enter the room.
My second wife would know, she didn't belong
among the pacifists making music. Every
day you encounter some people going
straight to hell.
Read more »

Katrin Bennhold in the NYT:

On July 24, Mr. Carney said that it had always been the bank’s intention to include another woman among the historical figures on the bank notes, and he announced that Austen would appear on future £10 notes. He also vowed to review the whole process of choosing historical figures for the notes.

“A brilliant day for women,” Ms. Criado-Perez said in response.

But that same day on Twitter a trickle of abuse grew into a shower of crude rape and death threats against Ms. Criado-Perez at a rate of nearly one per minute. Several other women, from members of the public to members of Parliament, have also been the targets of Twitter attacks. Three female journalists received bomb threats.

“I’m going to pistol whip you over and over until you lose consciousness,” one Twitter user warned Ms. Criado-Perez, threatening to “then burn ur flesh.”

“I will rape you tomorrow at 9pm,” a Twitter user told Stella Creasy, a Labour Party legislator. “Shall we meet near your house?”

Two men, ages 21 and 25, have been arrested so far in connection with the harassment. Scotland Yard’s electronic-crime unit is investigating the Twitter attacks involving mostly anonymous Internet users, so-called trolls.

What is perhaps most striking about the reaction, said Caitlin Moran, a columnist for the Times of London and the author of the witty 2011 feminist manifesto “How to Be a Woman,” is how little it took to set it off.

“If even a small thing like this, a nice middle-class debate about putting Jane Austen’s picture on the opposite side of a bank note from the queen, causes a storm of abuse like this, what will happen when we get to the bigger issues?” Ms. Moran asked in a phone interview.

Paul Bracchi in The Daily Mail on the faces behind the trolls.

Sarah Stillman on the use and abuse of civil forfeiture, in the New Yorker:

The basic principle behind asset forfeiture is appealing. It enables authorities to confiscate cash or property obtained through illicit means, and, in many states, funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, cops drive a Cadillac Escalade stencilled with the words “this used to be a drug dealer’s car, now it’s ours!” In Monroe, North Carolina, police recently proposed using forty-four thousand dollars in confiscated drug money to buy a surveillance drone, which might be deployed to catch fleeing suspects, conduct rescue missions, and, perhaps, seize more drug money. Hundreds of state and federal laws authorize forfeiture for cockfighting, drag racing, basement gambling, endangered-fish poaching, securities fraud, and countless other misdeeds.

In general, you needn’t be found guilty to have your assets claimed by law enforcement; in some states, suspicion on a par with “probable cause” is sufficient. Nor must you be charged with a crime, or even be accused of one. Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence.

One result is the rise of improbable case names such as United States v. One Pearl Necklace and United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins. (Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson’s forfeiture was slugged State of Texas v. $6,037.) “The protections our Constitution usually affords are out the window,” Louis Rulli, a clinical law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading forfeiture expert, observes. A piece of property does not share the rights of a person. There’s no right to an attorney and, in most states, no presumption of innocence. Owners who wish to contest often find that the cost of hiring a lawyer far exceeds the value of their seized goods.

Rukmini S in Caravan:

In most of the world, more men than women do paid work, since women do more unpaid cooking, cleaning and childcare within the home. (Worldwide, women hold about 40 percent of the world’s paid jobs, according to the ILO.) In developing countries like India, where female education rates are low and family sizes large, the barriers to entering the workforce are particularly high. (Seelampur fits this pattern well; it has among the lowest literacy rates in the state, and the highest proportion of children, indicating that fertility there is high and family sizes are big.) As countries develop, women generally become better educated and have fewer children, and more of them are expected to join the workforce.

India has met its Millennium Development Goals target on female educational enrollment and fertility has fallen far faster than it was expected to over the past ten years, but the workforce participation rate has still declined. The alarm bells first went off when the numbers from the 2009–10 round of the National Sample Survey, the only official source of employment data in India, came back. Among women over 15 years old, female workforce participation—which includes those who are usually employed and those looking for work—had crashed by 10 percentage points since the previous survey, in 2004–05. Just over a quarter of rural women (who traditionally have higher agriculture- and poverty-driven work-participation rates) were now in the workforce, and just over a tenth of urban women were. Even if an unusually large number of women participated in the workforce in 2004–5—and there is an argument that they did—20 years of data analysed by economists Steven Kapsos and Andrea Silberman of the ILO confirm that there has been a gradual fall in the proportion of Indian women looking for and going to work.

Three main hypotheses have commonly been put forward to explain this decline, all of which intend to minimise the alarm. The first, favoured by the planning commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, is that more young women are staying on in higher education, leaving fewer available to work or look for jobs. Kapsos and Silberman, however, have crunched the numbers to show that female enrollment in higher education is still low enough to explain only a very small part of the downward trend. The second, espoused in the media by the journalist and economist Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar, is that as Indian families get richer, they pull their women out of the workforce. Although this is a cultural phenomenon observed in India, Kapsos and Silberman’s calculations again show that it explains just a small part of the fall.

The third hypothesis relates to the tortured issue of data collection.

Sughra Raza. Calligraphy. July 2012.

Digital photograph.

Kenan Malik in Padaemonium:

When, on 3 July, the Egyptian army ousted President Mohammed Morsi, and took control of the nation, many liberals and secularists rationalized it not as a coup but as the military acting on behalf of the people to protect the revolution. When the army imprisoned Morsi, and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders, censored its media and suspended the constitution, many liberals and secularists rationalized it not as an authoritarian crackdown but as measures necessary to check the ambitions of the Brotherhood and to preserve the gains of the revolution. When, last week, the army shot dead dozens of pro-Morsi protestors, many liberals and secularists rationalized it not as a barbaric act comparable with the savagery of previous dictator Hosni Mubarak, but as ‘self-defence’ against ‘terrorists’ bent on bringing down democracy. In reality what is being rationalized away is the soul of the Egyptian revolution.

The tragedy of Egypt today is that contemporary events echo a historical pattern repeated again and again throughout the Arab world. Supporters of the coup point out that the Egyptian army is more than merely an army; it occupies, they argue, a special place in Egyptian society. They are right. But the army only does so because of the weakness of the political sphere. There is a long history in the Arab world of popular movements for democratic change and a secular society. Such movements have, however, often been organizationally fragile and politically incoherent. In their stead, the military has taken on the role of the agent of social change, the mechanism through which the nation is ‘modernized’. Secularism and ‘progressive’ politics have, as a result, long been associated not with freedom and democracy but with military power and authoritarian rule – from Nasserism in Egypt to Ba’athism in Syria and Iraq. This is turn has encouraged the growth of religious anti-liberal movements, including Islamism.

More here.

Laila Lalami in the New York Times:

My mother was abandoned in a French orphanage in Fez in 1941. That year in Morocco, hundreds of people died in an outbreak of the plague; her parents were among the victims. Actually, no, they died in a horrific car crash on the newly built road from Marrakesh to Fez. No, no, no, my grandmother died in childbirth, and my grandfather, mad with grief, gave the baby away. The truth is: I don’t know how my mother ended up in a French orphanage in 1941. The nuns in black habits never told.

Growing up in Rabat, I felt lopsided, like a seesaw no one ever played with. On my father’s side: a large number of uncles, cousins, second cousins, grandaunts, all claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad. On my mother’s side: nothing. No one. Often I imagined my mother’s parents, the man and woman whose blood pulsed in my veins but whom I had never seen.

I would have called them Ba-sidi and Mi-lalla. Like my paternal grandfather, Ba-sidi would have been old but active. He would have retired from a career in the police and spent his days performing El Melhun, Moroccan sung poetry, with his friends. Like my paternal grandmother, Mi-lalla would have worn long, rustling caftans, in which I would have sought refuge every time I got into trouble. She would have taught me all her herbal cures and hennaed my hands before each Eid.

More here.

George Dyson in Edge:

Data mining, on the scale now practiced by Google and the NSA, is the realization of what Alan Turing was getting at, in 1939, when he wondered “how far it is possible to eliminate intuition, and leave only ingenuity,” in postulating what he termed an “Oracle Machine.” He had already convinced himself of the possibility of what we now call artificial intelligence (in his more precise terms, mechanical intelligence) and was curious as to whether intuition could be similarly reduced to a mechanical procedure—although it might (indeed should) involve non-deterministic steps. He assumed, for sake of argument, that “we do not mind how much ingenuity is required, and therefore assume it to be available in unlimited supply.”

And, as if to discount disclaimers by the NSA that they are only capturing metadata, Turing, whose World War II work on the Enigma would make him one of the patron saints of the NSA, was already explicit that it is the metadata that count. If Google has taught us anything, it is that if you simply capture enough links, over time, you can establish meaning, follow ideas, and reconstruct someone's thoughts. It is only a short step from suggesting what a target may be thinking now, to suggesting what that target may be thinking next.

Does this not promise a safer world, protected not only from bad actors attempting to do dangerous things, but from bad actors developing dangerous thoughts? Yes, but at what cost? There's a problem, and it's the problem that Alan Turing was trying to answer when he first set us down this path. Turing delivered us into the digital age, as a 24-year-old graduate student, not by building a computer, but by writing a purely mathematical paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” published in 1936. The Decision Problem, articulated by Göttingen's David Hilbert, concerned the abstract mathematical question of whether there could ever be any systematic mechanical procedure to determine, in a finite number of steps, whether any given string of symbols represented a provable statement or not.

The answer was no. In modern computational terms (which just happened to be how, in an unexpected stroke of genius, Turing framed his argument) no matter how much digital horsepower you have at your disposal, there is no systematic way to determine, in advance, what every given string of code is going to do except to let the codes run, and find out.

Nicholas G. Carr's criticism can be found here, and Dyson's rejoinder here.

Richard Marshall interviews Sean Carroll in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: I thought we’d start by getting your overview of the situation as you see it regarding the relationship between physics and philosophy. There have been some high profile and rather bad tempered disagreements recently between the two camps – I’m thinking of theKraus vs Albert recently which led to an invitation for Albert to share a platform with Krauss at an event being pulled, and Hawking and Mlodinow who start off their book ‘The Grand Design’ by announcing the death of philosophy – so I wondered if there was any general points that such cases helped illustrate for you about the relationship, in particular, whether there is some truth in the thought that physics has such an elevated status in the general culture reflected (as reflected in both popular culture eg The Big Bang Theory and funding eg it gets LHC machines built) that it feels itself impervious to criticism?

SC: From inside physics, it hardly seems like we are impervious to criticism! Funding is being cut, our ability to do big projects is running up against problems of finance and international cooperation, and it’s a struggle to explain the importance of increasingly abstract basic research. Much of this feeling is a matter of historical context, of course; fifty years ago physicists were at the top of the heap, a position that is increasingly occupied by biologists (or maybe economists?). But anyone paying attention can tell that there is still immense public interest in discoveries like dark energy and the Higgs boson, and a great deal of respect for physics as a profession.

The public spat between physics and philosophy is just silly, more a matter of selling books or being lazy than any principled intellectual position. Most physicists know very little about philosophy, which is hardly surprising; most experts in any one academic field don’t know very much about many other fields. This ignorance manifests itself in a couple of ways. First, a lot of scientists are quite comfortable with simplistic philosophy of science. This usually doesn’t matter, but there are cases where good philosophy has something to offer, and scientists rarely put in the work necessary to understand what that good philosophy has to say. Second, scientists tend to think of philosophy as a service discipline – what good does it do for my practice of science? The answer is almost always “no good at all,” which they then translate into thinking that philosophy has no real purpose. The truth is that almost all scientific work can proceed quite happily without philosophy – you can be very good at driving a car without knowing how an engine works. But when it’s important, philosophy very important indeed.

Very few philosophers, by contrast, are going to accuse science of being worthless. Nevertheless, it’s no surprise that there are problems of appreciation and understanding flowing in that direction as well. The only remedy, if one is interested in finding one, is constant interaction and communication.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu interviews Peter Tatchell in The Boston Review:

I was born and grew up in Zimbabwe, and I voted first in the 2002 election. The people of my generation were all excited and thought that things were going to change. But Robert Mugabe was re-elected amidst claims of fraud and has been continuously re-elected. Nothing has changed. This Wednesday was election day in Zimbabwe, and Mugabe—despite claims of voter fraud from the opposition once again—appears to have secured another term in office.

Peter Tatchell, a prominent LGBT activist, has put himself in harm’s way to fight a number of controversial causes, among them stopping Mugabe from committing crimes against the Zimbabwean people. The lanky Australian-born, British-based activist has tried to arrest Mugabe not once, but twice—in London in 1999 and in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Brussels in 2001—for crimes against humanity. On the second occasion, Mugabe’s Central Intelligence Operatives beat him badly and left him with permanent brain damage.

Tatchell has been beaten on more than 300 occasions, arrested more than 100 times, participated in over 3,000 protests and received more than 500 death threats. A live bullet has been sent through his letterbox, and his small south London flat—where I spoke with Tatchell—is frequently targeted by vandals.

. . .

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: In the 1980s were you one of the people who celebrated Robert Mugabe or whatever he supposedly represented?

Peter Tatchell: My association with Zimbabwe began way back in the early 1970s during the war of liberation when I was a young student. Like most Zimbabweans, I was opposed to the white minority regime of Ian Smith; the denial of votes to black people was unconscionable. Every attempt by a Zimbabwean nationalist leader to secure a peaceful negotiation of the transference of power to attain black majority rule was rebuffed. All the leaders ended up in prison or under detention or under house arrest, in fact, all kinds of restrictions were placed upon them infringing on their ability to campaign peacefully and non-violently for change. The end result was that many people concluded that the armed struggle was the only way forward. Although instinctively I am a pacifist and loathe violence, I felt that an armed struggle was the only option available to black Zimbabweans and somewhat reluctantly supported that struggle. As a young student I helped to fundraise to buy medical kits for guerrillas in the bush and for the civilian population in areas controlled by the liberation movement. At the time, Robert Mugabe seemed like a good guy. If you read the original program of ZANU-PF [The Mugabe-led Zimbabwean African National Union—Patriotic Front], it was a program for democracy, human rights, and social justice.