Charles Q. Choi in Scientific American:

The long-range weather forecasts that warned of where Hurricane Katrina would strike depended on data from polar satellites. They capture not only details over the Arctic and Antarctic but also virtually every point on the planet’s surface as the world turns under them. Now the replacements for the aging U.S. military and civilian fleet are in jeopardy. The program is as much as $3 billion over budget, and the launch of the first replacement satellite is as many as three years behind schedule.

More here.

Gary King in PSOnline:

A decade ago this journal published a symposium on replication policies in political science. The symposium began with an article I wrote entitled “Replication, Replication,” and was followed by opposing and supporting comments by 19 others (King, 1995). The debate over proper policies continued for a few years in subsequent issues of the journal and a variety of other public fora. Since then, many journals in political science have adopted some form of a data sharing or replication policy. Some strongly recommend or expect data sharing and some require it as a condition of publication. The editors of the major international relations journals have collectively written and committed themselves to a strong standard minimum replication policy (Gleditsch et al. 2003). Most important, numerous individual scholars now regularly share their data, produce replication data sets, put these data sets on their web sites, send them to the ICPSR and other archives, or distribute them on request to other scholars. Scholars sometimes worry about being “scooped,” about maintaining the confidentiality of their respondents, or about being proven wrong, but since authors who make their data available are more than twice as cited and influential as those who do not (Gleditsch, Metelits, and Strand 2003), the strong trend toward data sharing in the discipline should not come as a surprise.

The broader scientific community both collectively and in many other individual fields is also moving strongly in the direction of participating in or requiring some form of data sharing. Recipients of grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health now are required to make data available to other scholars upon publication or within a year of the termination of their grant. Replicating, and thus collectively and publicly validating, the integrity of our published work is often still more difficult than it should be, and some still oppose thewhole idea, but our discipline has made substantial progress.

Jack Shafer in Slate:

It’s not Ted Koppel’s fault that the New York Times has made him a Times contributing columnist. As Koppel writes in yesterday’s (Jan. 29) debut column, “And Now, a Word for Our Demographic,” the invitation came from an “editor friend of mine,” so the fault belongs to whoever assigned, accepted, and edited or rewrote Koppel’s self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, late-to-the-party, and punishingly obvious 1,500-word piece about the state of television news. (It’s bad.) It’s not even Koppel’s fault if he thinks he’s any good at this columnist thing, when he isn’t. If we were to belittle every person who stretched his talents until they pop, we’d have little time for anything else.

So, my critique isn’t personal, it’s institutional. Based on what did the Times think Koppel could write a compelling newspaper column? Did they not see disaster in this piece?

More here.

From MSNBC:

Some types of ongoing, inexplicable pain like arthritis are caused by intact, healthy nerve fibers rather than those that have been damaged, a new study finds. The discovery surprised researchers. It had not been made before partly because studies of chronic pain have tended to focus on the damaged nerves. The new understanding, reported in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Neuroscience, could help scientists develop new types of painkillers.

The evidence so far applies only to ongoing pain associated with nerve injury and inflammation, although it may turn out to be more widely applicable, said Sally Lawson, a professor of physiology at the University of Bristol in Britain.

More here.

From Wired News:

A University of Arkansas scientist has developed a technology that makes undersea mud as clear as water, revealing deadly land mines. Now, she’s adapting the technique to detect a type of biological land mine — breast-cancer tumors. Magda El-Shenawee, an associate professor of electrical engineering, is adapting her rough-surface computational analysis — which, put very simply, is an algorithm that models dirt — to detect breast tissue cells that have gone awry. It turns out seeing through dirt is not so different from seeing through breast tissue.She’s collaborating with University of Arkansas professor Fred Barlow to develop, design, build and test a microwave imaging system to detect early stage breast cancer. “Eventually, we may be able to use this technology to not only reveal whether a tumor is present,” said Barlow, “but to find out what type of tumor it is.”

The work stems from El-Shenawee’s previous work at Northeastern University in Boston, where she developed the land-mine detection technique. Using a supercomputer and an extremely fast technique called “steepest descent fast multilevel multipole method,” or SDFMM, she worked out computational models that sift through ocean mud to find explosive devices.

More here.

“Fabricating events in a memoir can have serious consequences for readers as well as for the author.”

Niki Shisler in The Guardian:

Does it really matter whether a memoir is embellished? Frey’s “recovery” from drug and alcohol addiction is, according to him, “the primary focus of the book”. I have been in recovery for over a decade, so I know that it’s life-and-death stuff. One of Frey’s key themes is that he “recovered” by force of will alone. No AA, no 12 steps, no support group; just him and his demons. The message is that if he can drag himself out of the pit of hell, then anyone can. Except he didn’t.

Just think how dangerous that is. Addicts and alcoholics are desperate vulnerable people; if you’re going to offer them a way out, you’d better be certain it works. But how can you be, if you haven’t walked the path? The reader reviews for Frey’s book on Amazon contain this nugget: “I’ve been to four funerals in the last 12 months. One of them was a guy who dropped out of AA/NA after reading Frey’s crap – before it had been exposed as a fraud. He decided to follow Frey’s advice … He lasted about three months before he got high again. He was dead two months after that.”

Frey claims his memoir has “emotional truth”. But “emotional truth” is meaningless when it’s woven around events that bear no relation to reality – unless you’re writing fiction. This memoir was touted around publishers as a novel for a long time, unable to get a publishing deal. That should tell us everything.The book only works because we believe he really lived it. As fiction, it simply wasn’t good enough.

More here.

Helene Guldberg in Spiked Online:

Making Sense of Chemical Stories is a welcome corrective to the abundance of misinformation about chemicals. Chemicals are often presented as substances that are harmful to our health and the environment and should be avoided. But the idea of a chemical-free existence is absurd: the world is full of chemicals, both natural and manufactured, and we could not exist without them.

Today, it is especially the ‘man-made’, ‘synthetic’ or ‘industrial’ chemicals that we are encouraged to avoid. ‘But how do we explain the fact that we are living longer and healthier lives?’ asked Andrew Cockburn, director of Toxico-Logical Consulting Ltd, at the launch of the Sense about Science report. In the UK in 1840 the average life expectancy was only 40 years of age; today it is nearer to 80. ‘That makes us the healthiest hypochondriacs that ever existed’, said Cockburn.

More here.

Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Where have we seen this story before? An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s.

The standard query immediately presents itself: Will the nefarious politics destroy the reputation?

Marta Petreu’s An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to other names and scandals — de Man, Heidegger, Eliade — with its exposé of the expatriate Romanian anointed by Susan Sontag in her 1968 introduction to The Temptation to Exist as “the most distinguished figure” then writing in the lyrical, aphoristic, antisystematic tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.

Cioran, a lapidary ironist born in Romania, fled to Paris on a scholarship in 1937 (Petreu reports that Cioran faced possible prosecution for a newspaper piece urging a “St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre” of older Romanian intellectuals). After a brief repatriation to Romania in 1940 following the fall of Paris, he returned to his beloved Left Bank in early 1941 and lived there until his death.

More here.

David Biello in Scientific American:

More than 2,000 years ago, a plague gripped the Greek city of Athens. Ultimately, as much as a third of the population succumbed and the devastation, which helped Sparta gain the upper hand in the nearly 30-year-long war between the city-states. That much Thucydides–an ancient historian, general in the war and plague victim who recovered–conveys in his History of the Peloponnesian War. But he did not leave a precise enough description to decide definitively whether the disease was bubonic plague, smallpox or a host of other ailments. Now DNA collected from teeth in an ancient burial pit points to typhoid fever.

More here.

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

There is a paradox at the heart of any cultural institution. It is that the men and women who dedicate themselves to these essential enterprises exert a fiscal and administrative discipline that has nothing whatsoever to do with the discipline of art, which is a disciplined abandon. I imagine that for anybody who founds or sustains or rescues or re-invents a museum, an orchestra, or a dance company, this tension between the institution and the art comes to feel like a natural paradox. There is always a balancing act involved, which helps to explain why the very greatest institution-builders (Lincoln Kirstein comes to mind) invariably have something of the artist’s temperament. And when we consider how rare such people are, we realize that there is nothing surprising about the fragility, the mediocrity, and the downright banality of so many cultural enterprises. If making art is hard, making an arts institution work may be harder still. 

I believe it is important to recall the daunting nature of these challenges as we consider the deeply troubling state of the Museum of Modern Art a year after its re-opening.

More here.

Khalid Mish’al in The Guardian:

It is widely recognised that the Palestinians are among the most politicised and educated peoples in the world. When they went to the polls last Wednesday they were well aware of what was on offer and those who voted for Hamas knew what it stood for. They chose Hamas because of its pledge never to give up the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and its promise to embark on a programme of reform. There were voices warning them, locally and internationally, not to vote for an organisation branded by the US and EU as terrorist because such a democratically exercised right would cost them the financial aid provided by foreign donors.

The day Hamas won the Palestinian democratic elections the world’s leading democracies failed the test of democracy. Rather than recognise the legitimacy of Hamas as a freely elected representative of the Palestinian people, seize the opportunity created by the result to support the development of good governance in Palestine and search for a means of ending the bloodshed, the US and EU threatened the Palestinian people with collective punishment for exercising their right to choose their parliamentary representatives.

More here.  [Thanks to Mark Blyth.]

Michael Pips in the New York Times:

Even by the elevated standard of the New York art world, the rumor was exceptional: a tin of negatives buried in Africa for three decades that, when opened, revealed the work of a photographer who was neither “outsider” nor “indigenous” but spectacularly modern. And so the bejeweled and bohemian showed up at the Gagosian Gallery the evening of Oct. 18, 1997, wearing Fulani bracelets beneath their Charvet cuffs, blouses referencing Matisse referencing North African fabrics, Xhosa men in dinner jackets.

As accustomed as they were to art-world rumors, as familiar as they had become with exaggerations in the photo market, they could not help but be impressed. They saw mural-size black-and-white portraits in which the intricate designs of tribal costumes were set against backdrops of arabesque and floral cloths, the subjects disappearing into dense patterning that suggested Vuillard. A number of the photographs sold immediately, at prices of up to $16,000, and by the end of the evening, many in the crowd stood childlike in front of their limousines, waiting to catch sight of the photographer whose images they would never forget…

It is a story that includes screaming fights, a lawsuit and charges of theft, forgery and perjury. It survives the photographer himself, who died in 2001. And it touches on the broadest channels of human history, from colonialism to capitalism to revolution to race. But it also involves a conflict of the most rarefied sort – a philosophical disagreement over the nature of photography and the concept of authenticity.

More here.  More pictures by Keita here.  [Thanks to Moshe Behar.]

(via bookninja)

BOOKS of mine have been translated from the English in which they are written into some 25 other languages, the majority of them European. Of the 25 I can read two or three moderately well. Of many of the rest I know not a word; I have to trust my translators to render fairly what I have written.

Whether that trust is well placed I find out only rarely, when a bilingual reader who has compared translation with original happens to report back to me.

Some such reports come as a jolt. In Russia, I discover, The Master of Petersburg has been renamed Autumn in Petersburg; in the Italian version of Dusklands, a man opens a wooden crate with the help of a bird (what I wrote was that he used a crow, that is, a crowbar).

more from The Weekend Australian here.

From Scientific American:

New study results bolster the controversial hypothesis that certain cases of obesity are contagious. Over the last 20 years, some research has suggested that certain strains of human and avian adenoviruses–responsible for ailments ranging from the chest colds to pink eye–actually make individuals build up more fat cells. Having antibodies to one strain in particular, so-called Ad-36, proved to correlate with the heaviest obese people, and in one study, pairs of twins differed in heft depending on exposure to that virus. Now researchers have identified another strain of adenovirus that makes chickens plump.

Physiologist Leah Whigham of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues inoculated young male chickens with three strains of adenovirus–Ad-2, Ad-31 and Ad-37. She and her team then monitored the chickens for three and a half weeks, recording their food intake throughout. Though the infected chickens and noninfected controls consumed the same amount of food and were exposed to the same conditions, chickens carrying Ad-37 were found to have nearly three times as much fat in their guts and more than two times as much fat over their entire body at the end of the three-and-a-half week period. The other two virus strains appeared to have little effect on weight.

Whether or not hand-washing will help with weight management remains to be determined.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart’s “was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master.” Einstein believed much the same of physics, that beyond observations and theory lay the music of the spheres — which, he wrote, revealed a “pre-established harmony” exhibiting stunning symmetries. The laws of nature, such as those of relativity theory, were waiting to be plucked out of the cosmos by someone with a sympathetic ear.

Thus it was less laborious calculation, but “pure thought” to which Einstein attributed his theories. Einstein was fascinated by Mozart and sensed an affinity between their creative processes, as well as their histories. As a boy Einstein did poorly in school. Music was an outlet for his emotions. At 5, he began violin lessons but soon found the drills so trying that he threw a chair at his teacher, who ran out of the house in tears. At 13, he discovered Mozart’s sonatas.

From 1902 to 1909, Einstein was working six days a week at a Swiss patent office and doing physics research — his “mischief” — in his spare time. But he was also nourished by music, particularly Mozart. It was at the core of his creative life. And just as Mozart’s antics shocked his contemporaries, Einstein pursued a notably Bohemian life in his youth. His studied indifference to dress and mane of dark hair, along with his love of music and philosophy, made him seem more poet than scientist.

More here.

Richard Misrach. Monolake 2, California, 1999.

More on Misrach here and here.

In The New York Times, Garrison Keillor has a funny review of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo.

As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions. He has a brief encounter with a young man outside of Montgomery, Ala. (“I listen to him tell me, as if he were justifying himself, about his attachment to this region”), and suddenly sees that the young man has “all the reflexes of Southern culture” and the “studied nonchalance . . . so characteristic of the region.” With his X-ray vision, Lévy is able to reach tall conclusions with a single bound.

And good Lord, the childlike love of paradox – America is magnificent but mad, greedy and modest, drunk with materialism and religiosity, puritan and outrageous, facing toward the future and yet obsessed with its memories. Americans’ party loyalty is “very strong and very pliable, extremely tenacious and in the end somewhat empty.” Existential and yet devoid of all content and direction. The partner-swapping club is both “libertine” and “conventional,” “depraved” and “proper.” And so the reader is fascinated and exhausted by Lévy’s tedious and original thinking: “A strong bond holds America together, but a minimal one. An attachment of great force, but not fiercely resolute. A place of high – extremely high – symbolic tension, but a neutral one, a nearly empty one.” And what’s with the flurries of rhetorical questions? Is this how the French talk or is it something they save for books about America? “What is a Republican? What distinguishes a Republican in the America of today from a Democrat?” Lévy writes, like a student padding out a term paper. “What does this experience tell us?” he writes about the Mall of America. “What do we learn about American civilization from this mausoleum of merchandise, this funeral accumulation of false goods and nondesires in this end-of-the-world setting? What is the effect on the Americans of today of this confined space, this aquarium, where only a semblance of life seems to subsist?” And what is one to make of the series of questions – 20 in a row – about Hillary Clinton, in which Lévy implies she is seeking the White House to erase the shame of the Lewinsky affair? Was Lévy aware of the game 20 Questions, commonly played on long car trips in America? Are we to read this passage as a metaphor of American restlessness? Does he understand how irritating this is? Does he? Do you? May I stop now?

America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure…

Thanks, pal. I don’t imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?

In the Economist,

MOST people, even the law-abiding, have ambiguous feelings towards the police. They are a salvation when it comes to protecting life, limb and property, but their efforts are, perhaps, slightly less welcome if your foot happens to slip momentarily on the accelerator. Few, however, would argue that human societies could dispense with their activities altogether. Even in villages, where everybody knows everybody else and social disapproval and the near-certainty of exposure are enough to discourage most criminal acts, the local bobby is a reassuring presence.

Most people, too, would assume such policing is uniquely human. But they would be wrong—at least if Jessica Flack, of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, and her colleagues are correct. For Dr Flack thinks that monkey societies also have police. Moreover, removing those police makes such societies less happy places…

Dr Flack had discovered this behaviour in earlier research. Her latest work, just published in Nature, looked at how important policing is in maintaining harmony in the monkeys she studies, an Asian species called the pigtailed macaque. To do so, she went to the opposite end of the biological scale from that occupied by ethology (the science of animal behaviour) and borrowed a technique from genetics, called knockout analysis. In genetics, this involves “knocking out” a particular gene and seeing what effect its absence has on a cell’s biochemical network. In ethology, it involves removing particular animals from a group and seeing what effect that has on the group’s social network.

In the TLS, Omer Bartov reviews two newly published books on the Red Army, including the war diaries of the novelist Vasily Grossman.

Not all understanding [of the Soviet Union] is derived from documents newly salvaged from the archives. Some of the sources for understanding the tragedy and glory of Russia’s war have been waiting to be “discovered” and employed for decades, yet in a sense they were always available. This is the case of the two magnificent books under review here. Vasily Grossman completed his novel Life and Fate in 1960, but Mikhail Suslov, chief of the Cultural Section of the Central Committee, decided that it would not be published for at least 200 years, and the KGB seized all copies it could lay its hands on.

Life and Fate is finally being recognized as one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. But it had to be smuggled to Switzerland and only gradually came to be known by an international readership. It was finally published in Russia after the fall of Communism. An extraordinary combination of a sprawling nineteenth-century Russian novel and a Soviet social-realist depiction of simple men’s discovery of their capacity for heroism and sacrifice, the book was based on Grossman’s own experience at the front as a correspondent for the Red Army’s official paper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). Thanks to Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, the notebooks on which Grossman based much of his novel, written during his time at the front – where he spent most of the war years – are now available in an excellent English translation.

It is true that one doesn’t normally speak of Mozart and Sid Vicious in the same breath, but they do have this in common: primitivism. Rock’n’roll began as a primitivist movement, and it renews itself with mini-primitivisms, of which punk is just one example. To see Mozart as a primitivist is a little harder, since his style is so identified with the civilized and the rational, things we think of as anti-primitive, and yet the Classical movement in music, like its companion neoclassicism in art, owed everything to the primitivist desire to begin anew by stripping away the false and inessential. Écrasez l’infâme. To the Baroque’s heavy sauces, multiple courses, and thickly layered combinations of tastes and textures, the Classical would propose a nouvelle cuisine.

more from the TLS here.