In EurekaAlert!:

By repeating the Stanley Milgram’s classic experiment from the 1960s on obedience to authority – that found people would administer apparently lethal electrical shocks to a stranger at the behest of an authority figure – in a virtual environment, the UCL (University College London) led study demonstrated for the first time that participants reacted as though the situation was real.

The finding, which is reported in the inaugural edition of the journal PLoS ONE, demonstrates that virtual environments can provide an alternative way of pursuing laboratory-based experimental research that examines extreme social situations.

Professor Mel Slater, of the UCL Department of Computer Science, who led the study, says: “The line of research opened up by Milgram was of tremendous importance in the understanding of human behaviour. It has been argued before that immersive virtual environment can provide a useful tool for social psychological studies in general and our results show that this applies even in the extreme social situation investigated by Stanley Milgram.”

Stanley Milgram originally carried out the series of experiments in an attempt to understand events in which people carry out horrific acts against their fellows. He showed that in a so cial structure with recognised lines of authority, ordinary people could be relatively easily persuaded to give what seemed to be even lethal electric shocks to another randomly chosen person. Today, his results are often quoted in helping to explain how people become embroiled in organised acts of violence against others, for example they have been recently cited to explain prisoner abuse and even suicide bombings.

From Scientific American:

The mind is not as agile as it once was, even at the ripe old age of 34. Names elude me, statistics slip away, memory fades. This is just the first step on a long journey into senescence; and by 74, if I make it that far, I might remember practically nothing. That age is the average of a cohort of 2,802 seniors who recently participated in a long-term study to see if anything can be done to reverse this age-related mind decline. The good news: there is.

Sherry Willis of Pennsylvania State University led a team of scientists that followed this group of adults, aged 65 and older, still living independently between 1998 and 2004. The seniors came from all walks of life, races, and parts of the country, including Birmingham, Ala., Detroit, Boston and other major cities. They all had one thing in common when the study commenced: no signs of cognitive impairment.

More here.

From despardes:

(Commencement lecture by Pervez Hoodbhoy at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, December 9, 2006.) To help us along, let’s imagine a film like “Jinnah”. You die and fly off to the arrival gate in heaven where an angel of the immigration department screens newcomers from Pakistan. Admission these days is even tougher than getting a Green Card to America. You have to show proofs of good deeds, argue your case, and fill out an admission form. One section of the form asks you to specify three attitudinal traits that you want fellow Pakistanis, presently on earth, to have. As part of divine fairness, all previous entries are electronically stored and publicly available and so you learn that Mr. Jinnah, as the first Pakistani, had answered – as you might guess – “Faith, Unity, Discipline”. This slogan was in all the books you had studied in school, and was emblazoned even on monuments and hillsides across the country. Since copying won’t get you anywhere in heaven, you obviously cannot repeat this.

What would your three choices be? As you consider your answer, I’ll tell you mine. First, I wish for minds that can deal with the complex nature of truth. My second wish is for many more Pakistanis who accept diversity as a virtue. My third, and last, wish is that Pakistanis learn to value and nurture creativity.

More here.

Does this mean that the attention on Bosnia and Rwanda was also just about feeling good? Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch.

As a zone of ongoing, large-scale bloodletting Darfur in the western Sudan has big appeal for US news editors. Americans are not doing the killing, or paying for others to do it. So there’s no need to minimize the vast slaughter with the usual drizzle of “allegations.” There’s no political risk here in sounding off about genocide in Darfur. The crisis in Darfur is also very photogenic.

When the RENAMO gangs, backed by Ronald Reagan and the apartheid regime in South Africa were butchering Mozambican peasants, the news stories were sparse and the tone usually tentative in any blame-laying. Not so with Darfur, where moral outrage on the editorial pages acquires the robust edge endemic to sermons about inter-ethnic slaughter where white people, and specifically the US government, aren’t obviously involved.

Since March 1 the New York Times has run seventy news stories on Darfur (including sixteen pieces from wire services), fifteen editorials and twenty-one signed columns, all but one by Nicholas Kristof. Darfur is primarily a “feel good” subject for people here who want to agonize publicly about injustices in the world but who don’t really want to do anything about them. After all, it’s Arabs who are the perpetrators and there is ultimately little that people in this country can do to effect real change in the policy of the government in Khartoum.

In response to the NYC ban on trans fats, Ampersand noted, “Banning trans fats in restaurants, but not in grocery stores, doesn’t make sense. I guess the supermarket lobby is more powerful than the fast-food and donut lobby.” The Economist’s blog takes on the question:

I’d guess that it has more to do with public choice theory than ardent lobbying. Since national food producers are unlikely to reformulate their entire line for the benefit of a few million New Yorkers, a trans-fat ban would sweep large categories of food off the supermarket shelves, in a way that would be directly and obviously attributable to the ban (since they would disappear from every supermarket shelf at once). Banning them in restraurants, on the other hand, will merely make some of the food taste worse, other of the food more expensive, and so forth, in a thoroughly idiosyncratic way. Consumers are unlikely to connect thousands of subtles shift in their local restaurant fare to the ban, as they surely would of glazed donut holes suddenly vanished from the shelves of the city. The legislators do not need to be paid to act in their own self interest.

Although for me, this answer suggests Marx (on obscured casual pathways as a mechanism in ideology, here, with causes attributed not to inputs but to other factors) as much as it does public choice, which is not to say that the answer is correct.

In Naked Punch, an interview with Arthur Danto on art and philosophy:

I: So would you say then that now you need, really, a talent to notice or a talent to think, rather than a talent to craft?

ACD: Exactly. That`s it. I mean, Barbara and I just visited her nephew, who`s a sculpture student at Rutgers, and he`s building these intricate house-of-cards structures with tiles painted with nail polish. He gets all the girls to give him their old nail polish. It was really quite beautiful and he has this incredible patience. So you know it seems to be a transformation of a really remarkable sort. I felt with the Whitney Biennial of 2002, where you had all of these artists that no one ever heard of, that they were all working. Here was a beautiful work: it was a little collaborative called Praxis, just a man and a woman and they had this little storefront down in the East Village. You could go in on Saturdays and get one of three things: you could get a hug, you could have a band-aid put on and they would kiss it, or you could ask for a dollar and they`d give you a dollar. Simple things, but people would go in, they`d line up, get hugged, ask for a band aid—she`d put it on and make them feel better—or they`d get a dollar. And I thought, God how simple can life get, but there was something very moving about that work. It was interactive, people just came in, the couple were being artists in this kind of way. I thought it had a lot of meaning.

The news story of the day may just be the tragic verdict of the show trial (I suppose all show trial verdicts are tragic) of six foreign medical workers in Libya accused of deliberately infecting 400 children with HIV. In [email protected]:

A Libyan court today condemned to death six foreign health professionals accused of infecting over 400 children with HIV in 1998. The court refused to take into account a swathe of independent scientific evidence indicating that the outbreak had begun several years before the accused began working there and was caused by poor hygiene at the hospital.

The defence say they intend to appeal to the Supreme Court, which would be the last chance that the medics would have of being acquitted. Emmanuel Altit, the head of the international defence team, says the international community can help by insisting that scientific evidence be taken into account.

Behind-the-scenes discussions are also ongoing between the European Union, Bulgaria, the United States and Libya to find a diplomatic solution (under Islamic law, victims’ relatives may withdraw death sentences in return for compensation) but so far this has proved elusive.

The verdict has prompted widespread international condemnation. “We are appalled by the decision of the Libyan court to sentence the five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor to death,” says a statement from The World Medical Association and the International Council of Nurses. They emphasize that the denial of health problems that can promote the accidental spread of HIV, such as the use of dirty needles, is an ongoing, dangerous situation in Libya. “How many children will go on dying in Libyan hospitals while the Government ignores the root of the problem?”

In the American Scientist, Per Brandtzaeg tells us about how we develop food allergies.

The story of food allergy is a story about how the development of the immune system is tightly linked to the development of our digestive tract or, as scientists and physicians usually refer to it, our gut. A human being is born with an immature immune system and an immature gut, and they grow up together. The immune system takes samples of gut contents and uses them to inform its understanding of the world—an understanding that helps safeguard the digestive system (and the body that houses it) against harmful microorganisms.

The many-layered defenses of the immune system are designed to guard against invaders while sparing our own tissues. Food represents a special challenge to this system: an entire class of alien substances that needs to be welcomed rather than rebuffed. An adult may pass a ton of food through her gut each year, nearly all of it distinct at the molecular level from her own flesh and blood. In addition, strains of normal, or commensal, bacteria in the gut help with digestion and compete with pathogenic strains; these good microbes need to be distinguished from harmful ones. The body’s ability to suppress its killer instinct in the presence of a gut-full of innocuous foreign substances is a phenomenon called oral tolerance. It requires cultivating a state of equilibrium, or homeostasis, that balances aggression and tolerance in the immune system. Intolerance, or failure to suppress the immune response, results in an allergic reaction, sometimes with life-threatening consequences.

From Lens Culture:

In this age when many famous fine art photographers and photojournalists strive to capture the mundane, the banal, the everyday reality of our existence, it is like a breath of fresh air to come upon this unique collection of inexpensive snapshots taken by inexperienced camera operators.

These are truly delightful photos of ordinary day-in-the life experiences taken by the men and women who deliver the mail throughout Great Britain.This project — conceived, managed and edited by the young photographer Stephen Gill — offered the free use of disposable cameras to every member of the Royal Mail. Hundreds took him up on the offer, and as a result, Gill painstakingly reviewed over 30,000 images to end up with the best of the best. It is apparent that everyone had fun in the process.

The goal was to create intimate documentary views of the UK that are rarely seen except by postal carriers, utility workers, garbage collectors, and so on.

More here.

From Science:

Does a good mood help when doing your job? Not always, a new study suggests. Happy thoughts can stimulate creativity, but for mundane work such as plowing through databases, being cranky or sad may work better. The study is the first to suggest that a positive frame of mind can have opposite effects on productivity depending on the nature of a task.

Stress, anxiety, and a bad mood are notorious for narrowing people’s attention and making them both think and see only what’s right in front of them; for example, a person held at gunpoint usually recalls nothing but the weapon itself. Well-being, on the other hand, is known to broaden people’s thinking and make them more creative. But whether a good mood also expands people’s attention to visual details was unknown.

More here.

Banksy. Withus Oragainstus. 2005

Dead beetle with glued on sidewinder missiles and satellite dish.

More on this irreverent British artist here and here.

From Nature:

If you think only hounds can track a scent trail, think again: people can follow their noses too, a new study says. And they do so in a way very similar to dogs, suggesting we’re not so bad at detecting smells — we’re just out of practice.

Scientists have found that humans have far fewer genes that encode smell receptors than do other animals such as rats and dogs. This seemed to suggest that we’re not as talented at discerning scents as other beasts, perhaps because we lost our sense of smell when we began to walk upright, and lifted our noses far away from the aroma-rich earth. A team of neuroscientists and engineers, led by Noam Sobel of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, decided to test this conventional wisdom.

The team first laid down a 10-metre-long trail of chocolate essential oil in a grass field (the scent was detectable but not strong or overpowering). Then they enlisted 32 Berkeley undergraduates, blindfolded them, blocked their ears and set them loose in the field to try to track the scent. Each student got three chances to track the scent in ten minutes; two-thirds of the subjects finished the task. And when four students practiced the task over three days, they got better at it.

Next, the team tested how the students were following the trails. They counted how many whiffs of air each student took while tracking the scent trail, and tested the effect of blocking one nostril at a time. The scientists found that humans act much like dogs do while tracking a scent, sniffing repeatedly to trace the smell’s source. They didn’t do so well with one blocked nostril, suggesting that the stereo effect of two nostrils helps people to locate odours in space.

The study proves that humans aren’t so bad at smelling after all, says neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

More here.

From MSNBC:

For Christians, ’tis the season for shepherds and kings, animals and angels to gather together around the manger — at least in countless Nativity scenes around the world. But it takes more than any one of the four Gospels to assemble that precise tableau: The three kings (actually, astrologers) come from Matthew, while the shepherds come from Luke.

Did we say four Gospels? Actually, in the early centuries of the Christian church, there were quite a few more than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. For example, references to the ox and the donkey surrounding the infant Jesus come not from the four accepted gospels, but from an also-ran scripture called the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. Still other apocryphal texts portray the child Jesus as a divine “Dennis the Menace” — smarting off to his neighbors, giving his playmates a swift kick, even striking an offending youngster dead and then grudgingly bringing him back to life.

More here.

In n+1, Bruce Robbins reviews Walter Benn Michaels’s The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, which is followed by a reponse and counter-response.

Yes, there is trouble with diversity. But there’s also an obvious flaw in The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, and it’s in the subtitle. Behind the blandness of that “and,” Michaels suggests over and over that the relationship between identity and inequality is somehow causal. We still have so much inequality because we decided to work for diversity instead. Or we worked for diversity in order to evade the issue of inequality. Or in order to feel ok about evading it. Or something like that. If and only if P, then not Q. One example of Michaels’s shifty sense of causality will stand for many. Affirmative action at universities like Harvard, Michaels suggests, “functions to convince all the white kids that they didn’t get in just because they were white.” Every white kid at Harvard knows lots and lots of other white kids who didn’t get into Harvard. Do they really need to be convinced that they didn’t get in just because they’re white?

According to Michaels’s reading, The Great Gatsby teaches that we are “divided into races rather than into economic classes.” This is despite the valley of ashes that divides the haves of West and East Egg from the have-nots of Queens. “We would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty” (my italics in both). There’s a choice between two options, and we, like The Great Gatsby, have made the wrong one. As an historical account, this “rather than” formula is somewhat unpersuasive, to put it mildly. Michaels offers no evidence that if we had not chosen to champion diversity, this would have had any effect at all on inequality. Are we supposed to imagine that a powerful egalitarian movement was rumbling inexorably forward and no doubt would soon have triumphed had it not been tragically diverted at the last minute by a sudden passion for diversity?When and where? These are the sorts of choices (if you had to choose between X and Y…) that are offered to students in textbooks of philosophy. In history they don’t happen.

If you are thinking about historical reality, you will ask, though Michaels does not, about Other Countries. They too seem to have fallen short in the equality department these days, yet in most cases without throwing themselves wholeheartedly into a misguided diversity crusade. Recent history suggests that in the U.S., as elsewhere, there are probably much more potent reasons for lack of equality than an infatuation with diversity.

Also in the soon to be launched magazine Jewcy, David Shneer and Stefan Kanfer debate the relevance of Zionism for American Jews.

As we prepared to launch Jewcy, a slew of well-respected journalists, editors, and even Jewish educators offered us the same advice: your demographic does not want to read about Israel. They don’t care. They’re not interested.

What’s so compelling, after all, about an alternative homeland when you’re content with the one you have? As British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in The Controversy of Zion, “Jewry as a whole was converted to Zionism not by arguments but by events.” The Shoah converted Western Jewry to Zionism en masse after decades of passionate argument had failed to do so. But today’s young American Jews no longer feel the sting of antisemitism and find it difficult to contemplate a world in which the Holocaust is possible.

Is Zionism still relevant to the American Jew? Debating that question for Jewcy are University of Denver history professor David Shneer and Stefan Kanfer, a former editor at Time and a contributing editor at the conservative quarterly City Journal. For the next four days we will post one e-mail per day from each.

In The Guardian, a review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s The Caged Virgin and Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam.

The Caged Virgin is a shocking read. Ayaan Hirsi Ali rages at crimes that are done to women by men: from forced marriage to female genital mutilation; from denial of education to sexual abuse within the family. Her fury about these crimes makes her essays vibrant and inspiring, as she reminds her readers that women do not have to accept violence in the home or stunted ambitions: “You know you are worth more than this!” Hirsi Ali calls to her female readers. “You think and dream about your freedom! You no longer have to tolerate oppression.”

Female visionaries who break out of traditional societies often set other people’s teeth on edge. To their detractors, Andrea Dworkin was a fantasist, Emmeline Pankhurst was an egoist, and even Mary Wollstonecraft was a hyena in petticoats. For someone like Hirsi Ali a love-it-or-loathe-it fierce confidence was absolutely essential for her to become the woman she is now; she came from a Somali family which moved to Saudi Arabia and then to Kenya without losing its oppressive sense of tradition. She herself underwent female genital mutilation and was threatened with a forced marriage; if she had not decided to trust her own anger rather than other people’s opinions, how else would she have found the confidence to defy that weight of tradition?

Yet Hirsi Ali’s position in this book and in Submission, the film she made with Theo Van Gogh, is problematic in a very particular way. What sticks in the throats of many of her readers is not her feminism, but her anti-Islamism. It is not patriarchy as a whole that she is battling with, but a specific patriarchy sanctioned by a specific religion. “Islam is strongly dominated by a sexual morality derived from tribal Arab values dating from the time the Prophet received his instructions from Allah, a culture in which women were the property of their fathers … The essence of a woman is reduced to her hymen. Her veil functions as a constant reminder to the outside world of this stifling morality.”.

An excerpt from Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam can be found here in Jewcy

In The Nation, Peter Bergen reviews some new books on the war in Afghanistan.

What went wrong? The books under review supply pieces of that puzzle. Former British diplomat Rory Stewart describes his epic walk across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001, American author Ann Jones recounts the time she spent living in Kabul as an aid worker following the overthrow of the Taliban and American journalist turned aid worker Sarah Chayes writes of the years she lived in Kandahar following the American invasion.

Chayes arrived in Afghanistan as an NPR reporter covering the war against the Taliban. She became disillusioned with the timidity of her editors and decided to embark on a new career as field director of an aid organization, Afghans for Civil Society. It was an often frustrating job: “The whole of Afghan society was suffering from collective PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).” The result, she says, was “an inability to plan for the future. Inability to think beyond one’s own needs, excessive guile.”

Settling in Kandahar, Chayes lived a critical part of the Afghan story often overlooked by international journalists and aid workers, who tend to have an insular, Kabul-centric view of the country. As Chayes explains, foreigners generally settle in the capital and “live apart from Afghans in guarded compounds. They do not walk about, but are driven by chauffeurs.” Chayes, by contrast, lived with a local family, learned Pashto, kept a Kalashnikov by her bed and “loved the place.” If this is cause for a smidgen of self-congratulation, Chayes is entitled to it. Kandahar, located in the middle of a desert that broils in summer and freezes in winter, is a deeply boring, ultraconservative Afghan city that is now quite dangerous for foreigners. For most of us a week’s visit would suffice. Chayes lived there for four years.

Another area where you have made admirable progress is your risk profile. Initially, I was worried that you had a distinct tendency to underweight situational risk. Whether it was wandering casually toward the freeway or nipping at the tail of a 120-pound pit bull, you displayed a distinct inability to assess potential threats. Fortunately, you seem to have made measurable progress in this area, even if it did take the claws of a large tabby to focus your attention on this matter.

All in all, I must applaud the upward trend of most relevant indicators for your development from puppyhood to maturity.

There is, however, one aspect of your behavior that does portend some trouble, and that is your continuing irrational exuberance. While it is understandable that immediately after your arrival you would find everything to cause the most extreme excitement, it seems like a threshold may have been crossed where your excitement must stabilize.

more from McSweeney’s here.

Many of us have at least one book or tale that we read as a child and come back to now and then for the rest of our lives. A child or grandchild to read aloud to provides a good excuse, or we may have the courage to return, quite alone, to Peter Rabbit, for the keen pleasure of reading language in which every word is right, the syntax is a delight in itself and the narrative pacing is miraculous. Revisiting a book loved in childhood may be principally an indulgence in nostalgia; I knew a woman who read The Wizard of Oz every few years because it “made her remember being a child”. But returning to The Snow Queen or Kim, you may well discover a book far less simple and unambiguous than the one you remembered. That shift and deepening of meaning can be a revelation both about the book and about yourself.

more from The New Statesman here.

That’s Georgia. For Aka Morchiladze, this sentence carries the truth and the tragedy of his country. For the majority of people outside Georgia, the name won’t mean much at first. In his home country, Morchiladze is a celebrity author, TV presenter, soap writer, sports columnist and so famous that he coined himself a pseudonym. His real name is Gio Akhvlediani. Outside the Caucasus he is a person with an unpronounceable name whose works are written in a language that looks like the secret code of a children’s book. He has written 25 books. They’ve sold in huge numbers for Georgia. Not one of them has been translated. Until now. Now Munich’s Pendo Verlag has published his book “Santa Esperanza”, and it is, put nicely, the zaniest and most swashbuckling work of the season.

“Santa Esperanza” is not a book, but a collection of small rainbow-coloured booklets in a caramel coloured felt slipcase. “These endless covers, this binding, I wanted something different!” says Mordchiladze. He says it’s not necessary to read the glorious saga of “The Isle of Hope” from start to finish or even right through. He nearly made the end of “Santa Esperanza” into a crossword puzzle. In this light, the little booklets seem almost conservative.

more from Sign and Site here.