From The Atlantic Monthly:

Simonsohn does not look like a vigilante—or, for that matter, like a business-school professor: at 37, in his jeans, T-shirt, and Keen-style water sandals, he might be mistaken for a grad student. And yet he is anything but laid-back. He is, on the contrary, seized by the conviction that science is beset by sloppy statistical maneuvering and, in some cases, outright fraud. He has therefore been moonlighting as a fraud-buster, developing techniques to help detect doctored data in other people’s research. Already, in the space of less than a year, he has blown up two colleagues’ careers. (In a third instance, he feels sure fraud occurred, but he hasn’t yet nailed down the case.) In so doing, he hopes to keep social psychology from falling into disrepute. Simonsohn initially targeted not flagrant dishonesty, but loose methodology. In a paper called “False-Positive Psychology,” published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, he and two colleagues—Leif Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Wharton’s Joseph Simmons—showed that psychologists could all but guarantee an interesting research finding if they were creative enough with their statistics and procedures. The three social psychologists set up a test experiment, then played by current academic methodologies and widely permissible statistical rules. By going on what amounted to a fishing expedition (that is, by recording many, many variables but reporting only the results that came out to their liking); by failing to establish in advance the number of human subjects in an experiment; and by analyzing the data as they went, so they could end the experiment when the results suited them, they produced a howler of a result, a truly absurd finding. They then ran a series of computer simulations using other experimental data to show that these methods could increase the odds of a false-positive result—a statistical fluke, basically—to nearly two-thirds.

Just as Simonsohn was thinking about how to follow up on the paper, he came across an article that seemed too good to be true. In it, Lawrence Sanna, a professor who’d recently moved from the University of North Carolina to the University of Michigan, claimed to have found that people with a physically high vantage point—a concert stage instead of an orchestra pit—feel and act more “pro-socially.” (He measured sociability partly by, of all things, someone’s willingness to force fellow research subjects to consume painfully spicy hot sauce.) The size of the effect Sanna reported was “out-of-this-world strong, gravity strong—just super-strong,” Simonsohn told me over Chinese food (heavy on the hot sauce) at a restaurant around the corner from his office. As he read the paper, something else struck him, too: the data didn’t seem to vary as widely as you’d expect real-world results to. Imagine a study that calculated male height: if the average man were 5-foot‑10, you wouldn’t expect that in every group of male subjects, the average man would always be precisely 5-foot-10. Yet this was exactly the sort of unlikely pattern Simonsohn detected in Sanna’s data.

More here.

From Nature:

Humans, strawberries, honeybees, chickens and rats are among the many organisms to have their DNA sequenced. But although sequencing an individual species is challenging, it is much harder to sequence the DNA of a single cell.

To get enough DNA for sequencing, thousands or even millions of cells are usually required. And finding out which mutations are in which cells is almost impossible, and mutations present in only a few cells (like early cancerous cells) are hidden altogether. But a technique reported today in Science¹ provides a way to copy DNA so that more than 90% of the genome of a single cell can be sequenced. The method also makes it easier to detect minor DNA sequence variations in single cells and, so, to find genetic differences between individual cells. Such differences can help to explain how cancer becomes more malignant, how reproductive cells emerge and even how individual neurons differ.

More here.

Good Night, Ya Bastard

In Ballyferriter on holidays
we stayed above Seáinín na mBánach’s shop
and some nights
a crowd of locals
and summer visitors
would return after closing time
in Daniel Keane’s pub.

We, the children, lying in suspense
feigning sleep in our beds
waiting for the soft murmur of the company
making its way up the stairs.

Things would start with a bit of a chat,
stories being told, fun being poked,
you acting as shy host
’til the Beamish gave you voice
and you called for a song.

Everyone joining in the chorus,
the hiss as another bottle is opened.

And when the revelling was over
we’d hear the people going,
down on the road in the early morning
someone shouts, “Good night, ya bastard.”
in the full of his voice on the village street.

My sorest wish
to have grown up in time,
before you died,
so I could come
to a night you organised
over Seáinín’s shop
in Ballyferriter.

And when the night was over
and the company were going
I would head for my own lodgings too
in Baile Eaglaise or the Gorta Dubha.
Before I left I would turn to you
and say “Good night, ya bastard,”
fondly, tipsily.

Colm Breathnach
from An Fear Marbh
publisher: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhán, 1998
translation: 2007, Colm Breathnach

Lennon’s infamous utterance, “Before Elvis there was nothing”, can be consigned to the bin once and for all, now that we have his letter to Craig McGregor of the New York Times of September 1971. The reporter had filed the common charge against the Beatles, as Davies puts it, of “ripping off Black American music”. They didn’t sing their own songs in the early days, John wrote to McGregor, because they weren’t good enough, really – the one thing we always did was to make it known that there were black originals, we loved the music and wanted to spread it in any way we could. In the ’50s there were few people listening to blues – R&B – rock and roll, in America as well as Britain. People like – Eric Burdon’s Animals – Mick’s Stones – and us drank and ate and slept the music, and also recorded it, many kids were turned on to black music by us. As for the Rolling Stones, as Mick said in a recent television programme marking fifty years of existence, an achievement both admirable and absurd, they came from being the band that everyone hated to the band everyone loves. It was, after all, only rock and roll.

more from James Campbell at the TLS here.

Although what most of us now think of as “the book”—the codex form made up of pages bound to a spine—began to spread not long after Socrates, it took more than six hundred years for it, rather than the scroll, to lead Western readers where they pleased. This technological triumph is usually explained in terms of the codex’s greater efficiency. But such accounts have to assume that pagans, Jews, Indians, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, all of whom advanced quite happily without the codex, had no interest in efficiency, even though the last three were centuries ahead of the West in the development of the impressive efficiency of print. In fact, the codex is more likely to have spread among the new Christians of the West, and later the Islamists, not for its efficiency in delivering text, but for its ability to signify that its holder was bound for a new religion, not still enrolled in the old. (It should not be surprising, then, that enthusiastic readers of e-books sometimes resemble new sectarians.) Both Andrew Piper in Book Was There and Leah Price in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain look back to the rise of the codex, noting its symbolic and practical contribution to the conversion of Augustine of Hippo.

more from Paul Duguid at Threepenny Review here.

he Museum of World Culture has been favourably compared with the Musée du Quai Branly, which is often mentioned as the antithesis of the Swedish museum. But is the difference between seeking to honour formerly humiliated and despised people, and to promote intercultural exchange actually that great in practice? In both cases, the objectives involve strengthening existing self-images: in France the one depicting the country as the highest court of good taste; and in Sweden the one about being the ultimate domicile of good will. At the same time, and in spite of the ideological ambitions driving the museums, in both French and Swedish cases a kind of unintentional ethnography is being conducted: a haunted ethnography. Siegel points to how collections are made available through a classificatory system that fixes and delimits the understanding of the objects. The collections of the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg contain about 100 000 objects. These are classified in accordance with a variety of ontological and epistemological principles dating from the period in which the objects were acquired. These principles are difficult to grasp, but they determine what can be found.

more from Lisa Karlsson Blom and Mikela Lundahl at Eurozine here.

This week the chairman of Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal resigned. We explain the background to his action, our role in the story, and what it all means for his country’s search for justice.

From The Economist:

Bangladesh suffered a violent birth. In the last days of 1971 the country then called East Pakistan was engulfed by torture, rape, mass-killing and other acts of genocide. The main perpetrators were Pakistani troops bent on preventing secession from “West Pakistan”. But the army had the support of many of East Pakistan’s fundamentalist groups, including Jamaat-e-Islami, which remains Bangladesh’s largest Islamic party. Estimates of the death toll vary from around 300,000 to the current government’s reckoning of 3m—one in 20 of the population at that time.

In 2010 Bangladesh established a tribunal to try those accused of war crimes. It is called the International Crimes Tribunal, though it is not an international court in the sense of being founded on international law. Rather it is a national court, based on a Bangladeshi statute passed in 1973 and amended in 2009 and 2012. It was very late to begin the search for justice, for the accused as well as for victims. But war crimes are subject to no statute of limitation.

The main perpetrators are not in the dock, since they are either dead or living in Pakistan. But some suspects are still leading prominent lives in Bangladesh. Ten people have been arrested and charged with offences ranging from individual acts of rape and murder to the ordering of mass executions. This week the first case—that of Delwar Hossain Sayeedi (pictured above), a member of parliament in 1996-2008 and a leader of Jamaat—seemed to be moving towards its fatal conclusion. His conviction, and presumed death sentence, was widely expected in mid-December.

At the last moment, however, the presiding judge, Mohammed Nizamul Huq, resigned as chairman of the tribunal, following questions put to him by The Economist and the publication in Bangladesh of private e-mails which cast doubt upon his role and upon the court proceedings.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom, which has just moved to National Geographic:

About 1800 years ago, a volcano in northern Nicaragua exploded. The crater formed by the eruption slowly filled like a rain barrel. Eventually the water rose high enough to warrant the title of lake. Today it is called Lake Apoyeque. Although Lake Apoyeque is over 300 feet deep, the rains have a long way to before they reach its brim. Lake Apoyeque remains ringed by volcanic cliffs towering as high as 1200 feet. And yet, despite its young age and its remote location, it is filled with fish.

For thirty years, Axel Meyer, an evolutionary biologist now at the University of Konstanz in Germany, has journeyed to Lake Apoyeque and other lakes of Nicaragua to study the evolution of their fish. He and his colleagues have caught cichlids and sequenced their DNA. By comparing their genes, the scientists can work out how the fish spread across the country. At Lake Apoyeque, for example, they found that the cichlids shared a number of mutations with the cichlids of Lake Managua nearby. The fish of Lake Apoyeque have accumulated relatively few mutations of their own. Meyer and his colleagues studied those mutations to estimate how long it took for their genetic diversity to evolve. They concluded that the cichlids came from Lake Managua to Lake Apoyeque only about a century ago.

There are forests and cliffs dividing Lake Managua and Lake Apoyeque, and no one can say exactly how the fish leaped over them around 1900. One likely route is a water spout. Water spouts are known to pass over Nicaragua, and it’s possible that every few thousand years one of them happens to suck up fish from one lake along the way and drops them in another.

More here.

John Greenman in The Newer York:

“The Girl with the Inexplicably Large Readership”

Dagsson’s thriller tells the story of two people: Salamander Lutefisk, a deeply damaged twenty-three year old computer programmer, and Bjorn Enquist, an investigative journalist. Enquist’s problem, like that of so many Scandinavian reporters, is that too many women want to have sex with him. As the novel begins, Enquist and Lutefisk team up to solve the murder of Enquist’s wealthy employer’s niece’s botanist’s reindeer, I think. Without giving away too much, I can tell you that the more this duo chases the truth, the more it recedes. Also that that whole thing is an elaborate dream sequence. Rivetingly fast paced, this novel is not just for fans of Swedish municipal politics, but also for anyone afraid to admit that they are into S&M.

More here.

Mark Ames at NSFW (via Doug Henwood):

Until now, I have largely avoided getting dragged down into the gun control debate, in part because gun proliferation doesn’t explain why “going postal” first exploded into the culture in the late 1980s, and has worked its way into the American DNA ever since. Gun control or lack thereof doesn’t explain why these kinds of rampage shootings only appeared in the late Reagan era and spread ever since then. And there must have been my own personal prejudices too — I grew up with guns, and despite a couple of bad episodes involving guns and a drunken violent stepfather, I have a reflexive contempt for people who haven’t gone shooting and tell you that gun control laws are the answer.

Well, guess what? Their knee-jerk solution is more right than mine.

Passing gun restrictions today probably wouldn’t do much to slow down rampage massacres, at least not for awhile — but the politics of sweeping gun control laws could have a huge transformative effect over time. It’s no longer impossible for me to ignore that fact.

Which means it’s also no longer possible for me to ignore the National Rifle Association, and its hick fascism politics that’ve been poisoning our culture ever since the NRA’s infamous “coup” in 1977, when the NRA was taken over by far-right fanatics led by a convicted murderer and onetime US Border Guards chief named Harlon Carter — whose previous claim to fame was when he led a massive crackdown on Mexican immigrant laborers called “Operation Wetback.” That’s not a typo by the way.

Giyani Block

When the sun recedes
into the Soutpansberg,
Giyani Block puts on a
black adder coat;
a mirror of death and despair.

Doctors and nurses stand on their feet.
They shall not rest when the workers’ strike
ignites its furious flame.
They’re on tiptoe, looking up,
wrestling the faceless, tailless monster.

Death’s whistle rings,
Death is a bosom friend here.
He walks like a dragon snake in the mountain.
In this house, Death is a burrowing mole;
he digs a hole in a life on the brink.
In this house, Death is a lion
with sharpened teeth, awaiting a rabbit.

Whether you are the most feared inyanga
with a calabash full of muti,
or a priest with the bible in hand,
whether strong as an iron-breaker or weak as an outcast,
whether handsome, shining like the sun
or beauteous, dancing with the stars,
Giyani Block remains a black sea
that wrecks our boats,
leaving no evidence or trace.
In Giyani Block heavens fall,
towers come to ruins,
flowers fade away.
Poor granny has joined ‘ngoma’:
who'll dance till the balls of his feet are bloodied,
his pride is but history.

Ncindhani, my neighbour, is feeble,
washed away like a rope.
His shoulders like a clothes hanger,
the blue arteries along his hands straight
as the strings of Juluka’s guitar;
his eyes are clouds of death,
deeply sunken like the sun falling
into the mouth of the horizon.
When he puts the hospital jacket away,
fleshless ribs and his amulet stand out
like rinderpest, a drought-stricken goat
by the stream.

by Vonani Bila
from In the Name of Amandla
Timbila Poetry Project, Elim, 2004

From The Guardian:

We have outsourced the job of interpreting ourselves to the modern life sciences. The decoding of the human genome will tell us who we really are, pledged the gene-merchants. Brain scans will tell us who we really are, swore the neuro-hustlers. And what did we get? We got suckered. It turns out that humans have roughly as many protein-encoding genes as a fruit fly, and that fMRI scanning is still such an inexact art that a team of satirical neuroscientists have demonstrated significant “brain activity” in a dead salmon. This fascinating, lucid and angry book by the sociologist Hilary Rose and the neurobiologist Steven Rose (they are married) boasts abundant targets and a lethally impressive hit ratio. They decry the entrepreneurialisation of science – “wealth creation is now unabashedly formalised as the chief objective of science and technology policy” – not least because it actually impedes science. (“PhD students can work for months on a project only to find that they cannot continue as they have run into a patent.”) They lambast the “armchair” theorising of evolutionary psychology, with its ungrounded assumption that we have “stone-age minds in the 21st century”. They scorn the “neuromyths” sold to the educational establishment, with the result that schoolchildren become the unwitting subjects of uncontrolled experiments in applying alleged lessons from animal psychology to the classroom.

The book performs in high style the necessary public service of recomplicating the simplistic hogwash hysterically blasted at us by both uncritical science reporters and celebrity scientists. (The authors are very funny about Richard Dawkins, who clearly doesn't understand what a metaphor is.) Here are the knotty histories of molecular biology and evolutionary theory, with explanations of why evo-devo and epigenetics make the old genetic determinism untenable, and why there is hardly ever “a gene for” something. (“Ninety-five genetic loci have been found related to blood lipid levels,” the authors write, “possibly hundreds of genes might be implicated in coronary heart disease, and around a hundred in schizophrenia.”) They show how and why both genomics and stem-cell therapy have thus far failed to usher in a miraculous new age of medicine, and observe sorrowfully that, even as the media storm of neurogibberish rages unabated, Big Pharma is shutting down research into mental health disorders in favour of more tractable (and so profitable) diseases.

More here.

Erik Loomis blogs over at one of the smarter blogs around, Lawyers, Guns and Money. His position at the University of Rhode Island has come under attack, and there are a couple of statements in support. If you support him after reading the details, you may want to sign one of the statements in support. (Comments on this are closed.)

First, over at Crooked Timber:

Erik Loomis is no stranger to this blog. A gifted young scholar of US labor and environmental history, Loomis is also a blogger at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Many of us have tussled and tangled with him, most recently over whether leftists should vote for Obama. We have often disagreed with Loomis, not always pleasantly or politely, and he has certainly given as good as he has got.

But now we must stand by Loomis’s side and speak up and out on his behalf, for he has become the target of a witch hunt, and as an untenured professor at the University of Rhode Island, he is vulnerable. Loomis needs our solidarity and support, and we must give it to him.

Next over at Duck of Minerva:

Erik Loomis is a history professor at the University of Rhode Island and a long-time blogger. His highest-profile gig is at Lawyers, Guns & Money. In the immediate aftermath of the Newtown massacre, Erik tweeted that he “wanted to see Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.” The usual suspects in the conservative blogsphere soon translated this into the idea that Erik had called for LaPierre’s assassination.

The rest played out as you might expect. The stupid spread throughout the right-wing echo chamber, leading to depressing pot.kettle.black bullshit and, soon enough, calls to the Rhode Island police etc. etc. Erik was forced to delete his Twitter account, leading to the same kinds of losers who whine about “suppression of speech” at the slightest opportunity to crow victorious.

Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books:

It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives.

Perhaps the first thing to say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in childhood when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but rather that the small things go a long way. I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food, for example—any old food. An egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has the genuine power to turn my day around. Whatever is put in front of me, foodwise, will usually get a five-star review.

You’d think that people would like to cook for, or eat with, me—in fact I’m told it’s boring. Where there is no discernment there can be no awareness of expertise or gratitude for special effort. “Don’t say that was delicious,” my husband warns, “you say everything’s delicious.” “But it was delicious.” It drives him crazy. All day long I can look forward to a popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth. And though it’s true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America. A pineapple popsicle. Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.

More here.

It is of some consequence, then, to discover that not everything Scott wrote were his own words, even though that is how they have always appeared in print. One of the passages famously noted for being an example of Scott’s innate facility with language and metaphor—and therefore “proof” of his superiority as a writer and noble soul—was in fact written by a far more accomplished wordsmith: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. So how can it be that no one—not even Scott’s lauded editor, Leonard Huxley, or any of the scholars who have pored over Scott’s words in a hundred years—have noticed this glaring misappropriation? The fact that Scott was quoting Longfellow in the first place provides us with an insight into his literary life that is just as revealing as simply noting that it was overlooked. The passage that Scott quoted is itself illuminating.

more from Micki Myers at Paris Review here.

Not liking modernism and not wanting to be taken for poncy literary types were Amis-Larkin stances too, and proudly despising Beckett, in particular, is an Amis family tradition. (Kingsley to Larkin in 1985: ‘I think it’s all to do with Mandarin vs. Vernacular was it, as Cyril C put it? You know, art novel, Pickarso, European thought, bourgeois conscience, Tuscany, Beckett, we haven’t got a television set, lesson of the master and nothing happening.’) Yet Bradford’s discipleship is less wholehearted than it first seems. Throughout his narrative of the two men’s friendship it’s clear that he prefers Larkin’s closeted artiness to Amis’s knockabout style. Sometimes, as when he writes of the young Amis being viewed as ‘almost charismatic’, apparent bitchiness turns out to be a side effect of an awkward way with words. Elsewhere he seems as appalled as any taste-shaping puritan by Amis’s boozing and shagging. And after a while it’s hard not to feel for his subjects as he wrenches their every exchange into a pattern of one-way envy and obsession. When Larkin tells Monica that a letter from Amis ‘makes me laugh’, Bradford glosses: ‘No doubt it did but it stirred other feelings too.’ That these feelings, in this instance, weren’t mentioned only shows how deep they ran.

more from Christopher Tayler at the LRB here.

Roger Boylan reviews Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters (edited by Michael Hoffman), in the Boston Review:

Reading Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters is like sitting across a café table from Roth himself after he’s had a few. He holds nothing back. He rages, jokes, pleads, and sobs. “Don’t be upset,” he says—imagination supplies a wagging forefinger—“if my letters are full of impatience and even irritations. It so happens I live and write in a continual state of confusion.”

No standard biography of Roth exists in English, but this collection of his letters, superbly translated and judiciously edited by long-time Roth advocate Michael Hofmann, provides a more intimate portrait than any biography could. Roth’s letters are a study in authorial candor: in vino veritas, at least in part, for some of them were composed while he was drunk, getting that way, or hungover—the grim trinity that dominated his life more and more until he died of it, plusweltschmerz, in Paris in 1939. He was just short of 45 and had come a long way to die so young. He left behind one masterpiece,The Radetzky March, in which, in a series of vivid set-pieces, he evokes the reality of life high and low during the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s long decline, a vast theme encapsulated in the Trotta family, who ascend to nobility and imperial favor from provincial origins on the obscure fringes of the realm.