A new study in the NEJM on violence related mortality in Iraq between 2002 and 2006 has produced number  lower than the one produced by Lancet studies.  In the Washington Post:

A new survey estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of the country. Roughly 9 out of 10 of those deaths were a consequence of U.S. military operations, insurgent attacks and sectarian warfare.

The survey, conducted by the Iraqi government and the World Health Organization, also found a 60 percent increase in nonviolent deaths — from such causes as childhood infections and kidney failure — during the period. The results, which will be published in the New England Journal of Medicine at the end of the month, are the latest of several widely divergent and controversial estimates of mortality attributed to the Iraq war.

The three-year toll of violent deaths calculated in the survey is one-quarter the size of that found in a smaller survey by Iraqi and Johns Hopkins University researchers published in the journal Lancet in 2006.

Tyler Cowen asks “I am curious to see who will offer mea culpa and who will not.  “The two estimates aren’t as different as they look” is one way of spinning it; “I was wrong” is another.” Kieran Healy and Daniel Davies respond. Davies:

Anyone trying to pretend that people who defended the Lancet studies against ill-informed criticism in some way “wanted” the death count to be higher and are “disappointed” by the IFHS survey

This is not so much a “no apology” as a heartfelt “Kiss My Arse”, with a side order of “Try Saying That To My Face, Sunshine”. This is and always was a pure, simple and disgusting insult. Anyone who ever did this, went straight on my shit-list and has been on a permanent 100% discount factor for their views on Iraq ever since. I’ve even lodged standing instructions with the Grice United Fund to make sure they don’t accidentally respect your opinions on my behalf.  Which brings us on to the subject of …

In general, I just don’t agree with Tyler’s implicit view that there’s something illegitimate about making your case forcefully and not giving the kid gloves treatment to people who try to push weak, uninformed or fraudulent arguments against it (I’m glad to note that, revealed preference reveals, Alex Tabbarrok agrees with me on this one).

In sighandsight, Robin Meyer-Luch on what Web 2.0 means for information and journalism:

In early December, the deputy editor-in-chief of the online edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, felt the unexpected need to unleash a tirade against the “destructive forces of the free-opinion market” on the Internet. In the “faceless and characterless ‘many-to-many’ communication on the web,” knowledge is “trampled into a grass-roots democratic mush.” The “staggeringly unsuspecting public” has been taken in by the idiotic promises of decentralized information, when in fact web forums have little to offer except superficial knowledge, vulgar remarks, and slander. Graff, however, gets caught up in a breathtakingly structural-conservative, know-it-all attitude, which prevents him from making any kind of sophisticated contribution to the debate. For him, the reversibility and decentralization of the Internet are the breeding ground of brazen user-empowerment, serving solely as an end in itself and providing no sort of edification whatsoever – a kind of user-generated discourse delirium.

Graff, like Schirrmacher, is playing on the anxiety of journalism‘s entropic death on the net. They fear that “good journalism” could perish in the fever of participation, or, at the very least, lose its significance. What is most certainly a difficult path to a new digital information economy is reformulated as a history of loss.

Miguel Helft in the New York Times:

Mr. Wales expects his new Internet search engine, Wikia Search, an early version of which is being made available to the public Monday at www.wikia.com, to follow a similar trajectory.

“We want to make it really clear that when people arrive and do searches, they should not expect to find a Google killer,” Mr. Wales said. Instead, people who use the Wikia search engine should understand that they are part of the early stages of a project to build a “Google-quality search engine,” Mr. Wales said.

Like Wikipedia, Mr. Wales plans to rely on a “wiki” model, a voluntary collaboration of people, to fine-tune the Wikia search engine. When it starts up Monday, the service will rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm. Users will be allowed and encouraged to rate search results for quality and relevance. Wikia will gradually incorporate that feedback in its rankings of Web pages to deliver increasingly useful answers to people’s questions.

More here.  [Thanks to Karen Ballentine.]

Tim Penn at The Knackered Hack:

Tsoy and Kino are noteworthy for a number of reasons in the history of 20th century culture, and arguably much more iconic than all those indie bands that we neurotic boy-outsiders modelled ourselves after in our youths — those that were invariably selling out while pretending not to. [I’m fine with that, by the way.]

Tsoy died in a car accident in 1990. So deep was his influence on the culture, 65 Soviet youth reportedly committed suicide after his death, thus compounding the individual tragedy. As an icon, Tsoy was one of those rare agencies who was breathing life back into a society that had suffered from seven decades of some of the worst repression in human history.

My most recent research on the band suggests that little if any of their material is copyright. This is not surprising because you could say that the Soviet Russian concept of self-publishing ( “samizdat” or, in the case of the cassette of their songs that I own, “magnitizdat“), was the original creative commons: copy and pass along.

What makes Tsoy the definitive amateur though was that, despite a burgeoning career as Russia’s leading rock musician in the late ’80s, when he was finally signed to the state record company, he reportedly maintained his employment as a boiler operator.

More here.

Witold Rybczynski in Slate:

Thirty years ago, Piano and Richard Rogers designed the Pompidou Center, which heralded high-tech architecture and culminated a decade later in Norman Foster’s Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. Since then, Foster has moved away from high tech, as evidenced in his sleek Hearst Building, just up Eighth Avenue from the Times. So has Piano, whose addition to the Morgan Library in New York typifies his current low-key approach. However, in the New York Times Building (designed in association with FXFowle) Piano returns to his Pompidou roots; not exposed pipes and ducts—those were always impractical—but dramatic structural details that say, “This is how I am made.”

Read the photo-essay here.

Legends grew up around Hans-Jürgen Krahl, the Frankfurt student leader and disciple of philosopher Theodor Adorno, even during his lifetime. Second only to Rudi Dutschke, Krahl personified the charisma of the self-proclaimed ‘anti-authoritarian’ youth movement of the 1960s, with its mixture of permanent action and esoteric theoretical jargon. In February 1970, Krahl was killed in a car accident at the age of 27. For many, this was the horrifying, almost fateful consequence of the life he had led. Others stylised Krahl’s early death as a beacon of despair directed at the authoritarian tendencies within the student movement. More than the death of one man, for them the the fatal accident marked the end of the young emancipatory movement in Germany. Another, less heroic interpretation sees his death as the result of the extreme personal and political tension of Krahl’s life, which could only meet a catastrophic end.

more from Sign and Sight here.

Just before New Year’s, I attended a garden wedding in the Nairobi suburbs, where the maid of honor, who flew in from California for the event, greeted the guests in Kamba, Luo, and English. By the following Tuesday, I was glued to CNN International back home in New York City, watching with horror news footage which showed the smouldering ruins of a church in Eldoret, a sanctuary to which members of one ethnic group had fled, in vain, to escape retaliation from another tribe.

Which is the real Kenya? The cosmopolitan, multicultural society in which marriages between people from different backgrounds and regions are wholly unremarkable? Or the nation rent by “tribal clashes,” whose ethnic violence has been broadcast around the world since last Sunday’s rigged election?

more from n+1 here.

Painting is dead. Painting isn’t dead. Painting is dead! No, it isn’t! Yes, it is! Isn’t! Is! Shut up shut up shut up shut up!!! Okay, now that we have that out of the way… Painting isn’t the denial-plagued zombie elephant in the room — art theory is. It’s one of the lines Leonard Cohen left out: Everybody knows a work of art that doesn’t speak for itself is a failure as a work of art. Fortunately, in spite of the best efforts we critics have mustered to impose Artforum’s Rules of Order on the rabble, art — and particularly the medium non grata of painting — just won’t shut up.

Painters in the contemporary art world, particularly those from L.A., have to maintain a chameleonesque indeterminacy about their artistic intentions — be all things to all people — or face ghettoization. Is this an abstract painting? Or a painting of a painting of an abstract painting, wink wink? It’s the emperor’s new clothes all over. The ultimate irony is that the emperor is actually decked out in an Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat — the plausible deniability cultivated by painters for the social sphere creates a temporary autonomous zone in the studio wherein a thousand flowers have blossomed. No one can pin them down, so they can get away with anything. The psycho art-market bubble hasn’t hurt production either.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From Nature:

Chimpanzees in Uganda have been spotted eating dirt along with fistfuls of leaves. This might help to increase the plants’ anti-malarial properties, say researchers. Many animals, including humans, are known to deliberately eat soil, a practice called geophagy. Though the animals and people might not be aware of it, the main reason for this is that munching on dirt can have health benefits. Soil contains scarce minerals, such as iron, and can counter diarrhea, absorb toxins, and facilitate digestion. Eating earth can also reduce hunger pangs during famine.

Now, it seems that soil might also boost the pharmaceutical properties of foods.

Sabrina Krief, a veterinarian at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, noticed that chimpanzees in Kibale National Park often ate soil shortly before or after eating the leaves of Trichilia rubescens . After finding that the leaves contained novel anti-malarial compounds, the researchers suggested that the apes were self-medicating.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Acacia trees are the iconic shrub of the East African savanna. Their thorny thickets house a host of creatures and provide sustenance to the local charismatic megafauna, from elephants to zebras. In light of this continual foraging, the plants have struck a mutually beneficial bargain with several species of ants. The insect armies swarm intrusive browsers in exchange for housing and food. But according to new research in Science, it appears that without such browsing—a state of affairs the acacia might be thought to long for—the trees suffer.

Zoologist Todd Palmer and his colleagues examined the interdependence of one such acacia species—the whistling thorn tree, Acacia drepanolobium—the ants it hosts and the herbivores that eat it. He compared six such trees in Kenya that have been surrounded by an electrified fence since 1995 (by entomologist Truman Young of the University of California, Davis) with six trees open to local giraffes, elephants and other acacia-eaters. In the absence of herbivores, the whistling acacia stopped producing little ant houses in hollow thorns—known as domatia—and excreting the sweet nectar that its bodyguard ants eat. But instead of spurring more growth, the acacias found themselves more than twice as likely to be providing a home to another type of ant—Crematogaster sjostedti—which do not defend the trees and rely on invasions of the bark-boring cerambycid beetle larvae to build the holes in which they dwell. “The cavity-nesting antagonistic ants actually promote the activities of the stem-boring beetle,” says biologist Robert Pringle of Stanford University.

More here.

Flann O’Brien’s fictional scientist and savant De Selby conceived a theory that darkness, far from being the absence of light, is really an accumulation of minutely small black corpuscles. I had attributed this wonderful notion to O’Brien’s joyful surrealism, but I learn from Pascal Richet, in A Natural History of Time, that in 1896 the physicist Gustave Le Bon actually announced to the Academy of Science in Paris the discovery of black light. Maybe the voraciously curious O’Brien had come across this absurdity – a forgotten footnote in scientific history. There was no shortage of similar oddities at the end of the nineteenth century, following the discovery of X-rays – those mysterious entities that could pass through flesh itself. N-rays, “a new type of radiation”, for example, were visible particularly to their discoverer, an otherwise respectable professor from Nancy called René Blondlot. Like radium, they emitted radiant matter. He said of them: “The observer should accustom himself to look at the screen just as a painter, and in particular an ‘impressionist’ painter, would look at a landscape. To attain this requires some practice . . . some people, in fact, never succeed”. Indeed they didn’t, for N-rays were a fiction.

more from the TLS here.

TARA DONOVAN’S PINS are hard to miss. There are thousands of them upstairs at the new Institute of Contemporary Art. They’re smushed together almost as if dropped into a trash compactor, except instead of being bent, they form a 3½-foot-tall block of sinewy, shiny metal. This is art, and it sits in the center of a gallery at the ICA, one of the signature pieces of the museum’s collection.

Stare at “Untitled (Pins),” and you’re likely to have questions. How does this cube stick together? Is it solid or a kind of pin shell? And what of the artist? Did Donovan get pricked as she manipulated the piece? Was she wearing protective gloves? What kind of care and persistence did it require for her to turn these thousands of glittering pins into such a perfect square?

One thing you might not expect: Donovan didn’t put “Untitled (Pins)” together at all. The New York City artist figured out how to shape a mass of pins and sent instructions to the museum; the work was assembled in July, and again in August, entirely by the hands of ICA employees.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

In the NYT:

Tata Motors today took the covers off the world’s cheapest car — the Nano.

Over the past year, Tata has been building hype for a car that would cost a mere 100,000 rupees (roughly $2,500) and bring automotive transportation to the mainstream Indian population. It has been nicknamed the “People’s Car.” Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.

With the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey” playing, Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors drove the small white bubble car onto Tata’s show stage, where it joined two others.

They are not concept cars, they are not prototypes,” Mr. Tata announced when he got out of the car. “They are the production cars that will roll out of the Singur plant later this year.”

The four-door Nano is a little over 10 feet long and nearly 5 feet wide. It is powered by a 623cc two-cylinder engine at the back of the car. With 33 horsepower, the Nano is capable of 65 miles an hour. Its four small wheels are at the absolute corners of the car to improve handling. There is a small trunk, big enough for a duffel bag.

In American Scientist, Gilbert Harman reviews Margaret A. Boden’s Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science:

In her latest book, the lively and interesting Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, the relevant machine is usually a computer, and the cognitive science is usually concerned with the sort of cognition that can be exhibited by a computer. Boden does not discuss other aspects of the subject, broadly conceived, such as the “principles and parameters” approach in contemporary linguistics or the psychology of heuristics and biases. Furthermore, she also puts to one side such mainstream developments in computer science as data mining and statistical learning theory. In the preface she characterizes the book as an essay expressing her view of cognitive science as a whole, a “thumbnail sketch” meant to be “read entire” rather than “dipped into.”

It is fortunate that Mind as Machine is highly readable, particularly because it contains 1,452 pages of text, divided into two very large volumes. Because the references and indices (which fill an additional 179 pages) are at the end of the second volume, readers will need to have it on hand as they make their way through the first. Given that together these tomes weigh more than 7 pounds, this is not light reading!

Boden’s goal, she says, is to show how cognitive scientists have tried to find computational or informational answers to frequently asked questions about the mind—”what it is, what it does, how it works, how it evolved, and how it’s even possible.” How do our brains generate consciousness? Are animals or newborn babies conscious? Can machines be conscious? If not, why not? How is free will possible, or creativity? How are the brain and mind different? What counts as a language?

Also in The Wilson Quarterly, Benjamin Barber:

Why, as a nation, are we so obsessed with competition, so indifferent to cooperation? For starters, competition really is as American as apple pie.  America has always been deeply individualistic, and individualism has presumed the insularity and autonomy of persons and, thus, a natural rivalry among them. Capitalism also embraces competition as its animus, and America is nothing if not capitalistic. Even the American understanding of democracy, which emphasizes representation and the collision of interests, puts the focus on division and partisanship. There are, of course, democratic alternatives. Systems of proportional representation, for example, aim to ensure fair representation of all parties and views no matter how numerous. But our system, with its single-member districts and “first past the post” elections, is winner take all and damn the hindmost, a ­set­up in which winners govern while losers look balefully on, preparing themselves for the next battle.

This has never been more so than in this era when politics has, in Jonathan Chait’s recent portrait in The New Republic, become “an atavistic clash of partisan willpower,” with Christian Right pitted against the Netroots Left in a polarized media environment defined by hyperbolic talk radio and the foolish excesses of the blogosphere. Moderation, cooperation, compromise, and bipartisanship are lame reflections of a pusillanimous past and of a “pathetic and exhausted leadership” incapable of winning elections.

Via Delong, Karol Boudreaux and Tyler Cowen in The Wilson Quarterly:

On the charitable side, part of microcredit’s appeal lies in the fact that the lending institutions can fund themselves once they are launched. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, explains that you can begin by investing $60 billion in the world’s poorest people,   “and then you’re done!”

But can microcredit achieve the massive changes its proponents claim? Is it the solution to poverty in the developing world, or something more ­modest—­a way to empower the poor,    particularly poor women, with some control over their lives and their ­assets?

On trips to Africa and India we have talked to lenders, borrowers, and other poor people to try to understand the role microcredit plays in their lives. We met people like Stadile Menthe in Botswana. Menthe is, in many ways, the classic borrower. A single mother with little formal education, she borrowed money to expand the small grocery store she runs on a dusty road on the outskirts of Botswana’s capital city, Gaborone. Menthe’s store has done well, and she has expanded into the lucrative business of selling phone cards. In fact,     she’s been successful enough that she has built two rental homes next to her store. She has diversified her income and made a better life for herself and her daughter. But how many borrowers are like Menthe? In our judgment, she is the exception, not the norm. Yes, microcredit is mostly a good thing. Very often it helps keep borrowers from even greater     catastrophes, but only rarely does it enable them to climb out of ­poverty.

Glenn Loury and Joshua Cohen discuss over at bloggingheads.tv:

From NoUtopia:

The Clod and the Pebble
William Blake

“Love seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

So sang a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

“Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

From Science:

The single-celled creatures known as protozoans are primitive, exotic, and sometimes just plain weird, resembling animals, plants, or a combination of both. Researchers now report that one animal-like, parasitic protozoan relies on a biochemical pathway that is strikingly plantlike. The discovery could open up a new method of attacking protozoans that cause diseases such as malaria. Parasitic protozoans are extremely difficult to control because their animal-like biologies are often very similar to those of their hosts. As a result, drugs that target these parasites all too often damage the cells of the patient. Hoping to make headway, a team led by microbiologists Kisaburo Nagamune and L. David Sibley of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, took a close look at the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that causes the disease toxoplasmosis.

First, the scientists tried comparing biochemical pathways that they identified in the parasite with those of animals to better understand their function. “When we found few similarities, we thought these animal-like protozoans might not be all that they seemed,” says Sibley. So the team compared the biochemical pathways of Toxoplasma with those of plants. It found that the two had a lot in common. Of particular interest was abscisic acid, a hormone that in plants controls stress responses and dormancy. When the researchers disrupted abscisic acid production using a commonly available herbicide, the parasites inside animal cells in culture remained inactive even after reaching numbers that would normally have led to a violent mass exodus. The reason, the team argues, is that abscisic acid is controlling the shift from dormancy to active growth in protozoans, much as it does in plants. The same herbicide saves mice infected with Toxoplasma, the researchers report tomorrow in Nature.

More here.

From Nature:

India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh has announced unprecedented funding for science education and research, saying it is a top priority for his government. He has announced a range of schemes to attract students and replenish government agencies’ shrinking pool of scientific personnel. “We are planning to fund 30 new Central Universities, five new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology,” Singh said. In the next five years, he added, India will also be launching 1,600 polytechnics, 10,000 vocational schools and 50,000 skill-development centres. One million schoolchildren will receive science innovation scholarships of 5,000 rupees (US$130) each over the next five years, and 10,000 scholarships of 100,000 rupees per year will go to those enrolling on science degree courses.

“We need a quantum jump in science education and research,” Singh said. “This agenda can no longer wait. The time has come for action, and I assure you of my highest personal commitment.” Singh said a plan for implementing the proposals will be devised in the next six months. Funding the schemes has required a fivefold increase in the education budget for 2007–12.

More here.