From the BBC:
Some of English literature’s greatest masterpieces have been condensed into a few lines of text message to help students revise for exams.
The service condenses classic works such as Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice into a handy aide-memoire.
For example, Hamlet’s famous line: “To be or not to be, that is the question” becomes “2b? Nt2b? ???”.
A university professor claims it “amply demonstrates text’s ability to fillet out the important elements in a plot”.
The $100 laptop for the poor which Josh posted on, is unveiled by the UN.
A prototype of a cheap and robust laptop for pupils has been welcomed as an “expression of global solidarity” by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The green machine was showcased for the first time by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte at the UN net summit in Tunis.
He plans to have millions of machines in production within a year.
The laptops are powered with a wind-up crank, have very low power consumption and will let children interact with each other while learning.
“Children will be able to learn by doing, not just through instruction – they will be able to open up new fronts for their education, particularly peer-to-peer learning,” said Mr Annan.
He added that the initiative was “inspiring”, and held the promise of special and economic development for children in developing countries.
From The Guardian:
For two decades, evening commuters have come to sip coppery brown tea at Laxman Rao’s roadside stall on a busy South Delhi main road, to the sound of the blaring horns of passing traffic. But in recent years, customers come not for sugary chai but for a taste of Rao’s bittersweet words. Rao is the author of 18 novels, plays and political essays in Hindi, India’s national language which is thought to vie with Spanish to be the world’s third most-spoken mother tongue. Like most Hindi novelists he considers writing stories a calling, one he supports with the 4,000 rupees (£50) a month he makes from selling tea. “For 20 years I have made no money from my books.”
In the last few years English, which bound together a nation of 800 tongues and dialects and connected India to the outside world, has faced a challenge from native languages. As literacy levels rise in India, there is a palpable shift to a more subcontinental lingua franca and Hindi’s reach is lengthening. Although it is spoken by half of India’s 1 billion people, its writing is absent in the literary canon of India, which is dominated by exiles such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. “I do not read these books. They do not talk about the India I know,” says Rao. “The stories do not mean anything to me or people like me. India lives in villages, small towns, on streets. The authors do not.”
More here.
From 
MSNBC News:
Many insects go back and forth between their nests and a food source multiple times. But if the route to the food is very similar to the route away from it, then the foragers might get confused and not know which way to go. Different insects have different ways of dealing with this problem. Bees use the sun as their compass. But ants use visual landmarks and let their stomachs guide their way, a new study finds. Wood ants were trained to walk in a straight line alongside a black wall to reach a sugar reward at the other end. In this way, the ants learned that the wall would be on their left side when walking towards the sugar but on their right side when walking away from it back home.
More here.
Kathleen Koman in Harvard Magazine:
Nociceptive or somaticpain — a normal response to noxious stimuli — is essential for life. It tells you to pull your hand away from a flame or withdraw your mouth from a cup of hot coffee. If you break an ankle, the pain keeps you from walking around on it, so the bone can heal. Nociceptors are sensory receptors, or nerve endings, that react to mechanical, thermal, and chemical stimuli that may damage tissues. They relay nerve impulses — electrical messages from the site of injury in peripheral tissues such as skin, muscles, and joints — to the dorsal horn, an area in the spinal cord that acts as a switchboard. There, different chemicals determine whether these electrical messages reach your brain, where you actually perceive pain.
Nociceptive pain is very clear, says professor of anesthesiology Carol A. Warfield, chief of anesthesia, critical care, and pain medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. When you cut your finger, she says, you know darn well that it’s your finger that hurts; in fact, you could close your eyes and easily identify the location of the cut. Usually you feel a sharp pain, then throbbing, and finally, after a short time, the pain goes away. Pain that occurs suddenly and has a real, definable source is considered acute pain. Rapid in onset and relatively short in duration, it generally follows a traumatic event such as a bone fracture or a surgical procedure, but can occur in other situations, such as when a hemophiliac suffers internal bleeding. Doctors often treat acute pain with strong drugs, knowing that it will fade as the healing process takes over.
Sometimes, however, the pain message system goes awry, says Warfield, and people perceive pain for much longer than it’s useful.
More here.
Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:
This story starts in 1987, with the skin of a frog.
Michael Zasloff, a scientist then at NIH, was impressed by how well a frog in his lab recovered from an incision he had made in its skin during an experiment. He kept his frogs in a tank that must have been rife with bacteria that should have turned the incision into a deadly maw of infection. Zasloff wondered if something in the skin of the frog was blocking the bacteria. After months of searching, he found it. The frogs produced an antibiotic radically unlike the sort that doctors prescribed their patients.
Most antibiotics kill bacteria by jamming up their enzymes. The bacteria can no longer copy its DNA or expand its membrane as it grows or do some other task essential to their survival, and they die. Zasloff and his colleagues figured out that the antibiotics in frog skin worked entirely differently. These small molecules were attracted to the positive charge on the surface of many species of bacteria. Once they stuck to the membrane, the frog molecules changed shape, so that they punched a hole through the membrane. The bacteria’s innards spilled out of the hole, leading to their death.
The antibiotics from frog skin proved to be just a tiny sampling of a huge natural pharmacy.
More here.
William Dalrymple in the New York Review of Books:
Shortly before four British Muslims, three of them of Pakistani origin, blew themselves up in the London Underground on July 7, I traveled along the Indus River to Akora Khattack in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Here, straddling the noisy, truck-thundering Islamabad highway, stands the Haqqania, one of the most radical of the religious schools called madrasas.
Many of the Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, were trained at this institution. If its teachings have been blamed for inspiring the brutal, ultra-conservative incarnation of Islamic law that that regime presided over, there is no sign that the Haqqania is ashamed of its former pupils: instead, the madrasa’s director, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, still proudly boasts that whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters, he would simply close down the madrasa and send his students off to fight. In many ways, then, Akora Khattack represents everything that US policymakers most fear and dislike in this region, a bastion of religious, intellectual, and sometimes—in the form of the Taliban—military resistance to Pax Americana and all it represents.
More here.
From the BBC:
Hornby’s A Long Way Down and Rushdie’s Shalimar The Clown compete with Ali Smith’s The Accidental and The Ballad of Lee Cotton by Christopher Wilson.
Rachel Zadok – a finalist on a How to Get Published contest on TV’s Richard and
Judy show – is up for first novel.
All category winners and the overall book of the year selection will be announced on 4 January.
This year’s awards, which also includes categories for poetry collection, biography and children’s book, had 476 entries, the highest ever total for the Whitbread.
More here.
Alison Motluk in New Scientist:
What effect meditating has on the structure of the brain has also been a matter of some debate. Now Sara Lazar at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US, and colleagues have used MRI to compare 15 meditators, with experience ranging from 1 to 30 years, and 15 non-meditators.
They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.
“You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,” she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing”.
The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, she points out, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections.
More here.
From New Scientist and the AFP:
A last-minute deal has avoided a potentially damaging split between the US and other nations over future control of the internet, ahead of a UN summit aimed at reducing the global digital divide.
The agreement was reached the night before the start of the World Summit on the Internet Society, which opened in Tunisia on Wednesday. Some observers had suggested that the internet could have been torn into competing or disconnected networks if the issue of internet governance had not been resolved.
The deal maintains US control of the internet, through the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers based in California. ICANN manages the domain name system, which underpins the web by mapping site names to their numerical (IP) addresses. It is expected to have its tender renewed by the US government in summer 2006
But the deal also sets up talks about international cooperation on oversight and policy issues. Countries such as Iran and China had sought UN oversight of internet governance, while the European Union wanted to water down US powers.
More here.
The Village Voice has a background and an update on the graduate student strike at NYU.
Inside jokes and collegiate trappings aside, there’s little to distinguish this fight from the kind of bitter, take-no-prisoners labor-management standoffs that have come to characterize the George W. Bush era. NYU’s decision to revoke its recognition of the union representing graduate assistants came after the Bush-controlled National Labor Relations Board gave it a bright green light to do so last year. The panel ruled that the assistants are students, not employees with bargaining rights. The 3-2 decision, which overturned an earlier ruling by a Clinton-appointed board, was part of the lesser-known collateral damage inflicted by the pro-business Republican president.
As soon as the board ruled, NYU’s leaders began signaling that they intended to renounce their 2001 labor agreement with the students, a pact that was the first-ever graduate assistants’ contract signed by a private university. The sole reason, officials insisted, was that the union had failed to abide by its pledge not to file grievances concerning matters of academic procedure. That argument puzzled the union, however, since NYU had won all of the key grievances it cited as examples of that interference. In both cases, arbitrators had pointed to ironclad clauses in the contract that protected the university’s right to select instructors, even when it meant steering the work to assistants paid far less, or even importing them from off campus. The union had indicated it was willing to live with that arrangement, however much it hobbled its functions.
Alex Perry in Time:
There are not many elections where candidates campaign behind razor wire, surrounded by 14 bodyguards and watched over by helicopter gunships. But then there are not many elections that could make the difference between war and peace. To press his case in this week’s vote for Sri Lanka’s presidency, opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe has flown a plane of reporters north to an army base at Palaly, a peninsula of shrimp ponds and sandy jungle which is both a spiritual home to the island’s Tamil minority and a key battleground for its Tamil guerrillas. While Wickremesinghe chats amiably to the soldiers, there is no question of him leaving the base and meeting Tamils. “I just don’t think it’s possible,” he says, gesturing over a machine-gun nest at the no man’s land of empty, bullet-riddled farmhouses that separates him from Jaffna, the nearby Tamil capital.
After half a century of hostility between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, two decades of civil war, and three years of a steadily collapsing ceasefire, Sri Lanka could use someone prepared to take a few bold steps. So it’s depressing to learn that Wickremesinghe—widely considered the candidate most capable of delivering peace—expects to be cut down if he ventures into the unknown.
More here.
From MSNBC:
The more than 30 healthy-looking horses in a pasture here are all shapes and sizes and include an Appaloosa, a couple of bays, chestnuts, a paint and a Palomino. One thing that these mares have in common is that they are pregnant — and not naturally. Each has been impregnated with a cloned embryo produced by ViaGen Inc., an Austin, Texas, company that specializes in cloning horses, cattle and pigs. The mares are due to deliver in February.
More here.
BLVR: How much, if at all, do you concern yourself with entertaining the reader? It seems to me that even when The Tunnel is in tremendously dark territory, or when On Being Blue is entering a heady philosophical patch, the texts are still enormously entertaining—lively, daring, playful. Is entertaining the reader something you address consciously?
WG: No. The reader is somebody I don’t pay much attention to. But I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I’m antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum—not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can’t always be serious about it.
It is true—I have to take it back—I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that I’m talking to these people; I enjoy sort of preening them a bit. But it’s a matter of decorum, basically. And I hate ideologies of all kinds, so I avoid jargon. I’ve done enough philosophy to know that some specialized terms are really needed. I don’t complain when Kant does it. Or when Aristotle introduces all kinds of new words; he needed them. But these other people are just obfuscating. It just makes me annoyed.
more from the The Believer here.
Via Lindsay at Majikthise, Stephanie Schorow has an article on women and and in the blogosophere in SadieMag.
Clancy Ratliff, who is studying female blogs for her PhD, blogs on www.culturecat.com.
Ratliff, who blogs herself at www.culturecat.com, explains that male bloggers rarely link to female-written sites or even visit them to leave comments. Female hosted blogs seldom get listed alongside powerhouse sites such as Eschaton (www.atrios.blogspot.com) and InstaPundit (www.instapundit.com), and those sites that do often have a well-known host or catchy appeal. Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin’s blog, www.michellemalkin.com, for instance, consistently ranks high in ratings indexes, but she’s also a syndicated columnist and author. Wonkette (www.wonkette.com) provides a titillating, raunchy collection of inside-the-Beltway gossip–not a website for those who see women as the more refined sex–making Ana Marie Cox, Wonkette’s creator, the go-to gal when mainstream media wants to cite a “women blogger.”
“I think she’s funny,” says Beyerstein, “but it’s kind of frustrating for more serious female bloggers. She’s not a [policy] wonk, she’s an entertainer.” Kathy states it more bluntly: “Any woman blogger on the web can use her sexuality to gain readers. But is that what we want?”
Yet mainstream media pundits and academics regularly invite the dirty-writing Wonkette to comment on issues of blogging or blogging ethics. She “was invited to represent not only women but the liberal blogs. That [annoyed] the hell out of everyone,” Beyerstein says.
“Why the hell didn’t Hip-hop albums ever have liner notes?!!??” quoth journalist Brian Coleman, “Hip-hop fans have been robbed of context and background when buying and enjoying classic albums from the Golden Age: the 1980s.” With his self-published book, Rakim Told Me, Coleman set out to fix that problem and to fill a void in the written history of Hip-hop. That, and where a lot of writers who acknowledge the influence and importance of Hip-hop tend to focus on its sociological implications, Coleman stays with the music, how it was made, and where these artists were in the process. He brings a breath of fresh air to the study of Hip-hop, just by dint of focusing on the music itself.
frontwheeldrive: For the uninitiated, tell us about the premise behind Rakim Told Me.
Well, the book is 21 chapters, each one explores one classic Hip-hop album from the ’80s. The premise itself is something I call “invisible liner notes.” It’s the stories behind all these albums (e.g., Public Enemy, Run-DMC, Boogie Down Productions, Eric B & Rakim, etc.) — the history of the groups, from back when they first started. And, most importantly, it’s about talking to the artists themselves about their work as musicians, as creators. It seems to me that when you talk about music a lot of times, people tend to view the image of a group or at least the end product of their art, an album, as the most important thing. I think that the process of making them what they are as a group is as, if not more, important.
Beginning this Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History:
Darwin, the most in-depth exhibition ever mounted on this highly original thinker, botanist, geologist, and naturalist and his theory of evolution will open at the Museum on November 19, 2005, and remain on view through May 29, 2006. This exhibition continues a series of exhibitions the Museum has developed on great thinkers, explorers, and scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Ernest Shackleton, Albert Einstein, and now Charles Darwin.
This exhibition will explore the extraordinary life and discoveries of Charles Darwin, whose striking insights in the 19th century forever changed the perception of the origin of our own species as well as the myriad other species on this planet and launched modern biological science. Visitors of all ages will experience the wonders Darwin witnessed on his journey as a curious and adventurous young man aboard the HMS Beagle on its historic five-year voyage (1831–1836) to the Galapagos Islands and beyond.
The exhibition will feature live Galápagos tortoises and an iguana and horned frogs from South America, along with actual fossil specimens collected by Darwin and the magnifying glass he used to examine them. Darwin will feature an elaborate reconstruction of the naturalist’s study at Down House, where, as a revolutionary observer and experimenter, he proposed the scientific theory that all life evolves according to the mechanism called natural selection.
The recent issue of Postmodern Culture is devoted to Jacques Derrida. In it, Alex Thompson looks at what’s become of Derrida’s work and notion of “Democracy to Come”.
Faced with an apparently inevitable and overwhelming victory for the Islamist Front Islamique du Salut party, and following the resignation of President Chadli on 11 January 1992, democratic government in Algeria was dissolved between the first and second round of elections, to be replaced by military rule. Jacques Derrida draws our attention to these events in the third chapter of “The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?)” (2002), the first of two texts collected in Rogues (2003). Derrida does not go into any great detail about the event, whose interpretation is extremely complex: neither Chadli, nor the ruling Front de Libèration Nationale, nor the Islamist party that looked set to gain nearly seventy-five percent of the available parliamentary seats with the support of barely a quarter of the electorate could have formed what might be comfortably described as a legitimate government (Roberts 105-24). But Derrida’s attention is elsewhere, concerned not so much with the specific history of his homeland as with what it might tell us about the idea of democracy itself. This is an example, he suggests, of a suicidal possibility inherent in democracy. Derrida appears to mean this in two senses. First, it highlights a risk to which a democracy is always exposed: the apparently suicidal political openness that allows that a party hostile to democracy might be legitimately elected. (Derrida acknowledges that this is itself a matter of interpretation, noting “the rise of an Islamism considered to be anti-democratic” [Rogues 31, emphasis added].) Second, that democracy may interrupt itself in order to seek to preserve itself: a suicide to prevent a murder.
The issue also has a review of Derrida’s Rogues: Two Essays on Reason.
Bert Keizer in the Threepenny Review:
I described Mr. C. [a severe aphasic] as “mindless,” which sounds like a disqualification. I did not intend it that way. What bothers me about him is his equanimity, his incomprehensible compliance, which strikes me as mindless because, if mindful, he would be blazing with rage and despair at the horror of the situation he has landed in. He lacks that cast of mind, and this lack implies that he does not fully experience this, the way a blind dog may not know it is blind.I mean to say that I don’t regard C. as a great stoic who manfully shoulders his misery. I don’t know exactly what his burden is, but he carries it lightly.
“You can’t help wondering just what’s going through his head,” muses his son while he gently strokes his father’s face. “Maybe not much, eh, Dad?”
Relatives rarely if ever reach this conclusion when dealing with brain-damaged loved ones.
Over at Cosmic Variance, Lawrence Krauss guest posts on string theory, religion, and popularizing science.
On ID and Science: As many of you know who have followed any of my writing in this regard, the reason I took up this cause a bunch of years ago, and have spent many unfortunate hours defending science against attacks rather than doing what I prefer to do, which is getting people excited about science, is that I viewed the attack on evolution as an attack on science as a whole. The more I learned, the more I saw this as a campaign that was based on fear of the fact that God is not an explicit part of the scientific method. For some, this implies that science itself is immoral, and if you read much of the literature, in particular from the Discovery Institute, you will see this expressed explicitly. I also saw this campaign as not merely one by well-meaning but misinformed individuals, but rather by people who were very well schooled in public relations, who had a mission, and wanted to achieve it however possible. And since scientists, by nature, tend to be miserable at public relations, it seemed important to try and counter this in whatever ways possible.
