In The Guardian, Steven Poole reviews Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com 2.0:

n this revised edition of his 2001 book, Sunstein sticks to his paternalist view that the internet allows you, via blogs or feeds or personalised news services, to filter out unsolicited facts or viewpoints, so that you can end up conversing entirely within a partisan “echo chamber”. For democracy to flourish, Sunstein thinks, “people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance”, which he argues was more likely to happen with old media. Of course, people were never obliged to read newspapers or watch the TV news either, and ignoring what is going on around you is an age-old preference for some. Sunstein never provides any evidence that ignoring what is going on in the world is somehow easier or more likely thanks to the internet, which can after all allow you to find out more about what is going on in the world, if you are so inclined. He wants to regulate the functioning of a communications network, but what he is really annoyed about is people’s desire, or lack of it, for self-education.

Here is a Q&A with Sunstein, and here is Chapter 1 of the book.

From a while ago in the Fall/Winter 2004 issue of Letterspace, but worth a read:

By the mid-1940s, long after Art Deco had left, Neuland’s use in African-American texts remained. Famous African-American books such as Richard Wright’s Native Son and Wulf Sachs’ Black Anger (Plate 20) use Neuland on their covers. Critic Ellen Lupton notes, “Neuland has appeared…on the covers of numerous books…about the literature and anthropology of Africa and African-Americans” (37). Even today, books that fit into the category that Lupton outlines bear Neuland or Lithos on their covers (Plates 21). While the stereotypes associated with the fonts have remained, their applications have, in fact, increased in the present day beyond just book publishing. Neuland has found its way into Hollywood, used in such films as Jurassic Park, Tarzan, and Jumanji. Subaru used Lithos prominently in the logo for their new car, the Outback. Both fonts appear frequently on all sorts of extreme sports paraphernalia. These uses seem to indicate that in addition to Neuland and Lithos’ prior associations with informality, ineptitude, ugliness, cheapness, and unusability, they have since acquired qualities that suggest “jungle,” “safari,” and “adventure”—in short, Africa. Moreover, “stereotypography”—the stereotyping of cultures through typefaces associated with them—has been increasing as graphic design becomes a greater cultural force: just this year, House Industries, a type foundry in New Jersey, released a family of typefaces called “Tiki Type,” which is meant to signify Polynesia (Plate 22); at the same time, Abercrombie & Fitch, a clothing store catering to twentysomethings, created shirts with meaningless Chinese ideograms on them, meant to look as if they came directly from New York’s predominantly Chinese garment district.

[H/t: Linta Varghese]

He believes humanity is near that 1% moment in technological growth. By 2027, he predicts, computers will surpass humans in intelligence; by 2045 or so, we will reach the Singularity, a moment when technology is advancing so rapidly that “strictly biological” humans will be unable to comprehend it.

He has plenty more ideas that may seem Woody Allen – wacky in a Sleeper kind of way (virtual sex as good as or better than the real thing) and occasionally downright disturbing à la 2001: A Space Odyssey (computers will achieve consciousness in about 20 years). But a number of his predictions have had a funny way of coming true.

Back in the 1980s he predicted that a computer would beat the world chess champion in 1998 (it happened in 1997) and that some kind of worldwide computer network would arise and facilitate communication and entertainment (still happening).

His current vision goes way, way past the web, of course. But at least give the guy a hearing. “We are the species that goes beyond our potential,” he says. “Merging with our technology is the next stage in our evolution.”

more from The Spirit of here.

Machu Picchu, or old mountain in Quechua, the primary indigenous language of Peru, has only been a tourist destination for about seventy years. Before it was a postcard, before it was one of the most recognizable archeological sites in the world, reaching the Inca sanctuary took days by mule. The roads were remote and the forest ridge was imposing, even for the most intrepid explorers. The inaccessible land changed hands many times in the colonial period, and were eventually donated to an order of Bethlemite monks, who held onto the property for many decades. The monks left during the 19th century, and a family of Cusco landowners, the Nadals, took over the land as their own through the recently inaugurated Public Registry of Cusco. When, in 1905, Roxanna Abrill’s great-grandfather bought the land from the Nadals, no one suspected he had also gained a priceless treasure. This new owner was a lucky man. His name was Mariano Ignacio Ferro, and when the explorer Hiram Bingham arrived in Cusco in 1911, it was Ferro who offered the American help.

more from VQR here.

More from Cosma on the measurement of intelligence and heritability.

Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid question of what, if anything, g, the supposed general factor of intelligence, tells us about these matters. By calling g a “statistical myth” before, I made clear my conclusion, but none of my reasoning. This topic being what it is, I hardly expect this will change anyone’s mind, but I feel a duty to explain myself.

To summarize what follows below (“shorter sloth”, as it were), the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can’t tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn’t distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.

And Cosma’s valuable sociological insight:

In primitive societies, or so Malinowski taught, myths serve as the legitimating charters of practices and institutions. Just so here: the myth of g legitimates a vast enterprise of intelligence testing and theorizing. There should be no dispute that, when we lack specialized and valid instruments, general IQ tests can be better than nothing. Claims that they are anything more than such stop-gaps — that they are triumphs of psychological science, illuminating the workings of the mind; keys to the fates of individuals and peoples; sources of harsh truths which only a courageous few have the strength to bear; etc., etc., — such claims are at present entirely unjustified, though not, perhaps, unmotivated. They are supported only by the myth, and acceptance of the myth itself rests on what I can only call an astonishing methodological backwardness.

The bottom line is: The sooner we stop paying attention to g, the sooner we can devote our energies to understanding the mind.

The poet William Matthews once said of his classical counterparts that they are “kept alive by a process of continual translation, an enterprise that grows on itself like a coral colony.” Translation is not one act; it is a continuing gesture. There is no such thing as a definitive translation — in fact, there’s nothing definitive in the whole business, not even the dictionaries.

Two new versions of “War and Peace” have emerged this fall, the fruits of tremendous effort on the parts of the prolific translators Andrew Bromfield, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Both are immense gestures.

more from the LA Times here.

From The London Times:

The Museum of Forensic Medicine, where this elephantiasis-swollen body part is to be found, is hidden in a back block of the Siriraj Hospital. Built principally for the education of medical students, it’s actually six museums that were united in August 2004 into a low-budget palace of the macabre. But it’s the exhibits to be found in the parasitology, pathology and forensic departments that will revisit you in your dreams. Here you’ll find chain saws, guns and kitchen knives used in murders, along with the bloodstained clothing of the victims; diseased livers and legs; lungs with stab wounds; and heads that have been dissected and suspended in formaldehyde so you can see where the bullet went through.

Because these exhibits are housed in a converted office block, it feels less like a museum and more like a repository for the private collection of an insane millionaire. And, for what is ostensibly supposed to be a place of education, there’s a surprising lack of actual information. Mostly, it’s display cabinets marked by a simple label.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

One of three successful candidates from Latin America, Machu Picchu is a 15th-century mountain settlement in the Amazon region of Peru.

The ruined city is among the best known remnants of the Inca civilization, which flourished in the Andes region of western South America. The city is thought to have been abandoned following an outbreak of deadly smallpox, a disease introduced in the 1500s by invading Spanish forces.

More here.   (For Ga via Akbi).

Steven Poole reviews the book in The Guardian:

Cameron argues persuasively that the Mars and Venus myth does threaten women. Consistently, as she shows, aspects of the way our society is currently structured are taken to be clues to some basic difference in the nature of men and women, which always turns out to be to women’s disadvantage, a “natural” reason to keep them in lower-status roles. Cameron discusses Simon Baron-Cohen’s book, The Essential Difference, which posits a distinction between the male and female brains and concludes that “people with the female brain”, supposedly more empathetic, are better at jobs such as nursing (just as Rosalind’s notion of “Women’s gentle brain” would predict), and the male-brained, supposedly more analytical, make better lawyers. Cameron comments aptly that nurses also need to be analytical and lawyers need people skills: “These categorisations are not based on a dispassionate analysis of the demands made by the two jobs. They are based on the everyday common-sense knowledge that most nurses are women and most lawyers are men.”

Some gender differences do exist: for example “Men are more aggressive and can throw things further.” But even then, there is as much if not more variability within the groups as between them. Your correspondent cannot throw anything as far as Tessa Sanderson threw her javelins. Ethnographic studies of young girls in LA or male university students, meanwhile, show the girls acting confrontationally and the boys gossiping. Nor does the inherently “speculative” nature of evolutionary psychology inspire Cameron’s confidence. Where there do seem to be empirically attested variations between women’s and men’s language use, such as that women use more “tag questions” (“It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”), Cameron argues that this, again, is owed to the present gender-biased distribution of social roles. That men and women habitually “miscommunicate” owing to some notion of direct versus indirect speech-habits is also, as she shows, a useful get-out clause for men, as well as being highly implausible. Cameron cites a rape case in which the accused claimed he didn’t know the woman was not consenting, and ripostes: “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that someone who feigns unconsciousness while in bed with you probably doesn’t want to have sex.”

From the Introduction:

It is significant that we have reached a point in human history at which further attempts to make the world a better place will have to include not only changes to the world, but also changes to humanity, perhaps with the consequence that we, or our descendants, will cease to be human in the sense in which we now understand that idea. This possibility of a new phase of evolution in which Darwinian evolution, by natural selection, will be replaced by a deliberately chosen process of selection, the results of which, instead of having to wait the millions of years over which Darwinian evolutionary change has taken place, will be seen and felt almost immediately. This new process of evolutionary change will replace natural selection with deliberate selection, Darwinian evolution with “enhancement evolution.”

One of the ways in which philosophy can contribute to a better world is to help clear away the bad arguments that stand as much in the way of human progress and human happiness as do reactionary forces of a political and even of a military kind. When new technologies are announced, the first reaction is often either “wow—this is amazing!” or “yuck—this is sick!” This book is about the reasons and arguments that underlie both reactions, and about how it can sometimes be rational to move from “yuck!” to “wow!”

In news@nature:

Hold the doors please: teams are scrambling in Utah this weekend to prove that their technologies are the best if you want to get to space in an elevator. The 2007 Space Elevator Games will take place at the Davis County Event Center, after a week of frenetic preparations and qualifying rounds hampered by rain and high winds.

The idea of a space elevator is to allow cheap and easy transport of supplies and people to and from a station (or space hotel) in orbit around Earth. The idea has been around for decades, but the technologies needed to support it have yet to be created.

To promote development, the California-based non-profit Spaceward Foundation has hosted an annual competition since 2005, supported by a cash prize from NASA. Competing teams don’t have to build an actual elevator, but instead aim to build a super-strong tether (similar to what would be needed to support a real elevator), or get a robot to climb a suspended ribbon.

Over at MIT, a video of Marvin Minsky’s discussion of AI and commonsense:

Marvin Minsky is worried that after making great strides in its infancy, AI has lost its way, getting bogged down in different theories of machine learning. Researchers “have tried to invent single techniques that could deal with all problems, but each method works only in certain domains.” Minsky believes we’re facing an AI emergency, since soon there won’t be enough human workers to perform the necessary tasks for our rapidly aging population.

So while we have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, we don’t have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case. For “a machine to have common sense, it must know 50 million such things,” and like a human, activate different kinds of expertise in different realms of thought, says Minsky.

Minsky suggests that such a machine should, like humans, have a very high-level, rule-based system for recognizing certain kinds of problems.

Richard Skinner in Ekklesia:

Now I think the critics of Richard Dawkins are in the main quite right. I say ‘in the main’ because Dawkins does make a number of valid points, particularly relating to the role of religion, and Christianity in particular, in the life of this country; but I agree that a large proportion of his book is indeed based on error. However, I don’t think it right for us to say, “Ah, well, not only theologians but even atheists have demonstrated where Dawkins has gone wrong, therefore we don’t have to take his views seriously.”

We do have to take his views seriously, for more than one reason. Wilson suggests, and I agree with him, that Christians should be grateful to Dawkins, because “he has gathered together all of the best arguments against God’s existence in one place, with the intention of debating them publicly.” Quite so, but I think there’s another reason to listen to Dawkins. It’s this: theological writers and others can point out at length that what Dawkins does is to set up a straw man – or rather, a straw God – and then demolish it; they can show that Dawkins has not really got to grips at all with a true understanding of God and the religious dimension; but the straw God that Dawkins sets up and then demolishes is often uncomfortably close to the notion of God that we Christians all too frequently seem to talk about, pray to and worship.

What Dawkins demolishes in this book may well be a misrepresentation of God, but it is a misrepresentation, an idol, that we Christians all too have often set up and espoused as the real thing. We should listen to Dawkins because doing so can help us reflect on what we claim to believe, or think we believe, or imply that we believe. His views can act as an acid to eat away the false and phoney elements of our faith.

In Dissent, Michael Walzer, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sohail Hashmi, and Gerard Powers debate the case for withdrawing from Iraq. Sohail Hashmi:

The civil war may continue, and it may even escalate. But, quite frankly, this is a war we cannot win for the Iraqis.

On the other hand, the shock of America’s departure may just provide the catalyst for the Iraqis to start working to resolve their own problems. America’s departure from Iraq may well provide the impetus for regional powers to play a constructive role, rather than watching Iraq burn as if it is in another city rather than in their own backyard. The terrorists won’t give up their battle, and they may even claim they have won. But so what? They are claiming that already. They are claiming that today.

That’s her, ladies and gentlemen. That’s my wife. Yes, we are actually married.

If elected, I pledge that same woman—who is a full six years younger than my eldest son—will be by my side at all state dinners, dressed to the nines, causing the Chinese delegation’s jaws to drop in amazement at her gravity-defying rack.

This is my solemn vow to all Americans.

I am aware of the critics who doubt my ability to deliver on this promise. “What about Jackie Kennedy?” they ask. “Wasn’t she a hotter first lady?” If all America cares about is hotness from the neck up, then yes. Though Jackie looked good in a pillbox hat, she never possessed that I-have-obvious-father-issues sort of hotness the people of this country appreciate so deeply. Go on, close your eyes and try picturing Jackie Kennedy on the cover of some magazine spilling out of a bikini. You can’t do it, can you? Now try the same mental experiment with Mrs. Fred. The results speak for themselves.

I say America deserves hotter.

more from The Onion here.

“Yes, we’ve got a video!”

“A package from the Transvaal … how strange!”

“Bad for society … when the kids start to get into it!”

It’ll be difficult for readers under the age of 30 to believe, but if you were watching TV between 1982 and 1984, these phrases are like “Garlic bread!”, “I’m Rick James, bitch!” and Andy Pipkin’s “Yeah, I know” all rolled into one. They helped cement The Young Ones’ reputation as the high watermark of 1980s comedy. This month marks 25 years since the airing of the first episode, Demolition, and sees the rerelease of all 12 shows on DVD. In a fittingly iconoclastic gesture, that episode ended with the entire cast being wiped out in a plane crash; but then logic and continuity were never the show’s strong points. Rather, it was their disregard for convention that people found most endearing about The Young Ones, and this stemmed largely from producer Paul Jackson, who cobbled together the best new acts appearing at The Comedy Store, then London’s pivotal alternative comedy venue. Bar the 1980 BBC2 showcase Boom Boom … Out Go The Lights, the cast and crew had virtually no TV experience, which Jackson turned to his advantage.

more from The Guardian here.

If I had read “Fire in the Blood” knowing nothing of its author or the circumstances of its composition, I would have guessed it was by some elegist of the French countryside like Jean Giono. Knowing that Némirovsky completed this book about the timeless fire of love at the very moment an all-too-historical fire of hatred was snaking through France adds a painful poignancy to the reading experience. One can’t help wondering whether the deeply held secrets at the heart of the plot had anything to do with Némirovsky’s own double life as she tried desperately to blend into an ordinary village in extraordinary times. With the return to print of four of Némirovsky’s earlier novels (including “David Golder”) planned for the coming months, we will soon be in a better position to judge precisely where this modest melodrama belongs in the larger achievement of a complex and remarkable writer.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times:

Children, even good children, hide some part of their private lives from their parents; and parents, having been young and furtive themselves, remember the impulse. So when Ruth Ramsey, the divorced 41-year-old mother who is the protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” learns that her teenage daughter, Eliza (who could be a grumpy, pimply poster child for “The Awkward Years”), has concealed a book from her, she’s not surprised. “She must have kept it hidden in a drawer or under a mattress,” she reflects — just as she herself once hid books like “The Godfather” and “The Happy Hooker.” But the book Eliza has been keeping under wraps is not a pulp fiction fable of vice and libertinage: it’s the Bible. And Eliza has yet another secret to spring on her mother: she and her little sister, Maggie, want to start going to church. To Ruth, a tolerant, progressive sex-ed teacher, her daughters’ embrace of “Goody Two-Shoes Christianity” comes as a slap in the face. “I don’t think you’re a born-again, fundamentalist, evangelical, nut-job Christian,” she tells Eliza, not imagining she would disagree. “I believe in God,” Eliza stubbornly replies. “And I believe that Jesus is His only son, and that He died on the cross for my sins.”

Ruth is a protective mother and wants a say in whom her daughters choose for friends. But can a parent tell her kids she thinks Jesus is a bad influence and retain the moral high ground?

More here.

From Science:

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, has made many controversial remarks over the years. But telling a British newspaper that, in effect, blacks are intellectually inferior to whites seems to have landed him in unprecedented trouble. Last evening, as public criticism of those remarks swelled to a crescendo, the Board of Trustees of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Long Island, New York, stripped Watson of his title as chancellor of the 117-year-old institution.

Watson has been at CSHL for nearly 4 decades, having become its director in 1968. He became president of the lab in 1994 and chancellor in 2004. Although not involved in the lab’s day-to-day administration, Watson undoubtedly remains its most celebrated public face–so much so that its fledgling graduate school bears his name. But now the institution is trying hard to distance itself from the 79-year-old Nobelist. In an article that ran in The Sunday Times magazine on 14 October, Watson explained that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours–whereas all the testing says not really.”

Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, said yesterday in a statement. “He has failed us in the worst possible way. It is a sad and revolting way to end a remarkable career.”

More here.