Hartosh Singh Bal in Open:

The world’s top manufacturer of flavoured nacho chips was planning an overhaul of its top brand. The company had noted that the flavouring tended to come off as a sticky paste on the hands of consumers. This, the company believed, could easily be avoided by a new flavouring that would taste the same but would not coat the fingers. Shortly before making the change, the company turned to the emerging field of neuromarketing to test the product one last time. The results were unexpected: consumers experienced two pleasure peaks while consuming the chips. The first as soon as they crunched on the nachos, the second when they licked the flavouring off their fingers. The revamp, unsurprisingly, was promptly shelved.

The founder of NeuroFocus, the world’s biggest neuromarketing firm, is AK Pradeep, a PhD in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

More here.

From Respectful Insolence at Science Blogs:

I spent a lot of time writing about animal rights extremists who have threatened to harass the children of an investigator whom they view as a “vivisector” and how they fetishize the very violence they decry. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see that a fellow ScienceBlogger, namely Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries, appears to share some of the scientific misconceptions that the animal rights extremists when he prefaces an Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front with:

Vivisection, or what in polite society is merely called animal experimentation, is a barbaric practice that has led to some necessary medical breakthroughs but has mostly served to profit multinational pharmaceutical and cosmetic corporations. I agree with the researchers who published in the British Medical Journal in 2004 that:

Clinicians and the public often consider it axiomatic that animal research has contributed to the treatment of human disease, yet little evidence is available to support this view.

I am also sympathetic to your frustration that, despite mounting evidence that little is gained from this research, its use continues and even grows.

As was pointed out in many of the rapid responses to this BMJ review article, the analysis was poorly conducted and selective. Many of the rapid response letters show the problems with the review Eric cited point out its failure to address any but a subset of the very broad questions it asks. As for benefits to humans from animal research, my field of surgery is chock full of them. Virtually every major surgical advance in the last 100 years was developed first in animal models: transplantation, heart surgery and cardiopulmonary bypass, testing of medical devices, the list goes on and on.

More here.

In a truly great ongoing column at The Opinionater, Steven Strogatz explains math, from the beginning….

At this stage in the series it’s time to shift gears, moving on from grade school arithmetic to high school math. Over the next few weeks we’ll be revisiting algebra, geometry and trig. Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten them all — there won’t be any tests this time around, so instead of worrying about details, we have the luxury of concentrating on the most beautiful, important and far-reaching ideas. Algebra, for example, may have once struck you as a dizzying mix of symbols, definitions and procedures, but in the end they all boil down to just two activities — solving for x and working with formulas. Solving for x is detective work. You’re searching for an unknown number, x. You’ve been handed a few clues about it, either in the form of an equation like 2x + 3 = 7, or, less conveniently, in a convoluted verbal description of it (as in those scary “word problems”). In either case, the goal is to identify x from the information given.

“You know, it’s not really the original Shrek that we love so much here. It’s really the dubbing. It’s really more the Iranian Shrek that interests us.” The Iranian film industry has a long and illustrious tradition of high-quality dubbings. In the post-Revolution era, and the ensuing rise of censorship, dubbing has evolved to become a form of underground art, as well as a meta-commentary on Iranians’ attempt to adapt, and in some way lay claim to, the products of Western culture. A single American film like Shrek inspires multiple dubbed versions—some illegal, some not—causing Iranians to discuss and debate which of the many Farsi Shreks is superior. In some versions (since withdrawn from official circulation), various regional and ethnic accents are paired with the diverse characters of Shrek, the stereotypes associated with each accent adding an additional layer of humor for Iranians. In the more risqué bootlegs, obscene or off-topic conversations are transposed over Shrek’s fairy-tale shenanigans.

more from Brian T. Edwards at The Believer here.

In the minds of Irish-nationalist men of letters, around the end of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth, there existed a special affinity between Ireland and Ancient Greece. There might even be a shared mission. According to Patrick Pearse, who headed the Easter Rising in 1916, “what the Greek was to the ancient world the Gael will be to the modern”. Above all, though, the sense of affinity rested on the perceived kinship between traditions of heroic poetry and myth. For the historian Standish O’Grady, the Irish heroic age surpassed even the Homeric. Equations of figures from the two traditions were common. In 1906, W. B. Yeats glossed the characters of his play Deirdre: “Deirdre was the Irish Helen, and Naoise her Paris, and Conchubar her Menelaus”. Yeats’s own understanding of the affinity went wider and deeper; it was also unusually long-lasting. As late as 1939, he saw the world of Phidias and Pythagoras as, ultimately, “ours”: “We Irish, born into that ancient sect” (“The Statues”). For Yeats, the affinity subsumes aristocratic morality, as well as cultural tradition and oral creativity: a shared heritage of “custom” and “ceremony”, “images and memories”, “traditional sanctity and loveliness”; a creative heritage of music and poetry (“story-tellers . . . of Homer’s lineage”) and audiences responsive to “the book of the people”. Yet at bottom, for Yeats too, myth, with its imaginative depths and its heroic actors, is at the heart of the presumed affinity, and he can even talk as if his career were premissed on it: “we Irish poets . . . reject any folk art that does not go back to Olympus”.

more from Michael Silk at the TLS here.

Shamim-ur-Rahman in Himal SouthAsian:

A new extremism has developed in Pakistan’s economic hub, Karachi, a city that is increasingly serving as a safe haven for extremist groups backed by criminal mafias and certain political elements. The reported arrest of a top Taliban leader, Mulla Abdul Ghani Baradar, from the outskirts of Karachi in mid-February has only made this new dynamic clearer, and more ominous. The arrest not only proved that the network of al-Qaeda- and Taliban-linked fighters is well-entrenched and active across the north-south length of Pakistan; but the joint operation, conducted by Pakistan and American intelligence operatives, also sent a message that Pakistan might no longer be the safe haven that it once was. However, if the government fails to address ‘bread and butter’ issues – providing employment, controlling inflation and ensuring the availability of essential items – and the political parties continue to fight among themselves for narrow vested interests, the Taliban could still spring a surprise. If this happened, it would most likely be with the support of the sizeable fundamentalist-minded and generally disgruntled segments of Pakistani society.

The sheer number, scale and consistency of the attacks on Karachi are all adding to the worries of already disoriented city citizens. From October 2009 through mid-February, about 200 people have been killed in both politically motivated targeted killings and extremist blasts in various parts of Karachi, while several hundred more have been injured. Alongside, billions of rupees have been lost due to looting, arson and the closure of businesses during strikes that have been called by various political parties to highlight the lack of security. Yet while extremist attacks are getting much of the headlines and anger, the city has been under particular pressure due to the targeted killing of activists aligned with various political outfits – the Sindh-based Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of the late Benazir Bhutto, the Pashtun-dominated Awami National Party (ANP), the sectarian Sunni Tehrik, the Islamist Jamaat-i-Islami and others. Incredibly, even as the violence mounts, the MQM, PPP and ANP technically remain in a coalition government together.

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

Have you ever died and come back to life? Me neither. No one has. But plenty of people say that they have, and their experiences were the subject of an episode of Larry King Live last December on which I appeared as the token skeptic among a tableful of believers, including CNN’s medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, New Age author Deepak Chopra, a football referee who “died” on the playing field, and an 11-year-old boy named James Leininger who believes he is the reincarnation of a World War II fighter pilot.

Dr. Gupta started us off by recalling that when he was in medical school the residents were taught to mark the time of death to the minute, when death can often take anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours to occur, depending on the conditions. As Gupta noted, people who have fallen into freezing lakes and “died” were not quite dead, and their core body temperatures dropped so rapidly that their vital tissues were preserved long enough for subsequent resusci­tation. In other words, people who have near-death experiences (NDEs) are not actually dead!

More here.

Mark Magnier in the Los Angeles Times:

Hijra have long been stigmatized and subject to discrimination and abuse in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, with its rigorously defined roles for men and women. But in a landmark decision in December, the Supreme Court ordered that they be protected from police harassment, be eligible for a separate gender category on ID cards and be recognized under inheritance laws.

“We need proper rights,” said Noor, a 21-year-old member of Nanni's household. “No one listens to our concerns.”

Although nascent legal status is a first step, social acceptance is likely to take far longer. Noor and the others said police officers and residents often beat, harass, rob and sexually abuse them.

More here.

Mark Rowlands in the Times of London:

Among philosophers of a certain persuasion, there is a basic argument for animal rights. Ethics isn’t mathematics; but by the standards of accuracy and precision involved in moral reasoning, this argument is about as unassailable an argument as you can get in moral philosophy. There is a problem with unassailable moral arguments however, and that is that it’s hard to make people care about them. In his book Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick entertained a little fantasy about a hypothetical and unspecified argument that is so powerful, so utterly compelling, that refusal to accept it sets up reverberations in the brain and kills the refuser. But bitter experience teaches us that there are no such, as we might call them, Arguments of Mass Destruction. Humans are not rational creatures in this sense; we don’t respond well to logical argument.

We do, however, respond well to pictures. Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of two novels, Everything is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), and the genius of his new gripping, horrible, wonderful book, Eating Animals, lies in his novelist’s ability to take a simple argument, one with empirically unassailable premisses and a conclusion that follows logically from those premisses, and give this abstract argument concrete, detailed, pictorial form, a form grounded in the day-to-day realities of human lives.

Safran Foer’s trajectory (some might say “descent”) into vegetarianism will be familiar to many.

More here.

This is the Sixth Annual Israeli Apartheid Week. This article by Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan is a couple of years old, but still worth reading:

… the comparison with the essence of apartheid remains valid — in South Africa, black people lived under the control of a state over which they had no control even as they participated in a shared economy, on the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians live under a state over which they have no control which seeks to keep them out of a shared economy. But in both cases, they found themselves ruled by a state that denied them the rights of a sovereign people. Even now, after it has ostensibly withdrawn from Gaza, Israel still tightly controls Palestinian life there, determining whether the lights work and whether salaries are paid, who may enter and who may leave, and much of the time who will live and who will die. Sure, the Palestinians have an elected government (which the Israelis together with the U.S. are doing their best to subvert), but it isn’t allowed to govern — post-pullout Gaza, in fact, looks rather a lot like what the apartheid regime had in mind in its original Bantustan policy: A separate geographic state within which Africans could “exercise their political rights” while still remaining under effective sovereign control of the Pretoria regime. In the West Bank, Israel is the effective political authority, and there it creates restrictions on the movement of Palestinians every bit as odious — if not even more so — than those imposed on black people under apartheid. That’s because on the West Bank, Israel is not only maintaining overall sovereign control, as in Gaza, but is also trying to “cleanse” of Palestinians vast swathes of the best land illegally settled since 1967, and the networks of roads that connect them.

More here.

My own thoughts on the Kapuściński “problem” here (from 2007):

I’ll admit that I came to writing about Kapuscinski with the intention of defending him, praising him. I think his writings are unique and that they traverse a ground between fiction and nonfiction that tells us something important about who we are. I think he is right that we need historians who are also storytellers, who understand that mode of human communication. But the more I’ve looked over those passages the more I think it is too complicated for simple praise or blame. If I’m right that Kapuscinski is defending himself in these pages, then it is an odd and troubling defense. It has the flavor of grandiosity to the point of feeling desperate, creepy. I don’t know if it is a healthy thing to think of yourself as someone tasked with interpreting the world and guiding everyone else through it, as the nucleus of human community. In the beginning of Travels with Herodotus, Kapuscinski talks about his youth and the beginning of his fascination with Herodotus. It arose out of the ashes of a nation and a community utterly destroyed. He writes, “We were children of war. High schools were closed during the war years and although in the larger cities clandestine classes were occasionally convened, here, in this lecture hall, sat mostly boys and girls from remote villages and small towns, ill read, uneducated. It was 1951.” 1951 in Poland is a big deal. It is the dazed landscape of civilization in ruins.

My friend Tom Bissell on Kapuściński’s death in 2007 from the NYT here:

Kapuscinski saw more, and more clearly, if not always perfectly, than nearly any writer one can think to name. Few have written more beautifully of unspeakable things. Few have had his courage, almost none his talent. His books changed the way many of us think about nonfiction and made many of us want to travel for ourselves and see for ourselves. Herodotus, Kapuscinski reasonably imagines, interviewed many of his subjects by campfire. “Later, these will be called legends and myths, but in the instant when they are first being related and heard, the tellers and the listeners believe in them as the holiest of truths, absolute reality,” he writes. And so “the fire burns, someone adds more wood, the flames’ renewed warmth quickens thought, awakens the imagination.” When the last page of this book is turned, note how much smaller and colder the world now seems with Kapuscinski gone.

Ryszard Kapuściński kept two notebooks when he was on the road. One was for his job as an agency reporter, haring about the world, meeting deadlines and battling to file stories whose transmission was paid for out of the pittance of worthless communist currency he received from Warsaw. The other was for his calling as a writer, making reflective, creative, often lyrical sense out of what he was experiencing. To mix the two notebooks up is to miss the point of him. Artur Domoslawski’s book, from what is reported about it, suggests that Kapuściński was a dishonest reporter who made up stories about events he hadn’t seen, and invented quotes. This is to confuse his journalism with his books. Almost all journalists, except for a handful of saints, do on occasion sharpen up quotes or slightly shift around times and places to heighten effect. Perhaps they should not, but they – we – do. A few of us go beyond the unwritten rules of what is tolerable, and send our papers eyewitness accounts of events we never saw because we were somewhere else. That, in the profession’s general view, is right off the reservation – not on.

more from Neal Ascherson at The Guardian here.

He has been voted the greatest journalist of the 20th century. In an unparalleled career, Ryszard Kapuściński transformed the humble job of reporting into a literary art, chronicling the wars, coups and bloody revolutions that shook Africa and Latin America in the 1960s and 70s. But a new book claims that the legendary Polish journalist, who died three years ago aged 74, repeatedly crossed the boundary between reportage and fiction-writing – or, to put it less politely, made stuff up. In a 600-page biography of the writer published in Poland yesterday, Artur Domoslawski says Kapuściński often strayed from the strict rules of “Anglo-Saxon journalism”. He was often inaccurate with details, claiming to have witnessed events he was not present at. On other occasions, Kapuściński invented images to suit his story, departing from reality in the interests of a superior aesthetic truth, Domoslawski claims. Domoslawski told the Guardian: “Sometimes the literary idea conquered him. In one passage, for example, he writes that the fish in Lake Victoria in Uganda had grown big from feasting on people killed by Idi Amin. It’s a colourful and terrifying metaphor. In fact, the fish got larger after eating smaller fish from the Nile.”

more from Luke Harding at The Guardian here.

One Hundred and Eighty Degrees

Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?

If you've done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.

If you've not done this, you probably don't understand this poem,
or think it's not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day's time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.

But if you've arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you're open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.

How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.

by Federico Moramarco

From Wired:

Though less obvious than gender bending, immunosuppression could play just as large a part in the worldwide decline of amphibians, which have porous skin and easily absorb chemicals from rain, groundwater and even water vapor. “Numerous studies have documented the effects of environmental pollutants on the amphibian immune system. Nearly all of these studies suggest that amphibians are particularly sensitive,” wrote Tyrone Hayes, a University of California, Berkeley biologist, in a paper published in the March 15 Journal of Experimental Biology. “In particular, the widespread herbicide atrazine impairs immune function and increases disease rates.”

Hayes is also an author of a March 1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study on the developmental changes wrought in male frogs by groundwater atrazine concentrations regularly found in the United States, where 80 million pounds of the herbicide are used every year. The frogs had low levels of sperm and testosterone; some even produced estrogen, developed female reproductive organs and were ultimately impregnated by their former gender mates.

More here.

From Prospect Magazine:

New research shows how our social ties can influence us for better—and worse: making us fatter, more likely to smoke, marry, divorce and even vote. Governments should take heed

If friends of your friends begin to put on weight, you are likely to do the same—even if you don’t know the people in question, and even if they live hundreds of miles away. Obesity spreads like a fad; it is contagious. This striking finding about how obesity spreads through social networks was the result of a 30-year study in Massachussetts, as Nicholas A Christakis and James H Fowler note in their new book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (HarperPress). Research shows that the same is true for smoking, and a range of other behaviours and attitudes like drinking, depression, charitable giving, sexual practices—even the decisions to marry, divorce, reproduce, or vote.

Why is this important? Because from healthcare to climate change, governments today face a range of problems where they must persuade people to change their behaviour. But instead of relying on their powers of persuasion, politicians should consider taking a class in “network science.” True, many claims for the power of social networks are based on the hype surrounding websites like Facebook. But the basic idea is simple: people join together in groups with particular patterns of ties, and these patterns then have important effects on the way they behave. The shape of these networks has surprising effects. Take an unlikely example: Broadway musicals. Brian Uzzi is a sociologist at Northwestern University in Chicago. He is also a big music hall fan. From Cats to Spamalot, musicals have been big business for decades, but investors have to guess which shows will be a hit. Bye Bye Birdie, a profitable 1960 production starring Dick van Dyke, ran for 607 nights. Bring Back Birdie, its 1981 sequel, was a flop and closed after just four.

Intrigued, Uzzi used network science to find out why.

More here.

In History News Network (via bookforum):

You write, that “Marx and Engels would have been horrified by the suggestion that their writing might one day be elevated to the status of religion.” Yet it seems to continually landed in the hands of folks looking for a roadmap to heaven. How do you see this conflict, essentially between the content and the application of Marxism?

The very fact the idea of communism took off in two of the most backward societies at the beginning of the 20th Century — China and Russia — meant that the way it was picked up by many people, especially peasants and not so well educated people who joined in that revolutionary ferment was that the only way they could see it was as a secular religion, as a secular faith. The intellectuals who were initially won over the idea were of course not at all religious minded and by-in-large did not go in that direction or take Marxism in that direction either. If you look at the early Bolsheviks, most of who were of Jewish origin, they were cutting loose from religion— the were very much the great-grandchildren of the French Enlightenment. That was also the impact on the intellectuals in China who founded the Chinese Communist Party.

I don’t think there was anything in the theory that meant it should go in that direction. It was, I’ve always felt that the emergence of one-Party state, the emergence of all powerful Politburos and Central Committees, the emergence of a total monopoly of information and of ideas by the Party made it almost inevitable that they would transmit these ideas as ideas that were unchallengeable. If you challenged them you were a heretic or much worse than that, a traitor or an enemy of the people.

It was that form of application of Marxism that reminded me very much of the Spanish Inquisition which the Catholic Church used to use against Muslims and heretics in medieval Spain. It was when this dictatorship was imposed and free thought was more or less banished that the process took on this particular form.

Alexander Ewing in More Intelligent Life (for Jane Renaud):

After decades of decline, board games are back in vogue. In 2008 board-game sales reached $808m, an increase of 23% over the previous year. Industry insiders suggest that sales grew another 20% last year. The recession has helped many to reconsider the joys that can be found in cardboard and plastic pieces. And this has been an especially snowy winter, particularly in my hometown of Washington, DC, where we recently enjoyed our third blizzard of the season. Monopoly, the most popular board game in history, was introduced during the Great Depression, when the fun of play-acting as a vicious real-estate mogul perhaps was most plain. Players wielding pewter thimbles and doggies could malevolently corner a market and penalise hapless neighbours; getting out of prison involved paying a little fee.

The return of board games as a diversion is good news (and something we've written about before), but let’s set some parameters. I’m not keen on board games 2.0. Many of the new games on the market are insipid recreations of Charades or Pictionary, and are far too concerned with entertainment utility. What about the needs of the hyper-competitive and the overly-sensitive (ie, an important niche of board gamers)? Any game that requires a battery is sacrilegious. I’m also sceptical of anything “hands-on”. No Jenga or Cranium please. But Trivial Pursuit counts; it is just cards and a board, with ample room for humiliation.

Classics such as chess and checkers (draughts to the Brits) endure, but they are limited to two players and have been hijacked by the computer. If you play checkers, try the multi-player Chinese variety. Backgammon is my two-person exception; it is near and dear to my heart. As a boy I played regularly with my father. At university, recovering from a protracted and messy break-up, I started playing on the internet for money (usually losing it) and tried to improve by reading books like “Backgammon for Blood”, a 1970s strategy classic by Bruce Becker. It was a dark time.

Board games are more than recession-friendly recreation; they are rich in sociology. The Game of Life, invented by Milton Bradley, the godfather of board games, is America at its best and worst. The game features plastic mini-vans that you drive from birth to death, accumulating fellow passengers (a spouse and kids) and making loads of cash along the way, regardless of career (journalism was not one of the choices).