From Science:

The research field Eva Barroso chose for her Ph.D. is so new that even she had never heard of it before seeing the job posting on the Internet. “I was interested in human genetics, but not especially in this field,” she says. What the Ph.D. project was proposing was the opportunity to try and track down genetic markers in order to predict an individual’s susceptibility to diseases that involve more than one gene.

The impact of such research could be huge. In the long term, Barroso says, “the idea is to have your DNA checked for [predisposition] to breast cancer, and every [other known disease].” Not only does she find it fascinating, she also finds it easy to grab the interest of her family and friends when she explains what she does–a rare quality in a scientific job.

More here.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in the weekend’s installment of “Freakonomics” in the New York Times Magazine:

“Although motor-vehicle crashes are still the top killer among children from 2 to 14, fatality rates have fallen steadily in recent decades — a drop that coincides with the rise of [child safety] car-seat use. Perhaps the single most compelling statistic about car seats in the NHTSA manual was this one: ‘They are 54 percent effective in reducing deaths for children ages 1 to 4 in passenger cars.’

But 54 percent effective compared with what? The answer, it turns out, is this: Compared with a child’s riding completely unrestrained. There is another mode of restraint, meanwhile, that doesn’t cost $200 or require a four-day course to master: seat belts.

For children younger than roughly 24 months, seat belts plainly won’t do. For them, a car seat represents the best practical way to ride securely, and it is certainly an improvement over the days of riding shotgun on mom’s lap. But what about older children? Is it possible that seat belts might afford them the same protection as car seats?

The answer can be found in a trove of government data called the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which compiles police reports on all fatal crashes in the U.S. since 1975. These data include every imaginable variable in a crash, including whether the occupants were restrained and how.

Even a quick look at the FARS data reveals a striking result . . .”

From Scientific American:

The bursting blooms of many types of flowers herald the onset of spring. New research is helping scientists unravel the cellular signaling that prompts the plants to blossom after their winter slumber. According to a report published in today’s issue of the journal Science, the action of one protein that responds to daylight starts a chain reaction that allows flowering to commence. 

More here.

From the Australian Broadcast Corporation Online:

“The movie gives two examples of experiments which have shown the power of the mind affecting reality. Neither of them convincingly achieve this. . .

John Hagelin, PhD, describes a study he did in Washington in 1992. 4000 volunteers regularly meditated to achieve a 25% drop in violent crime by the end of summer. He claims the drop was achieved.

But Hagelin’s use of the term ‘achieved’ for the drop in crime is a bit strong. He announced in 1994 (one year after the study) that violent crime had decreased 18%. You might think that meant there were 18% fewer violent crimes than in the previous year, but the decrease was actually relative to his predicted increase based on some fancy statistical footwork. Regular indicators of violent crime told a different story – the number of murders actually went up.

The meditation may not have helped the victims of violent crime, but it did win Hagelin the 1994 Ig Nobel Peace Prize.”

Via Political Theory Daily, Paul Erlich and Simon Levin outline some first steps in developing an integrated evolution theory of norms as a first step towards understanding cultural evolution.

“There is a long-recognized need both to understand the process of human cultural evolution per se and to find ways of altering its course (an operation in which institutions as diverse as schools, prisons, and governments have long been engaged). In a world threatened by weapons of mass destruction and escalating environmental deterioration, the need to change our behavior to avoid a global collapse has become urgent. A clear understanding of how cultural changes interact with individual actions is central to informing democratically and humanely guided efforts to influence cultural evolution. While most of the effort to understand that evolution has come from the social sciences, biologists have also struggled with the issue. . . [B]iologists and social scientists need one another and must collectively direct more of their attention to understanding how social norms develop and change. Therefore, we offer this review of the challenge in order to emphasize its multidisciplinary dimensions and thereby to recruit a broader mixture of scientists into a more integrated effort to develop a theory of change in social norms—and, eventually, cultural evolution as a whole.”

In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system – called the “Logic Alphabet” – in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic. Indeed, Zellweger has built a series of physical models of his alphabet that recall the educational teaching toys, or “gifts,” of Friedrich Froebel, the great nineteenth century founder of the Kindergarten movement. Just as Froebel was deeply influenced by the study of crystal structures, which he believed could serve as the foundation for an entire educational framework, so Zellweger’s Logic Alphabet is based on a crystal-like arrangement of its elements. Thus where the traditional approach to logic is purely abstract, Zellweger’s is geometric, making it amenable to visual play.

more here.

Compared to Mark McGowan’s previous performance pieces, his latest enterprise seems relatively harmless. For an artist whose three-year career has included an attempt to catapult a 76-year-old pensioner into space (to highlight the way in which the young mistreat the old), walking backwards for 11 miles with a 27lb turkey on his head while shouting at fat people (to draw attention to the obesity epidemic), and scratching 50 shiny cars with his keys and photographing the evidence (for reasons that have never been entirely clear), his decision to leave a tap running for a year sounds almost anodyne. But McGowan’s latest stunt – wasting water in the backroom of a south London gallery – has caused the kind of publicity he can only have dreamed of. It’s a Shangri-la scenario for a man whose art doesn’t really exist unless people take notice of it.

more here.

From The New York Times:

A SWEDISH diplomat recently announced that he was nominating Rudy Giuliani, New York’s famously bellicose former mayor, for the Nobel Peace Prize. My first thought was: He won’t accept! But then, even better: If he wins, he could use his speech to denounce peace. Or Swedes. Or New York liberals. We miss Rudy; even some of the people who could barely stand him at the time miss him. The administration of the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has turned out to be, as Fred Siegel puts it in this very insightful and very argumentative book, a ”moderately competent muddle.” The Giuliani years were neither moderate nor muddled.

Two biographies of Giuliani appeared during his tenure, but in ”The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life,” Siegel has produced the first book-length reckoning with Giuliani’s philosophy, achievements and legacy.

More here.

From MSNBC:

A parrot has grasped the concept of zero, something humans can’t do until at least the toddler phase, researchers say. Alex, a 28-year-old African gray parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, has a brain the size of a walnut. But when confronted with no items on a tray where usually there are some, he says “none.” Zero is thought to be a rather abstract concept even for people. Children typically don’t grasp it until age 3 or 4, Brandeis researchers say. Some ancient cultures lacked a formal term for zilch, even as recently as the Middle Ages.

More here.

“The adventures of a hot-tempered and impetuous Scottish pirate named Alexander Selkirk inspired one of literature’s greatest adventures, as our author, himself a member of the family, recounts.”

Bruce Selcraig in Smithsonian Magazine:

Three centuries ago an impetuous Scottish sailor known as Alexander Selkirk was languishing off the coast of Chile in a battle-scarred, worm-eaten British ship called the Cinque Ports when he began to argue with the captain that the leaky, disease-ridden vessel was a deathtrap. Selkirk, a skilled navigator, and the ship’s sickened crew were privateers—in effect, legalized pirates for the British Crown—who had spent a year at sea off South America robbing Spanish ships and coastal villages. Selkirk had already been on a similar voyage. He knew all the risks. But by October 1704, as the Cinque Ports anchored off a deserted archipelago 418 miles west of Valparaiso, Chile, he had made a life-changing decision.

Selkirk demanded that his 21-year-old captain, Lt. Thomas Stradling, whom he regarded as arrogant, leave him on the largest island, a wish that Stradling was only too happy to oblige.

More here.

Sandy Szwarc in Tech Central Station:

It has been well documented that dieting virtually always fails long-term — about 90 to 95% of the time — and that dieting drop-out rates are high. But this study also poignantly illustrated that improvements to health and health behaviors with dieting are not maintained and in the end dieting actually worsens women’s health and quality of life. The dieting group which had significantly increased their physical activity right after the treatment period, had returned to their initial levels by the end of the study. And most remarkably, there was nearly 200% more bulimia and eating disorders among the dieters compared to the nondieters. The dieters’ self esteem and depression had also significantly worsened, which isn’t surprising given most dieters are left with an overwhelming sense of failure. And the psychological and physiological effects, as well as eating problems, resulting from calorie restriction itself have been clinically documented.   

The nondieters, on the other hand, enjoyed extraordinary improvements in their self esteem and feeling good about their bodies, and less depression.

More here.

Leonard David at Space.com:

In his new book, Teleportation – The Impossible Leap, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., writer David Darling contends that “”One way or another, teleportation is going to play a major role in all our futures. It will be a fundamental process at the heart of quantum computers, which will themselves radically change the world.”

Darling suggests that some form of classical teleportation and replication for inanimate objects also seems inevitable. But whether humans can make the leap, well, that remains to be seen.

Teleporting a person would require a machine that isolates, appraises, and keeps track of over a trillion trillion atoms that constitute the human body, then sends that data to another locale for reassembly—and hopefully without mussing up your physical and mental makeup.

“One thing is certain: if that impossible leap turns out to be merely difficult—a question of simply overcoming technical challenges—it will someday be accomplished,” Darling predicts.

In this regard, Darling writes that the quantum computer “is the joker in the deck, the factor that changes the rules of what is and isn’t possible.”

More here.

Ben Adler in The New Republic:

Pressure to temper the teaching of evolution in public schools has come overwhelmingly from conservatives; the Kansas board’s re-examination of its evolution standards resulted from Republican gains last November that put an anti-evolution conservative majority on the board. So we were curious: How do leading conservative thinkers and pundits feel about evolution and intelligent design? We asked them. Here’s what they said.

William Kristol, The Weekly Standard

Whether he personally believes in evolution: “I don’t discuss personal opinions. … I’m familiar with what’s obviously true about it as well as what’s problematic. … I’m not a scientist. … It’s like me asking you whether you believe in the Big Bang.”

How evolution should be taught in public schools: “I managed to have my children go through the Fairfax, Virginia schools without ever looking at one of their science textbooks.”

More here.

Bookforum throws 19 or so authors into a discussion of Pynchon and his legacy for no particular reason at all. It’s nice, and not entirely un-Pynchonesque, when magazines do things like that.

From Gerald Howard:

In 1973, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow landed on my brain and exploded there like, well, a V-2 rocket. It was precisely the book I needed at the time, which tells you something about my mental and spiritual condition. Hey, it was the ’70s. The country was low in the water and so was I. Tar-black humor, crushing difficulty, rampant paranoia, accelerating entropy, jaw-dropping perversity, apocalyptic terror, history as a conspiracy of the conjoined forces of technology, death, and sinister Control—it was all good. I preferred having my spirit crushed by a great American novel to the everyday humiliations of my first year of postcollegiate life and the cultural and political demoralizations of the era.

The revival of interest in Land Art, and the new projects that seem to have emerged from that tradition as it first manifested itself in the early 70s, is pretty interesting. Artforum’s summer issue devotes a fair amount of space to the greater Land art phenomenon.

Land art and subsequent site-specific work therefore share a deep structure. Belonging to a period of unprecedented media expansion (the television era), both sets of practices center on the mutual delimitation of virtuality and presence. In Land art presence is associated with remote territories, while virtuality inheres in mechanically reproduced documentation. In site-specific art, it is the artist as diagnostician or itinerant consultant who signifies presence in materializing a hitherto-virtual discursive site, as when Christian Philipp Müller actualizes an unmarked international border by crossing it on foot (Green Border, 1993) or Andrea Fraser ventriloquizes the entire dramatis personae of the art world while undressing (Official Welcome, 2001). In one set of practices it is the land, and in the other, the body, that serves as the material limit of representation.

From Science Daily:

Sometime, when you are out on the road and looking for something to occupy you, try this little experiment: If traffic is heavy, pick out another vehicle. It can be anything, from a cute little Mini Cooper to a humongous Hummer, just as long as its driver is doing one thing: trying to get ahead of everyone else. After you have selected your subject, over the course of, say, the next 20 minutes, keep track of where that vehicle is in relation to your own. If the traffic is really solid, or if you are proceeding along a strip dotted by traffic lights, chances are that other vehicle will not move substantially ahead, and whatever energy that driver has been expending will be for naught.

Somewhere along the line, in the American driving culture, pushing to get ahead became the norm.

More here.

From Nature:

Sniff test suggests when, and with whom, women are most likely to cheat. Women are most likely to cheat on their long-term partner when they are at their most fertile, and they tend to choose genetically superior men for their fling. That’s the claim of a study by Czech researchers, which found that the smell of a socially dominant male is most exciting to women in stable relationships, especially on days when they are ovulating.

More here. 

Hasbro’s Monopoly live takes place in london, where players can buy hotels and apartments and collect virtual rent, while prices are determined by real life traffic data, taken from 18 GPS equipped cabs that roam around london. Every million a player makes gets them one entry to a draw, that will get them a year’s worth of rent or mortgage:

“Gamer Matthew Knight, a British website developer, has been playing Monopoly Live since it launched last month, and hopes his knowledge of the city’s true traffic patterns can provide an edge over other players. For example, the world’s largest tennis tournament has compelled him to invest heavily in Wimbledon and surrounding properties last week.

“That someone had the idea to tag up London taxis with GPS and use them as pawns in a giant interactive board game: Geek++,” Knight said. “

More here

Reviewed by Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly.

In 1942, the financial adviser to the royal family of Lichtenstein asked the artist Emma Kunz if she would attempt to “repolarize” Adolf Hitler from a distance. Citing excessive negative energies, she at first declined. When she later relented, the 63-centimeter metal spring Kunz used as a “transmitter” flew up and began to slash at her body, before wresting itself from her grip and flying across the room. As is often the case, art had failed to make an impact on worldly events.

This is from a few years ago, but worth posting again (I had posted it to the Aula POV back then) not only because this character is so bizarre, but because it illustrates the rot at the heart of psychoanalysis. (A conversation with Robin Varghese reminded me of Masud Raza Khan yesterday.)

Robert S. Boynton wrote in the Boston Review:

In February 2001 the psychoanalytic world was shaken by a London Review of Books article by Wynne Godley, visiting scholar at Bard College’s Levi Economics Institute, professor emeritus of applied economics at Cambridge University, and onetime member of H.M. Treasury Panel of Independent Forecasters (the so-called Six Wise Men). “Saving Masud Khan” tells the story of Godley’s lengthy psychoanalysis with Mohammed Masud Raza Khan, the charismatic Anglo-Pakistani who—it was recently revealed—slept with and abused many of his patients. In Godley’s telling, he was essentially tortured by Khan from beginning to end. It was a “long and fruitless battle culminating in a spiral of degradation.”

“Within minutes of our first meeting, the therapeutic relationship had been totally subverted,” he writes. In later sessions Khan violated every conceivable boundary between analyst and patient…

…The article was devastating because Khan had been one of psychoanalysis’s best and brightest—a senior training analyst, a director of the Sigmund Freud Copyrights, an Anna Freud protégé, and longtime collaborator with the most famous child analyst of the twentieth century, D. W. Winnicott (Khan edited and, some speculate, may have coauthored much of his mentor’s voluminous output of books and papers). With his impeccable pedigree he was the link between the legendary first generation and some of today’s most important analysts. Indeed, Anna Freud insisted that Khan understood her father’s work better than anyone (other than herself, of course), and she defended him whenever he aroused the Society’s ire…

…Khan’s manners were no better when he kept his appointments. The director Mike Nichols, a close friend in the 1960s, remembers a dinner party at which Khan spied a man flirting with a woman at the end of the table. “You are wasting your time, sir! You are barking up the wrong tree!” bellows Nichols, imitating Khan’s clipped Pakistani accent. “Can’t you see that she is a lesbian!” On another occasion, Nichols says, Khan sent a chocolate cake to an obese man at another table at the restaurant, calling across to him as it was delivered, “So that you might die sooner!” Some suspected Khan’s mischief was designed to show off his Svengali-like powers of persuasion. Once, while drinking champagne with the French analyst Andre Green, Khan deliberately nudged the bottle off the table, sending it crashing to the floor. He then turned to the man at the adjacent table and demanded an apology, creating such a scene that the innocent diner eventually bought them a new bottle.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Khan’s behavior was that it usually went unchallenged. One reason, suggests Kermode, was Khan’s intelligence. He recalls a standing-room-only lecture by Lacan at London’s Institute Français in the mid-1960s, when the French analyst was at the height of his fame. “It was boring and went on for three hours. Finally, Masud strode up to the stage and interrupted him saying, ‘No, you’re explaining this incorrectly.’” Khan then proceeded to offer his own version of Lacanian theory while Lacan beamed with admiration. “He was obviously quite fond of Masud,” Kermode tells me.

Much more here.