From The Guardian:

Nocturnes is Ishiguro's first collection of short stories, after six novels. He has said in interviews that he conceived the book holistically, almost as a piece of music in five movements. Like a cycle, the collection begins and ends in the same place – Italy – and it contains modulations of tone that would be awkward within a single narrative. The opening story, “Crooner”, establishes a mood of quiet melancholy. Tony Gardner, an ageing American singer, comes to Venice with his wife, Lindy. He hires Jan, a guitarist from a band in the Piazza San Marco, to accompany him while he serenades his wife from a gondola beneath their hotel window.

Jan, the narrator, is thrilled to be in Gardner's company; his records, he tells Gardner effusively, were one of the only sources of comfort to his beleaguered single mother as she was raising him in communist Poland. When, at the end of the serenade, Jan hears Gardner's wife sobbing inside her hotel room, he thinks their music has helped bring the couple back together after a row: '”We did it, Mr Gardner!' I whispered. 'We did it. We got her by the heart.”' He is right, but not in the way he imagines. With his mixture of overfamiliarity, ingenuity and banal patter (“it was a relief, let me tell you”), Jan is a typical Ishiguro narrator, recounting episodes from his life with a frankness that reveals more than he intends.

More here.

From Scientific American:

When we walk into a voting booth and cast our vote, we like to think that we are making a considered decision, based on the issues. After all, a properly functioning democratic system, which gives its citizens the power to choose their leaders and shape critical policies, requires that voters are, for the most part, rational and that society can trust them to make sound judgments.

Perhaps partly for this reason, choosing competent leaders is considered too important to be left to minors, which is why most democracies only allow their adult citizens to vote. You wouldn’t think, therefore, that a group of children would be able to predict the outcome of elections in another country, based only on photos of the candidates. And yet, this is exactly what a recent study in the journal Science has found. The study, conducted by psychologists John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, shows that Swiss children as young as five years can predict which candidates are more likely to win French parliamentary elections.

More here.

Poor Engels. He spent his best years ‘playing second fiddle’, as he himself described it, to his friend Karl Marx. He was for most of his adult life the only source of income for Marx and his family. There must have been many years when Engels spent less on himself and his mistress Mary Burns than he did on Marx’s family. He sacrificed both his intellectual and political career to that of Marx. It is hard to imagine anything less congenial to Engels than working in the family firm of Ermen and Engels of Barmen and Manchester; yet he did it for one reason only – to allow Marx to devote himself to that cumbersome masterpiece Das Kapital. It took twenty years to write, and when Marx died, only the first – and most interesting – volume had been published. Engels duly edited and published the other two. Yet Engels had published his own masterpiece when he was in his mid-twenties. The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) is a work that shows what historical materialism is; while Marx was still weaving philosophical spells, Engels had walked the streets of Manchester, read everything there was to read on the ‘Condition of England Question’, and turned it all into coruscating prose.

more from Literary Review here.

Human reason has this peculiar fate,” Immanuel Kant wrote in 1781, “that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.” He was talking about the way reason can speculate about, and yet not know, the ideas that transcend it. For some philosophers, consciousness—what Kant called the self—counts as one of these ideas. We can no more illuminate the nature of our selfhood than, as in a celebrated metaphor sketched by Julian Jaynes, a flashlight can illuminate its own structure. The limit of reflection lies at the margin where reflection is made possible. Still, philosophers are nothing if not persistent in the face of a challenge. Even though one fairly influential contemporary school of thought— called, with a nod to the one-hit wonders who gave us “96 Tears,” the New Mysterians—has concluded that consciousness can never be known, it remains the holy grail of philosophy. From arcane European layerings (Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida) to aggressive reductionist or eliminativist accounts (the mainstream of today’s analytic tradition), everybody has a view of what makes consciousness possible. Few works set out quite so expressly (or, one might add, arrogantly) to settle the question as Daniel Dennett did in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, but one way or another, they’re all in the business of explaining consciousness.

more from Bookforum here.

The unexamined essence of the game, then, would be an event that completely lacks both action and tension. Nobody swings the bat, nobody runs; neither team gains any real advantage. And you see it happen all the time. The most boring moment in baseball, the mud flat exposed at its lowest ebb, is ball two. Ball two stands alone, above any of the other dull business on the diamond. The intentional walk at least adds a base runner to the game. The halfhearted throw to first to check the runner is a sign that the pitcher is feeling tension. But ball two signifies almost nothing. If your attention, like mine, starts to drift whenever ball two is called, the statistics say that’s a rational response. The sportswriter Joe Posnanski, of Sports Illustrated and the Kansas City Star, recently did a study of all major-league plate appearances from 2000 to 2008, examining the shifting dynamics of the battle between hitter and pitcher in more than a million matchups. He was looking for the critical points in the average at-bat: strike two makes hitters stop swinging for power (with two strikes, the average hitter has a Kevin Cash-like slugging percentage of .293); a 1-1 count strongly favors the pitcher.

more from The Boston Globe here.

Without Warning
David Brooks

My father spent most of his adult life
working for the Commonwealth Public Service, shunting files
from one end of his long desk to the other.
When he died he left half-written
a History of Australian Immigration,
only half-joking when he willed that I should finish it.
Why didn’t he tell me
how little would ever be completed?
letters left unanswered, accounts not settled, promises
never fulfilled, the parts of that motorcycle
unreassembled, lying ten years
on a concrete floor in Westgarth St, people
dying without warning, mid sentence,
taking the next words with them.

From: Walking to Point Clear: Poems 1983-2002
Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger, Blackheath, 2005

From Science:

In tribal societies, one might expect that the fiercest warriors get the most women and father the most children. But that's not necessarily the case, says a new study of the brutal Waorani tribe of Ecuador. The most aggressive Wao warriors have about the same number of wives and children as milder-mannered men have, and their children are less likely to survive beyond the age of 15, largely due to an endless cycle of revenge killings. The Waorani are one of the most homicidal tribes ever studied. Located in a region just south of the Napo River, the place where the Andes Mountains meet the Amazon Basin, the tribe is preoccupied with revenge. Young Wao men are encouraged to develop a ferocious reputation early on, and before long they start raiding. The tribespeople constantly recount stories of these raids in gruesome detail, noting who was responsible and who needed to be avenged. Half of all Waos die violently.

Studies of a similarly murderous tribe, the Yanomamö of nearby Venezuela, suggested that such homicidal behavior conveyed an evolutionary advantage. In a 1988 paper in Science, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, now a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that the most aggressive Yanomamö men had higher prestige within the tribe, which led to them having more wives and children, than less-aggressive men. The new study argues that the picture is not so clear-cut. Lead author Stephen Beckerman of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and colleagues interviewed 121 Waorani elders to compile histories of 95 of the tribe's warriors. (The Waorani are much more peaceful today than they were in the past, possibly due to Christian missionaries, who first made contact in 1958.) The team defined highly aggressive men as those who took part in more than four raids over their lifetimes; some of the most violent warriors fought in as many as 16 raids.

Beckerman's group found no significant difference in the number of wives or children between highly aggressive Wao males and less aggressive males. What's more, the most aggressive warriors had fewer children survive past their reproductive age–about 15 years old–than the more peaceable Wao men had, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings show that, at least for the Waorani, it's actually less advantageous to be murderous, because so many of a warrior's children wind up dead before they can reproduce.

More here.

From The New York Times:

It was time, the panel of experts said, to put more science in forensic science. A report in February by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences found “serious problems” with much of the work performed by crime laboratories in the United States. Recent incidents of faulty evidence analysis — including the case of an Oregon lawyer who was arrested by the F.B.I. after the 2004 Madrid terrorist bombings based on fingerprint identification that turned out to be wrong — were just high-profile examples of wider deficiencies, the committee said. Crime labs were overworked, there were few certification programs for investigators and technicians, and the entire field suffered from a lack of oversight.

But perhaps the most damning conclusion was that many forensic disciplines — including analysis of fingerprints, bite marks and the striations and indentations left by a pry bar or a gun’s firing mechanism — were not grounded in the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed research that is the hallmark of classic science. DNA analysis was an exception, the report noted, in that it had been studied extensively. But many other investigative tests, the report said, “have never been exposed to stringent scientific scrutiny.”

More here.

Pamela Constable in the Washington Post:

When black-turbaned Taliban fighters demanded in January that Islamic sharia law be imposed in Pakistan's Swat Valley, few alarm bells went off in this Muslim nation of about 170 million.

Sharia, after all, is the legal framework that guides the lives of all Muslims.

Officials said people in Swat were fed up with the slow and corrupt state courts, scholars said the sharia system would bring swift justice, and commentators said critics in the West had no right to interfere.

Today, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Swat and Pakistani troops launching an offensive to drive out the Taliban forces, the pendulum of public opinion has swung dramatically. The threat of “Talibanization” is being denounced in Parliament and on opinion pages, and the original defenders of an agreement that authorized sharia in Swat are in sheepish retreat.

More here.

The Seventh HARVEY DAVID PREISLER Memorial Symposium

Saturday, May 16, 2009

9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

The New York Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40^th Floor
New York, NY: 10007

RSVP: In the comments to this post. Seating is limited to the first 100 people who respond.

This invitation to 3 Quarks Daily readers is presented, as always, through the courtesy of my sister Azra in memory of her late husband Harvey David Preisler. As some of you know, the first six speakers at this symposium have all been eminent scientists, including Robert Gallo, Steven Wolfram, medicine Nobel laureate Craig Mello, and last year, Richard Dawkins. This year, we are privileged to have as a speaker Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel, whose work on retrodifferentiation of cells into pluripotent stem cells may well revolutionize medicine as we know it. I suspect that you will be hearing much more about her in the mainstream press very soon. If you are (or can be) in New York City at the time, I urge you not to miss this event!

9:00 a.m: Reception

9:30 a.m: Welcome of guests and tribute to Harvey Preisler by Sheherzad Raza Preisler

9:45 a.m: Introduction of Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel by Azra Raza

10:00 a.m: Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel

Title of Lecture: Human pluripotential stem cells via retrodifferentiation

11:00 a.m: Questions and Discussion

Dr. Harvey David Preisler: Director of Rush Cancer Institute and the Samuel G. Taylor III Professor of Medicine at Rush University, Chicago, died on May 19^th 2002. The cause of death was lymphoma. Dr. Preisler grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and obtained his medical degree from the University of Rochester, NY in 1965. He trained in Medicine at New York Hospitals, Cornell Medical Center, and in Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in NYC. He then joined Mount Sinai hospital in NY, and subsequently moved to Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY to direct the Leukemia Service there for the next 14 years. Dr. Preisler was recruited to Rush University as Director of the Cancer Institute in 1992. At the time of his death, he was the Principal Investigator of a ten million dollar grant from the National Cancer Institute in addition to several other large grants which funded his independent research laboratory with approximately 25 scientists. He published extensively including more than 350 full-length papers in peer reviewed journals, 50 books and/or book chapters and approximately 400 abstracts. He was married to Azra Raza, M.D.

Tribute to Harvey by Azra: http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/05/rx_harvey_david.html

Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel: was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and obtained her doctorate and post doctoral fellowship in Immunology at Kings College, London University (1986-1990). She discovered the process of retrodifferentiation in the early nineties. This direct reprogramming of differentiated somatic cells is achieved through cell surface receptor contact of more mature adult human cells such as leucocytes. She was awarded worldwide patents on the methodology and device, enabling the production of unprecedented levels of pluripotent stem cells from differentiated cells. Based on her research, Dr. Abuljadayel co-founded the TriStem Group. During the period 1990 to 1995, Dr Abuljadayel worked as a consultant immunologist at the King Fahd Armed Forces Hospital in Jeddah, and from 1996-2000 headed the TriStem Research on retrodifferentiation at the London Hospital, Kings College, Downing College University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke Hospital. In 2000 Dr Abuljadayel performed the first preclinical study on the functional utility of the autologous retrodifferentiated stem cells in collaboration with the George Washington Medical centre, USA, in two animal models of human diseases. From 2003 to 2005 Dr Abuljadayel in a clinical human trial, applied the autologous retrodifferentiated stem cell therapy in aplastic anemia and beta thalassemia-major in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research and the Pakistan Medical Research Council, respectively. She currently resides in the UK and remains the head of research for clinical application of the autologous retrodifferentiated stem cell therapy in hematological and degenerative diseases including rejuvenation.

Judith Larsen. Attractor. 2007

Iris print on somerset paper.

More on this Boston artist here and here.

Special Boy With Freakishly Large Brain Wins Spelling Bee

Making lists of the world’s most impressive monuments is an irrational and ultimately pointless enterprise: Who has seen all the wonders of the world? And what would the criteria be? Yet scribblers have been at it since the second century B.C., when a Greek poet named Antipater of Sidon came up with his canonical seven, now all gone or reduced to rubble except the pyramids of Giza. If Antipater had lived a millennium later, he would surely have put Borobudur, the astonishing stone mountain of exquisitely wrought sculpture in Central Java, on his list. No construction of the preindustrial era makes a more wondrous impression. Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the most well-traveled men of his day, wrote of Borobudur in 1869, in “The Malay Archipelago” (a book usually cited minus its melodious subtitle, “The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise”): “The amount of human labor and skill expended on the Great Pyramids of Egypt sinks into insignificance compared with that required to complete this sculptured hill-temple in the interior of Java.”

more from the WSJ here.

Round the back of Waterloo station in London is a graffitied and bolted blue wooden door you wouldn’t look twice at, behind which are derelict railway tunnels and rooms most recently used as storage space. But visitors entering the door this week will discover an other-wordly art and performance space that is part disconcerting, part frightening and part thrilling. The art project, opening today, is ­entitled Tunnel 228 and is a collaboration between the Old Vic and one of the UK’s most innovative performance companies, Punchdrunk. About 20 artists have work displayed, and it is essentially a Metropolis-inspired weird dream with a mixture of art and live performance by actors. One of the most astonishing things about it is how those involved have ­managed to keep it secret with word of mouth only getting going in the last few days. It is free to get in but only via the website, and organisers fear it will be fully booked up by the end of today.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Boston Globe:

In recent years, cognitive scientists have turned in increasing numbers to the study of human happiness, and one of their central findings is that we are not very good at predicting how happy or unhappy something will make us. Given time, survivors of tragedies and traumas report themselves nearly as happy as they were before, and people who win the lottery or achieve lifelong dreams don't see any long-term increase in happiness. By contrast, annoyances like noise or chronic pain bring down our happiness more than you'd think, and having friends or an extra hour of sleep every night can raise it dramatically.

These findings have fed the growth of a burgeoning “positive psychology” movement focused on helping people enrich their own lives. But now some scholars are starting to ask a bigger question: shouldn't this new understanding affect policy, too? A huge range of social systems, from tort law to urban planning to medical care, are built on assumptions about what makes people happy. Now, for the first time, researchers are claiming to be actually measuring happiness, to actually know what causes it. In a society whose founding document asserts a basic right to the pursuit of happiness, that new knowledge could have far-reaching implications.

More here.

From Salon:

Funny things happen when moms meet Gmail, not just because they get tripped up by technology (plenty do not) but because moms — in their earnestness, their frankness, their goofiness — are simply funny. Anyone looking for further evidence need only flip through “Love, Mom,” a collection of maternal missives to adult children that are as endearing and cringe-inducing and skewed as mothers themselves. Like this little gem: “My computer has software transmitted diseases (STDs) from all the software I had to download for a class… I hate computer STDs. ☹ “

Or this terse slapdown: “Michael, I think you do too many drugs and say too many disparaging things about women on your blog. Love, Mom. “

The book “Love, Mom” originated in a charming website called PostcardsFromYoMomma, started by Doree Shafrir and Jessica Grose after joking about their own maternal correspondence. What began as an experiment — asking friends to send in their own forehead-slapping letters from home — quickly ballooned. “There was no way we could've anticipated the absolute deluge of emails we started to get as soon as the site went up,” Shafrir and Grose write in the introduction to “Love, Mom.” Go figure: When it comes to mothers, people like to vent. But more than mere mockery, the letters are a tribute to the adorable and exasperating quirkiness that make moms, well, moms. As one classic exchange on the Postcards website puts it, “You were welcome to stay in my uterus for nine months, and then my house for 17 years. But I understand, a week at your apartment might be a bit … much.”

More here.

John Gross in the Wall Street Journal:

In the annals of British literature and the British theater, the 1950s have gone down as the era of the Angry Young Men — of a change in the cultural climate signaled above all by Kingsley Amis's novel “Lucky Jim” (1954) and John Osborne's play “Look Back in Anger” (1956). The phrase “Angry Young Men” itself was devised by a theater publicist at the time, and in a rough fashion it indicates what the fuss was about: a scornful rejection of Establishment values, a truculent individualism. But it was never more than a loose journalistic label, and over the years it has lost most of such resonance as it once had.

David Castronovo, who teaches at Pace University in New York, has set out to find a more satisfactory collective term for the writers of the Amis/Osborne generation and their successors. He has come up, as his title proclaims, with “blokes.” In a long introductory chapter he explains that a bloke is “a male who believes in his own spirit and is willing to do almost anything to see that it doesn't die.” Unlike a gentleman, who lives by rituals and codes, a bloke has no time for traditional social disciplines. The qualities that distinguish him include self-assertion, the pursuit of pleasure and “transgressive humor.”

More here.