Gary Wolf in Wired:

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge — introspection, intuition, and conscious thought — but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Christine Kenneally in the New York Times:

Faced with pictures of odd clay creatures sporting prominent heads and pointy limbs, students at Carnegie Mellon were asked to identify which “aliens” were friendly and which were not.

The students were not told that the aliens fell naturally into two groups, although the differences were subtle and not easy to describe.

Some had somewhat lumpy, misshapen heads. Others had smoother domes. After students assigned each alien to a category, they were told whether they had guessed right or wrong, learning as they went that smooth heads were friendly and lumpy heads were not.

The experimenter, Dr. Gary Lupyan, who is now doing postdoctoral research at Cornell, added a little item of information to one test group. He told the group that previous subjects had found it helpful to label the aliens, calling the friendly ones “leebish” and the unfriendly ones “grecious,” or vice versa.

When the participants found out whether their choice was right or wrong, they were also shown the appropriate label. All the participants eventually learned the difference between the aliens, but the group using labels learned much faster. Naming, Dr. Lupyan concluded, helps to create mental categories.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Israeli researchers announced this week that they have developed a new technique that may wipe out stubborn bacteria that elude antibiotics. Some infections such as tuberculosis (TB) can lay dormant in the lungs for decades before reactivating and causing symptoms— even after most of the disease-causing bacteria have been leveled by antibiotics.

But scientists at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that they discovered a way to eradicate the stubborn bugs and prevent them from suddenly striking again when an individual’s immune system is off guard. The new method capitalizes on the dormant bacteria’s need for nutrients such as iron and magnesium. Such cells can avoid antibiotics when they’re starved and become inactive. But the researchers were able to reduce populations of persistent bacteria by up to 99 percent by first perking them up with nutrients and then blasting them with an antibiotic.

More here.

From Nature:

The sex of new babies is influenced by the mother’s diet before she conceives, a new study suggests. According to a survey of 740 British mums to be, a high-calorie diet is more likely to lead to a baby boy in nine months’ time. Researchers led by Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter collected data on the pre-conception dietary habits of pregnant women, and found that 56% of women in the highest one-third of calorie intake had male fetuses. In the lowest third, only 45% bore boys.

The women, who were attending maternity clinics, were asked to compile a ‘retrospective diary’ of their food intake in the weeks before they fell pregnant. Mathews and her colleagues then analysed the results to look for a relationship between food intake and the sex of their offspring. The level of calorie intake was the main dietary factor that affected offspring sex, say the researchers, who report their research in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Overall, women in Matthews’s study who produced sons ate an average of 180 calories more per day than those who had daughters — “the equivalent of eating a banana”, she says.

More here.

///
Ode to History
Mary Jo Bang

Had she not lain on that bed with a boy
All those years ago, where would they be, she wondered.
She and the child that wouldn’t have been but was now
No more. She would know nothing
Of mothering. She would know nothing
Of death. She would know nothing
Of love. The three things she’d been given
To remember. Wake me up, please, she said,
When this life is over. Look at her—It’s as if
The windows of night have been sewn to her eyes.

///

Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present Alison Bowen, in the New York Daily News, on my sister:

Dr. Azra Raza speaks with the fierceness of someone whose existence revolves around life-saving matters.

For more than 30 years, she’s treated leukemia patients and researched how to treat pre-leukemia cells before they develop into cancer.

“Constantly I’m pushing the envelope,” says Raza, 55, the director of the Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) Center at St. Vincent’s Comprehensive Cancer Center. “That, no. We are not going to become complacent.”

Most wrenching among the many heartbreaks she’s seen was the death of her husband of 17 years, Dr. Harvey Preisler, the director of the Rush Cancer Institute in Chicago, who died in 2002 of leukemia.

“To that day, even as he could see that the end was clearly approaching him, he wanted other patients to suffer less,” says Raza.

The MDS Center near Union Square, which Raza has headed since moving to the city from Massachusetts in October, is one of a few that does both MDS research – the study of abnormal cells that can trigger leukemia – and treats patients.

A hallmark of the program is a bank containing more than 40,000 tissue samples of MDS collected over two decades by Raza – and brought here last year in a U-Haul truck.

More here.

Something about the South African dock workers refusal to unload arms headed to Zimbabwe reminds me of the internationalism of the old labor movement, especially the image of COSATU going up against Mbeki’s tacit support for Mugabe on behalf of the Zimbabwean population.  Here is an online petition by the International Action Network on Small Arms, for those interested, calling on the international community to stop the arms shipments.  I think one targeted at the South African government may be more poignant. From All Africa:

The London-based International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said yesterday they were mobilising unions in China and Africa, including those in Angola, to take a firm stand and to stop the ship from offloading its cargo of weapons. The ITF, which consists of more than 650 unions, representing 4,5-million workers in 148 countries, is believed to have been instrumental in Mozambique’s refusal allow the ship to dock in Maputo after ITF affiliate the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) asked it to intervene.

An ITF spokesman in Durban, Sprite Zungu, indicated yesterday he was expecting information about the final destination of the ship by tomorrow and would fly to that country to speak to the authorities there.

Cosatu spokesman Patrick Craven said yesterday Cosatu had been in contact with all its affiliates and was “doing everything possible to alert the international trade union movement to the danger to the workers of Zimbabwe if the cargo is allowed to be unloaded and delivered to Mugabe’s forces”.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

INTERVIEWER What was your next obsession, after detective stories?

ISHIGURO
Rock music. After Sherlock Holmes, I stopped reading until my early twenties. But I’d played the piano since I was five. I started playing the guitar when I was fifteen, and I started listening to pop records—pretty awful pop records—when I was about eleven. I thought they were wonderful. The first record that I really liked was Tom Jones singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home.” Tom Jones is a Welshman, but “The Green, Green Grass of Home” is a cowboy song. He was singing songs about the cowboy world I knew from TV.
I had a miniature Sony reel-to-reel that my father brought me from Japan, and I would tape directly from the speaker of the radio, an early form of downloading music. I would try to work out the words from this very bad recording with buzzes. Then when I was thirteen, I bought John Wesley Harding, which was my first Dylan album, right when it came out.

more from The Paris Review here.

Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic inventor and engineer of minimalist spectacle, is so much better than anyone else in today’s ranks of crowd-pleasing installational artists that there should be a nice, clean, special word other than “art” for what he does, to set him apart. There won’t be. “Art” has become the promiscuous catchall for anything artificial that meets no practical need but which we like, or are presumed or supposed to like. Still, play with the thought at “Take Your Time,” the Eliasson retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and at MOMA’s affiliate, P.S. 1. By the way, please make the P.S. 1 trek—three stops on the No. 7 train from Grand Central. That part of the show details and deepens a sense of Eliasson’s creative integrity, which may remain slightly in question amid his stunts on West Fifty-third Street: an electric fan swaying on a cord from the ceiling of the atrium, rooms awash in different kinds of peculiarly colored light, a wall of exotic (and odorous) moss, a curtain of falling water optically immobilized by stroboscopic flashes. I had a little epiphany in Queens while looking at Eliasson’s contemplative suites of photographs of Icelandic landscapes, seascapes, glaciers, icebergs, and caves: here’s someone for whom beauty is normal. His character suggests both the mental discipline of a scientist and the emotional responsibility of a poet. If leadership in public-spirited art extravaganzas were a political office—and it sometimes feels as if it were—he’d have my vote.

more from The New Yorker here.

TO SOME DEVELOPMENT economists, the world can be boiled down this simply: There are rich countries that keep getting richer, and there are poor countries that seem destined to grow poorer. And then, there is Africa.

For every symptom of Africa’s relentless underdevelopment, there is a theory about its root causes. Colonialism, the Cold War, climate change, ethnic warfare, the choking off of technology – they all rank high on the list of ills and crimes perpetrated on this continent in the last century. But underneath all those, many scholars have long sensed that to answer the two most nagging questions about Africa – How do we fix it? And how did it break? – you have to go much farther back in time. All the way to African slavery.

Sensing it is one thing. Proving it is another. Could there be a direct, quantifiable link between the African countries most ravaged by slavery and those that are the most underdeveloped today? And if there were such a link, could it be measured?

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

[Thanks to Pete Chapman.]

From Nature:

A team led by Elaine Holmes and Ruey Leng Loo of Imperial College London took advantage of an older epidemiological study on diet and blood pressure that collected urine samples from 4,680 people between 1997 and 1999. These samples were analysed, and the results published in 2003, then preserved with boric acid and kept frozen. The research team were able to do with most of the samples something not possible in the original study: identify all the chemical compounds in the urine, using an analytical technique called proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The method produces a graph with thousands of peaks, each of which corresponds to a different metabolite, the compounds left over after the body is done digesting food. The researchers then compared these graphs across the 17 populations of subjects, who came from China, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. “Of the thousands of peaks, we find the 20, 30 or 40 that are different” from each other, says team member Jeremy Nicholson, also from Imperial College.

“What our study really shows is how incredibly metabolically diverse people are around the world,” says Nicholson. “British and American [metabolomes] are nearly identical. Japanese and Chinese people are totally different metabolically even though they are nearly identical genetically.” People who lived in Hawaii had metabolomes equally similar to those of people on the mainland United States and in Japan. Interestingly, Nicholson says, the biggest difference between the 17 groups was between people from South China and everyone else. “They have a very different and much broader range of diet,” he says. “Very broadly speaking, the southern Chinese are the healthiest and the people in southern Texas are least healthy.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

At Harvard, the social psychologist Daniel Gilbert is known as Professor Happiness. That is because the 50-year-old researcher directs a laboratory studying the nature of human happiness. Dr. Gilbert’s “Stumbling on Happiness” was a New York Times paperback best seller for 23 weeks and won the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

Q. HOW DID YOU STUMBLE ONTO YOUR AREA OF STUDY?

A. It was something that happened to me roughly 13 years ago. I spent the first decade of my career studying what psychologists call “the fundamental attribution error,” which is about how people have the tendency to ignore the power of external situations to determine human behavior.

Why do many people, for instance, believe the uneducated are stupid? I’d have been content to work on this for many more years, but some things happened in my own life. Within a short period of time, my mentor passed away, my mother died, my marriage fell apart and my teenage son developed problems in school. What I soon found was that as bad as my situation was, it wasn’t devastating. I went on.

One day, I had lunch with a friend who was also going through difficult times. I told him: “If you’d have asked me a year ago how I’d deal with all this, I’d have predicted that I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.” He nodded and added, “Are we the only people who could be so wrong in predicting how we’d respond to extreme stress?” That got me thinking. I wondered: How accurately do people predict their emotional reactions to future events?

More here.

///

Horizon
Billy Collins

You can use the brush of a Japanese monk
or a pencil stub from a race track.

As long as you draw the line a third
the way up from the bottom of the page,

the effect is the same; the world suddenly
divided into its elemental realms.

A moment ago there was only a piece of paper.
Now there is earth and sky, and sky and sea.

You were sitting alone in a small room.
Now your are walking into the heart of a vast desert

or standing on the ledge of a winter beach
watching the light on the water, light in the air.

///

Sebastiao Salgado. Valdes Peninsula, Patagonia, Argentina. 2004.

Photograph.

More on this master photographer here, here and here.

,,,
Before the Ink Dries
Jim Culleny

When suits enter the woods
the animals flee.

When Pradas plod the undergrowth
not even the king of the jungle is safe.
Lions become lambs
and lambs, lamb chops.

When the scent of Brooks Brothers
wafts through primal domains
even 800 lb gorillas take a hike
like pipsqueak squirrels
who can smell death
at distances of light years.
They scurry into shadows
at the glint of cufflinks.

All forest creatures know
that a man in a tie may be
more vicious than a werewolf
at full moon or a great white
off Coney Island in high-sweat July.

Beware the lapel, the mother bear
warns her cubs. Lapels frame the heads
of mighty predators like necklaces
of skulls and tiger’s teeth
and silk hankies that peek
from breast pockets are no less than
the marks of Cain.

The spear-pens of bankers may pierce
the heart of a wilderness
more deeply than the bronze tips
of fierce Greeks pierced the heart of Troy.

Once they’re hurled a wilderness dies
a sure death before the ink dries.

,,,

Why can’t we have comment discussions like this?

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

Sara Dickerman in Slate:

As an industry, we rhapsodize about la cucina povera—that is, “poor food” like polenta, beans, and braise-worthy cuts of meat like short-ribs and pigs trotters—but we rarely talk about cooking in terms of dollars and cents. When food writers and producers advocate economy, they’re usually talking about time—churning out recipes for fast, easy, everyday weeknight meals that can be prepared in minutes. The dollar-savvy recipe is far less common. Why, even as the economic news turns grim, is it so unusual for the food media to take cost into account?

In part, it’s because we assume our readers are looking for a window into the epicurean life, not a mirror of their own kitchens. And, of course, there is the subtle or not-so-subtle pressure to sell advertisers’ expensive food products, travel packages, and restaurants. But a big factor, I think, is an aesthetic concern—a fear of taking the hectoring tone of the much-maligned home economist.