From Nature:

Two decades ago, some of the first science, maths and technology magnet high schools opened in the United States. The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) in Aurora, outside Chicago, was established the same year as Jefferson in 1985. The magnet concept caught on quickly as a way to challenge the best young minds, and as a possible answer to the decline in US-produced scientists and engineers. There are now 86 science magnet schools nationwide, which select gifted children with an aptitude for science. Australia, Jordan, Israel, Korea, Thailand, Japan and the United Kingdom have set up similar science-focused schools.

But is it a mistake to immerse students in the sciences at the age of 14 or 15? By the time they reach graduate school, such students have already spent eight years in focused study. Is ‘nerd’ school a place where overachievers bloom while others wilt under the pressure? Or would their talents be undernourished at a ‘normal’ high school? Graduates of the high-tech highs give a range of answers.

More here.

From Nature:

In March 1997, Chris Wemmer, a biologist with the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington DC, received an alarming fax. It was an article from the British Observer newspaper accusing him of colluding with the Burmese junta in committing human rights abuses in the country now known as Myanmar.

The article, headlined “Save the rhino, kill the people”, implicated Wemmer’s organization in the murder and forced removal of ethnic Karen people to make way for a huge wildlife park, called the Myinmoletkhat Reserve. It criticized the Smithsonian Institution for being one of the first Western organizations to work with the regime “since it massacred 3,000 demonstrators in 1988”.

Wemmer still fumes about the article, which he claims misrepresented the Smithsonian’s involvement in this secretive southeast Asian nation. That the institution’s project, in a wildlife park called Chatthin, headed by a Karen warden, was based 1,200 kilometres north of the site of the atrocities described in the piece didn’t seem to matter, he complains: “We were guilty by association.”

More here.

Here’s an online chess program that visualizes the search algorithm as it plays.

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(Hat tip: Roop)

From Princeton University:

“[W]e asked the Princeton University community to submit imagery produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science. The response was overwhelming: more than 200 entries from nearly 100 individuals in 15 departments. We selected 55 of these works to appear in the 2005 Art of Science Exhibition.”

One piece in the exhibit.

“A tornado ripping through the atmosphere is easy to identify, but in a mathematical sense, what velocity information is needed and how can we identify where the vortex begins and where it ends? A new method to do this involves following particle trajectories and investigating where the distances between trajectories stretch. This image shows some results of that work. We look at a very chaotic, periodic velocity field, named the ABC flow after its developers. We integrate trajectories both forward and backward in time, and observe the maximum stretching that occurs. The panels in the picture represent two-dimensional cuts through the three-dimensional velocity field.”

(Hat tip: Linta)

I recently stumbled across this, the last interview of WG Sebald before his tragic death in a car accident in 2001.

“My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds, and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain. For most of those years, I didn’t know what class we belonged to. Then the German “economic miracle” unfolded, so the family rose again; my father occupied a “proper” place in lower-middle-class society.

It was that social stratum where the so-called conspiracy of silence was at its most present. Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp. There it was, and we somehow had to get our minds around it – which of course we didn’t. It was in the afternoon, with a football match afterwards. So it took years to find out what had happened. In the mid-60s, I could not conceive that these events had happened only a few years back.”

It’s a real site, sort of, I think.  Here’s how they explain themselves. “rentagerman.de offers a wide range of Germans for your personal and social needs. You can select the German of your choice for an exclusive lifetime experience: Imagine to appear with your German at parties, family events, or just hang out with them at the local shopping center.”

And you can read various customer reviews like these:

Leila R., 36 (Rio de Janeiro):
“I will never forget, when I went to the beach with the German.
My friends had a good time, eating chicken with him under the sun of Ipanema beach.
Next time, I will buy him a new swimming trouser.”

Adam G., 48 (San Francisco):
“It was awesome! Having a German at the office for a week was a huge success! Since then, my relationship with my co-workers has improved big time! I’ll definitely do it again- It was, like, “oh my god, this is so it!”

From The New York Times:

The swells who showed up before Al Franken’s speech at a Democratic fund-raiser to down finger food and punch were thrilled to see him, all the more so because he continues to make threatening noises about running for the Senate here in 2008. Mr. Franken grew up in St. Louis Park, a Minneapolis suburb, and was admitted to Blake, a competitive and expensive prep school, because, he said, “they needed some Jews to get their SAT scores up.”

“In this country, we are going through a very dark period,” he told his audience, “and someday your grandchildren are going to ask what you did, and you are going to tell them, ‘I worked my butt off,’ ” he said, exhorting the audience to work to turn out the current administration. He is a public person who likes his public and enjoys a microphone.

More here.

From Scientific American:

According to a report published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, circadian rhythm genes help to regulate the brain’s reward system and could influence the addictive properties of drugs such as cocaine.

Colleen A. McClung of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and her colleagues studied mice lacking a circadian rhythm gene known as Clock. Compared to control animals, mice without Clock were hyperactive and became even more so after being given cocaine. What is more, they also found the drug more rewarding than normal mice did. Finally, Clock-deficient animals exhibited increased activity in the dopamine neurotransmitter system in the brain, which is heavily stimulated by cocaine use. “We found that the Clock gene is not only involved in regulating sleep/wake cycles, but is also very involved in regulating the rewarding responses to drugs of abuse,” McClung says.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Almost the first thing that every essay about the nineteenth-century American novelist William Dean Howells announces is that no one writes essays about William Dean Howells anymore; his eclipse is his identity. Yet in every decade since his death, in 1920, he has found strong advocates—and, although one might think that he needs to be argued for because he is distant from us, each new Howells has oddly resembled the critic who offers him. Howells is somehow both the road not taken and the street where we live.

More here.

Celeste Biever in New Scientist:

Cryptographers have found a way to snip a digital signature from one document and attach it to a fraudulent document without invalidating the signature and giving the fraud away.

The development means that attackers could potentially forge legal documents, load certified software with bogus code, or turn a digitally-signed letter of recommendation into one that authorises access to private information.

Digital signatures are used to authenticate website connections, emails and legal documents in some countries. They work because they are unique to the file or software that is signed, as they are created from the contents of the signed file. Therefore, if someone tries to cut a digital signature from one document and stick it to another, the signature fails because it no longer matches the document.

More here.

Matthias Schulz in Spiegel Online:

New pornographic figurines from the Stone Age have been discovered in Germany. But researchers can’t agree on what the 7,000-year-old sculptures mean. Were our ancestors uninhibited sex fiends, or was reproduction strictly controlled to improve mobility? An increasing number of finds seem to indicate the Stone Age was an orgy of sexual imagination.

The project itself was far from extraordinary. Workers near the Eastern German city of Leipzig were digging a ditch for a new gas line. Hum drum. But what they discovered was far from routine. A backhoe unearthed a 7,200-year-old, Stone Age garbage pit — and it was filled with refuse from some of the first farmers on the European continent. Moreover, upon rushing to the site, archeologists discovered an 8.2 centimeter (3.2 inches) clay torso buried underground. The legs, abdomen and head were missing, but, according to the lucky archeologists, the figure still had its most important features intact: a “well-shaped behind” and a “short, but impressive” penis.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

A favorite slice of reality TV in today’s Iraq is the melodramatically named program Terrorism in the Grip of Justice. Aired on state-run Al Iraqiya, which doesn’t require a satellite dish, it shows the confessions of captured “insurgents,” mainly foreign fighters. When possible, it also shows the videos that these people have made, so that, for example, a man can be viewed as he slices a victim’s throat and then viewed, looking much less brave, as he explains where he comes from, how he was taught to rehearse beheadings and throat-slittings on animals, and other insights into the trade. On occasion, these characters are confronted with the families of their victims. At other times, they have been able to tell the families of the missing what happened to their loved ones. The aim is to demystify the holy warriors and also to encourage civilians to call in with further tips…

Terrorism in the Grip of Justice could only be shown once the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government had been made. The United States could not have put any of these people on television, because the Geneva Conventions forbid the exhibiting of prisoners.

More here.

John Allen Paulos explains how numbers can suggest fishy business, in his column at ABC News:

Looking at large data sets and deriving loud conclusions from the reams of whispering numbers is often enjoyable. Herein are three quite disparate examples.

The first concerns sumo wrestlers and comes from “Freakonomics,” a fascinating new book by economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, that employs Levitt’s quirky economic insights to illuminate many everyday activities and practices. The second is simply a study I reported on in a book I wrote on the stock market, and the third comes from a simple analysis I recently made of grade distributions for a required math course at my university.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

The spy thriller still pines for the Soviet Union. No post-Iron Curtain intrigue, no replay of the British Empire’s Great Game in Afghanistan or its intrusions into the Middle East, no elaborate “security measures,” no double-double cross in the murk of C.I.A.-F.B.I. rivalry can match, for heart-stoppingly high geopolitical stakes, the good old days when, in terms of John le Carré’s fiction, M.I.6’s Smiley matched wits with the K.G.B.’s Karla on the global chessboard. There was an intelligibility if not a friendly intimacy in the old contest, one between two large, idealistic, rough-mannered nations seeking to maintain their spheres of influence short of tripping nuclear war. As one hardened undercover functionary cozily tells another in Robert Littell’s new book, “Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation” (Overlook; $25.95), “We all came of age in the cold war. We all fought the good fight. I’m sure we can work something out.” The so-called war on terror has no such surety; “working out” is just what the other side, or sides, doesn’t want. Littell conscientiously covers the new ground—the post-Soviet Russia of the oligarchs; the potential for financial shenanigans opened up by worldwide computerization; the stagnant antipathy between Israel and its neighbors; Bosnia; Chechnya; and (news to me) an international smugglers’ cove where the borders of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet and whores dance sleepily in one another’s arms—but he remains most excited by, and most at home with, occupants of the old U.S.S.R. as they strike up fresh relations with capitalism and the C.I.A.

More here.

Diane Martindale in Scientific American:

In the underworld of assisted suicide and euthanasia, Russel Ogden examines the means and methods–even as he is shunned by academia and chased by the law:

In 1990 David Lewis, a Vancouver man living with HIV, went to a local newspaper and announced that he had assisted eight friends, all suffering from AIDS, in committing suicide–an act of murder in the eyes of Canadian law. For many people, the news simply affirmed what they had long suspected was happening in the AIDS community. But to Russel Ogden, a criminology graduate student at Simon Fraser University looking for a research project, it was an opportunity to go where no scientist had ventured before.

“I had a population in my backyard that had been living with euthanasia issues for some time,” recalls Ogden, who is believed by many to be the first researcher in North America to have formally studied the practices of underground assisted suicide and euthanasia.

More here.

Joshua Foer reviews Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human by Joel Garreau, in The Washington Post:

Far-fetched as it may sound, the first person who will live to be 1,000 may already walk among us. The first computer that will think like a person may be built before today’s kindergarteners graduate from college. By the middle of this century, we may be as blasé about genetically engineered humans as we are today about pierced ears. These sorts of predictions have a habit of sounding silly by the time they’re supposed to come true, but there’s a certain logic to them. Joel Garreau calls that logic “The Curve.”

The Curve is the untamable force of exponential growth that propels technological progress. It’s the compound interest on human ingenuity. The fact that computing power has doubled every 18 months, right on schedule, for the last four decades is a manifestation of The Curve. So is the rapid expansion of the Internet and the recent boom in genetic technologies. According to the inexorable logic of The Curve, if you want to get a sense of how radically our world will be transformed over the next century, the best guide will be looking back at how much things have changed, not over the past century, but over the past millennium.

More here.

‘We have no proof as to what the most unread book of the last twenty years may be, but we can certainly hazard a guess: A Brief History of Time has long been mocked by publishers and comedians alike as the quintessential book that flies out of stores, only to collect dust at home. This year, Jim Wallis’s latest, God’s Politics, will join Hawking’s effort on your bookcase’s highest shelf , where it will remain ever after as a source of mild guilt. It’s easy to see why the Brief History goes unread: Physics is hard. Most people were traumatized in high school and don’t feel qualified to broach the subject. “Time” itself is so abstract as to seem unfriendly, and many of us like our books with people in them. By comparison, the unreadableness of God’s Politics is a mystery.’

From Leora Bersohn at The Revealer.

Looking at art in New York’s Chelsea can be a boring affair. So much painting, so much stuff for rich people. But that’s OK. There are things to be discovered. The Plum Blossom gallery has been doing a good job of showing quality work from Asia even if it is often suspiciously buyable. The current show, The Way to China is the Way to America has good stuff by Ji Dachun:

And by Zhang Hongtu:

Via Crooked Timber, John Thompson looks at the problems of publishing academic books. (In The Chornicle of Higher Education.)

“Whereas the ‘long decade’ from the early 1980s to 2000 was a buoyant period for many presses in the field of academic publishing, including many university presses, the period since 2001 has brought a rude awakening. Growth rates of university presses have fallen to the lowest levels in many years, returns from booksellers have reached unprecedented heights, and some university presses have been faced with the prospect of imminent closure. Nor has it been plain sailing for the big college-textbook publishers. Accustomed to annual growth rates of 6 percent to 8 percent, textbook publishers have suddenly found themselves faced with declining unit sales and surrounded by allegations that they are fleecing students with inflated prices.

Why do academic publishers find themselves in such difficult circumstances, and what, if anything, can they do about them?

To understand the problems of academic publishers today, we have to see that their current predicament is the outcome of a long process of development that stretches back to the 1970s and before.”

US researchers have claimed to have discovered a planet similar to Earth some 15 light years away. . .

“This planet answers an ancient question. Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus argued about whether there were other Earth-like planets. Now, for the first time, we have evidence for a rocky planet around a normal star,” said team leader Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley.

more here.