From Science:

Buyer beware: Videos aimed at improving infant and toddler language skills are not as beneficial for language learning as they claim to be, according to a new study. Rather than helping youngsters, such products may actually hurt their vocabularies.

Videos like Brainy Baby and Baby Einstein have been marketed to parents since 1997. The researchers interviewed the parents of more than 1000 U.S. children between the ages of 8 and 16 months, gathering information on the children’s vocabulary and how frequently they watched videos like Baby Einstein. When the team controlled for factors such as socioeconomic status, race, and parental education, it found that Baby Einstein and his ilk are not the geniuses they’re cracked up to be. For every hour per day spent watching the videos, children understood an average of six to eight fewer words than did those of the same age who did not watch them–a 17-percentile drop in vocabulary, the team reports online tomorrow in the Journal of Pediatrics. “There is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from these videos, and there is some suggestion of harm,” says Zimmerman.

More here.

Just watch it:

Christopher Mims in Scientific American:

There are two ways to look at the explosive growth of the Internet: One is to celebrate the fact that in the 15 years since it became commercially available, what began as an obscure military technology morphed into a global phenomenon that is regularly accessed by over a billion people. The other is to ask why the world’s other five billion folks aren’t online yet.

Biswas says his goal, and that of Meraki, is to “connect the next billion people.” Biswas and his engineers are almost exclusively programmers, yet Meraki doesn’t sell software. Instead it sells Wi-Fi hardware—relatively cheap, commodity hardware built by outside vendors. It’s a combination of this hardware and Meraki’s software that yields a kind of magic that Biswas believes will go viral the way few things have. His business model depends on it.

“We now have more than 1,000 networks around the world,” Biswas says, “and all that growth was through word of mouth.” Meraki doesn’t advertise, in part because Biswas’s team has been too busy to bother. “Our focus has been to create the best thing possible, and then trust that people will run with it.”

More here.

Jane Mayer in The New Yorker:

Mohammed’s interrogation was part of a secret C.I.A. program, initiated after September 11th, in which terrorist suspects such as Mohammed were detained in “black sites”—secret prisons outside the United States—and subjected to unusually harsh treatment. The program was effectively suspended last fall, when President Bush announced that he was emptying the C.I.A.’s prisons and transferring the detainees to military custody in Guantánamo. This move followed a Supreme Court ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which found that all detainees—including those held by the C.I.A.—had to be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions. These treaties, adopted in 1949, bar cruel treatment, degradation, and torture. In late July, the White House issued an executive order promising that the C.I.A. would adjust its methods in order to meet the Geneva standards. At the same time, Bush’s order pointedly did not disavow the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would likely be found illegal if used by officials inside the United States. The executive order means that the agency can once again hold foreign terror suspects indefinitely, and without charges, in black sites, without notifying their families or local authorities, or offering access to legal counsel.

More here.

Tom Hilde in Phronesisaical:

In a moment of frustration yesterday at the slowness of a major research and exchange program I’ve been developing over the past year or so, at its twists and turns, at uncreative bureaucratic inertia and unimaginative and fearful academic doings, at serious political differences and narrow ideologies, and at the seemingly constant deferment of the payoff, I decided to work on the perfect crime. This won’t be a full-time project, but a pastime, which will make the crime’s perfection all the more delicious through the insouciance of its effort. Ideal perfection would be the crime that is not a crime, and effort that is not effort. I imagine sitting here doing nothing while the crime bathes its brilliance around me (or radiates from me, the guiltless criminal?).

Although seemingly unwise in a public forum such as this, I don’t mind telling you of my intent to develop the perfect crime because it is a crime for which there does not yet exist any penalty, so perfect is it. In fact, this perfect crime itself does not yet exist, since “crime” necessarily implies concomitant moral and/or legal sanction. The perfect crime is not simply one of great efficiency at its execution and its circumventing of moral norms and law. That’s the “perfect” crime of slaves. My perfect crime is a Nietszchean “transvaluation of value,” a criminal mastery so superb that it involves the very creation of the sanction at the same time as the crime. The sanction will depend entirely on my whim. If I require the thrill of transgression, I will write up moral laws to transgress. Otherwise, the essence of the crime’s perfection will be in its crimelessness, for only the criminal can determine the perfect crime to be a crime or not.

More here.

Peter Smith in the London Times:

Early one freezing January morning in 1896, a massive explosion ripped through the Tylorstown Colliery in the Rhondda Valley. The force of the explosion blew the roof off pitshaft number 7 and sent a “black tornado of dust up through the shafts”. A quick count of the missing miners’ lamps suggested that more than 100 men were below. In addition, there were the boys, known as “the trappers”, employed to open and close the thick wooden doors in the pitch-black tunnels.

Alerted by a Home Office telegram, Dr J. S. Haldane arrived as quickly as the train connections from his Oxford laboratory would allow. The 35-year-old physiologist had been instructed to determine the cause of death and to test a theory. It was generally believed that deaths from such explosions were caused by blast injuries.

Haldane thought differently. He was convinced that three quarters of fatalities were due to suffocation from gases seeping into tunnels. But as Haldane talked to the Tylorstown rescue party, he found that the toxic gas produced after the explosion – known as “afterdamp” (damp from the German for steam, Dampf) – had not extinguished the miners’ lamps. This meant oxygen was present and therefore suffocation must be ruled out.

Even though it threatened his theory, the man The Times once described as a “medical detective” was excited by this intriguing new evidence. In order to explain what had happened, Haldane had the unenviable task of visiting the bereaved families to examine the bodies of the dead miners. Here he found the evidence he needed. From the pink and red appearance of their skin, he suddenly understood why so many miners were dying in pit explosions: carbon-monoxide poisoning. A distinctly carmine-red blood sample provided the final proof.

More here.

More here.  [Via Boing Boing.]

Dwayne Carter, the twenty-four-year-old rapper from New Orleans known as Lil Wayne, hasn’t released an album or a single in months, though he has appeared as a guest on songs by other artists. But he is indisputably the rapper of the year. He has been recording songs constantly—sometimes three or four a night. Many are astonishingly good, and most eventually find their way onto the Internet, where they can be downloaded for free, apparently with his blessing. Among hip-hop fans, discussion has been dominated by talk of Lil Wayne—his place in the hip-hop canon, his romantic status, his sexual orientation, and the release date of his sixth album, “Tha Carter III.” Last week, MTV’s “hip-hop brain trust”—ten staffers—voted Lil Wayne the “hottest m.c. in the game.”

In four years, Lil Wayne has evolved from a fairly predictable Southern gangsta rapper into an artist who may actually deserve the bragging rights to “best rapper alive,” his current motto.

more from The New Yorker here.

CONSIDER this frank greeting in William Gibson’s “Spook Country”: “I’ve just checked the number of your Google hits, and read your Wikipedia entry.” This is what translates as fame today: a foothold in the ether, an identity composed by a faceless committee of unknown size. Gibson famously coined the term “cyberspace” in his reality-crashing, paradigm-shifting 1984 debut, “Neuromancer,” and his conception of its “consensual hallucination” rings truer now, more than two decades later, as we pursue terminally framed existences teeming with hyperlinks and blogs, worlds of Warcraft and second lives.

The Googlee in question is Hollis Henry, singer in a defunct 1990s cult band, the Curfew. She’s now a journalist working on a story for a shadowy magazine, Node, that hasn’t published an issue yet. (It’s variously and hilariously described as a would-be Wired, generating sub-rosa buzz by its very anti-buzz.) Cults, shadows, secrets: in other words, Gibson country.

more from the LA Times here.

From The New York Times:

In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee. The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup. That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it. Psychologists say that “priming” people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it’s a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.

More fundamentally, the new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known.

More here.

Richard Dawkins at his website:

In the dark days of 1940, the pre-Vichy French government was warned by its generals “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” After the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill growled his response: “Some chicken; some neck!” Today, the bestselling books of ‘The New Atheism’ are disparaged, by those who desperately wish to downplay their impact, as “Only preaching to the choir.”

Some choir! Only?!

As far as subjective impressions allow and in the admitted absence of rigorous data, I am persuaded that the religiosity of America is greatly exaggerated. Our choir is a lot larger than many people realise. Religious people still outnumber atheists, but not by the margin they hoped and we feared. I base this not only on conversations during my book tour and the book tours of my colleagues Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, but on widespread informal surveys of the World Wide Web. Not our own site, whose contributors are obviously biased, but, for example, Amazon, and YouTube whose denizens are reassuringly young. Moreover, even if the religious have the numbers, we have the arguments, we have history on our side, and we are walking with a new spring in our step – you can hear the gentle patter of our feet on every side.

More here.

David Gritten in The Telegraph:

It would be stretching a point to claim Ingmar Bergman invented art-house cinema. Other directors before him had presented visions of cinema so austere and serious as to exclude entertainment values completely; but Bergman was the first to attract such wide audiences to his work.

Buñuel’s experiments with Dalí qualified as high art, but were so experimental as to be museum pieces. Italian neo-realists such as De Sica and Rossellini tackled serious social themes, but always addressed themselves to audiences’ emotions. Bergman seemed grandly indifferent to such considerations; the rigour, seriousness and intellectual questing of his films became their unique selling point.

He became a giant on the stage of world cinema with The Seventh Seal, re-released last week in Britain on its 50th anniversary to gushing reviews.

More here.

Reuters via CNN:

An exclusive magazine for prostitutes is offering a snapshot of life in some of India’s biggest brothels, reporting the murky world of pimps and violent customers and showcasing the dreams and talents of sex workers.

“Red Light Despatch,” a monthly publication, is full of emotional outpourings of women sold to brothels as children, personal accounts of torture and harassment, poems and essays by prostitutes, book and film reviews and advocacy articles.

Health workers and prostitutes sit together once a week in a tiny newsroom located inside a brothel in India’s financial capital to discuss stories, headlines and the design of issues.

The reporters, often themselves prostitutes or their relatives, file their contribution after scouring the brothels of Mumbai, Kolkata and New Delhi and some smaller cities.

More here.

With thanks to M.A., who let me know that I’m not too cool for the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry… see?

Harry Potter?  I know, as a self-respecting member of my peer group, I’m supposed to remind everyone that they should be spending their Potter time revisiting something more important – maybe Elements of the Philosophy of Right, or Jude the Obscure?  Or, as Alex Balk drolly tells us, Harry Potter is only for children or feeble-minded adults – meanwhile he’s reading Michael Ondaatje’s latest (damn, son, that’s supposed to be better?).  There’s also this polite version of the dodge, made by formidable HT of That Was Probably Awkward: “I tried to read it, but gave up after twenty pages and am now ensconced in William T. Vollman’s amazing Europe Central.”  Well, la di da, HT.

We can’t all be that brainy and stylish.  Some of us have become addicted to these books somewhere along the way.  In my case it happened after six years of studiously, hiply ignoring the things, until a Potter-mad friend took me to the third movie.  Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a great children’s film, convincing and complete.  Most impressive to me was the movie’s unabashedly frightening, depressing and even fatalistic tone: from the opening image of Harry reading at night by wandlight to the Munchian creatures (“dementors”) who board his train, there was a visceral, dank sense of fearfulness in it that made its happier moments feel that much more thrillingly earned.  At that point I went out and read all the books, and while the first two were pretty simple, I (like so many other “adults”) found books three through five enthralling.  The other movies, too (again excepting the first two), are particularly impressive in the quality of their execution and in the consistent tone imposed by their producers, even while directors come and go, even though their attempts to adapt seven-hundred page novels for the screen necessitate near-fatal overdoses of plot.

The series’ setting is not static; it’s a slow zoom outwards that reveals more and more of the wizarding world, and as J.K. Rowling continually enlarges it, it comes to resemble our own (often with frustrating new layers of bureaucracy and political pettiness).  Through this expansion, the novels provide to adults both a return to the simplicities of childhood, and a return to that adolescent feeling of growth, of increasing knowledge and sophistication: the optimistic mastery of youth.  The books also explore the following laudable theme of the bildungsroman: growing up involves demystifying the idea of authority, whether personal or institutional, and learning to act for oneself.  Harry’s burgeoning awareness that everyone, from the Minister of Magic to the beloved, avuncular Sirius to the big Daddy, Dumbledore himself, is flawed and human is the mark of real change in the books.  This is the true story arc, not the episodic pursuit of the monomaniacally evil Voldemort. 

Politically, however, the heart of the struggle in Harry Potter is between Voldemort’s racialist love of “purebloods” and the liberal multiculturalism of Harry and his allies.  It’s a reassuring if somewhat superficial multiculturalism, featuring many token characters (Cho, the Patil twins, Kingsley, Seamus), none of whom betrays any difference other than the sound of their names.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows even includes a subplot recounting young Dumbledore’s regetted flirtation with fascism.  It’s hard not to read this as a warning about and revision of the pastoral longings of much fantasy literature: for instance, in J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, the sense that monstrous technology wielded by subhuman invaders is to blame for the loss of the world’s innocence.  Or consider Roald Dahl, another fantastist with strongly nativist politics.  Rowling does inherit most of the elements of Tolkien-style Christian allegory, modernizing them around the edges and thankfully dispensing with the donnish snobbery.  But the real difference between her and her predecessors is her willingness to think about what happens after the books end, beyond the fantasy.  It’s the parents’ perspective, and genuinely new in the genre.

That’s why, at first, Deathly Hallows seems not quite up to the previous standard.  Actually, parts of it really aren’t up to the previous standard.  It often reads like a communiqué to faithful cultist-curators who have grown up (or gotten old) obsessing over the books, rather than with a sense of fresh invitation and invention.  The massive popularity of the series, which must have encouraged Rowling to Take Herself Too Seriously, may be to blame.  (And don’t think that old “It’s only a kid’s book!” excuse flies – compare it to her best books, Prisoner of Azkaban and Order of the Phoenix.)  In Deathly Hallows, after five hundred pages of strangely penitent plot starvation comes an emetic span in which the main storylines, and masses of other loose ends, are tied up within a hundred pages: plot bulimia.  And when the novel does move, it’s far too often by narrative fiat, or as Sam Anderson puts it: “Rowling has cranked the “coincidence” dial up to eleven and is now flagrantly abusing her “imminent-death-thwarted-at-the-last-possible-moment” privileges.”  Actually, you know what?  Just read Sam’s entire reading diary for a nice account of the problems with the novel.

Rowling has always delighted in creating rules, standards and procedures: this curse is unforgivable, this Vow unbreakable, this spell doesn’t work in this location, this is a Horcrux, that a Hallow.  But she never resolves Deathly Hallows’ endless crises with the intricate feats of logical navigation that all these impediments make you expect.  Instead, the plot moves ahead in the time-honored but facile way of bad novels: coincidental appearances, secret passageways,  and unexpected reversals.  It’s as if Rowling is reminding us that these are fantasies and she’s in charge, playing with events in an almost childlike way.  Which, anyway, fits the logic of these novels: encroaching adulthood is a form of death.  For Harry, this is literally true.  And for the adults: Harry’s parents are killed at twenty-one, his older friends (Sirius, Lupin) have their best days behind them, and the rest are schoolteachers or parents of Harry’s classmates – incorrigibly second order.  Of Rowling’s two most textured characters, Severus Snape and Hermione Granger, one reaches death after a life that never surpasses a childhood love’s intensity, the other reaches adulthood after a precocious childhood… and we learn no more (sniff!).  Rowling’s first allegiance is to children: we merely eavesdrop on something that belongs to them.

The promise of death, though, has always animated these books.  Deathly Hallows’ first epigraph, from Aeschylus, begins with the following lines:

Oh, the torment bred in the race,
the grinding scream of death
and the stroke that hits the vein,
the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,
the curse no man can bear.

The epigraph is deliciously scary, but not surprising: we’ve always known that one of the three friends would die.  Wondering which one it would be provided most of the suspense, since you knew the result of the good versus evil conflict wasn’t going to surprise you.  Finally discovering that they all survive felt like a cheat, a failure of nerve.  Thinking about it again, though, this might be a more generous, more brilliant ending.  For Rowling is a most prosaic of fantasists: she exults more in the invention and naming of magical pranks than in the political victories of her adults.  Her battle scenes and final confrontations are less convincing than her detailing of school culture.  Heroism, in Harry Potter, is a mantle to be put back down and forgotten as soon as things are safe.  And with the epilogue, Rowling has made clear that her characters, having become mere adults, should make room for their own children’s fantasies and marvels, rather than prolonging their own.  It disappoints the reader because the dramatic death of Harry or Hermione would prolong the fantasy, in the form of mourning a beloved character who will always remain seventeen.  You could stay a kid forever that way.  Instead, Rowling, by letting them survive, has written a more mature, more parental ending.

Most fantasy twins the reader and main character: both simultaneously discover and explore an unsuspected world.  For the reader, it lies inside the book, for the protagonist, beyond the Shire, or at a faraway school, or, in Lewis’ brilliant metaphor, at the back of a wardrobe, between coats spread apart like pages.  Losing oneself in the other-world is magic, and fantasy literature’s metaphor for the reading process is the plot, a journey to the end.  When one completes the book, the magic, as it must, ends and real life beckons – and that lies outside the purview of such books.  Rowling, a late and self-conscious practitioner of her genre, includes the closing of the book in her book.  Harry grows up, becomes a dad himself.  The quest over, he disenchants himself, and, like the rest of us, goes on living.

The rest o’ my Dispatches.

Harry Callahan. Circus, Chicago, 1955.

Gelatin silver print.

More on this master American photographer here, here, and here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Last week the world press took note of a fish hauled up off the coast of Zanzibar. (AP, Reuters). Why did they care? Because the animal was one of the most celebrated fish of the sea: it was a coelacanth.

The coelacanth is an ugly, bucket-mouthed creature. At first scientists only knew it from its fossils, the youngest of which was 70 million years old. In 1938, however, a flesh-and-blood coelacanth was dredged up near East London, South Africa. The five-foot long beast had many of the hallmarks of fossil coelacanths, such as hollow spines in their vertebrae, peculiar lobe-shaped fins, and a joint dividing its eye and “nose” from its brain and ears. The coelacanth became a celebrity in the, hailed as a “living fossil.”

Its fame was reinforced by its elusiveness. It was not until 1952 that a biologist found a second coelacanth, caught this time off the Comoros Islands. Scientists chased the coelacanth so doggedly in part because of what it might reveal about ourselves. Fossils of the coelacanth lineage dated back over 300 million years to the Devonian Period. They belonged to the same group of fishes as our own ancestors (known now as lobe-fins). While the ancestors of coelacanths stayed in the water, our own fishy ancestors climbed on land and evolved into mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. (See my book At the Water’s Edge for more on this transition.)

More here.

Lee Billings in Seed Magazine:

In April, the government of Japan released more than 60 pages of recommendations to “secure the safe performance of next-generation robots,” which called for a centralized database to log all robot-inflicted human injuries. That same month, the European Robotics Research Network (EURON) updated its “Roboethics Roadmap,” a document broadly listing the ethical implications of projected developments like robotic surgeons, soldiers, and sex workers. And in March, South Korea provided a sneak peek at its “Robot Ethics Charter” slated for release later in 2007. The charter envisioned a near future wherein humans may run the risk of becoming emotionally dependent on or addicted to their robots.

The close timing of these three developments reflects a sudden upswing in international awareness that the pace of progress in robotics is rapidly propelling these fields into uncharted ethical realms. Gianmarco Veruggio, the Genoa University roboticist who organized the first international roboethics conference in 2004, says, “We are close to a robotics invasion.”

More here.

From the website of Shoemaker & Hoard:

This Shoemaker & Hoard Poetry series features interviews and readings with three American poets/writers whose works have shaped and enhanced contemporary poetics: Gary Snyder, Robert Hass, and Wendell Berry. These recordings were brought to you by Shoemaker & Hoard, Publishers, and the interviews were conducted by host Joanne Greene.

More here.

Jim Holt in the New York Times Magazine:

If God is dead, does that mean we cannot survive our own deaths? Recent best-selling books against religion agree that immortality is a myth we ought to outgrow. But there are a few thinkers with unimpeachable scientific credentials who have been waving their arms and shouting: not so fast. Even without God, they say, we have reason to hope for — or possibly fear — an afterlife.

Curiously, the doctrine of immortality is more a pagan legacy than a religious one. The notion that each of us is essentially an immortal soul goes back to Plato. Whereas the body is a compound thing that eventually falls apart, Plato argued, the soul is simple and therefore imperishable. Contrast this view with that of the Bible. In the Old Testament there is little mention of an afterlife; the rewards and punishments invoked by Moses were to take place in this world, not the next one. Only near the beginning of the Christian era did one Jewish sect, the Pharisees, take the afterlife seriously, in the form of the resurrection of the body. The idea that “the dead shall be raised” was then brought into Christianity by St. Paul.

The Judeo-Christian version of immortality doesn’t work very well without God: who but a divine agent could miraculously reconstitute each of us after our death as a “spiritual body”? Plato’s version has no such need; since our platonic souls are simple and thus enduring, we are immortal by nature.

More here.

Yes, a few of us here at 3QD deeply love Zbigniew Herbert. In the NYT:

[F]or most of us, discovering “the Poland that is real” means reading works translated from Polish. The most significant such translation this year — possibly in many years — is Zbigniew Herbert’s “Collected Poems, 1956-1998” (Ecco/HarperCollins, $34.95), translated by Alissa Valles, which was published in February to (almost) universal acclaim. The book is significant for two reasons. First, Herbert himself is significant — like Frost and Auden, he’s a poet whose failure to win the Nobel Prize says more about the prize committee than about the writer. Second, his poetry is relatively difficult to find. Although most of Herbert’s collections have been translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, many of those books are now out of print. For the casual reader, then, this “Collected Poems” is the likeliest path to this poet’s achievement.

That achievement is well worth the journey. Along with Tadeusz Rozewicz, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, Herbert is one of the principal figures in postwar Polish poetry — and by extension, in European letters generally. Born in 1924, he was active in the Polish resistance during the German occupation, then became an admirably uncooperative citizen of the subsequent Soviet puppet state. (According to a recent article in Süddeutsche Zeitung, whenever Herbert was asked by the secret police to write up reports on foreign trips, he would fill them “with interpretations of the poems of the Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz … as well as long-winded cultural-philosophical observations.”)