Also check out their two photo projects Dancers vs. Garbage and Dancers vs. Food, as well.

Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Ever since word got out that a prominent Harvard University researcher was on leave after an investigation into academic wrongdoing, a key question has remained unanswered: What, exactly, did he do?

The researcher himself, Marc D. Hauser, isn't talking. The usually quotable Mr. Hauser, a psychology professor and director of Harvard's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, is the author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Ecco, 2006) and is at work on a forthcoming book titled “Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad.” He has been voted one of the university's most popular professors.

Harvard has also been taciturn. The public-affairs office did issue a brief written statement last week saying that the university “has taken steps to ensure that the scientific record is corrected in relation to three articles co-authored by Dr. Hauser.” So far, Harvard officials haven't provided details about the problems with those papers. Were they merely errors or something worse?

An internal document, however, sheds light on what was going on in Mr. Hauser's lab.

More here.

UPDATE: Ed Yong has collected a bunch of related links with more info here:

The case of Marc Hauser really erupted this week. The Chronicle published the first direct accusation of wrongdoing from a brave lab member. Harvard Dean Michael Smith published a letter confirming the misconduct, David Dobbs has yet more great analysis (including a discussion on study design) Frans de Waal comments on the implications, and Nicholas Wade has an excellent piece on Hauser, including viewpoints from a veritable who’s who of scientists, such as Hauser’s mentors, Cheney and Seyfarth. The last sentence is tragic.

Cyril Almeida in Dawn:

It didn’t register immediately. That the flood coverage is really about two catastrophes, not one. There is of course the damage caused by the flooding itself, the one Pakistan will take years to recover from. Then there’s the damage of the last 63 years that the floods have uncovered.

By now everyone’s seen them on television screens, the miles-long processions of barely recognisable humanity, the materially dispossessed, the broken and the bowed.

Traumatised, lives shattered, you expect the flood victims to look a certain way. But it’s more than that. The victims are clearly not new acquaintances of adversity. You can hear it in their voices, see it in their eyes, sense it through their leathery skin. The victims of the floods carry the burden of a lifetime of misery.

The second catastrophe: the great floods of 2010 have uncovered 63 years of the great unwashed masses of this country. The people the state has failed in the most terrible of ways, not this week, not last month, but over its entire, sordid history.

More here.

Stephen Budiansky in the New York Times:

Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.

The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.

The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

It takes about a tablespoon of diesel fuel to move one pound of freight 3,000 miles by rail; that works out to about 100 calories of energy.

More here.

The Surrealist Learns to Fly

Occasionally he wakes, finds
the cool cube of his room
delirious with colors: blaring
daffodils and rigid roses,
petals a soft, translucent red

like the inside of an eyelid.
By the window, a clock's
expressionless face near glossy skins
of magazines, a telephone
the color of frozen milk

or silence, the color of old.
He is melting, his bones
grown paper-light, they travel
over the bed's pale hills, the woman
who comes to wash him.

The ceiling is a landscape
bleeding white as he floats
through the muted winter sky,
a boundless symbol of nothing.
The woman draws the blinds.

by Jennifer O'Grady
from Poetry Magazine, 1993

From Scientific American:

Although scientists have not pinpointed exactly what goes on in the brain when a person experiences déjà vu, they can make good guesses based on models of memory. All theories of memory acknowledge that remembering requires two cooperating processes: familiarity and recollection. Familiarity occurs quickly, before the brain can recall the source of the feeling. Conscious recollection depends on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, whereas familiarity depends on regions of the medial temporal cortex.

When these cooperating processes get out of sync, we can experience déjà vu, the intense and often disconcerting feeling that a situation is familiar even though it has never happened before. This feeling can occur when a brand-new situation is very similar to other events stored in our memory. For example, a Texas airport may seem vaguely familiar to you even though you have never been to Texas. It is possible the airport is strikingly similar to a single event stored in memory—perhaps you recently saw the airport in a movie or magazine. It is also possible that many memories of visiting similar airports create the sensation that you have been to this one. Déjà vu is a stronger version of this kind of memory error.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The influential political scientist Samuel P. Huntington theorized about the “clash of civilizations.” The journalist and poet Eliza Griswold takes on the same topic in a much more visceral way: she traveled through the “torrid zone” to see, smell, taste and write about it. Her book “The Tenth Parallel” is a fascinating journey along the latitude line in Africa and Asia where Christianity and Islam often meet and clash. Since Americans commonly equate Islam with the Arab Middle East, this book is a useful reminder that four-fifths of Muslims live elsewhere. It’s also an intimate introduction to some of those who live in places like Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

“The Tenth Parallel” is a beautifully written book, full of arresting stories woven around a provocative issue — whether fundamentalism leads to violence — which Griswold investigates through individual lives rather than caricatures or abstractions. In this tropical region where monsoons and jungles give way to desert, she looks at how history, resources, climate and demographic trends have combined with and shaped the struggle among religions. Because of both population growth and the explosion of Christianity in Africa in the last half-century, nearly a fourth of the world’s Christians now live south of the 10th parallel, alongside Muslims who are migrating from the north to escape creeping desertification. All along this fault line, struggles over valuable resources like oil, lumber and minerals add to the volatile mix.

More here.

“We were proud of the way we used to make things up as we went along”, he says. “It's like robbing a bank but legal”

Johann Hari in The Independent:

David Craig gives a typical explanation of what the consultants Actually Do. After getting a degree specialising in romantic poetry, he was astonished to be hired by a prestigious management consultancy, given three weeks training, and then dropped into major corporations to tell them how to run their oil rigs, menswear stores, and factories, for tens of thousands of pounds a pop. In his brave memoir Rip Off! he explains: “We were proud of the way we used to make things up as we went along… It's like robbing a bank but legal. We could take somebody straight off the street, teach them a few simple tricks in a couple of hours and easily charge them out to our clients for more than £7,000 per week.” It consisted, he says, of “lies, lies and even more lies.”

He worked to a simple model, which is common in the industry. He had to watch how a workforce behaved for a week – and then tell the company's bosses, every time, that they had 30 percent too many staff and only his consultancy could figure out who should be culled. If he calculated they actually had the right amount of staff, he was told by his bosses not to be so ridiculous and do his sums again: where was the money for them in a properly-staffed company? The company had to be POPed – People Off Payroll.

Of course, this advice was often disastrous. His company was sent into a chain of 500 menswear shops. They advised them to cut staff by (surprise!) 30 per cent, and to replace most full-time staff with part-timers. The result? The full-time employees had been highly motivated, because they wanted a career in the company; the part-timers only wanted a little extra cash. So motivation levels in the company collapsed, and with it the standard of service. The company was bankrupt within a few years.

More here.

Nick Fotion in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Back in 1981, R.M. Hare, in his book Moral Thinking, featured a distinction that today I still find useful. Hare admitted that the distinction was not original with him, but he argued that philosophers have not appreciated its importance. The distinction is between critical and “intuitive” (what I call non-critical) thinking. It is still important since it reminds us not to make the mistake of focusing too much attention on the critical level. Philosophers are prone to make this mistake because they like to look critically at the norms their society holds to. Their critical outlook leaves the impression that thinking in ethics is mainly critical or reflective in nature. What they then fail to appreciate is that most ethical thinking takes place on the non-critical level. Indeed, it has to be that way since, otherwise, we would be spending all our energy critically examining one issue and then another. We would, thus, have no time to carry out our responsibilities at home and work; and no time for play.

Another bad consequence of taking the critical level too seriously is that we would quickly all turn into skeptics. Skepticism has its place in philosophical thinking but it can turn into a vicious philosopher’s game. Non-critical thinking can’t be all wrong since the rules and principles found there are part of what some philosophers call the common morality. It is the morality that, if it were questioned too seriously, would lead to social disintegration. Instead of questioning it all of the time, the critical/non-critical distinctions reminds us to pay more attention to the common morality so that we understand how it can be used to educate our children and to remind adults and children alike of their responsibilities when they are tempted to stray from the fold.

Another reason the distinction between critical and non-critical thinking was and is important becomes evident when we observe philosophers engaging in theory criticism. It is quite common for critics of utilitarianism, for instance, to insist that utilitarians must always be making utilitarian calculations. To be sure, act utilitarians may be addicted to calculating. But rule utilitarians can restrict their calculating ways to the critical level. On that level, they can generate new rules and modify old ones using their calculative skills. But having done that, they can place these criticised rules on the non-critical level and proceed to cite them in ways that make them sound like deontologists rather than true utilitarians.

The critical/non-critical levels distinction is useful not only in showing how utilitarianism is misunderstood, but also in making it clear how utlitiarianism is a much more flexible theory than many philosophers suppose.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in New Politics:

The left has always been a marginal actor on Pakistan’s national scene. While this bald truth must be told, in no way do I wish to belittle the enormous sacrifices made by numerous progressive individuals, as well as small groups. They unionized industrial and railway workers, helped peasants organize against powerful landlords, inspired Pakistan’s minority provinces to demand their rights, set standards of writing and journalism, etc. But the Left has never had a national presence and, even at its peak during the 1970s, could not muster even a fraction of the street power of the Islamic or mainstream parties.

A comparison with India is telling. While the Indian Left has also never attained state power — or even come close to exercising power and influence on the scale of the Congress Party — it looms large in states like Kerala, Tripura, and West Bengal where it successfully ended iniquitous feudal land relations. Across the country it helps maintain a secular polity, protects minorities, keeps alive a broad focus on progressive ideas in culture, art, and education, and uses science to fight superstition. Today, a Maoist movement militantly challenges the depredations of capitalism as it wreaks destruction on their native habitat. Left-inspired movements noticeably impeded passage of the U.S.-India nuclear deal. Indeed, for all its divisions and in-fighting, the Indian Left is a significant political force that is a thousand times stronger than its Pakistani counterpart.

Surely this difference begs an explanation. The answer is to be found in Pakistan’s genesis and the overwhelming role of religion in matters of the state. Understanding this point in detail is crucial to the question: how can one hope to make the Pakistani Left relevant in the future? Are there intelligent ways to deal with a major handicap?

Tom Jacobs in Miller-McCune:

Writing in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, a research team led by University of Kentucky social psychologist C. Nathan DeWall links symptoms of Type-2 diabetes to lower levels of forgiveness. Their study suggests low levels of blood glucose are not only dangerous to your health: They may also be poisonous to your personality.

DeWall and his associates describe four experiments testing their thesis, three of which featured 511 volunteers (average age 28) who participated in an Internet survey. They first completed the revised Diabetic Symptoms Checklist, which measures the number and severity of a variety of diabetes symptoms. (Examples include “Numbness or loss of sensation in the feet” and “Shortness of breath at night.”)

Their willingness to forgive was then measured using three different scales. First, they filled out a 10-item survey measuring the degree to which they are predisposed to pardon. It featured questions such as “I can forgive a friend for almost anything.”

Second, they reported their likely forgiveness level in five hypothetical scenarios, such as “Would you forgive a person who revealed something you told them in confidence?” Third, they reported to what degree they had actually forgiven someone who recently hurt them.

The researchers found a positive correlation between diabetic symptoms and a tendency to be unforgiving in both the real and hypothetical situations. They also found a negative correlation between the symptoms and one’s general tendency to forgive.

In Reset DOC:

Giuliano Amato, Giancarlo Bosetti and Ramin Jahanbegloo, members of Resetdoc’s scientific committee, have written a letter to UNESCO’s General Director Irina Bokova to prevent the 2010 World Philosophy Day from being hosted by Iran. Doing so would make mockery of the victims of repression, in a country where one can be imprisoned or killed for expressing one’s ideas. “We are certain that we will not be alone in our concern in presenting such an urgent appeal – the authors write – and invite philosophers and intellectuals from all over the world to join us in this by sending a message of support to [email protected].”

To the Director General of UNESCO

Her Excellency Irina Bokova

Paris

We have recently learned that Iran is the candidate country for the 2010 World Philosophy Day, usually held in the month on November. This annual event is a worthy initiative that each year allows an intense dialogue at a global level and involves philosophers and students in ways that are new to the usual academic circuits. We have experienced this on successful occasions, when our Association, Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations, has had the honour to cooperate with UNESCO’s philosophical sector, such as in Morocco in 2006 and in Turkey in 2007.

We believe that Iran’s candidature for the coming edition should not be considered as a normal rotation of location, since we are sadly aware, due to a very close experience, how one can be imprisoned and risk one’s life in Iran because of one’s ideas.

Mario Margiocco in Project Syndicate:

Italians and other Europeans have serious problems addressing their own national debts, public and private, so it may seem immodest for a European to discuss America’s growing and grave debt problem. But the fiscal realities on both sides of the Atlantic nowadays are very similar, and only lingering trust in the promise of America keeps alive the expectation among some Europeans that some grand American coup de théâtre will resolve the country’s dire debt situation.

Of course, many Americans recognize the scale of the country’s debt burden. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and thus America’s highest ranking military officer, recently said, “The greatest danger to American security comes from the national debt.” Four Americans out of ten agree with him, whereas less than three in ten deem terrorism or Iran more dangerous.

America’s Great Power status has always been tied to its level of debt. Indeed, it was the absence of debt that marked the United States’ emergence as a world power between 1914 and 1917. The US went from owing $3 billion (mostly to Great Britain) to being a net creditor for about the same amount, thanks to $6 billion in war credits given to the Western Allies. A further $3 billion in credits for European post-war reconstruction cemented America’s status as the world’s premier creditor nation, with its surplus equal to roughly 8% of GNP at the time.

This shift meant that the US had essentially replaced Britain as the heart of the world’s financial and monetary system. Previously, thanks to the gold standard and Britain’s political stability, the City of London had been the world’s key source of capital and financial guarantees for more than a century.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I came across the frog rabbit in the basement of the Petit Palais in Paris. A medium-sized plaster sculpture, the frog rabbit is a hairless beast with a pointy reptilian nose, rabbit ears, long talon-like toes, and a stubby rabbit tail with no fur. He is a monster, though it is unclear whether he bodes something evil or merely something strange.

Jean Carriès sculpted “The Frog with Rabbit Ears” in 1891, a couple of years before he met an early death at the hands of an obscure lung ailment the likes of which regularly robbed the world of starving young artists in those days. It was, after all, the fashion: a little art and then a terrible death. It is particularly unfortunate that Carriès wasn't given a few more years. He was hard at work on his unfinished masterpiece, “Monumental Door.” When finished, it would have been a giant door sculpted with endless grotesque faces and misshapen figures. Looking at the fragments Carriès completed before his death, we can be sure that the door would have been magnificent, a testament to Jean Carriès' dark vision and extraordinary craftsmanship.

Instead, Jean Carriès died and his art was largely forgotten. Looking back at the art of Carriès today is a reminder that the movement we now call Art Nouveau (Jugendstil in the German world) was diverse. Art Nouveau is often described, and not unjustly, as a movement that tried to bring organic form back to the plastic arts. This was most obvious and startling, perhaps, in architecture and design, where the hard lines and sharp angles of building materials such as iron and concrete were made to bend and flow like plants.

From PakStudyLibrary:

Mir Ibrahim Rahman has joined the distinguished ranks of alumni awarded the Robert F Kennedy Public Service Award from Harvard University, one of the top centres of learning in the world. Mir is the first Muslim and only the second individual from South Asia to have received this Award. Twenty-nine-year old Mir Ibrahim Rahman is the grandson of the late Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman, the founder of the Jang and Geo Groups, the nephew of Group Chairman, Jang Group Mir Javed Rahman, and the son of Group Chief Executive and Editor-in-Chief, Jang and Geo Group Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman.

Professor of Business Ethics at Babson College James Hoopes, who was Mir Ibrahim’s tutor, said that his former student’s address at the Harvard graduation ceremony was not only an honour but was also one of the best speeches he had heard on the occasion. “He was able to capture the spirit of the current global confusion in a manner that the world needs to hear. In my 40-year career, Ibrahim is the student I feel the proudest about. I believe he possesses a unique combination of practical leadership qualities, intellectual profundity and ideological depth.” He added that his relationship with Mir Ibrahim has now reached a point where “not only do I teach him but I also learn from him. I intend to write a book on leadership in the next few years and if Ibrahim permits me, I would like to mention him in my book so that others too can learn from him.”

Here is the brilliant speech:

So today as I stand here before you… I have some questions my grandfather would have wanted me to ask.

I am not advocating that Iran should have the right to nuclear weapons but I am asking why isn’t there a debate. Why a place like Harvard can hold a debate in the middle of the Forum on Iran, without a proper Iranian point of view presented?

I am not saying that Israel, as well as Islamic dictatorships and illegitimate rulers for that matter, should not be out rightly supported by the US, but I am asking why there is no debate about the measure of that support and the costs of that support to the US and to the World.

At times I feel that due to political correctness/politeness, and not just ideology, America avoid many real political issues.

I am curious why US mainstream media portrays Socialism as a bad word – as bad as communism? I am not saying the US, like all industrialized nations, should provide healthcare to its citizens, but I am asking why the difference between socialism and communism isn’t debated by the media?

I am not saying the US should not spend $3 trillion in the Iraq/Afghanistan wars or that its annual military annual budget should not be more than the entire world combined, but why isn’t there proper national debate about what is the return on investment?

I am not asking the country which has the highest rate of lawsuits per capita, and that believes in its accountability system, why it isn’t suing those responsible for an illegal war against Iraq, leading to millions of deaths, but I am asking why isn’t this issue being debated at least?

I am not saying that ‘Joe the plumber’ should know about every corner of the world better than he does his 1992 world series baseball statistics but I am wondering whose interest it is serving for the average American to be one of the most ill informed world citizens in this age of globalization.

I am not saying that the American political system is no longer the ideal representative system to balance efficiency with fairness, but should you not debate how effective a representative system can be where its average congressman just to get re-elected has to raise between $10,000-30,000… a week! (and where 95% of congressmen are re-elected!)

I am not saying that DC should not have 40,000+ lobbyist spending 4 billion dollars a year, but why isn’t there a debate whether one of the reason you don’t see as much corruption in American politics compared to other country’s is because you have legalized corruption/bribery – aka as lobbying. (some preliminary research shows that up to 70% of discretionary budget is linked to lobbyists!)

Read the full transcript here.

From The Guardian:

Last week an event took place that hasn't occurred since 2000: a living author appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The recipient of this accolade was novelist Jonathan Franzen, best known – until now – for his multi-generational epic about a midwestern family, The Corrections, which came out in the week of 9/11 and was one of the most talked about (and bestselling) novels of the last decade.

It has taken Franzen nine years to complete his follow-up, Freedom, which is about to be published in the US. (It doesn't hit UK bookshops until late September.) Understandably, Franzen hasn't significantly departed from the template that served him so well last time. The novel is another multi-generational epic that microscopically examines the tensions within an outwardly successful but inwardly unhappy midwestern family. There are striking plot similarities: both books feature get-rich-quick schemes and copious extra-marital affairs. It has been suggested, in fact, that the main difference between the two is that, while the family in The Corrections had three children, the family at the centre of Freedom – the Berglunds – have just two. Time's decision to make Franzen its cover star is intriguing, for reasons both obvious and less straightforward. Ever since The Corrections appeared, Franzen, who is 50, has been regarded as one of America's most important novelists, a leading member of the generation down from the “old guard” of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike that dominated US fiction from the 1950s until at least 2000. The appearance of a new novel by him, especially after such a long absence, is a major literary event, which it is appropriate for Time to honour.

More here.

Annalee Newitz in io9:

LSD and ketamine, two powerful hallucinogens, are also potential cures for depression, OCD, and anxiety. Two studies published this week, in Science and Nature, confirm that hallucinogenic drugs stimulate healthy brain activity, even promoting the growth of neurons.

Ketamine and depression

The study in Science, released today, focused entirely on the drug ketamine. Used frequently as an animal sedative, ketamine can also be used to sedate humans and is also taken recreationally because of its hallucinogenic and euphoric effects. Molecular psychiatrist Nanxin Li and colleagues dosed rats with modest amounts of ketamine, and observed that the drug boosted signaling between neurons in the brain, and even led to healthy growth of synapses. (Chronic depression can be linked to inhibited synaptic growth.) Ultimately, they concluded that ketamine might be useful in treating depression because it increases brain activity instantly – so there is no need to wait weeks or months for the drug to take effect.

LSD and OCD

In the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Franz X. Vollenweider and Michael Kometer gave a broad overview of research into hallucinogens over the past half century. They gathered together research from hundreds of studies on how hallucinogens like LSD, psilocybin, and ketamine affect the brains of healthy people – as well as people suffering from depression and other disorders.

Ahmed Rashid in the NYRB blog:

Though it has received only moderate attention in the western press, the torrential flooding of large swaths of Pakistan since late July may be the most catastrophic natural disaster to strike the country in half a century. But even greater than the human cost of this devastating event are the security challenges it poses. Coming at a time of widespread unrest, growing Taliban extremism, and increasingly shaky civilian government, the floods could lead to the gravest security crisis the country—and the region—has faced. Unless the international community takes immediate action to provide major emergency aid and support, the country risks turning into what until now has remained only a grim, but remote possibility—a failed state with nuclear weapons.

Since the upper reaches of the Indus and other rivers in Northern Pakistan first flooded their banks over three weeks ago, the floods have spread to many other parts of the country, submerging dozens of villages, killing thousands, uprooting some 20 million people, and leaving millions of poor children and infants at terrible risk of exposure to water-borne diseases. But the next few months could be even worse, as the collapse of governance and growing desperation of flooded areas leads to increasing social and ethnic tensions, terrible food shortages, and the threat that large parts of the country, now cut off from Islamabad, will be taken over by the Pakistani Taliban and other extremist groups.

A key part of the security problem lies in the already precarious situation of the regions most affected. The floods and heavy rain have caused the worst damage in the poorest and least literate areas of the country where extremists and separatist movements thrive: this includes the northern region, near Afghanistan, but also parts of Balochistan and Sindh provinces in the south. By contrast, central Punjab, the country’s richest region, with incomes and literacy about double that of other parts of the country, has been relatively unscathed by the disaster. The longstanding resentment by ethnic groups in the smaller provinces against Punjab is thus likely to increase.