Kelly Amis and Joseph E. Robert, Jr. in the Washington Post:

Some say the scholarship program isn't needed because charter schools can fill the void. But charters and private school scholarships are not mutually exclusive reforms, and while the District's charter program is vibrant, it is far from providing all local students with an excellent education.

Indeed, charter schools are just part of the District's “three-sector strategy” toward education reform. This strategy, which we helped to design, presumes that all children deserve excellent schools and that every school effectively and appropriately educating students — whether traditional, private or charter — should be applauded and supported.

The strategy is working. The competition of new options created a landscape in which Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee could take steps only dreamed of by prior administrations: refining the downtown bureaucracy, closing near-empty schools and shifting the savings to academic programs, and holding teachers more accountable.

More here.

Hello,

The voting round of our arts & literature prize (details here) is over. A total of 2010 (odd coincidence, huh?) votes were cast for the 79 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own sites. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. 3 Quarks Daily: James Ensor: Keepin' It Surreal
2. The Millions: Proust’s Arabesk: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
3. The Second Pass: Mary Flannery, Quite Contrary
4. The Rumpus: Interview with Sam Anderson
5. 3 Quarks Daily: Somebody Nailed My Dress To The Wall
6. Quantum Tantra: The New Sex Robot
7. PEN America: Tomasz Rozycki on “Scorched Maps”
8. The Millions: It’s All Right to Cry: Restoring Raymond Carver’s Voice
9. Digital Emunction: Fake Book Review 9
10. Imaginary Boundaries: To Live Outside the Law, You Must Be Honest
11. Geoffrey Philp's Blogspot: You're Not My Son Anymore
12. The Millions: It’s Not You, It’s Me: Thoughts on Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs
13. Digital Emunction: A Lume Spento
14. Letters From Exile: Letters From Exile IV
15. 3 Quarks Daily: The Bitter Taste of Life
16. In This Light: Lens and Pen as Mirrors
17. 3 Quarks Daily: Mapping the Cracks: Art-Objects in Motion
18. Cognition and Culture: The universality of music: Cross-cultural comparison, the recognition of emotions, and the influence of the the Backstreet Boys on a Cockatoo
19. Infrequent Thoughts, Haphazardly Published: Lucky
20. Michael Bérubé: Mighty Moloch, cure me of my severe allergy to the discourse of the “cure”

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Robert Pinsky on March 10. We will also post the list of finalists here on that date.

Good luck!

Abbas

by Jeff Wilson

I. GONDWANALAND, MIGRATION, AND DINOSAURS

Greater India has long inspired geographers with its singularly wondrous shape: an inverted triangle bounded on two sides by waters of the Indian Ocean and on its third side by the Himalayan Mountain Range. Nourished by the Indus and Ganges Rivers, Greater India covers nearly 4.5 million km². Those more familiar with its geography will know that within Greater India is a smaller triangle known as the Deccan Plateau. Bounded by Western Ghats, Eastern Ghats, and the Satpura and Vindhya Ranges, the Deccan is a catchment area (14,21,000 km²) for several large rivers and sanctuary to many of India’s endemic species. This geography becomes more interesting when we take into account its deeper history and evolution.

Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula. The majestic Himalayas, the mighty Indus and Ganges Rivers, and the expansive Deccan Plateau did not yet exist. These geographical features, which are integral to modern characterizations of Greater India, did not emerge until well after the extinction of dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic Era, 65 million years ago. The Greater India that was known to early dinosaurs and their antecedents was interlocked with Antarctica, Africa, Madagascar, Australia, and South America. These conjoined southern landmasses were called “Gondwana” or “Gondwanaland”, owing to their shared flora and fauna (du Toit 1937; Sorkhabi 1996). The break-up of Gondwana later in the Mesozoic Era remains a fascinating event in Earth history because it led to the creation of islands, each initially seeded with a common flora and fauna, that became progressively isolated from one another. Greater India in particular is interesting because it rifted from Gondwana and drifted across the equator some 6,000 km to Asia. The evolutionary changes and extinction events manifest during that journey remain the subject of investigation by many paleontologists.

Dinosaurs are one of the best groups for studying the potential effects of paleogeographic changes on evolution because dinosaurs were large animals that were capable of traversing continent scale-distances. For example, early in the Mesozoic Era, when the Earth's continental landmasses were connected, dinosaur faunas worldwide are generally similar. Carnivorous dinosaurs from North America, for example, bear striking resemblance to those from southern Africa, and herbivorous dinosaurs from China resemble those from South America. Later in the Mesozoic Era, however, this is not the case. Dinosaur faunas worldwide became more distinctive from one another due to evolutionary changes and extinction associated with increased isolation.

The first reported dinosaur from Greater India was discovered in 1828 by Captain W. H. Sleeman, famous for eradicating the ‘thaggi’ from central India, who encountered bones in Cretaceous sediments on Bara Simla hill near Jabalpur (Sleeman 1844). At that time, the name “Dinosauria” had not yet been coined, and Sleeman's discovery was not formally described and interpreted for some years. After passing through several hands, those first bones finally reached the Geological Survey of India. In 1877, Richard Lydekker named India's first dinosaur Titanosaurus indicus, or “India's titan lizard”. Although the remains were fragmentary (tail bones and a thigh bone), they indicated a large, herbivorous dinosaur that resembled the sauropod Cetiosaurus (“whale lizard”), known from Jurassic rocks of England. Lydekker named other species of Titanosaurus in a second paper in 1879, but few dinosaur discoveries followed.

Read more »

Ship-breaking in Bangladesh

Researchers are reporting impressive results in testing a vaccine for mesothelioma, a cancer that attacks the lining which protects the body's internal organs. Mesothelioma is almost always caused by exposure to asbestos, which means that it's almost always industrial and occupational in origin. Asbestos miners and millworkers are at high risk for the disease, as are shipyard workers and the family members of people who work with asbestos.

Technology created the disease. Science may have found a new way to treat it. But the worldwide path of the disease and the likely arc of its treatment offer reason for reflection. 125 million people are exposed to asbestos every year, and lower-income people are far more likely to be at risk. The World Health Organization (WHO 2006) and others have noted that the best way to eliminate mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease is to eliminate exposure, but we don't. And nanotechnology, the latest technological breakthrough, may bring the risk of another mesothelioma outbreak.

The success of the vaccine approach is worth celebrating. But, as with so many diseases, it seems we're more likely to celebrate the cure than we're willing to eliminate the cause. Should the cure be validated by future testing, the financial structure of modern medicine suggests it will be distributed as unequally and unfairly as the disease's causes have been. Economics. as much as biology, has shaped this disease's story. And economics will probably paint its future arc.

Read more »

Sughra Raza. Drive by shooting series, #x.

Digital photograph. Karachi, February, 2010.

Years

First it was all just
Is
—a indiscrete jumble of
titillation

Is was
then came

I can
followed soon by
I am

I am
is a most persistent condition
—an arbitrary concoction of boundaries
as if a single point of view was all

I am
should be a passing through
—just a glimpse upon a river
between Is and the wine-dark sea

To be caught here
alone and starkly immobile
like a dead log snagged on stone
while the river goes on to
we are

and eventually vanishes into
we are not

is to miss the possibility of

then
maybe

light

by Jim Culleny
Feb 2010

“What is wrong with our culture is that it offers us an inaccurate conception of self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition to nature. (We fail to realize that) if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self.”–Freya Matthew

………………………………

For four decades, Thomas Lopez, also known as Meatball Fulton, has been president of The ZBS Foundation, a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to the production of lush, adventurous, experimental modern radio fiction. ZBS' large catalog of productions includes many adventures from characters who have, over the years, become beloved: metaphysical adventurer Jack Flanders and Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe are the two best-known. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

“Radio drama,” “audio theater,” “audio drama,” “radio theater” — which do you prefer?

I was at the European Radio Drama conference, and they decided to change the name to “audio drama,” because it exists on so many different platforms other than just radio. In America, they generally would call it “audio theater,” but it was interesting to hear the Europeans' take on it, that theater seems to have a connotation of… you know, theater, as opposed to drama, which is more general. I always liked “radio fiction,” frankly.

That's one I've not heard before.

I prefer that, simply because it distinguishes it. Public radio, particularly, has gone to — and I don't mean this is in a bad way — news and information, and fewer and fewer fictions. What they call “radio stories” are really documentaries. They call that storytelling, which is fair enough, but it's not the type of storytelling that I do.

I do wonder why the bent has turned so strongly toward well-told nonfiction, when fiction could be told equally well in just about the same way on radio.

Definitely. That's why I did a series called Two-Minute Film Noir. The object was, I felt radio drama could exist with the documentaries — there was no reason not to. It was well-produced little noir type stories, self-contained, running about two to three minutes, and at the time, NPR's Day to Day, which was a midday magazine show, would play some of these right in with the documentaries and news that they were doing. It worked perfectly fine, as I thought it would, and then, of course, NPR discontinued Day to Day. At least I was proven right, that if a station will give it a chance, the short pieces can work very well with the existing documentaries.

At the beginning of this program, the audience heard a scrap of radio fiction themselves, a clip of a ZBS production called Dreams of the Amazon, starring what I'd call the “primary protagonist” of ZBS, Jack Flanders. That was actually the first ZBS thing I ever heard. I'm pretty sure my story is fairly typical for a ZBS listener. Back in '93, I was just a kid browsing the library looking for CDs, and I found this Dreams of the Amazon thing with very cool cover art. I picked it up on the basis of that alone, popped it in and it was like nothing I'd ever before. If it was some kind of audiobook I wouldn't have been surprised, but it was this full-cast production with this lush sound. Is that a fairly common was for people to find ZBS?

What's particularly amusing is the young kids — well, I call them kids — that have never heard radio drama, don't even know what it is, and pick it up thinking that it's an audiobook, meaning somebody reading a book, and then discover a full production and had never heard anything quite like it. Not that they're aren't other things out there; they just aren't exposed to it.
Read more »

*

Daupo’s Loneliness is a coloring book for adults, available here on Etsy. The artist lives in NYC. The Owls site hosts digital writing projects and some art projects. New pages from the coloring book will appear on the site each Monday for the next eight weeks. You can subscribe to updates from The Owls via email at WordPress or become a fan of the site on Facebook.

Stanley Fish in the NYT (via Andrew Sullivan):

While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it. No matter how much information you pile up and how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform, you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson or imperative it points to; for it doesn’t point anywhere; it just sits there, inert and empty.

Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?”

Smith is not in the business of denigrating science and rationalism or minimizing their great achievements. Secular reason — reason cut off from any a priori stipulations of what is good and valuable — can take us a long way. We’ll do fine as long as we only want to find out how many X’s or Y’s there are or investigate their internal structure or discover what happens when they are combined, and so forth.

But the next step, the step of going from observation to evaluation and judgment, proves difficult, indeed impossible, says Smith, for the “truncated discursive resources available within the downsized domain of ‘public reason’ are insufficient to yield any definite answer to a difficult issue — abortion, say, or same sex marriage, or the permissibility of torture . . . .” If public reason has “deprived” the natural world of “its normative dimension” by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, “could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?” No way that is not a sleight of hand. This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the “pure” investigation of “observable facts.”

Russell Blackford and Norman Geras respond.

One of the most common complaints made about today’s artists is their apparent inability to draw. In matters of art, no question is more decisive, more majestically final, than: “But can he/she draw?” In a melodramatic hatchet job on Francis Bacon, Picasso biographer John Richardson recently claimed that Bacon’s “graphic ineptitude” was his Achilles heel: “Tragically, he failed to teach himself to draw.” The pro-life-drawing movement is one of the most lasting legacies of the artistic Renaissance in Florence, for it was here that disegno (design or drawing) was enshrined as the source of all visual competence. The first art academy, founded in Florence in 1563 on the urging of Giorgio Vasari, was called the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, and the curriculum centred on drawing of the live (and dead) model, and of approved artworks that would enable the aspiring artist to “correct” nature. Michelangelo, a compulsive drawer whose most exquisite creations are the subject of a major exhibition at the Courtauld Institute Galleries, was being typically Florentine when he asserted that “Design, which by another name is called drawing . . . is the fount and body of painting and sculpture and architecture and of every other kind of painting and the root of all sciences.”

more from James Hall at The Guardian here. (h/t Elatia Harris)

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

by Robert Hayden

from Twentieth Century American Poetry
McGraw-Hill, 2004

David Gelernter in Edge:

1. No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to.

2. One symptom of current problems is the fundamental puzzle of the Internet. (Algebra and calculus have fundamental theorems; the Internet has a fundamental puzzle.) If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about? What do our children know that our parents didn't? (Yes they know how to work their computers, but that's easy compared to — say — driving a car.) I'll return to this puzzle.

3. Here is a simpler puzzle, with an obvious solution. Wherever computers exist, nearly everyone who writes uses a word processor. The word processor is one of history's most successful inventions. Most people call it not just useful but indispensable. Granted that the word processor is indeed indispensable, what good has it done? We say we can't do without it; but if we had to give it up, what difference would it make? Have word processors improved the quality of modern writing? What has the indispensable word processor accomplished?

4. It has increased not the quality but the quantity of our writing — “our” meaning society's as a whole. The Internet for its part has increased not the quality but the quantity of the information we see. Increasing quantity is easier than improving quality. Instead of letting the Internet solve the easy problems, it's time we got it to solve the important ones.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Outnumbering our human cells by about 10 to one, the many minuscule microbes that live in and on our bodies are a big part of crucial everyday functions. The lion's share live in the intestinal tract, where they help fend off bad bacteria and aid in digesting our dinners. But as scientists use genetics to uncover what microbes are actually present and what they're doing in there, they are discovering that the bugs play an even larger role in human health than previously suspected—and perhaps at times exerting more influence than human genes themselves.

One team of researchers recently completed a catalogue of some 3.3 million human gut microbe genes. Their work, led by Junjie Qin of BGI–Shenzhen (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) and published in the March 4 edition of Nature, adds to the expanding—but nowhere near complete—census of species that reside in the intestinal tract. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Another group turned its attention to a particular host gene that seems to impact these inhabitants of the intestines. They found that in mice, a loss of one key gene led to a shift in microbiota communities and an increase in insulin resistance, obesity and other symptoms of metabolic syndrome (a cluster of these conditions). Their results were published online March 4 in Science.

More here.

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Johann Hari in The Nation:

Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as “unworkable” and “unrealistic,” as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted “brands” in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters–and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.

More here.