NOTE: All posts at 3QD related to the Aula 2006 ─ Movement event, including this one, will be collected on this page. Bookmark it to stay on top of the Aula meeting at all times for the next week.

The second keynote speech at the Aula 2006 ─ Movement public event will be given by Alastair Curtis. I want to give him just a very brief introduction here.

Effective April 1, 2006, Alastair Curtis is Nokia’s new Head of Design. He replaces the redoubtable Frank Nuovo, who will now be overseeing Nokia’s luxury lines of handsets. Alastair is no newcomer to Nokia, having started working there in 1993, having obtained a Master of Arts degree in Industrial Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art in London, as well as a Diploma of Engineering from the Imperial College and a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design from Brunel University. In 1996, Alastair was named Senior Designer and in 1997 he moved to Los Angeles to as Global Operations Manager of Nokia’s new Design center there. This was at a time when design was becoming more and more important as a distinguishing feature in mobile telephones, and many of the main manufacturers were racing to invest in expanding their design operations.

After his appointment as Nokia’s Head of Design, Alastair said:

Having a multidisciplinary global team will enhance our ability to combine great user experience design with the latest technology, to create a world-class portfolio for consumers. Ease-of-use and style will continue to be central to our design work and the Nokia brand.

Alastair will be delivering a talk entitled “People Moving” at the Aula event, which I am sure Morgan and I will have more to say about next week.

13hrs and 20 minutes from the first game of the 2006 World Cup, here is a blog (or rather 34 of them) reporting nearly every detail. There are, of course, many, many, many blogs, leading me to wonder whether this will be the most blogged event in history. Betting markets meanwhile are heavily favoring Brazil. I’ll be watching the Germany v. Costa Rica game at Loreley in the Lower East Side with my friend E.Z. (of German extraction), who dejectedly said, “this is probably the only game we’ll win.” But the mood in Germany appears to be exceedingly festive (potential racist attacks notwithstanding). From World Cup Blog:

Fan Fest Berlin was a blast. The strip that runs from the Brandenburg Gate was full of people, old and young, all out for a good time. Plenty of street side bars and snack places selling bratwurst and other German favorites. In front of the Brandenburg Gate a stage was set up and the acts included Brasilian samba band Olodum, who were perfect for the street festival audience. The atmosphere in front of the Brandenburg Gate was of excitement and anticipation. Up to this point I have not seen many Germans wearing their nation’s colors, but at Fan Fest they started to come out.

One great thing here in Berlin is the civilized nature of life. People are cool and there is not a ‘drunken soccer fan’ mentality, as there is in other countries. Of course people here would like to see Germany win, but they also appreciate good football and are open enough to give credit where it’s due.

Philip Gourevitch has a piece on Darfur and intervention, in this weeks New Yorker.

Given the Bush Administration’s contempt for the U.N., and the U.N.’s own dysfunction, it is a measure of how low Darfur’s situation ranks among the Administration’s priorities that it is willing to let the Security Council handle it. And it is a measure of how forsaken Darfur is that Bush has been more actively engaged with its crisis than many Western leaders. (Last month, when the World Food Program, finding itself strapped for funds, cut food rations for Darfuri refugees, Bush noted that the United States, unlike other nations, had met its financial commitment.) Still, one can’t help thinking that the words “Not on my watch” originally carried a bigger promise.

The interventionist impulse—whether it is espoused by liberal humanitarians or neocon hawks—is not much in favor these days. Anti-genocide activists argue that Darfuris should not be made to pay for mistakes made in Iraq, and that “saving Darfur” can redeem America’s international honor. But how do we know that, if we take action, we will do the right thing and do it successfully? “Tough talk” aside, Darfur presents no more of a cakewalk than Iraq did. A major ground invasion would be required to stop the janjaweed’s horse- and camel-mounted killers—and advocates of intervention insist that air power would be needed as well. There are dozens of ethnic groups in Darfur, and at least three fractious rebel movements, in addition to the janjaweed, the Army, and the Air Force, and it is not clear which of them would be on our side, or whose side we would want to be on.

This is welcomed, even if I disagree with their positions on most of the salient political issues of our time.

Conservatives Against Intelligent Design (CAID) was founded to give a voice to Republicans, Independent Conservatives, and Libertarians across the country who stand opposed to the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ and other forms of creationism in the classroom. In recent years Republican legislators at all levels of government have authored, sponsored, and voted for various anti-evolution bills with perceived immunity, confident that those who vote for them are creationists like themselves. CAID is intended as a wake-up call to these legislators, to remind them that the teaching of evolution is not a partisan issue, but rather one of the separation between theology and science.

CAID holds that there is no conflict between evolution and religion because each speaks to a different level of understanding and to a different level of explanation: Namely empirical versus metaphysical. Neither threatens nor invalidates the other. However, by their very nature alternative theories like ‘intelligent design’ rely on the supposition of a metaphysical creator and therefore stand outside the domain of rational empiricism. Science–being based upon the latter–has no room within it for theological supposition; therefore such theories must remain outside the science classroom, being more suitable for discussion in philosophy courses.

Darwinian evolution has continued to gain empirical and theoretical support in the nearly 150 years since the original publication of Origin of Species. Although scientists continue to debate the specifics of evolutionary pattern and process, these represent attempts to refine and clarify extant theory rather than supplant or disprove either evolution or natural selection as the dominant mechanism of change.

In Science:

After more than 2 years of what Harvard Provost Steven Hyman called “the most extensive ethical and scientific review in recent memory,” Harvard University researchers have been given the go-ahead to use cloning to create disease-specific lines of human embryonic stem cells.

Experts say research cloning–known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT)–will give scientists a far more effective tool for studying diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson’s. But some people oppose the technique for religious and philosophical reasons because it involves creating and destroying fertilized eggs, and the procedure is banned in some states. There are no reports of success with SCNT, now that the research of Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang was discredited (ScienceNOW, 12 May).

In the Daily Star (Beirut), Tzvetan Todorov on “homegrown” terrorism, in the wake of the arrests in Canada.

There have always been fanatical individuals ready to die and kill in the name of their beliefs. But they seem far more dangerous nowadays as a result of technological advances that have “democratized” bomb making. After all, as the London and Madrid bombings demonstrated, a cell phone is all that is needed to time an explosion – or a series of explosions – with deadly efficiency.

Our freedoms and social fluidity also contribute to the threat. People move about the globe cheaply and with relative ease. Immigrants can establish themselves in new societies, and in democratic states they can live completely free of supervision. Our freedoms are their tools.

So how do we fight such an amorphous enemy?

US President George W. Bush has demonstrated one way not to do it: His invasion and occupation of Iraq shows that directly attacking Muslim states only fuels fanaticism. Of course, civilized countries should not give up the fight against extremist Islam because of the bloodshed in Iraq; but we must recognize that war, occupation, and forced submission to military power have merely caused mass humiliation and resentment among many ordinary Muslims – emotions that are then channeled into terrorist networks. British Prime Minister Tony Blair could loudly proclaim that the London bombings of July last year were unrelated to Britain’s participation in the Iraq war, but the terrorists themselves, once arrested, said exactly the opposite.

In Slate, Daniel Byman on what the death of Zarqawi meand for the insurgency.

A new jihadist leader might succeed in uniting the insurgency more effectively. Such a leader could eschew the sectarian vitriol Zarqawi regularly spouted. He might be an Iraqi, making him better able to bring together the strands of jihadism and nationalism. And unlike Zarqawi, who also actively plotted attacks outside Iraq, a new leader may focus the struggle on targets within the country.

Nor does the structure of the Iraqi insurgency suggest that the killing will have a lasting impact. When Israel killed the leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shiqaqi, in 1995, it paralyzed the organization. Shiqaqi had led a highly hierarchical organization, and his successors squabbled for years over leadership and next steps. The Iraqi insurgency, in contrast, is highly decentralized…

The removal of leaders can also have dangerous unexpected consequences. U.S. officials thought that the capture of Saddam Hussein would deal a major blow to the Iraqi insurgency… In fact, his capture on Dec. 14, 2003, removed a stigma under which many insurgents operated: No longer were they seen as fighting to restore a brutal dictatorship but rather to liberate Iraq from the United States.

Other takes from Hitchens (also in Slate), David Corn (The Nation), and Ron Jacobs (in Counterpunch)

Perry Anderson on Hervé Juvin’s L’avènement du corps, in the New Left Review.

Social agendas in the West are in flux, as new kinds of issues gain salience—pension-systems, immigration regimes, reproductive rights, marital arrangements. Each is giving rise to large blocs of literature. On the left, Robin Blackburn’s Banking on Death and Göran Therborn’s Between Sex and Power stand out. On the right, Francis Fukuyama’s The Great Disruption and Our Posthuman Future were well-received interventions. Ongoing changes have found a vaster anthropological setting in Maurice Godelier’s Métamorphoses de la parenté. In different ways, all these works aim at the forms of social science. L’avènement du corps belongs to another genre: the philosophical essay, illustrated with an abundance of striking—if rarely sourced—data, and delivered with an intellectual mordancy and crisp literary éclat that remain, even today, peculiarly French. Its author, Hervé Juvin, might also be regarded as a local phenomenon. In Anglophone societies business and culture are typically strangers, yielding at best—if we exclude the distinguished example of W. G. Runciman, a throw-back to hereditary wealth closer to the time of Rosebery or Balfour than the cbi—earnest middle-brow apologetics at the level of Adair Turner’s Just Capital; but in France the intellectual executive is a not unfamiliar figure. Operating in the insurance world, Juvin writes without overt political attachments. But in so far as he can be situated, his connexions lie with Le Débat, the country’s liveliest journal of the Centre-Right.

L’avènement du corps announces a time when the human body has started to pre-empt all other measures of value in the West, separating the experience of contemporary generations from that of all predecessors, and the rest of the world. At the basis of this sea change lies a spectacular transformation of life expectancy. When the Revolution broke out in 1789, the average span of life in France was 22. By 1900 it was just under 45. Today, it is 75 for men, and over 83 for women, and continually increasing. ‘We have every reason to hope that one girl out of two born in France since 2000 will live to be a hundred years old’. This prolongation of life is ‘the present that a century of blood and iron has left us—the present of a life that has doubled’. It amounts to ‘the invention of a new body, against need, against suffering and against time; against the world too—the world of nature, which was destiny’. The gift is restricted to the rich. ‘An entire generation will soon separate Europe from its neighbours to the south, when the median age of its population passes 50 (towards 2050), while that of the Maghreb remains under 30’.

From EGO:

It was about 12am during my Saturday overnight call–the worst night to be on-call. Despite the obvious loss of the weekend, it was also the “night float” interns’ night off, which means four of us held down the fort for the other interns’ patients, while we admitted new ones. I had six patients I was already caring for, some of their problems were clear cut and being treated, others I was clueless about. I had one 40 year old patient in fulminant liver failure. Liver cancer? Infection? Some autoimmune or inflammatory disease? The etiology remained unknown, but fluid was accumulating in his abdomen (ascites) and lungs (pulmonary edema), and now his kidneys were beginning to fail. He was in severe respiratory distress on the brink of being intubated, and all we could do is cross our fingers and await the biopsy while we pumped him full of antibiotics to cover any sort of infection.

My second sick patient was an IV drug abuser with sepsis, who likely had endocarditis–bacteria growing his blood and seeding into the valves of his heart–causing symptoms of a failing heart. His vital signs were barely stable as we tried to control his infection with broad spectrum antibiotics and intravenous fluid support. I had four other patients with everything from an HIV patient with a fungal pneumonia, to an 80 year old man who thought it was 1975 and swore he talked to dead people last night. Such was the scene on a busy night during my first month on the medicine wards as an intern.

Sleep deprived, and overwhelmed with the workload, I felt like I would never sit down, never eat, and my pager would never stop beeping.

More here.

From BBC News:

The creature was of the sauropod type – that group of long-necked, four-footed herbivores that were the largest of all the dinosaurs.

But at just a few metres in length, this animal was considerably smaller than its huge cousins, scientists report in the journal Nature. The team thinks the Jurassic species evolved its small form in response to limited food resources on an island. Martin Sander, from the University of Bonn, and colleagues studied the remains of over 11 sauropods found in a quarry at Oker, near Goslar, Lower Saxony. With total body lengths ranging from 1.7 to 6.2m (5.5-20ft), the team originally thought the dinosaurs were juveniles. But when the scientists examined the fossils closely, they realised they were dealing with dwarf creatures.

More here.

Yesterday I explained what the Aula 2006 ─ Movement meeting next week in Helsinki is about. Today I would like to say a few words about Clay Shirky, the first speaker at the event.

NOTE: The Aula public meeting on Wednesday, June 14th, in Helsinki has been moved to a larger venue and registration is no longer required to attend. For details, go here.

Among many other things, Clay Shirky teaches New Media at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. For some years now, he has been at the forefront of thinking about the effects of new technologies on social interaction and coined the term “social software.” Among his many influential contributions to this field are “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality,” “Communities, Audiences, and Scale,” “Half the World,” “Situated Software,” and “Ontology is Overrated,” in which he makes this typically astute observation:

There are many ways to organize data: labels, lists, categories, taxonomies, ontologies. Of these, ontology — assertions about essence and relations among a group of items — seems to be the highest-order method of organization. Indeed, the predicted value of the Semantic Web assumes that ontological successes such as the Library of Congress’s classification scheme are easily replicable.

Those successes are not easily replicable. Ontology, far from being an ideal high-order tool, is a 300-year-old hack, now nearing the end of its useful life. The problem ontology solves is not how to organize ideas but how to organize things — the Library of Congress’s classification scheme exists not because concepts require consistent hierarchical placement, but because books do.

Earlier this year, Clay Shirky responded to John Brockman and Steven Pinker’s question “What is your dangerous idea?” at Edge.org, with:

Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account.

…consider the phenomenon of ‘super-sizing’, where a restaurant patron is offered the chance to increase the portion size of their meal for some small amount of money. This presents a curious problem for the concept of free will — the patron has already made a calculation about the amount of money they are willing to pay in return for a particular amount of food. However, when the question is re-asked, — not “Would you pay $5.79 for this total amount of food?” but “Would you pay an additional 30 cents for more french fries?” — patrons often say yes, despite having answered “No” moments before to an economically identical question.

Super-sizing is expressly designed to subvert conscious judgment, and it works. By re-framing the question, fast food companies have found ways to take advantages of weaknesses in our analytical apparatus, weaknesses that are being documented daily in behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology…

…in the coming decades, our concept of free will, based as it is on ignorance of its actual mechanisms, will be destroyed by what we learn about the actual workings of the brain. We can wait for that collision, and decide what to do then, or we can begin thinking through what sort of legal, political, and economic systems we need in a world where our old conception of free will is rendered inoperable.

One of Clay’s observations about the blogosphere in “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality” has been encapsulated by Hugh McLeod as what is sometimes referred to as “Shirky’s Law”:

Equality, fairness, opportunity: pick two.

Clay will be delivering a keynote talk entitled “Failure for Free” at the Aula 2006 Movement meeting. A complete list of his writings can be found here. Stay tuned for more.

Jeff Jarvis in The Guardian:

We need to kill the book to save books. Now relax. I’m not suggesting burning books, nor replacing them with electronic gizmos in some paperless future of fable and fantasy. Instead, I’m merely arguing that the book is an outdated means of communicating information. And thanks to the searchable, connected internet, books could be so much more.

Yet efforts to update the book are hampered because, culturally, we give extreme reverence to the form for the form’s sake. We hold books holy: children are taught there is no better use of time than reading a book. Academics perish if they do not publish. We tolerate censors regulating and snipping television but would never allow them to black out books. We even ignore the undeniable truth that too many books, and far too many bestsellers, are pap or crap. All this might seem to be the medium’s greatest advantage: respect. But that is what is holding books back from the progress that could save and spread the gospel of the written word.

More here.

Ingrid Spencer in the Architectural Record:

Modernist prefab isn’t just for artsy Californians or Europeans these days. The fact that Dan Rockhill has a wait list for his Studio 804 prefab homes in Kansas City, Kansas proves that modernist modular homes are in demand across the country. Studio 804, a self-funded, not-for-profit corporation affiliated with the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Design, has just completed its third such house, called Modular III, which sold for about $170,000 before construction had even been completed. The approximately 1,200-square-foot home, fabricated in six transportable 10-by-20-foot segments in a warehouse in Lawrence, Kansas, and moved by truck to the site, is the eighth designed and built entirely by Rockhill’s graduate and undergraduate students.

More here.  [Thanks to Shabbir Kazmi.]

“Lacking internal support or external legitimacy, writes Hamid Dabashi, the US empire now banks on a pedigree of comprador intellectuals, homeless minds and guns for hire.”

From Al-Ahram:

So there is in fact no absence of interest or insight into how and on what general contours is the American empire navigating its turbulent course. As part of this more general concern about an American empire, with or without hegemony, one might also propose that given the way the US propaganda machinery is operating ever since 9/11, it seems (both domestically and internationally) to be completely contingent on a mode of momentary amnesia, a systematic loss of collective memory, a nefarious banking on the presumption that no one is watching, no one is counting, and no one is keeping a record of anything–that history is dead, as is memory, recollection, experience. This proposition may indeed work and tally well with the principal thesis that set this predatory empire in motion, namely Francis Fukuyama’s notion of “the end of history,” which in this case amounts to the end of collective memory and the effective erasure of shared experiences–even (or perhaps particularly) of the most recent history.

How could one account for this politically expedited collective amnesia –of manufacturing consent and discarding history at the speed of one major military operation every two years?

More here.  [Thanks to Zara Houshmand.]

John Derbyshire reviews Party of Death by Ramesh Ponnuru, in the New English Review:

Can Right to Life (hereinafter RTL) fairly be called a cult? This is a point on which I cannot make up my mind. Some of the common characteristics of culthood are missing—the Führerprinzip, for example. On the other hand, RTL has the following things in common with every cult in the world: To those inside, it appears to be a structure of perfect logical integrity, founded on unassailable philosophical principles, while to those outside—among whom, obviously, I count myself—it seems to some degree (depending on the observer’s temperament and inclinations) nutty; to some other degree (ditto) hysterical; and to some yet other degree (ditto ditto) a threat to liberty. My own ratings of RTL on those three degrees are 2, 6, and 4 out of a possible ten each…

Whether it is a cult or not, RTL is made as presentable as possible in Party of Death, with writing that is engaging and lucid. Will Ponnuru’s book make any converts to the RTL whatever-it-is? That depends on how much exposure it gets outside RTL circles. Just to be on the safe side, the mainstream media are studiously ignoring the book—a sad reflection on the current state of public debate, and of respect for rhetorical virtuosity. RTL-ers are welcoming Party of Death very joyfully, though, and they are right to do so, as it is an exceptionally fine piece of polemical writing in support of their… cause.

More here.  Ramesh Ponnuru has a response here.

David Biello in Scientific American:

In the 1990s the Garden of Eden was destroyed. The fertile wetlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were diked and drained, turning most of 15,000 square kilometers of marsh to desert. By the year 2000, less than 10 percent of that swampland–nearly twice as big as Florida’s Everglades–remained. But reflooding of some areas since 2003 has produced what some scientists are calling the “miracle of the Mesopotamian marshes”–a return of plants, aquatic life and even rare birds to their ancestral home.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

Heeeeeeere’s Cat Man!

On a projection screen at Stanford Law School, an auditorium full of nerds stared at a picture of a guy who’d done himself up like a cat—not with makeup, but with tattoos and surgery. The guy’s whiskers were implanted. His nose had been converted to a cat nose. His teeth had been filed into the shape of cat teeth. His head has been flattened, and he was looking for a doctor to implant a tail. And that’s just the tip of the freakberg. Behind him, there’s Lizard Man, Amputee Online, the Church of Body Modification, and Suspension.org, the Web site for people who like to be impaled on hooks.

Our guide to the self-mutilators, professor Robert Schwartz of the University of New Mexico, wasn’t trying to gross us out…

More here.

Vali Nasr reviews Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope by Shirin Ebadi and Azadeh Moaveni, in The New Republic:

The book is a powerful condemnation of the dictatorship of the ayatollahs, at its best when it recounts the suffering of those whom Ebadi represented. The gross injustices and the everyday cruelties of the Islamist regime in Iran would be comical were they not so tragic.   

But the narrative loses its poignancy when it shifts to the writer herself. As commendable as her efforts on the part of the victims of injustice in Iran have been, Ebadi’s confused rendition of Iranian history, which vacillates between celebrating the revolution and condemning its consequences, makes it difficult to regard her as a symbol of democracy. Still, it is possible to look beyond her perplexing tentativeness and regard her story as emblematic of the paradox of a revolution that mobilized, educated, and ultimately frustrated Iranian women. Revolutionary fervor promised to break down traditional patriarchy, but in its place there appeared new discriminations. Ebadi hopes that the unfulfilled promises of revolution will finally bring a fury down upon the Islamic Republic and fracture its pious edifice. But this hope, however fond, is a distant one–more distant than Ebadi seems to understand.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The cosmos would make perfect sense … if it turns out we’re living in a 10- or 11-dimensional realm where gravity is bubbling off a different plane entirely. At least that’s what’s emerging as the hottest concept on the frontier of physics. Though these sound like virtually unverifiable claims, physicists are trying to come up with ways to gather evidence to back up or disprove the extradimensional theories currently in vogue. But it’ll take several years to get that evidence, if it can be gotten at all.

The claim that the cosmos has more than the four dimensions we can perceive — that is, three spatial dimensions plus time — is exotic enough. But the quest to prove that claim brings in a virtual menagerie of mysteries: mini-black holes and dark matter, gravitational waves and cosmic inflation, super-high-energy particle collisions and ultra-powerful gamma-ray bursts.

Even the physicists behind today’s most-talked-about extradimensional theory, Harvard University’s Lisa Randall and Johns Hopkins University’s Raman Sundrum, aren’t yet exactly sure whether the approaches will pay off.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty last night triumphantly passed the “desert island” test of a good read by winning the £30,000 Orange prize for fiction. After a record three-hour judges’ meeting, she narrowly beat exceptionally strong contenders by Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters to take the first major literary award to match her prodigious celebrity.

She had the additional joy of finally winning the prize which first gave her recognition. She broke into the limelight as a 25-year-old when her debut – the exuberantly youthful, instantly bestselling White Teeth – was shortlisted for the Orange. On Beauty is the fruit of her early maturity and of her marriage to the poet Nick Laird.

Extract

Here they all were. Howard indulged in a quick visual catalogue of their interesting bits, knowing that this would very likely be the last time he saw them. The punk boy with black-painted fingernails, the Indian girl with the disproportionate eyes of a Disney character, another girl who looked no older than fourteen with a railroad on her teeth.

And then, spread across this room: big nose, small ears, obese, on crutches, hair red as rust, wheelchair, six foot five, short skirt, pointy breasts, iPod still on, anorexic with that light downy hair on her cheeks, bow-tie, another bow-tie, football hero, white boy with dreads, long fingernails like a New Jersey housewife, already losing his hair, striped tights – there were so many of them that Smith couldn’t close the door without squashing somebody. So they had come, and they had heard. Howard had pitched his tent and made his case.

More here.