Pervez Hoodbhoy reports on relief efforts in earthquake devastated regions in Pakistan, in Z Magazine.

For me personally, there was a sense of dejavu. Nearly 31 years ago, on 25th December 1974, a powerful earthquake had flattened towns along the Karakorum Highway killing nearly 10,000 people. I had traveled with a university team into the same mountains for similar relief work. Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had made a passionate appeal for funds around the world, taken a token helicopter trip to the destroyed town of Besham, and made fantastic promises for rehabilitation. But then hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funds received from abroad mysteriously disappeared. Some well-informed people believe that those funds were used to kick off Pakistan’s secret nuclear program.

Shall the present government do better? This will only be if citizens, and international donors, demand transparency and accounts are available for public audit.

The clock is ticking. In barely two months from now, the mountains will get their first snowfall and temperatures will plummet below zero. There are simply not enough tents, blankets, and warm clothes to go around. Hundreds of tent clusters have come up, but thousands of families remain out under the skies, facing rain and hail, and with dread in their hearts.

Art changes along with the world, for better or worse. Some artists’ work is so caught up in a particular moment, so bounded by gossip, by articles and rumours and reputation, that it becomes almost impossible to look at it freshly. Opinion drifts into consensus and the orthodox official line, the lines of explanatory text on the museum wall. The artist gets caught up in all this too, and might spend all their energy trying to escape. This has happened with Damien Hirst.

Perhaps one of the best artists at dealing with this impasse has been Bruce Nauman. Working between sculpture, performance, film and sound, neon works and drawings, he has made both one of the most varied and consistent bodies of work since the 1960s, while remaining somewhat aloof from the tides of fashion. Everyone else is left trying to catch up, as many students, leafing through the Nauman back catalogue, soon discover. But how many artists are conscious of their own range, the richness of what they do? Mostly, Nauman reacts to the difficulty of not knowing what to do next, and working through the condition of creative emptiness. Looking at his new work can make you think of things he did more than 20 or 30 years ago, and throw them in a new light. Lesser artists, meanwhile, just repeat themselves. Nauman’s kind of digging-in is more than persistence or doggedness.

more from The Guardian here.

My favorite image of Rosa Parks, who died Monday at the age of 92, is of the confrontation between her and a policeman on that auspicious afternoon of Dec. 1, 1955, when she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. After the officer had instructed her to “make it light on yourself” and give up her seat to a standing white man, she later said, she asked him, “Why do you push us around?” And he had given an honest answer: “I don’t know.” But then he explained that he had to arrest her anyway (even though she was not in technical violation of the city’s segregation laws, but that’s a whole other tangent of this rich saga). And so did history turn. In support of Parks’ defiance, the black citizens of Montgomery boycotted the city buses until segregated seating was abolished, one whole year later. And so was born what is still known as the modern civil rights movement.

more from Slate here.

From The Village Voice:

May 6, 1965
Andy Warhol makes movies with the same unruffled objectivity that he looks at life. His usual procedure is to set up the action—often a group of people interacting—point the camera at them, turn it on, and step back. The camera makes the movie: whatever happens, planned or not, is the film. Sometimes in the studio (which he refers to as “the factory”) there will be interruptions: telephone calls, people going up or down in the elevator, somebody dropping something or walking inadvertently in front of the camera. All is recorded. No trace of surprise or annoyance registers on Warhol’s face. He is totally cool or very uptight, depending on your point of view. The latter school says: “Andy’s been trained in Madison Avenue. He’s like a high-powered executive who doesn’t show his feelings, but he’s seething inside.” Personally, I think it the height of coolness to regard everything with a detached eye and rely on intuition to make instant decisions. Warhol’s intuition is usually correct.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

The history, theory, and analysis of films as cultural and aesthetic “texts” became a legitimate academic field in the late 1960s, leading to a 1970s boom in cinema-studies programs across America — but not at Harvard. Although the College ventured into film studies through a General Education course and subsequent courses at the Carpenter Center, there was no degree program. In the film-studies program, students learn how to “read” films as complex historical and aesthetic artifacts. D.W. Griffith’s Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation (1915), might be analyzed as a cinematic masterpiece of framing, continuity editing, mise en scène, and narrative structure, as well as a palimpsest of U.S. racial history: its positive depiction of the KKK was highly controversial but didn’t extinguish its popularity. Students examine national cinemas, film theory, and special topics such as film and philosophy, or the human body, or architecture.

More here.

Christopher Hart in the Times of London:

Jonathan Swift observed that the problem with religion was that there wasn’t enough of it around: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Three centuries on there is even less of it around and we still hate each other.

The difficulty, at least for the scientifically educated but spiritually malnourished, is not the idea of religion itself, meaning some system of ritualised worship that helps us to make sense, if only symbolically, of the human, natural and supernatural worlds. The difficulty is rather that all the religions on offer are so patently preposterous, if not downright unpleasant.

More here.

Over the past few years, the art world has rediscovered color photographers–such as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld–who, in the 1970s and early ’80s, helped push the medium from the confines of commercial magazines into the realm of high art. At first glance, the vivid depictions of American life in “Bound for Glory,” on view at the Library of Congress through November 26, might be mistaken for works by one of their contemporaries. Familiar scenes from the American vernacular abound–gas stations, bars, store fronts, churches, home interiors–all rendered in the characteristically rich hues of then-popular Kodachrome slide film. The images, however, are more than 60 years old, created between 1939 and 1943 by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Despite the establishment’s past condescension toward color photography, these pioneering works are anything but facile.

more from TNR here.

Here’s a thesis to try out on friends: The anti-war movement, in its current form, is an unwitting complement to US government policy, not an opposition to it. It will enable a cowardly premature withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, an event that will be a horrendous betrayal of the Iraqis we promised to “liberate” and a complete failure of political imagination, and which both the Bush administration and the anti-war movement will claim as a victory. . . .

My doubts began the week before, at the meeting to plan out the banners called by Stormin’ Norman the Doorman. “Norm,” as he’s known around here, is a former Marine who did two tours of duty in Vietnam. This gives him a certain grave authority, though he keeps his war experiences at a distance which leaves whatever horrors he saw or did buried under gruff bad jokes: “I was shot at and missed and shat at and hit.” But Norm’s past is less worthy than his present. He’s the man who lets you into the building every time you reach the gate, who sells you laundry tokens and tells you where the buses go, who governs his post with the perfect sense of a good tyrant, knowing just when to enforce the rules and when to let them go (and there are rules aplenty here). He tells us that the sign is supposed to read “All troops out of Iraq” in English and Italian. “What about ‘All troops out of Iraq, all terrorists out of Iraq’?” I ask, wanting both to be even-handed and to voice my feeling that whoever caused the death of thousands of Shiites on a bridge, whoever killed Steven Vincent, whoever has been kidnapping girls who won’t wear veils—these people shouldn’t be part of the new Iraq either. Later, our resident poet will propose a sign: “Everyone out of Iraq.”

more from Marco Roth’s second dispatch from Rome at n+1 here.

From Wired News:

Google’s plan to scan library book collections and make them searchable may be drawing ire from publishers and authors’ advocates, but some obscure and first-time writers are lining up on the search engine’s side of the dispute — arguing that the benefits of inclusion in the online database outweigh the drawbacks.

“A cover does sell a book to a certain extent, but once you’re intrigued by a cover you want to dig deeper,” said Meghann Marco, whose first book, Field Guide to the Apocalypse, was published in May.

Marco said she wanted to include excerpts of her book in the search tool, but her publisher, Simon & Schuster, refused to allow it. Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, said many of its authors do participate in Google Print’s opt-in program for publishers, and didn’t know why Marco’s book wasn’t included.

Simon & Schuster is one of five publishing houses that jointly filed a lawsuit against Google last week. The suit charges the search company with willful infringement of copyrights for its Google Print Library Project, which involves four university libraries and the New York Public Library. Google wants to scan all or portions of their collections and add the text to Google Print’s searchable database.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Those who suffer the devastating effects of chronic pain may fantasize about a life that is completely pain-free. In fact, such a life is far from idyllic. People who are born with congenital insensitivity to pain, a rare genetic disorder, chew their tongues and lips to pieces, burn their flesh, and fracture their bones without realizing the harm they are doing to their bodies. Lacking a warning system to protect themselves from dangers in the environment, they tend to die young, often in their twenties. 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.

More here.

From Scientific American:

For the first time, scientists have pinpointed an area of the brain involved in a woman’s menstrual cycle. The research, reported online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows contrasts in activity over the course of a month and provides a baseline for understanding the emotional and behavioral changes that 75 percent of all women report experiencing before, during and after their period. For any woman who has found herself becoming inexplicably angry or sad during her menstrual cycle, the possibility that her “time of the month” may be responsible is not news. But although a great deal of research has looked at the influence of hormones on nerves, very little work has delved into the role a woman’s menstrual cycle can play in the emotions.

More here.

George Packer in The New Yorker:

There was a moment, in April of 1937, when the Lost Generation of nineteen-twenties Paris reunited in Madrid. The occasion was the Spanish Civil War, already in its ninth month, but the regular shelling of the Hotel Florida and other privations of the Fascist siege didn’t prevent Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, and Hemingway’s latest distraction from the thought of suicide, Martha Gellhorn, from living well. Though the Hotel Florida wasn’t the Café des Amateurs, Hemingway managed to procure, thanks in part to impeccable connections with the Spanish government and the Russian general staff, the best food and brandy in the city. Every morning, the other guests woke up to the smell of eggs, bacon, and coffee being prepared by a Hemingway flunky in Room 108, courtesy of the Communist International. The moveable feast had crashed the Red decade.

More here.

From Spacedaily.com:

Working with a material 10 times lighter than steel – but 250 times stronger – would be a dream come true for any engineer. If this material also had amazing properties that made it highly conductive of heat and electricity, it would start to sound like something out of a science fiction novel.

Yet one Florida State University research group, the Florida Advanced Center for Composite Technologies (FAC2T), is working to develop real-world applications for just such a material…

Buckypaper is made from carbon nanotubes — amazingly strong fibers about 1/50,000th the diameter of a human hair that were first developed in the early 1990s. Buckypaper owes its name to Buckminsterfullerene, or Carbon 60 — a type of carbon molecule whose powerful atomic bonds make it twice as hard as a diamond.

More here.

“Intellectual-property protection can be good for the technology industry as well as for its customers, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here). But it requires careful handling.”

From The Economist:

In information technology and telecoms in particular, the role of intellectual property has changed radically. What used to be the preserve of corporate lawyers and engineers in R&D labs has been speedily embraced by the boardroom. “Intellectual-asset management” now figures as a strategic business issue. In America alone, technology licensing revenue accounts for an estimated $45 billion annually; worldwide, the figure is around $100 billion and growing fast.

Technology firms are seeking more patents, expanding their scope, licensing more, litigating more and overhauling their business models around intellectual property. Yet paradoxically, as some companies batten down the hatches, other firms have found ways of making money by opening up their treasure-chest of innovation and sharing it with others. The rise of open-source software is just one example. And a new breed of companies has appeared on the periphery of today’s tech firms, acting as intellectual-property intermediaries and creating a market for ideas.

More here.

From the London Times:

The tradition of bestselling love guides goes back to the Ancient Chinese. Our earliest known manuals were first written in 300BC and buried in a family tomb at Mawangdui, in Hunan province. Recent translation reveals the timeless nature of the subjects they tackled.

Written as Cosmo coverlines, they would look like this: Four Seasons of Sex — and Why Autumn is Hot, Hot, Hot; Wild New Positions; Tiger Roving, Gibbon Grabbing and Fish Gobbling; Aphrodisiacs to Keep You Up All Night!Plus Exclusive! Your Love Route to Immortality.

As ever, it was all nonsense: home-made Viagra recipes involved ingredients such as beetle larvae, wasps and dried snails. The books also promised that any man who had sex with a different virgin every night for 100 nights without ejaculating would live for ever (albeit rather uncomfortably).

More here.

The other day I came across an article in a new journal, In Character, which has issues titled “Thrift”, “Purpose”, “Creativity”. The latest issue is entitled “Loyalty”. In it, I found a article by Bret Stephens on “Keeping Faith with the Jews, Keeping Faith with Israel”. The article was a rejoinder to Tony Judt’s 2003 piece in The New York Review of Books. Judt had written an article which endorsed a binational state as a solution the decades old conflict between the Palestinians and the Jewish state.

The idea of a binational state is a old one, but initially it came from the Zionist movement’s left wing—Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt at the moment of Israel’s birth. In more recent times, it was taken up by Palestinian secular nationalists and some in the Left wing, Palestinian and non-Palestinian.

The essay itself was odd. Its opening lines: “This is an essay about loyalty—the loyalty that Jews owe the State of Israel. To understand what such loyalty entails, let me begin by describing an act of betrayal.”

(The article itself was relatively uninteresting, for me at least, if only because Stephens kept suggesting that a Jew may not identify with Jewish religion, history and culture, but to be part of the Jewish community still he or she must minimally identify with what is “filial[ly] and political[ly]” Jewish, by which Stephens implicitly meant loyalty to the Israeli polity. The Satmar came to mind.)

But that wasn’t what caught my eye. Stephens mentioned a web site called “Palestine: Information with a Provenance”. The website catalogs information about people who write and speak on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its categorizations are, well, to say the least interesting. The site’s categories include “Hardline Zionist American Jew” and “anti-Zionist Mizrahi American”.

Stephens reaction was the following.

[T]he radically pro-Palestinian politics of the site were nowhere near as disturbing as the uses to which they had put their views. Among its other features, it places individuals in “author categories”: Jewish, Zionist, Israeli, American, Palestinian, Arab. I “found myself,” so to speak, as “Bret Stephens: Zionist American Israeli Jew.” With a meticulousness that would have delighted Adolf Eichmann, they had made lists, and I was on four of them, the very four they held in greatest contempt.

It struck me, to some extent, as a reverse Campus Watch. And therein was the odd, disturbing bit—which in all honesty I don’t quite know what to make of.

Campus Watch’s response to charge of McCarthyism was and has always been simple.

• Campus Watch is not a government activity or associated with any government organization.

• Campus Watch has no legislative or judiciary authority. It cannot dictate to any educational institution hiring or firing decisions.

•Campus Watch lacks any coercive powers.

And “Palestine: Information with a Provenance”:

A great many untruths and half-truths have been written on the conflict over Palestine. Therefore, it is important to understand the provenance of all material about the situation. For each article, map or book: who produced it? what agenda do the author(s) have? where was it published? what agenda does the journal have? Similarly, it is important to understand the provenance of each film or audio/video clip: who is speaking in it? what agenda do the speakers(s) have? where was the film or clip produced or broadcast? what agenda does the producer/broadcaster have? An attempt is made here to provide this information.

Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault’s case study of modern prisons, or properly, his extension of his sociological claim that one of the hallmarks of the modern era is surveillance, laid out an image of world in which people, cognizant of constantly being watched, alter their behavior and thereby alter themselves. Anthony Giddens and Timur Kuran have made similar claims, though Kuran does not associate it with modernity per se.

The monitoring is not necessarily done by states or other organized forms such as hospitals, asylums, factories and prisons, though states and other formal organizations are in a better position to do it. Or at least were. With the advent of the net, we can all be implicated in this mutual monitoring.

Daniel Pipes and Campus Watch are of course right in that, unlike McCarthy, they are not associated with any government organization, have no legislative authority, and cannot dictate hiring or firing in educational institutions. They are wrong in that they do have a coercive power. The power they have is the specter and, perhaps, reality of the lynch mob. It is certainly the fear that many on Campus Watch’s list feel, and what Bret Stephens felt. If “Palestine: Information with a Provenance” had the same scope and prominence, others on the “blacker” of its list may feel the same.

And it is this in the net and the blogosphere that generates this patrician worry of mine.

Ernesto Caivano: Philapores Navigate the Log and Code, 2003

More on Caivano here and here.

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John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

What’s important is the “utility” to you of the dollars you receive, and their utility drops off, often logarithmically, as you receive more of them. Gaining or losing $1 million means much more to most people than it does to Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. People consider not the dollar amount at stake in any investment or game, but the utility of the dollar amount for them.

Note that the declining average utility of money provides part of the rationale for progressive taxation and higher tax rates on greater wealth.

A less weighty illustration than progressive taxation is provided by a recent British study of the show “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.” It confirms that contestants behave as considerations of utility would suggest. Once they’ve reached a high rung on the winnings ladder, they more often quit while ahead rather than risk falling to a much lower level.

More here.

THE adage “what you see is what you get” could be thought to ring true for a group of people who dedicate their lives to collecting tiny flickers of light from very distant objects. But astronomers and cosmologists, who do exactly that, have long held that the universe is pervaded by far more than that which can be seen. Since the 1930s, they have postulated the existence of “dark matter”, an ethereal and, as yet, undetected form of matter.

Physicists claim to need dark matter to explain why the stars in the outermost reaches of rotating galaxies are moving at such great speeds. If these galaxies consisted only of the stars that can been seen, their gravity would be insufficient to hold on to the outermost stars. The individual stars would simply fly out of the galaxy, like a doll thrown from a rapidly spinning merry-go-round. Thus, the galaxy must contain some mysterious matter that makes it massive enough to keep hold of these stars. . .

Now, in a controversial paper that has recently appeared on arXiv, an online collection of physics papers, Fred Cooperstock and Steven Tieu of the University of Victoria in Canada claim that one of the key pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter is not really there.

more from The Economist here.