Steve Conner in The Independent:
The two winners of the Aventis Prizes for science books – one writing for children and another for adults – will each walk away with £10,000 and the glory of the most prestigious award in popular science writing.
This year sees Richard Dawkins and Robert Winston battling it out with four other shortlisted authors for the general prize, which will be announced at the Royal Society in London on 12 May.
More here.
Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed:
Right after 9/11, the obituaries started to appear: Irony, the reports said, was dead. Either that or in really bad condition.
It had been a very 1990s thing, this irony. Never before in human history had so many people so often used that two-handed gesture to inscribe quotation marks in the air. Or pronounced the word really with an inflection conveying the faux enthusiasm that doubled as transparent contempt (as in; “I really like that new Britney Spears single”). The manner had been forged in earlier times — by pioneers at the Harvard Lampoon, for example. But it really caught on during the cold peace that followed the Cold War. Suddenly, irony became available to everyone, on the cheap. It was the wit of the witless, the familiar smirk beneath the perpetually raised eyebrow.
And then it died. Hard realities broke through the callow veneer of detachment. Everybody became very earnest. And then America entered its present golden age of high seriousness…
More here. And see our own Morgan Meis’s riff on neo-sincerity here.
Kiernan Ryan in The Guardian:
Coleridge, arguably Shakespeare’s greatest critic, came closest to defining the distinctive quality of his vision, when he observed that Shakespeare is as unlike his contemporaries as he is unlike us. In other words, his plays at their most powerful are out of sync with both Shakespeare’s epoch and ours, and so can’t be explained fully in terms of the past they sprang from or the present in which we encounter them. What drives his drama is the dream of a dispensation whose advent we still await, the prospect of a future free from the division and domination that crippled Shakespeare’s world and continues to cripple ours.
More here.
From Nature: “The human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity. In a symbolic sense, it is the heritage of humanity.”
Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights
It is with great pleasure that Nature presents this special section of the Genome Gateway to mark the publication of the initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome. We are delighted to uphold the principle at the heart of the Human Genome Project: free and unrestricted access to all our genome related material through these web pages. more…
The human genome is by far the largest genome to be sequenced, and its size and complexity present many challenges for sequence assembly. The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium constructed a map of the whole genome to enable the selection of clones for sequencing and for the accurate assembly of the genome sequence. Here we report the construction of the whole-genome bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) map and its integration with previous landmark maps and information from mapping efforts focused on specific chromosomal regions. We also describe the integration of sequence data with the map.
More here.
Yad Vashem’s on-line database of survivors’ and victims’ names turns Holocaust museum into an ever-lasting monument By Ronny Shani for ynetnews.com
“Yad Vashem, considered by some the world’s largest Holocaust museum, has been operating an on-line survivors’ and victims’ database of names for a little over a year. Since November 2004, more than 4 million surfers from 178 countries have checked out the 3-million- name database; most visitors are English and Hebrew speakers, a museum source said. According to the source, the website proved to be successful in locating long-lost relatives and bringing families back together after dozens of years apart.”
John Allen Paulos in his monthly column at ABC News:
At first glance (and maybe the second one too), narrative and mathematics don’t seem to be natural companions, but recent years have made the juxtaposition much more common.
There have, for example, been many biographies about mathematicians ranging from Sylvia Nasar’s “A Beautiful Mind” about John Nash to Rebecca Goldstein’s just released “Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel”…
There’s even a new television murder mystery show, “Numb3rs,” featuring a crime-solving mathematician. (This latter reminds me of a joke that generally appeals only to mathematicians: How do you spell Henry? Answer. Hen3ry. The 3 is silent.) And these just scratch the surface. Countless — well, not really, you can count them — narrative renderings of things mathematical have poured forth in recent years…
With all this ferment it’s perhaps not surprising that the phenomenon has attracted academic interest. Scheduled for July 12-15 in Mykonos, Greece, an international conference on Mathematics and Narrative will explore the interplay between these two seemingly disparate ways of viewing the world.
More here.
Elizabeth Kolbert in the second of a three-part series in The New Yorker (part 1 here):
The world’s first empire was established forty-three hundred years ago, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The details of its founding, by Sargon of Akkad, have come down to us in a form somewhere between history and myth. Sargon—Sharru-kin, in the language of Akkadian—means “true king”; almost certainly, though, he was a usurper. As a baby, Sargon was said to have been discovered, Moses-like, floating in a basket. Later, he became cupbearer to the ruler of Kish, one of ancient Babylonia’s most powerful cities. Sargon dreamed that his master, Ur-Zababa, was about to be drowned by the goddess Inanna in a river of blood. Hearing about the dream, Ur-Zababa decided to have Sargon eliminated. How this plan failed is unknown; no text relating the end of the story has ever been found.
More here.
Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom (do first read the post, then try the tests before scrolling down to the answer):
Evolutionary psychologists argue that we can understand the workings of the human mind by investigating how it evolved. Much of their research focuses on the past two million years of hominid evolution, during which our ancestors lived in small bands, eating meat they either scavenged or hunted as well as tubers and other plants they gathered. Living for so long in this arrangement, certain ways of thinking may have been favored by natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists believe that a lot of puzzling features of the human mind make sense if we keep our heritage in mind.
The classic example of these puzzles is known as the Wason Selection Task. People tend to do well on this task if it is presented in one way, and terribly if it is presented another way. You can try it out for yourself.
Version 1:
You are given four cards. Each card has a number on one side and a letter on the other. Indicate only the card or cards you need to turn over to see whether any of these cards violate the following rule: if a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other side.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Version 2:
Now you’re a bouncer at a bar. You must enforce the rule that if a person is drinking beer, then he must be over 21 years old. The four cards below each represent one customer in your bar. One side shows what the person is drinking, and the other side shows the drinker’s age. Pick only the cards you definitely need to turn over to see if any of these people are breaking the law and need to be thrown out.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Highlight the area between the Xs for the answers:
X The answer to version one is D and 5. The answer to version two is beer and 17. X
If you took these tests, chances are you bombed on version one and got version two right. Studies consistently show that in tests of the first sort, about 25% of people choose the right answer. But 65% of people get test number two right.
This is actually a very weird result. Both tests involve precisely the same logic: If P, then Q. Yet putting this statement in terms of social rules makes it far easier for people to solve than if it is purely descriptive.
More here.
Jennifer Viegas in New Scientist:
The most comprehensive study to date exploring the genetic divergence of humans and chimpanzees has revealed that the genes most favoured by natural selection are those associated with immunity, tumour suppression, and programmed cell death.
These genes show signs of positive natural selection in both branches of the evolutionary tree and are changing more swiftly than would be expected through random mutation alone. Lead scientist Rasmus Nielsen and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, examined the 13,731 chimp genes that have equivalent genes with known functions in humans.
Research in 2003 revealed that genes involved with smell, hearing, digestion, long bone growth, and hairiness are undergoing positive natural selection in chimps and humans. The new study has found that the strongest evidence for selection is related to disease defence and apoptosis – or programmed cell death – which is linked to sperm production.
More here.
Paul M. Barrett in the Wall Street Journal:
In a compact stone and glass building here, the creators of the Arab American National Museum seek to set the record straight.
“If somebody else tells your story, it’s not your story,” Ismael Ahmed told me, “and in this case, we even think the story has been told with malice” by others. Mr. Ahmed heads the nonprofit social-services organization in Dearborn that built the museum, which opens today. By malice, he meant a desire to portray Arab-Americans as out of the mainstream, hostile toward the U.S. and possibly sympathetic toward terrorism.
The museum uses personal artifacts, skillfully distilled reminiscences and absorbing interactive displays to recount the tale of Arab immigration and accomplishment since the late 1800s. There is much to boast about, but just below the surface of the museum’s colorful exhibits–and sometimes emerging into full view–is a sense that corrections are needed; wrongs must be righted. It makes for a lively museum experience.
More here.
Michael Novak in First Things:
In the century since Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the book has been subject to severe and sustained criticism, much of it justified. Yet reflecting on its thesis in the light of worldwide economic developments during the past several decades reveals that, for all of his errors, Weber grasped something crucially important about the spiritual wellsprings of capitalism—something that has been neglected by capitalism’s radical critics no less than by many of its most enthusiastic champions.
As Weber began to contemplate a study of capitalism’s emergence in the early modern world, he pondered a fact that many others, including Adam Smith, had noted before him—namely, that there are many areas of the world in which people—even dedicated, persistent, industrious people—tended to work only to a target they set for themselves, after which they stopped. Yet Weber also noticed that some groups were gripped by what he perceived as a new and different work ethic, such that they felt motivated to earn as much as they could and go constantly beyond their earlier gains. What accounted for this difference in values?
More here.
Robert Roy Britt for LiveScience.com
“If you’re into time travel, mark your calendar for Saturday, May 7, 2005, when the first Time Traveler Convention will be held at MIT. Or if you miss it, perhaps you can wait a few years and attend anyway. That’s kind of what organizer Amal Dorai is banking on.
While scientists have not figured out the practical specifics of time travel, they also haven’t ruled it out as a possibility.
Dorai, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, hatched a rather ingenious plan to test the concept. Though obviously a stunt, the whole idea is a mindbender worthy of any scientifically inclined mind.
The gathering will be held at MIT’s East Campus Courtyard. Dorai gave the specific coordinates for anyone needing to plug them into some futuristic machine: 42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W.”
The deadline for RSVP is today (wednesday) at midnight.
Steven Johnson in Wired:
Twenty-three years ago, an American philosophy professor named James Flynn discovered a remarkable trend: Average IQ scores in every industrialized country on the planet had been increasing steadily for decades. Despite concerns about the dumbing-down of society – the failing schools, the garbage on TV, the decline of reading – the overall population was getting smarter. And the climb has continued, with more recent studies showing that the rate of IQ increase is accelerating. Next to global warming and Moore’s law, the so-called Flynn effect may be the most revealing line on the increasingly crowded chart of modern life – and it’s an especially hopeful one. We still have plenty of problems to solve, but at least there’s one consolation: Our brains are getting better at problem-solving.
More here.
From Nature:
Enlightenment is hard work — especially when you mix philosophy with quantum physics. But the Dalai Lama is always keen to investigate areas of science, no matter how complex they seem. And in 1997, when he wanted to delve into the quantum world, one of the men he invited to India was Anton Zeilinger.
Based at the University of Vienna in Austria, Zeilinger is committed to explaining his work to a broad audience. As a student, he was fascinated by both opera and the mathematical beauty of quantum mechanics. And although Zeilinger, who turns 60 in May, has just revived his old student hobby of playing walk-on parts at the Vienna State Opera House, it was fundamental physics that won his heart. Over the years, his scientific achievements, as well as his communication skills, have made him a media star, at least in his native Austria.
More here.
In an almost unbelievable decision, the University of Chicago has denied Sean Carrol tenure. I may write later here about how ridiculous the system of tenure has become in academia, but meanwhile, I am sure Sean could use some bucking up, and we should encourage him not to let up on posting, thereby depriving us of his inimitable, rational, bright and clear voice. Please go to Preposterous Universe and leave a comment urging Sean to keep blogging. Here is how Sean has bravely announced the bad news:
The bad news is that I’ve been denied tenure at Chicago. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn’t anticipated any problems at all. But apparently there are a few of our faculty who don’t think much of my research. A stylistic clash, I imagine. And a handful of dissenters is all it takes to derail a tenure case. I don’t think there are many people in the outside world who believe that the University of Chicago is better off without me than with me, but there seems to be an anomalously high concentration of them among my own colleagues.
So now I am on the job market again. Which is sad, both because of the intrinsically demoralizing nature of the job market, and because I cannot tell you how much I love this city and the friends I have made here. It truly feels like home to me. But I’m hopeful of getting a position at some other great place and flourishing there — doing well is the best revenge.
In the meantime, though, blogging will likely be a low priority. I’m not going to stop, but my former ambition to put something up every day (no matter how lame) is going to be set aside as I concentrate on other things.
See what Mark Trodden has to say about Sean here.
Dr Tony Phillips and Patrick L Barry in First Science:
Four hundred years ago – or so the story goes – Galileo Galilei started dropping things off the Leaning Tower of Pisa: Cannon balls, musket balls, gold, silver and wood. He might have expected the heavier objects to fall faster. Not so. They all hit the ground at the same time, and so he made a big discovery: gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate, regardless of their mass or composition.
Nowadays this is called “Universality of Free Fall” or the “Equivalence Principle,” and it is a cornerstone of modern physics. In particular, Einstein crafted his theory of gravity, i.e., the general theory of relativity, assuming the Equivalence Principle is true.
But what if it’s wrong?
“Some modern theories actually suggest that the acceleration of gravity does depend on the material composition of the object in a very subtle way,” says Jim Williams, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). If so, the theory of relativity would need re-writing; there would be a revolution in physics.
A group of NASA-supported researchers are going to test the Equivalence Principle by shooting laser beams at the Moon.
More here.
Paul Marks in New Scientist:
The Great Wall of China is poised to play its part in pushing back the boundaries of quantum cryptography. Later this year a Chinese team, which has just broken the record for transmitting entangled particles, will test the feasibility of satellite-based quantum communication using the wall.
The Great Wall’s new role was revealed after Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and his colleagues successfully transmitted “entangled” photons through more than 7 kilometres of the Earth’s turbulent lower atmosphere without losing the photons’ fragile quantum properties.
More here.
From Open Democracy:
“How is it that Vietnamese and Americans can now shake hands, but Vietnamese continue to refuse to offer a hand to their fellow Vietnamese?” Pham Thi Hoài, the exiled Vietnamese novelist, writes a bittersweet memoir of the sorrows of war and hopes of national reconciliation.
More here.
Reihan Salam reviews Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?) by Michael Eric Dyson, in The New Republic:
Elitism has many dimensions. There is the contempt of the middle classes for the very poor. This has an old pedigree. This contempt is often strongest among working families only slightly removed from poverty. Thanks to intimate familiarity with the pathologies that scar the lives of the poorest among us, these families react sharply against the faintest whiff of laziness or violent behavior. And so the anxiety-ridden members of this lower middle class are quick to flee the inner cities that threaten to swallow up their children. Having grown up sheltered in one of the neighborhoods largely left behind, I know these attitudes well. Just to declare my own allegiances at the outset, I sympathize. But I don’t think “contempt” is the right word. “Fear” is more like it.
When you’ve been a victim of crime, or more pressingly when you’ve seen a relative incarcerated or tormented by drug addiction or institutionalized for yet another reason, you know that you’re living on a knife’s edge and that your relative security can easily dissipate as a result of one serious mistake. You could splurge at the wrong time, or your child could end up in the wrong crowd. Fear is pervasive and palpable. It makes life tense and uneasy, and while it can occasionally spill over into ugly resentments of the vandals and hooligans you’re careful to never look in the eye, mainly it just makes you tenaciously protective of the people and communities you love. This is the so-called elitism that, strikingly, Michael Eric Dyson chooses to savage in his fierce polemic, Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?).
More here.
From my post about clocky, you can probably guess that I have problems waking up in the morning. In contrast to the irritation that clocky may cause–I don’t want to run around looking for a hidden clock first thing in the morning–SleepSmart:
. . . measures your sleep cycle, and waits for you to be in your lightest phase of sleep before rousing you. Its makers say that should ensure you wake up feeling refreshed every morning.
As you sleep you pass through a sequence of sleep states – light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep – that repeats approximately every 90 minutes. The point in that cycle at which you wake can affect how you feel later, and may even have a greater impact than how long or little you have slept. Being roused during a light phase means you are more likely to wake up perky.
SleepSmart records the distinct pattern of brain waves produced during each phase of sleep, via a headband equipped with electrodes and a microprocessor.
(Hat tip to Roop.)
