From Wired News:

A new HIV test the size of a credit card promises to diagnose the disease in minutes rather than weeks, and could be deployed in sub-Saharan Africa as early as next year.

The device could solve one of the vexing problems of AIDS treatment in underdeveloped countries, where patients are not within easy reach of medical facilities. By providing an on-the-spot diagnosis, doctors hope to close the gap between test and treatment, and prevent known cases from slipping through the cracks.

The technology is similar to “blending digital camera technology with the brains of a Palm Pilot,” says Dr. Bruce Walker, director of AIDS research at Harvard Medical School. Walker is part of a team of scientists at Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin who developed the sensor system. In tests, it has detected the amount of CD4 cells in the blood in as little as 10 minutes. The CD4 count indicates the stage of HIV in a patient, and helps doctors determine the best treatment and how much of it to administer.

More here.

From BBC News:

Astronomers have detected a faint glow from the first stars to form in the Universe, Nature journal reports. This earliest group of stars, called Population III, probably formed from primordial dust and gas less than 200 million years after the Big Bang. These objects cannot be seen by any present or planned telescopes. Nasa scientists detected the stars from the imprint they have left on the general glow of infrared radiation dispersed throughout the cosmos.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

French scientists have identified a protein receptor that resides in the taste buds and may be responsible for sensing fat. As such, this so-called fatty acid transporter, known as CD36, could be to blame for our love of high-fat foods–and could thus serve as a possible target for treatment of obesity. If the link bears out, CD36 would allow fat to join the five previously identified tastes that govern the experience of food: bitter, salty, sweet, sour and “umami,” or savoriness (like the meaty goodness of soup stock).

More here.

Daniel Mendelsohn on the film Capote in the New York Review of Books:

A film entitled simply Capote might have been about many things. It might, for instance, have been a bittersweet coming-of-age story with a triumphantly happy ending. In this story, we would have seen how a diminutive and dreamy child named Truman Streckfus Persons survived an eccentric, if not traumatic, childhood—shuttling between his alcoholic and abusive mother on upper Park Avenue and a beloved, rather childish aunt in small-town Alabama —to emerge as the elfin celebrity who, having turned the Gothic material of those early years into his hothouse first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, became an overnight literary sensation in Manhattan at the age of twenty-one.

Or the film might just as legitimately have belonged to the equally clichéd (and equally satisfying) genre of celebrity decline. In this movie, we would witness the internationally famous writer and personality Truman Capote —the rich, social-climbing darling of the jet-set women whom he called his “swans,” the creator of admired works of fiction such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, of the best-selling “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood—disintegrating over a period of twenty years, alienating his socialite friends by betraying their perfumed confidences, careening from one unfinished project to another, and becoming, by the time of his death in 1984 at the age of fifty-nine, an appalling parody of his earlier, impish self: incoherent, incontinent. “The only one who can destroy a really strong and talented writer is himself,” Capote once said, and it was an observation that turned out, at least in his own case, to be true.

More here.

“The Times op-ed columnist adds nothing to the debate between the sexes.”

Katie Roiphe in Slate:

Maureen Dowd’s penchant for provocative overstatement has found its most recent outlet in a much talked about excerpt of her new book, Are Men Necessary?, in the New York Times Magazine. In it she bemoans a perceived return of 1950s values and courtship rituals and portrays a younger generation of women as grasping, shallow housewife wannabes and “yummy mommies.” In the most inflammatory and intriguing passages, she claims that men are put off by women in power, that they prefer the women who serve them—maids, masseuses, and secretaries—to their equals. She attributes the fact that she is unmarried to her powerful position as an op-ed columnist at the New York Times. Then she notes her own family history of domestic service and concludes that “being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men.”

Is this dark view of sexual politics a little extreme? If it is, it shouldn’t be surprising. Dowd pushes every statement to its most exaggerated form; her column occupies a space somewhere in between the other columns on the New York Times op-ed page and the political cartoons that sometimes run there.

More here.

From The Edge:

The Edge of Computation Science Prize, established by Edge Foundation, Inc., is a $100,000 prize initiated and funded by science philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein.

Metaphors of information processing and computation are at the center of today’s intellectual action. A new and unified language of science is beginning to emerge. Concepts of information and computation have infiltrated a wide range of sciences, from mathematics, physics and cosmology, to cognitive psychology, to evolutionary biology, to genetic engineering. Such innovations as the binary code and the algorithm have been applied in ways that reach far beyond the programming of computers, and are being used to understand such mysteries as the origins of the universe, the operation of the human body, and the working of the mind. These are the areas of exploration that have been central to Edge.

The Prize recognizes individual achievement in scientific work that embodies extensions of the computational idea — the design space created by Turing. It is a 21st Century prize in recognition of cutting edge work — theoretical, experimental, or both — performed, published, or newly applied within the past ten years.

More here.

Following and building on my Monday Musing post Regarding Regret, Abhay Parekh wrote Big Fat Regret, in which, among other things, he points out that the frequency of events we consider significant enough to really merit regret seems to follow a power law. Then, Robin had this post about Cosma Shalizi’s disagreement with Albert-László Barabási’s observation that delays in responding to correspondence, be it email or snail mail, also follow a power law. So I asked Abhay about it, and he responded by saying, “This is actually a new trend — take someone’s claim that something is a power law/lognormal and then claim it is actually distributed the other way. Frankly, the two distributions are very close… The interesting thing to me about regret is that it displays this odd pattern of elephant and mice along multiple time scales,” and he pointed me to this very interesting discussion of the distribution issue at Suresh Venkatasubramanian’s blog:

Over the last few days, there has been much discussion of a paper in Nature by Oliveira and Barabási on the correspondence patterns of Darwin and Einstein. One of the main conclusions of the paper was that at some point, their response patterns started following a power-law distribution, with coefficients such that a finite fraction of mail went unanswered.

Soon after this, there was a response suggesting that the analysis was flawed, and in fact the data followed a log-normal pattern, rather than a power-law. Cosma Shalizi and Aaron Clauset weighed in on this as well, on the side of the “log-normal folks”.

As Geomblog denizens might know, I had a while ago mentioned a fascinating article by Michael Mitzenmacher on the difference (and similarity) between log-normal and power-law distributions, and the natural processes that generate them. I asked Michael if he’d like to weigh in on this controversy, and what follows below is his note. He comments not only on the technical issues involved, but on the whole issue of PR in science, and the contributions that Barabási has made to the field, and his perspective is very interesting indeed.

For those of you who might wonder why computer scientists (and theoretical computer scientists at that) should concern themselves about such matters, I’ll refer you to the reading list for Jon Kleinberg’s course on Information Networks, where you’ll see how many aspects of link structure analysis on the web (which in turn is used for search engines like Google) relate to understanding power law distributions.

And now for the article…

Suresh asked me to comment on a current controversy: a paper by Barabasi et al claims that many human interactions, including the example of Darwin’s and Einstein’s letter response frequency, are governed by a bursty process that leads to power law tails. A rebuttal by Stouffer et al claims that the distribution is really lognormal.

I believe Suresh asked me to comment because (here comes the blatant self-promoting plug) I had written a survey on lognormal and power law distributions (and a slightly more fun, less edited earlier version). I’m embarassed to say I had not heard of the controversy, but it looks like a lot of fun for those of us who enjoy this sort of thing. Rather than focus on the specific technical details, let me make two high level comments…

More here.

From The New York Times:

You would never guess that Jon Spallino drives what is probably the most expensive car in this city, known for its automotive excess. Or that he is the world’s most technologically advanced commuter.

“When the cars pull up to me, the Porsches and the Bentleys and all that, I just sort of say, well, that’s nice, but for what this costs I could buy 10 of those,” said Spallino, while driving up the Route 405 freeway from his office in Irvine, California, toward his home in Redondo Beach.

Spallino was at the wheel of his silver Honda FCX, a car worth about $1 million that looks like a cross between a compact – say, a Volkswagen Golf – and a cinder block.

The FCX is powered by hydrogen fuel cells, the futuristic technology that many automakers see as an eventual solution to the world’s energy woes, though the viability of the technology is a subject of vigorous debate inside and outside the auto industry.

More here.

Cosma Shalizi weighs in on Albert-László Barabási’s take on correspondence in email, and other forms, follow a power law distribution because of a queuing process.

[T]his is not true; the apparent power law is merely an artifact of a bad analysis of the data, which which is immensely better described by a log-normal distribution. . .

As every school-child knows (at least, these school-children do!), adding together many independent random variables, each of which makes a small contribution to the over-all result, generally gives you a Gaussian or normal distribution (unless the contributing variables are, themselves, kind of pathological). This fact is the central limit theorem.

What happens if the inputs are multiplied together, rather than added? Well, take the logarithm: log(XY) = log(X) + log(Y). The logarithm of the product will be the sum of the logarithms of the inputs. The latter will still be independent, so the logarithm of the output will be normally distributed. Undoing the log gives what’s imaginative called the log-normal distribution. Log-normals are very common, for the same reasons that normals are. Unlike normals, they are very easy to mistake for power law distributions, especially if your knowledge of statistics is as limited as most theoretical physicists’. (The distribution of links to weblogs, for instance, is much better fit by a log-normal than a power law, as we’ve seen.)

Update: Cosma points to the original paper in which Stouffer, Malmgren and Amaral properly reanalyzed the data. His post largely reports on their work.

From the inaugural issue of The Human Security Report:

The extent of the change in global security following the end of the Cold War has been remarkable:

° The number of armed conflicts around the world has declined by more than 40% since the early 1990s (see Figure 1.1 in Part I).

° Between 1991 (the high point for the post–World War II period) and 2004, 28 armed struggles for self-determination started or restarted, while 43 were contained or ended. There were just 25 armed secessionist conflicts under way in 2004, the lowest number since 1976.

° Notwithstanding the horrors of Rwanda, Srebrenica and elsewhere, the number of genocides and politicides plummeted by 80% between the 1988 high point and 2001 (Figure 1.11).

° International crises, often harbingers of war, declined by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001 (Figure 1.5).

° The dollar value of major international arms transfers fell by 33% between 1990 and 2003 (Figure 1.10). Global military expenditure and troop numbers declined sharply in the 1990s as well.

° The number of refugees dropped by some 45% between 1992 and 2003, as more and more wars came to an end (Figure 3.1).

In the August Ekklesia, Giles Fraser offers an interesting response to the calls for a Islamic Reformation.

Salman Rushdie has now joined those who insist that Islam needs a reformation. What better place to assess such a demand than in the new Musée International de la Réforme in Geneva? Here familiar portraits of Luther and Calvin magically appear in a mirror to lip-synch the glories of the 16th-century Reformation – a revolution against a corrupt Catholic church that ripped off the gullible by selling passports to heaven. By translating the Bible into the vernacular (one of the earliest and most influential English Bibles was produced in Geneva in 1560), the reformers bypassed the power of the Catholic clergy to interpret the word of God to ordinary believers. The parallels with a religion that refuses to accept the authenticity of translations of the Qur’an are superficially powerful.

Even so, Islam already resembles a reformed religion a great deal more than Rushdie acknowledges. Reformation pamphleteers railed against the papacy as the whore of Babylon, yet there is no equivalent centralised authority in Islam. Nor is there a hierarchical clerical establishment. The sober dress of Muslim leaders and the absence of fancy vestments to mark them out as special are clearly reminiscent of post-Reformation austerity.

So too is the thoroughgoing commitment to iconoclasm.

In the New York Times:

IT may have been only one more review among many, but when Michelin announced its first ratings for restaurants in New York City yesterday morning, superstar chefs and proprietors reacted with joyous tears, resignation and, in some cases, dismay.

Four restaurants – Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, Jean Georges, Le Bernardin and Per Se – received the top ranking, three stars. But Daniel, long considered to be in the very top rank of New York’s restaurants, had to settle for two, along with Masa, Bouley and Danube.

And in some of the more surprising rankings, the Spotted Pig, a no-frills Greenwich Village pub with an idiosyncratic menu, got a star, putting it up with restaurants like Babbo and Gramercy Tavern, while respected restaurants like Chanterelle, Felidia, the Four Seasons and Union Square Cafe got no stars. Scott Conant, one of the city’s most admired young chefs, failed to win a star for either of his restaurants, L’Impero and Alto.

From The Edge:

History abounds with examples of how instinct, not data, led to discoveries. Even Einstein’s theory of relativity had to wait decades for verification, says Ian McEwan. Some science appears true because it is elegant – it is economically formulated, while seeming to explain a great deal. Despite fulmination against it from the pulpit, Darwin’s theory of natural selection gained rapid acceptance, at least by the standards of Victorian intellectual life. His proof was really an overwhelming set of examples, laid out with exacting care. A relatively simple idea made sense across a huge variety of cases and circumstances, a fact not lost on an army of Anglican vicars in country livings, who devoted their copious free time to natural history.

Steven Weinberg describes how, from 1919 onwards, various expeditions by astronomers set out to test the theory by measuring the deflection of starlight by the sun during an eclipse. Not until the availability of radio telescopy in the early Fifties were the measurements accurate enough to provide verification. For 40 years, despite a paucity of evidence, the theory was generally accepted because, in Weinberg’s phrase, it was “compellingly beautiful”.

In James Watson’s account, when Rosalind Franklin stood before the final model of the DNA molecule, she “accepted the fact that the structure was too pretty not to be true”. Nevertheless, the idea still holds firm among us laypeople that scientists do not believe what they cannot prove. At the very least, we demand of them higher standards of evidence than we expect from literary critics, journalists or priests.

More here.

From New Scientist:

Feminine beauty, the subject of philosophical and artistic musings for millennia, can be predicted by something as basic as hormones – in women, but not men. Researchers at the University of St Andrews in Fife, UK, have found that women’s facial attractiveness is directly related to their oestrogen levels. Miriam Law Smith and colleagues photographed 59 women, aged between 18 and 25, every week for six weeks. On each occasion, they provided a urine sample for hormone analysis and gave information on where they were in their menstrual cycle. None of the women wore make-up, nor were they taking the contraceptive pill. The researchers then selected the photograph of each woman that had been taken at the time of her highest urine-oestrogen level. As expected, this correlated to the point of ovulation in the women’s menstrual cycles. These photographs were rated by 14 men and 15 women, also aged 18 to 25, for attractiveness, health and femininity.

The group also rated two composite face images. One composite was an amalgamation of the 10 women with the lowest peak-oestrogen levels, while the other image was a combination of the 10 women with the highest levels (see image). “There was a very strong and direct correlation between the level of each woman’s oestrogen and how attractive, healthy and feminine they were found to be, showing that fertility is related to attractiveness,” Law Smith told New Scientist. The faces considered most healthy and feminine were also deemed the most attractive.

More here.

John Updike in The New Yorker:

The works of Gabriel García Márquez contain a great deal of love, depicted as a doom, a demonic possession, a disease that, once contracted, cannot be easily cured. Not infrequently the afflicted are an older man and a younger woman, hardly more than a child. In “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967; English translation 1970), Aureliano Buendía visits a very young whore:

The adolescent mulatto girl, with her small bitch’s teats, was naked on the bed. Before Aureliano sixty-three men had passed through the room that night. From being used so much, kneaded with sweat and sighs, the air in the room had begun to turn to mud. The girl took off the soaked sheet and asked Aureliano to hold it by one side. It was as heavy as a piece of canvas. They squeezed it, twisting it at the ends until it regained its natural weight. They turned over the mat and the sweat came out of the other side. Aureliano was anxious for that operation never to end.

Her condition is pitiable:

Her back was raw. Her skin was stuck to her ribs and her breathing was forced because of an immeasurable exhaustion. Two years before, far away from there, she had fallen asleep without putting out the candle and had awakened surrounded by flames. The house where she lived with the grandmother who had raised her was reduced to ashes. Since then her grandmother carried her from town to town, putting her to bed for twenty cents in order to make up the value of the burned house. According to the girl’s calculations, she still had ten years of seventy men per night, because she also had to pay the expenses of the trip and food for both of them.

Aureliano does not take advantage of her overexploited charms, and leaves the room “troubled by a desire to weep.” He has—you guessed it—fallen in love:

He felt an irresistible need to love her and protect her. At dawn, worn out by insomnia and fever, he made the calm decision to marry her in order to free her from the despotism of her grandmother and to enjoy all the nights of satisfaction that she would give the seventy men.

This curious blend of the squalid and the enchanted—perhaps not so curious in the social context of the author’s native Colombia in the years of his youth—returns, five years later, in the long short story “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother” (translated 1978), which was made into a movie from a script by the author.

More here.

Caroline S. Wagner and Calestous Juma in SciDev.net:

The steady growth of scientific capacity, the expansion of the Internet, and the hyper-mobility of knowledge has enabled new knowledge producers to join the United States in global science and technology communities.

The issue here is whether the United States can come to see this as a resource rather than a source of competition.

In a networked world, no nation leads or lags in some competitive race. Thankfully, that 20th century technological paradigm is swiftly changing.

Space research is a case in point. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States and the former Soviet Union were both racing to win the big prizes in the field. When the United States eventually reached the Moon first in 1969, it was seen as a validation of US scientific prowess, which had been shaken by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite.

Cooperation in space science has since replaced this competitive mentality. Today, scientists from Russia, the United States and many other nations work side by side as partners on joint projects. They live and learn together in space, expanding the frontiers of human knowledge.

More here.

“Pre-eminent American literary critic Harold Bloom’s twenty-ninth book, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, was officially launched a few hours after this conversation took place in his Manhattan apartment on 26 October 2004.”

Ieva Lesinska in Eurozine:

IL: Do you posess wisdom?

HB: No.

IL: No?

HB: No. If I posesed any wisdom, I would not write a book called Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? I am very unwise, I can asure you. Unwise in all things. I think I am a good teacher of literature, particularly of Shakespeare. At Yale on Wednesdays I give an undergraduate seminar. Of course, I am a one-man department, I divorced the English department back in 1976, I convinced them to reappoint me as a “profesor of absolutely nothing” – I give courses in something called humanities. And on Wednesdays I give a course, year by year, where we read all of Shakespeare together. And on Thursdays I give a course called “The Art of Reading Poetry”. I regard myself as a teacher. I remark in this new book that I have only three criteria for whether a work should be read and reread and taught to others, and they are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom.

More here.

Andrew Cohen in Newsweek:

Maira Kalman, an illustrator and children’s book author best known for her New Yorker covers, including the popular “Newyorkistan” map of few years ago, told The New York Times she was so taken by the colorful examples used in Strunk and White to illustrate their grammatical points that she wondered why anyone hadn’t illustrated them before.  Thus, her illustrations for the book contain such captions as: “Polly loves cake more than she loves me,” “It was a unique eggbeater,” “None of us is perfect” and “Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in.”

Her zeal for the book has since spilled over into the musical realm. She shared her enthusiasm with family friend Nico Muhly, a Juilliard-trained composer who wrote an operatic song cycle based on the book, “The Elements of Style: Nine Songs,” which had its gala premier Oct. 19 in the main reading room of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.

More here.  [The picture is of Nico Muhly, who is also a friend of my family.]

As grad students at NYU prepare to go on strike, Alan Sokal offers some arguments in support.

3) Some red herrings.

We can save a lot of time by recognizing that certain questions are NOT relevant to our current debates.

One question that is NOT relevant (for us as faculty, that is) is whether unionization is in the best interests of grad students. It is an accepted principle of a democratic society that adults are permitted to determine their own interests. (There are at least two reasons for this: people are ordinarily better-informed about their own situation than outsiders are; and people are more likely to have their own interests fully at heart than outsiders are.) Everyone is free to try to persuade others about what their own interests are; but no one is allowed to substitute his or her view of other people’s interests for those people’s own view.

For these reasons, I as a faculty member do not purport to suggest to grad students whether or not they should support unionization — much less whether or not they should strike. I simply support grad students’ right to decide these issues for themselves.

The only valid argument in support of the Administration’s anti-union position would be that, through collective bargaining, the grad students would infringe unfairly on the interests of_other_ segments of the university community — so unfairly, in fact, that the latter’s interests would override the grad students’ democratic rights.

In American Scientist, Sean Carroll reviews Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages and Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds.

A distinctive feature of Warped Passages is the discussion of two different ways of extending physics beyond the Standard Model: the bottom-up, model-building “Harvard” approach; and the top-down, string-theory “Princeton” approach. Both philosophies are interesting and important, and the study of extra dimensions has brought them into close collaboration. The perspective of someone who has been immersed in the details makes the discussion of this dichotomy an especially valuable feature of the book.

Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, although superficially similar to Randall’s book, actually differs significantly from it. Although Kaku worked on string theory in its early days, he has become well known more recently as a popularizer of physics, and this is evident from the text. Parallel Worlds is not written from the viewpoint of an insider relating developments as they occurred. It is telling, for example, that the bibliography consists solely of other books for a general audience, with no citations of the primary literature. Nonetheless, the presentation is extremely polished, and the discussion is invigorated by the inclusion of numerous interesting and revealing anecdotes about the participants.

Kaku is also very attuned to the fact that what interests the general reader is not always what interests the professional physicist. He is quite willing to discuss the possibility of life on other planets, or even the religious implications of the work he describes.