From The Harvard Gazette:

In 1976, in the education journal Change, President Derek Bok famously asked, “Can ethics be taught?” At the time, few universities and even fewer faculty specialized in ethics; philosophers rarely applied their moral insights to real-world problems; and doctors, lawyers, businesspersons, and policymakers usually had little or no ethics training, even as the world was becoming increasingly complicated in matters of often long-ranging moral import.

By 1986, though, Bok was starting an initiative that would ultimately help to change all that. He brought Dennis Thompson to Harvard as the founding director of the University Center for Ethics and the Professions, an institution that last week celebrated its 20th anniversary as the now-endowed Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. A yearlong series of special events culminated over the weekend (May 19-20) with a conference that featured Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy, giving the keynote address, and with the panel discussions “Justice: True in Theory but Not in Practice?” and “University Ethics” featuring pre-eminent scholars from the fields of law, medicine, government, politics, and philosophy.

Sen discussed a wide range of topics regarding ethics, a subject on which he said — paraphrasing Edmund Burke — “It is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.” He parsed how theory gives rise to practice, noting that “agreement on theory is not, in general, a prerequisite of agreement on policy” while at the same time, “a theory need not be so rigidly structured that it always guarantees an invariably definitive conclusion about the rightness of actions.” Recalling the French Revolution and America’s current war in Iraq, he noted that “the need for removing moral disagreement in theory may not, in fact, be compelling,” adding, “Indeed, the guillotine is not the only way of moving from theory to practice.”

More here.

From Science:

As a northeasterly wind whips against the shore, a meters-long dinosaur plunges into the shallow lake. Working hard, the predator takes strong strides with its hind limbs through the shoulder-deep water. The current is so strong that the beast must constantly fight to stay on course, but it succeeds, heading straight across the water. That’s the story told by a remarkable set of fossilized footprints, described in the June issue of Geology, that provide the first hard evidence of predatory dinosaurs traveling in water.

The 125-million year-old trackway was discovered in 2004 during excavations at a famous fossil site in Northern Spain, called the La Virgen del Campo track site. The site had yielded many tracks of dinosaurs walking on land, so a team led by paleontologists Rubén Ezquerra of the Fundación Patrimonio Paleontológico de La Rioja, Spain, and Loïc Costeur of the Université de Nantes came looking for more in an untapped layer of rock. To their surprise, they found a set of footprints unlike any they had seen before.

With three telltale toemarks on each print, the tracks clearly belonged to a major group of bipedal, carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods. But the tracks themselves were different. When theropods walk on land, they typically leave claw marks and an imprint of the foot itself. The lack of the footprint suggested that this animal was not supporting its weight. A sedimentologist on the team confirmed that ripple marks in the stone had been created by currents in water 3.2 meters deep.

More here.

In the American Political Science Review, Dan Nexon and Thomas Wright on what hinges on the answer to “Is there is an American Empire?”:

In informal empires the lines between influence and rule necessarily blur. When actors believe that certain options are “off the table” because of an asymmetric (if tacit) contract, or consistently comply with the wishes of another because they recognize steep costs from noncompliance, then the relationship between the two becomes effectively one between ruler and ruled (Barnett and Duvall 2005, 63). Recall that one of the fundamental processes of imperial rule involves the ongoing negotiation of contractual bargains between a variety of actors. Intermediaries and local actors may, in theory, opt to reject or renegotiate any aspect of the imperial bargain. They may decide not to because they accept the legitimacy of the bargain, out of habit, or because they fear imperial sanction. The fact that such sanctions may involve the loss of crucial military, economic, or political support rather than the use of force does not render the relationship nonimperial (Barkawi and Laffey 1999).

These considerations shed important light on the salience of imperial structures and dynamics in American foreign relations. The American-led invasion of Iraq, for instance, currently positions the United States in an imperial relationship with that country. The United States negotiates and renegotiates asymmetric contracts with other states—–such as its bargains with Pakistan concerning counterterrorism policy—–that place foreign leaders in the structural location of local intermediaries between U.S. demands and their own domestic constituencies (e.g., Lieven 2002). Its basing agreements incorporate many of the hallmarks of imperial bargains (Johnson 2000). But “American empire” is not a phenomenon restricted to the post-Cold War or post-9/11 world. Most of the architecture of contemporary imperial relations in American foreign policy developed during the Cold War (e.g., Bacevich 2002). Decades-long geopolitical developments have, in fact, tended to render American relations less, rather than more, imperial in character.

Daniel Ben-Ami in Spiked:

When Wolfowitz took over as the head of the World Bank in 2005 he too made corruption central to his approach. The differences between himself and Wolfensohn on the issue were of detail rather than substance. Where they did differ was on their political affiliations. Wolfensohn was widely seen as a liberal. Wolfowitz, in contrast, was vilified as a neo-conservative representative of the Bush administration and architect of the Iraq invasion of 2003.

No doubt it was the Bush connections that made Wolfowitz unpopular with many European governments and World Bank staff. They disliked him before the scandal over his girlfriend’s job broke. The dispute over her finances simply provided an opportunity for the critics to attack his integrity. Rather than question his political approach, they simply accused him of hypocrisy.

This attack on individual moral failures follows a pattern that has become established in Western countries in recent years.

In The Nation, Richard J. Evans reviews Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941, on the key decisions that led to the specific unfolding of WWII.

If Britain sued for peace, he said, it would be forced to disarm and become a slave state, under a puppet government run by British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. In the event, the French decided to go it alone; their peace feelers were rudely rebuffed by Mussolini, who did indeed want to “take his whack.” Nearly 225,000 British troops were evacuated from the Continent at Dunkirk, an event that Churchill’s stirring rhetoric remarkably turned from a calamitous defeat into some sort of victory. And Britain fought on.

What would have happened if Halifax and his allies had carried the day in the Cabinet? Here, following Churchill’s lead, Kershaw engages in some fascinating counterfactual speculation. Certainly, he argues, in the event of a peace between Britain and Germany in May or June 1940, Hitler would have demanded the sacking of the Churchill administration. But more likely as a successor than the unpopular and discredited Mosley would have been a widely admired politician such as David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister in World War I and a self-professed admirer of Hitler. Lloyd George indeed envisaged a role of this sort, possibly under a restored King Edward VIII, whose sympathies with Nazi Germany and belief in the need for a separate peace with Hitler were also on record. This would have been something like the regime installed in France in 1940 under the hero of France’s army in World War I, Marshal Philippe Pétain, though initially at least without its Fascist leanings. A rival government, possibly under Churchill, might have been set up in Canada. But with Britain effectively on Germany’s side, the swelling tide of American aid would have been stopped, and Hitler would have been free to marshal all his forces, whenever he wanted to, for the long-desired invasion of the Soviet Union.

Also in re-public, Paul Hartzog on the politics of a networked, peer-to-peer society:

Panarchy is the emerging system of sociopolitical activity that we might refer to as the “wiki-fication” of society. By “wikification,” I refer to the rise of mass participation systems, that include 1) software production, or “open source,” 2) knowledge production, e.g. wikipedia, or 3) group/identity production, e.g. communities. Mass participation is enabled by the recent spread of connective network technologies, from cell phones to the Internet. Panarchy emerges when these connective technologies, which lower the threshold for collective action, enable cooperative peer-to-peer production – of knowledge, of tools, of power.

Network technologies, because they increase human connectivity, increase both the speed and frequency of human interaction. But more connectivity also means more complexity, and therefore more unpredictability. As small events cascade into large ones, power becomes distributed throughout the system, at once everywhere and nowhere. The outcome of all of this is nothing less than the transformation of civilization. Where the current system is hierarchical, centralized, and differentiated, the new system is anarchical, diffuse, and overlapping. Where the current system marginalizes and represses difference, the new system generates difference in order to create, explore, and adapt to future possibilities and uncertainties. Where the current system reduces human labour to proprietary economic production, the new system consists of many modes of human labour and the production of open commons. And finally, where the current system institutionalizes static structures, the new system exhibits complex dynamics – it is a field whose elements and relations are continuously coalescing and dissolving, the whole field of which is called panarchy.

In re-public, Richard Dawkins on time:

For poets, time is anything but an illusion. They hear its wingèd chariot hurrying near; they aspire to leave footprints on the sands of it; wish there was more of it – to stand and stare ; invite it to put up its caravan, just for one day. Proverbs declare procrastination to be the thief of it; or they compute, with improbable precision, the ratio of stitches saved in it. Archaeologists excavate rose-red cities half as old it. Pub landlords announce it gentlemen please . We waste it, spend it, eke it out, squander it, kill it.

Long before there were clocks or calendars, we – indeed all animals and plants – measured out our lives by the cycles of astronomy. By the wheeling of those great clocks in the sky: the rotation of the earth on its axis, the rotation of the earth around the sun, and the rotation of the moon around the earth.

By the way, it’s surprising how many people think the earth is closer to the sun in summer than in winter. If this were really so, Australians would have their winter at the same time as ours. A glaring example of such Northern Hemisphere Chauvinism was the science fiction story in which a group of space travellers, far out in some distant star system, waxed nostalgic for the home planet: “Just to think that it’s spring back on Earth!”

In The Hollywood Reporter (via Crooked Timber):

Haitian auteur Raoul Peck will direct “Karl Marx,” tracing the young adventures of the German philosopher and revolutionary, producer Jacques Bidou said Thursday.

The picture will cover the period 1830-1848, including Marx’s time in Paris before being expelled to Brussels and culminating with the publication of the Communist Manifesto. “Marx was considered a young genius at the time, but it was also a period marked by the birth of a great movement in thinking,” Bidou said.

The story also will encompass Marx’s love for his aristocratic wife Jenny von Westphalen, and his friendship with Friedrich Engels, with whom he co-authored the Manifesto.

No cast is yet attached, but Bidou said the principal characters will necessarily be young. “Raoul very definitely wants to make this a film for a wide public,” he said.

The English-language movie will be produced by Bidou’s JBA Prods. and, with a budget of about $20 million, will be the Paris-based production house’s most ambitious project to date.

In Edwin Abbott’s 1884 classic Flatland, a religious allegory about geometry, a very sensible Square discovers the existence of Spaceland, a mysterious world of three dimensions. Thrilled with his knowledge, he tries to tell the public what he’s seen, only to be imprisoned for heresy. Similar daring and dimension-crossing dreams appear in the Drawing Center’s marvelous exhibit of work by Gertrud Goldschmidt, the German-born Venezuelan artist known as Gego, who gave grids, arcs, polygons, and squiggles enchanting lives of mass and motion.

more from The Village Voice here.

Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and on many continents, interdisciplinary conferences about consciousness draw together bizarre motleys that include philosophers, psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, computer scientists, the Dalai Lama, novelists, neurologists, graphic artists, priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics. Institutes of consciousness studies are bountifully subsidised. Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated and the introspectable. There is no end of consciousness gossip on Tuesdays in the science section of the New York Times. Periodically, Nobel laureates pronounce on the connections between consciousness and evolution, quantum mechanics, information theory, complexity theory, chaos theory and the activity of neural nets. Everybody gives lectures about consciousness to everybody else. But for all that, nothing has been ascertained with respect to the problem that everybody worries about most: what philosophers have come to call ‘the hard problem’. The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?

more from the LRB here.

From Science:

A team of mathematicians has set a new record for factoring a large number into primes, breaking a massive 307-digit number into its three indivisible factors and besting the previous mark by 30 digits. Written as a binary string of zeros and ones, the number is 1017 places or “bits” long–nearly as long as the 1024-bit numbers currently used to encode electronic messages–and the researchers’ method of using a network of computers raises the prospect of hijacking PC and video-game systems to try to crack codes. However, security experts say they’re confident they can stay ahead of would-be hackers.

In fact, Play Station 3 video-game systems, which are optimized for number crunching and typically connected to the Internet, could provide a useful resource for such chicanery. Kleinjung and his colleagues are now trying to get their hands on a substantial number of Play Stations. “We want to have thousands of them, or ten thousands, and see what analytic potential they may have,” says Lenstra.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Do you think Seattle is the rainiest city in the United States? Well, think again. Mobile, Ala., actually topped a new list of soggiest cities in the contiguous 48 states, with more than 5 feet of rainfall annually, according to a study conducted by San Francisco-based WeatherBill, Inc. The 10 rainiest cities in the U.S. by amount of annual rainfall include:

1. Mobile, Ala.: 67 inches average annual rainfall; 59 average annual rainy days
2. Pensacola, Fla.: 65 inches average annual rainfall; 56 average annual rainy days
3. New Orleans, La.: 64 inches average annual rainfall; 59 average annual rainy days
4. West Palm Beach, Fla.: 63 inches average annual rainfall; 58 average annual rainy days
5. Lafayette, La.: 62 inches average annual rainfall; 55 average annual rainy days
6. Baton Rouge, La.: 62 inches average annual rainfall; 56 average annual rainy days
7. Miami, Fla.: 62 inches average annual rainfall; 57 average annual rainy days
8. Port Arthur, Texas: 61 inches average annual rainfall; 51 average annual rainy days
9. Tallahassee, Fla.: 61 inches average annual rainfall; 56 average annual rainy days
10. Lake Charles, La.: 58 inches average annual rainfall; 50 average annual rainy days

More here.

In a recent international debate, developing in the New York Review of Books and on Signandsight.com, you have been opposed to Tariq Ramadan. He has been banned from the U.S., and there are those who wish he were not invited to speak in Rome, like in Udine, some weeks ago.

I am a liberal in the classical liberal sense, so I do not like what Tariq Ramadan says. In fact, I think his message is the worst kind of message against liberalism, but in a free society, we have to give even those who have ideas that we do not like the freedom to debate them with us. I think this is a characteristic of this civilization. The European and Western civilization relies on that idea. So for him and me to debate, and for him to come to Rome, the US or France is fine. But what he is saying and campaigning for is against liberal and liberalism. Let Ramadan speak, and let us refute what he says, because the message that he wants to convey is more embarrassing than his presence. I have been in debate with him, and seen that he gets very angry when I touched on the core issue of what he says. He wants to take away fundamental freedoms from you and from me, and put them in the hands of God. And when I told him “If you do that for yourself it is fine, but why are you propagating it?”, then he got very angry.

more from RESET here.

This all began on a very long plane ride, East Coast to West, when I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” her book about Abraham Lincoln and his political competitors, and how, in the course of the Civil War, he turned them into a collegial Cabinet. It is a well-told, many-sided story, which attempts to give context to Lincoln without diminishing him, to place him among his peers and place him above them, too.

Coming to the end of the book, to the night of April 14, 1865, and Lincoln’s assassination, I reached the words that were once engraved in every American mind. At 7:22 A.M., as Lincoln drew his last breath, all the worthies who had crowded into a little back bedroom in a boarding house across the street from Ford’s Theatre turned to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s formidable Secretary of War, for a final word. Stanton is the one with the long comic beard and the spinster’s spectacles, who in the photographs looks a bit like Mr. Pickwick but was actually the iron man in the Cabinet, and who, after a difficult beginning, had come to revere Lincoln as a man and a writer and a politician—had even played something like watchful Horatio to his tragic Hamlet. Stanton stood still, sobbing, and then said, simply, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

more from The New Yorker here.

There was a sense in both of these books that Eggers was in danger of disappearing up his own irony. However much he wanted to care, his literary defence mechanisms and his slightly uncomfortable celebrity placed him at several removes from the world. It is easy to see how meeting Valentino Achak Deng might represent a way out of that dead-end. By adopting Achak’s voice, Eggers could play it entirely straight without losing credibility. He could do away with smartness and ennui, the apparatus of self-promotion and self-deprecation. He could tell a heartbreaking tale and not bother with the staggering genius.

Often, in its catalogue of horror, What Is the What has the starkness – and style – of a Human Rights Watch report. Eggers frames Achak’s story with the brutal reality of his life in America (which may or may not be factual). Much of the ‘Lost Boy’s’ biography is replayed in his head while he lies bound and gagged on the floor of his Atlanta apartment, which is being ransacked by burglars; having fought so long and hard for his American identity, he is mute and referred to by the gangsters simply as ‘Africa’.

more from The Guardian here.

From Ego:

Official selection at the Toronto, Berlin and AFI film festivals, and winner of the FIPRESCI (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique/ International Federation of Film Critics) award, Shonali Bose’s movie Amu releases on May 25th in select theatres in New York Citybefore embarking on openings across the US.

While the movie opens with the story of a young Indian-American girl’s foray into her adopted past in India, its main subject matter is the anti-Sikh riots following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of Indiaat the hands of her Sikh guards in 1984. As a result it has had its share of controversy as noted in the publicity materials – “Hailed by renowned director Mira Nair as “courageous, honest, [and] compelling,” Bose’s provocative film comes to the U.S. after its controversial run in India, where it was censored for its brave indictment of the Indian government’s role in the Delhi riots that followed the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Sikhs.”

More here.

E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post:

Boy, it would be fun if Al Gore changed his mind and ran for president — fun for the voters, anyway. Imagine a candidate whose preelection book is devoted in large part to an attack on the media for waging war on reason.

Politicians, it is often said, never win by attacking the media. That’s simply not true. Conservatives have been attacking the media for decades, to good effect from their point of view. Their intimidation sometimes worked — go back to the coverage of the 2000 Florida recount if you want to see media bias. When intimidation fails, they declare inconvenient facts to be merely “liberal” opinions.

It’s delightful to see the critique coming from the other side. Gore’s book, “The Assault on Reason,” to be released today, is about “the strangeness of our public discourse” as mediated through television….

…Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.

More here.

Christopher Hamlin reviews The Ghost Map: The Study of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson, and The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera by Sandra Hempel, in American Scientist:

To epidemiologists, the London doctor John Snow (1813-1858) is no mere pioneer—he is an icon for the discipline, whose still-cited work represents a common core of method and rigor. In the treatise for which he is famous, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1855), Snow elucidated the means by which the disease was spread during the London epidemics of 1848-1849 and of 1853-1854: through fecal-oral transmission of a specific pathogenic agent in contaminated water. He reached this conclusion chiefly on the basis of two natural experiments.

First was the investigation Snow made in the summer of 1854 of an area of south London served by two water companies, one using an upstream source, the other drawing from the sewage-ridden tidal Thames. Because these rival companies had at one point competed head to head, some streets had beneath them mains from both companies, with adjacent homes relying on one or the other for service. Such conditions permitted something like an accidental randomization of every variable except water source. But Snow found profound differences between the two companies (nearly an order of magnitude, he claimed) in the number of cholera deaths per household served.

Better known is Snow’s mapping of cases of cholera in Soho near the Broad Street pump, a hand-operated affair that served up drinking water from a shallow well. There Snow focused on a sudden eruption of cholera within a single densely populated neighborhood. He showed that use of water from the Broad Street pump was a common factor in almost all of the cholera deaths and also that nonuse of that water was a characteristic of two groups (workhouse residents and brewery workers) that suffered little from the disease. In likening the behavior of the apparent cholera agent to a living thing, Snow is often listed as a pioneer of the germ theory. Empirically, he predicted the characteristics of Vibrio cholerae, the organism that Robert Koch would identify almost three decades later (and which Filippo Pacini had described much earlier, at about the same time that Snow was carrying out his investigations).

More here.

Taylor Dinerman in The Space Review:

Solar power from both the Moon and from satellites would provide energy for operations in space and could be beamed down to Earth using either lasers or microwaves. The great advantage of beamed power is that it does not have to be transmitted across the giant transcontinental grids as it done today. Multiple solar power satellites, along with a large set of arrays on the Moon, would be the basis of a system that would be far more robust and reliable than our current one, which suffers from occasional blackouts such as the one suffered along the US East Coast in August 2003, or the terrorist campaign that is being carried out today against the Iraqi electricity grid.

Distributed receiver antennas (rectennas) would receive power directly from space and would be easier to isolate from a large grid than is the case with today’s large power plants. It is also the case that it would be fairly easy to replace one beam with another in case a satellite or lunar array went down.

More here.