From PhysOrg:

The world could one day be an economically equal place, if the lower-income population have anything to do with it. In an interesting yet disheartening series of socioeconomic experiments, led by a team of UC Berkeley researchers, the findings are that those on the lower-income levels are more likely to give and be charitable than their higher paid counterparts. In one experiment in particular, led by doctoral student, Paul Piff and his researchers, participants completed a questionnaire reporting their socioeconomic status and a few days later were provided with $10 to share anonymously. The findings concluded the more generous of the income brackets were on the lower-income scale. A recent national survey reiterates the results, revealing lower-income people give more of their hard-earned money to charity than the wealthy.

More here.

Timothy Garton Ash in the NYRB blog:

The poet Paul Celan said of his native Czernowitz that it was a place where people and books used to live. Tony Judt was a man for whom books lived, as well as people. His mind, like his apartment on Washington Square, was full of books—and they walked with him, arguing, to the very end.

Critical though he was of French intellectuals, he shared with them a conviction that ideas matter. Being English, he thought facts matter too. As a historian, one of his most distinctive achievements was to integrate the intellectual and political history of twentieth-century Europe—revealing the multiple, sometimes unintended interactions over time of ideas and realities, thoughts and deeds, books and people.

In Postwar, a history of postwar Europe conceived as the continent’s cold war division was crumbling, he performed another great integration. While the two halves of the divided continent were being sewn together politically and economically, in the years after 1989, he brought together their histories. His 1968, for example, was not only Paris, and not only Prague, but rather the whole complex of their simultaneities, contradictions, and malentendus. His was the first major history of contemporary Europe to analyze the stories of Eastern and Western Europe in equally rigorous, nuanced detail, but also as part of a single, larger whole.

Over at The Subversive Copy Editor, an interview with the principal reviser Russell David Harper (via Brainiac over at the Boston Globe):

Russell David Harper is the only person on the planet with all of the following qualifications: He has worked as a manuscript editor for the University of Chicago Press for more than a dozen years, and he contributed to the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. For nearly three years, he kept a finger on the pulse of CMOS readers by serving as editor of the online Q&A. He is a technology wonk (I’m sorry, Russell, but I looked it up to make sure, and you are a wonk), with experience in typesetting, proofreading, and printing. And for good measure, he’s a polymath, a published author, and a kind and generous and funny person whose patience and reliability under pressure are legendary.

Because of his unmatched experience in Chicago practices and his techie leanings, Russell was decided to be a perfect choice to serve as principal reviser for the sixteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. As principal reviser, he was responsible for drafting a detailed outline and summary of the new edition and, in cooperation with the Manuscript Editing Department at the University of Chicago Press and the CMOS Board of Advisors, for writing the manuscript itself and serving as its nominal author through all the stages of publication.

CAROL: So, Russell, tell me: when you were asked to revise CMOS for the sixteenth edition, did you have any fears or reservations, and if so, what were they, and did you get over them?

RUSSELL: Well yes. My first fear was for my family. I knew the Manual well, and I knew what a revision would mean. (They survived.) Next, I worried for my safety. My third-floor office at the time—in the attic of a hundred-year-old house in Ithaca, New York—trembled and swayed whenever a city bus or fire truck passed by (about every twenty minutes). So I resolved to make daily backups of every stage of the manuscript to a variety of off-site servers, leaving passwords and instructions with a close and highly literate family member across the Atlantic.

Also check out their two photo projects Dancers vs. Garbage and Dancers vs. Food, as well.

Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Ever since word got out that a prominent Harvard University researcher was on leave after an investigation into academic wrongdoing, a key question has remained unanswered: What, exactly, did he do?

The researcher himself, Marc D. Hauser, isn't talking. The usually quotable Mr. Hauser, a psychology professor and director of Harvard's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, is the author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Ecco, 2006) and is at work on a forthcoming book titled “Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad.” He has been voted one of the university's most popular professors.

Harvard has also been taciturn. The public-affairs office did issue a brief written statement last week saying that the university “has taken steps to ensure that the scientific record is corrected in relation to three articles co-authored by Dr. Hauser.” So far, Harvard officials haven't provided details about the problems with those papers. Were they merely errors or something worse?

An internal document, however, sheds light on what was going on in Mr. Hauser's lab.

More here.

UPDATE: Ed Yong has collected a bunch of related links with more info here:

The case of Marc Hauser really erupted this week. The Chronicle published the first direct accusation of wrongdoing from a brave lab member. Harvard Dean Michael Smith published a letter confirming the misconduct, David Dobbs has yet more great analysis (including a discussion on study design) Frans de Waal comments on the implications, and Nicholas Wade has an excellent piece on Hauser, including viewpoints from a veritable who’s who of scientists, such as Hauser’s mentors, Cheney and Seyfarth. The last sentence is tragic.

Cyril Almeida in Dawn:

It didn’t register immediately. That the flood coverage is really about two catastrophes, not one. There is of course the damage caused by the flooding itself, the one Pakistan will take years to recover from. Then there’s the damage of the last 63 years that the floods have uncovered.

By now everyone’s seen them on television screens, the miles-long processions of barely recognisable humanity, the materially dispossessed, the broken and the bowed.

Traumatised, lives shattered, you expect the flood victims to look a certain way. But it’s more than that. The victims are clearly not new acquaintances of adversity. You can hear it in their voices, see it in their eyes, sense it through their leathery skin. The victims of the floods carry the burden of a lifetime of misery.

The second catastrophe: the great floods of 2010 have uncovered 63 years of the great unwashed masses of this country. The people the state has failed in the most terrible of ways, not this week, not last month, but over its entire, sordid history.

More here.

Stephen Budiansky in the New York Times:

Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.

The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.

The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

It takes about a tablespoon of diesel fuel to move one pound of freight 3,000 miles by rail; that works out to about 100 calories of energy.

More here.

The Surrealist Learns to Fly

Occasionally he wakes, finds
the cool cube of his room
delirious with colors: blaring
daffodils and rigid roses,
petals a soft, translucent red

like the inside of an eyelid.
By the window, a clock's
expressionless face near glossy skins
of magazines, a telephone
the color of frozen milk

or silence, the color of old.
He is melting, his bones
grown paper-light, they travel
over the bed's pale hills, the woman
who comes to wash him.

The ceiling is a landscape
bleeding white as he floats
through the muted winter sky,
a boundless symbol of nothing.
The woman draws the blinds.

by Jennifer O'Grady
from Poetry Magazine, 1993

From Scientific American:

Although scientists have not pinpointed exactly what goes on in the brain when a person experiences déjà vu, they can make good guesses based on models of memory. All theories of memory acknowledge that remembering requires two cooperating processes: familiarity and recollection. Familiarity occurs quickly, before the brain can recall the source of the feeling. Conscious recollection depends on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, whereas familiarity depends on regions of the medial temporal cortex.

When these cooperating processes get out of sync, we can experience déjà vu, the intense and often disconcerting feeling that a situation is familiar even though it has never happened before. This feeling can occur when a brand-new situation is very similar to other events stored in our memory. For example, a Texas airport may seem vaguely familiar to you even though you have never been to Texas. It is possible the airport is strikingly similar to a single event stored in memory—perhaps you recently saw the airport in a movie or magazine. It is also possible that many memories of visiting similar airports create the sensation that you have been to this one. Déjà vu is a stronger version of this kind of memory error.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The influential political scientist Samuel P. Huntington theorized about the “clash of civilizations.” The journalist and poet Eliza Griswold takes on the same topic in a much more visceral way: she traveled through the “torrid zone” to see, smell, taste and write about it. Her book “The Tenth Parallel” is a fascinating journey along the latitude line in Africa and Asia where Christianity and Islam often meet and clash. Since Americans commonly equate Islam with the Arab Middle East, this book is a useful reminder that four-fifths of Muslims live elsewhere. It’s also an intimate introduction to some of those who live in places like Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

“The Tenth Parallel” is a beautifully written book, full of arresting stories woven around a provocative issue — whether fundamentalism leads to violence — which Griswold investigates through individual lives rather than caricatures or abstractions. In this tropical region where monsoons and jungles give way to desert, she looks at how history, resources, climate and demographic trends have combined with and shaped the struggle among religions. Because of both population growth and the explosion of Christianity in Africa in the last half-century, nearly a fourth of the world’s Christians now live south of the 10th parallel, alongside Muslims who are migrating from the north to escape creeping desertification. All along this fault line, struggles over valuable resources like oil, lumber and minerals add to the volatile mix.

More here.

“We were proud of the way we used to make things up as we went along”, he says. “It's like robbing a bank but legal”

Johann Hari in The Independent:

David Craig gives a typical explanation of what the consultants Actually Do. After getting a degree specialising in romantic poetry, he was astonished to be hired by a prestigious management consultancy, given three weeks training, and then dropped into major corporations to tell them how to run their oil rigs, menswear stores, and factories, for tens of thousands of pounds a pop. In his brave memoir Rip Off! he explains: “We were proud of the way we used to make things up as we went along… It's like robbing a bank but legal. We could take somebody straight off the street, teach them a few simple tricks in a couple of hours and easily charge them out to our clients for more than £7,000 per week.” It consisted, he says, of “lies, lies and even more lies.”

He worked to a simple model, which is common in the industry. He had to watch how a workforce behaved for a week – and then tell the company's bosses, every time, that they had 30 percent too many staff and only his consultancy could figure out who should be culled. If he calculated they actually had the right amount of staff, he was told by his bosses not to be so ridiculous and do his sums again: where was the money for them in a properly-staffed company? The company had to be POPed – People Off Payroll.

Of course, this advice was often disastrous. His company was sent into a chain of 500 menswear shops. They advised them to cut staff by (surprise!) 30 per cent, and to replace most full-time staff with part-timers. The result? The full-time employees had been highly motivated, because they wanted a career in the company; the part-timers only wanted a little extra cash. So motivation levels in the company collapsed, and with it the standard of service. The company was bankrupt within a few years.

More here.

Nick Fotion in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Back in 1981, R.M. Hare, in his book Moral Thinking, featured a distinction that today I still find useful. Hare admitted that the distinction was not original with him, but he argued that philosophers have not appreciated its importance. The distinction is between critical and “intuitive” (what I call non-critical) thinking. It is still important since it reminds us not to make the mistake of focusing too much attention on the critical level. Philosophers are prone to make this mistake because they like to look critically at the norms their society holds to. Their critical outlook leaves the impression that thinking in ethics is mainly critical or reflective in nature. What they then fail to appreciate is that most ethical thinking takes place on the non-critical level. Indeed, it has to be that way since, otherwise, we would be spending all our energy critically examining one issue and then another. We would, thus, have no time to carry out our responsibilities at home and work; and no time for play.

Another bad consequence of taking the critical level too seriously is that we would quickly all turn into skeptics. Skepticism has its place in philosophical thinking but it can turn into a vicious philosopher’s game. Non-critical thinking can’t be all wrong since the rules and principles found there are part of what some philosophers call the common morality. It is the morality that, if it were questioned too seriously, would lead to social disintegration. Instead of questioning it all of the time, the critical/non-critical distinctions reminds us to pay more attention to the common morality so that we understand how it can be used to educate our children and to remind adults and children alike of their responsibilities when they are tempted to stray from the fold.

Another reason the distinction between critical and non-critical thinking was and is important becomes evident when we observe philosophers engaging in theory criticism. It is quite common for critics of utilitarianism, for instance, to insist that utilitarians must always be making utilitarian calculations. To be sure, act utilitarians may be addicted to calculating. But rule utilitarians can restrict their calculating ways to the critical level. On that level, they can generate new rules and modify old ones using their calculative skills. But having done that, they can place these criticised rules on the non-critical level and proceed to cite them in ways that make them sound like deontologists rather than true utilitarians.

The critical/non-critical levels distinction is useful not only in showing how utilitarianism is misunderstood, but also in making it clear how utlitiarianism is a much more flexible theory than many philosophers suppose.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in New Politics:

The left has always been a marginal actor on Pakistan’s national scene. While this bald truth must be told, in no way do I wish to belittle the enormous sacrifices made by numerous progressive individuals, as well as small groups. They unionized industrial and railway workers, helped peasants organize against powerful landlords, inspired Pakistan’s minority provinces to demand their rights, set standards of writing and journalism, etc. But the Left has never had a national presence and, even at its peak during the 1970s, could not muster even a fraction of the street power of the Islamic or mainstream parties.

A comparison with India is telling. While the Indian Left has also never attained state power — or even come close to exercising power and influence on the scale of the Congress Party — it looms large in states like Kerala, Tripura, and West Bengal where it successfully ended iniquitous feudal land relations. Across the country it helps maintain a secular polity, protects minorities, keeps alive a broad focus on progressive ideas in culture, art, and education, and uses science to fight superstition. Today, a Maoist movement militantly challenges the depredations of capitalism as it wreaks destruction on their native habitat. Left-inspired movements noticeably impeded passage of the U.S.-India nuclear deal. Indeed, for all its divisions and in-fighting, the Indian Left is a significant political force that is a thousand times stronger than its Pakistani counterpart.

Surely this difference begs an explanation. The answer is to be found in Pakistan’s genesis and the overwhelming role of religion in matters of the state. Understanding this point in detail is crucial to the question: how can one hope to make the Pakistani Left relevant in the future? Are there intelligent ways to deal with a major handicap?

Tom Jacobs in Miller-McCune:

Writing in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, a research team led by University of Kentucky social psychologist C. Nathan DeWall links symptoms of Type-2 diabetes to lower levels of forgiveness. Their study suggests low levels of blood glucose are not only dangerous to your health: They may also be poisonous to your personality.

DeWall and his associates describe four experiments testing their thesis, three of which featured 511 volunteers (average age 28) who participated in an Internet survey. They first completed the revised Diabetic Symptoms Checklist, which measures the number and severity of a variety of diabetes symptoms. (Examples include “Numbness or loss of sensation in the feet” and “Shortness of breath at night.”)

Their willingness to forgive was then measured using three different scales. First, they filled out a 10-item survey measuring the degree to which they are predisposed to pardon. It featured questions such as “I can forgive a friend for almost anything.”

Second, they reported their likely forgiveness level in five hypothetical scenarios, such as “Would you forgive a person who revealed something you told them in confidence?” Third, they reported to what degree they had actually forgiven someone who recently hurt them.

The researchers found a positive correlation between diabetic symptoms and a tendency to be unforgiving in both the real and hypothetical situations. They also found a negative correlation between the symptoms and one’s general tendency to forgive.

In Reset DOC:

Giuliano Amato, Giancarlo Bosetti and Ramin Jahanbegloo, members of Resetdoc’s scientific committee, have written a letter to UNESCO’s General Director Irina Bokova to prevent the 2010 World Philosophy Day from being hosted by Iran. Doing so would make mockery of the victims of repression, in a country where one can be imprisoned or killed for expressing one’s ideas. “We are certain that we will not be alone in our concern in presenting such an urgent appeal – the authors write – and invite philosophers and intellectuals from all over the world to join us in this by sending a message of support to [email protected].”

To the Director General of UNESCO

Her Excellency Irina Bokova

Paris

We have recently learned that Iran is the candidate country for the 2010 World Philosophy Day, usually held in the month on November. This annual event is a worthy initiative that each year allows an intense dialogue at a global level and involves philosophers and students in ways that are new to the usual academic circuits. We have experienced this on successful occasions, when our Association, Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations, has had the honour to cooperate with UNESCO’s philosophical sector, such as in Morocco in 2006 and in Turkey in 2007.

We believe that Iran’s candidature for the coming edition should not be considered as a normal rotation of location, since we are sadly aware, due to a very close experience, how one can be imprisoned and risk one’s life in Iran because of one’s ideas.

Mario Margiocco in Project Syndicate:

Italians and other Europeans have serious problems addressing their own national debts, public and private, so it may seem immodest for a European to discuss America’s growing and grave debt problem. But the fiscal realities on both sides of the Atlantic nowadays are very similar, and only lingering trust in the promise of America keeps alive the expectation among some Europeans that some grand American coup de théâtre will resolve the country’s dire debt situation.

Of course, many Americans recognize the scale of the country’s debt burden. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and thus America’s highest ranking military officer, recently said, “The greatest danger to American security comes from the national debt.” Four Americans out of ten agree with him, whereas less than three in ten deem terrorism or Iran more dangerous.

America’s Great Power status has always been tied to its level of debt. Indeed, it was the absence of debt that marked the United States’ emergence as a world power between 1914 and 1917. The US went from owing $3 billion (mostly to Great Britain) to being a net creditor for about the same amount, thanks to $6 billion in war credits given to the Western Allies. A further $3 billion in credits for European post-war reconstruction cemented America’s status as the world’s premier creditor nation, with its surplus equal to roughly 8% of GNP at the time.

This shift meant that the US had essentially replaced Britain as the heart of the world’s financial and monetary system. Previously, thanks to the gold standard and Britain’s political stability, the City of London had been the world’s key source of capital and financial guarantees for more than a century.