J. G. Ballard’s early landscapes flickered up off the page, their drowned or desert conditions hinting at the landscapes of global warming to come. His early narcissistic psychiatrists and deranged movie stars glowed against this background – less human beings than messages etched into the brutalist semiotics of arts centre, Hilton hotel and motorway flyover. Whatever else he has been, Ballard began as an imagist. His ideas were welcome because they seemed to be inseparable from his inventiveness, the tone of his voice, the archi-tectonics of Ballardian space. The symptoms of his literary pathology were presented with all the enchantment of a page of Vogue or Architectural Review, while deconstructing both. His eye was cinematic, fractured, relentlessly selective, intermittent as a broken video camera operated by one of Rebecca Horne’s disordered mechanical structures, prefiguring a kind of art accident not yet technologically possible. Now, years later, in Kingdom Come, we encounter the same frozen restlessness, the same obsessive but broken regard, no longer inventing the future, only misappropriating the present. It is difficult to overstate how far ahead of his time Ballard seemed to readers in 1956. But now that history has caught up and passed the old motorist, his late vision – of consumption as Fascism out of uniform, or at least as a precondition for the full-blown, full-dress kind – seems simultaneously unassuming and cranky. If you accept the vision, Kingdom Come makes the usual kind of Ballardian sense.

more from the TLS here.

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Imagine the outcry if 500 people in a developed country such as the US or UK died after being given a fake medicine. Then consider that in the early 1990s a similar number of children died of kidney failure in India, Haiti, Bangladesh and Nigeria after taking fake paracetamol syrup contaminated with a toxic solvent. Barely anyone noticed bar their families and a few doctors.

Their deaths represent just one documented case of a trade in illicit pharmaceuticals that claims countless lives each year. Victims, mostly among the world’s poorest, unwittingly buy fake medicines that often contain toxic substances or little or no active ingredients, yet purport to combat the most common preventable killers, including malaria, tuberculosis and typhoid…

Experts fear the trade in counterfeit pharmaceuticals kills more people and causes more harm than the trade in illegal narcotics. And it isn’t a great deal less lucrative. In 2005, the US Food and Drug Administration estimated that worldwide sales of fake drugs exceeded $3.5 billion, but other estimates suggest the figure is 10 times as high. The Center for Medicines in the Public Interest, a charity backed by the US pharmaceutical industry, predicts that global sales of fake drugs will reach $75 billion by 2010 unless the trade is curtailed.

More here.

What are we to make of this connection, however loose, to Futurism and Expressionism? As for the former, its outrageous politics, celebration of power, and attack on culture are not easily forgotten; as for the latter, well, there is a way in which its expressive values are now condoned, indeed encouraged, in advanced-capitalist society. These may not be problems for Hadid—in any event they would not be hers alone—yet they cannot be simply dismissed. And what about the other modernisms she develops? Certainly Hadid has carried Suprematism and Constructivism into the promised land of actual building, but it might be argued that, in so doing, she has also diverted them—turned Suprematism away from its radical autonomy and Constructivism away from its political engagement. Here, too, of course, Hadid can hardly be blamed for historical reversals that occurred long ago (and that transcend us all as individuals in any case). And yet to a jaundiced critic her relation to these modernisms might appear less deconstructive than “deco”—a styling of Futurist lines, Suprematist forms, Expressionist shapes, and Constructivist assemblages that updates them according to the expectations of a computer age. (21)

more from Artforum here.

Seed Magazine was there with a video camera:

Complete transcript of meeting here.

From the University of Chicago Press website, the Introduction to Fred Turner’s book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism:

In the mid-1990s, as first the Internet and then the World Wide Web swung into public view, talk of revolution filled the air. Politics, economics, the nature of the self—all seemed to teeter on the edge of transformation. The Internet was about to “flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people,” as MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte put it. The stodgy men in gray flannel suits who had so confidently roamed the corridors of industry would shortly disappear, and so too would the chains of command on which their authority depended. In their place, wrote Negroponte and dozens of others, the Internet would bring about the rise of a new “digital generation”—playful, self-sufficient, psychologically whole—and it would see that generation gather, like the Net itself, into collaborative networks of independent peers. States too would melt away, their citizens lured back from archaic party-based politics to the “natural” agora of the digitized marketplace. Even the individual self, so long trapped in the human body, would finally be free to step outside its fleshy confines, explore its authentic interests, and find others with whom it might achieve communion. Ubiquitous networked computing had arrived, and in its shiny array of interlinked devices, pundits, scholars, and investors alike saw the image of an ideal society: decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free.

But how did this happen? Only thirty years earlier, computers had been the tools and emblems of the same unfeeling industrial-era social machine whose collapse they now seemed ready to bring about.

More here.

From Science:

Behind the creaky knees and forgetfulness of aging is a failure of tissues throughout the body to repair themselves when damaged. Scientists have wondered whether a dwindling supply of stem cells might help explain why this repair system falters with age. Now, three groups have bolstered this idea with research on a protein that keeps tabs on adult stem cells. Harnessing the discovery for antiaging potions may be a challenge, however: Blunting the protein also causes cancer.

In the late 1990s, several researchers found that a protein called p16^ink4a, produced by a gene by the same name, increases dramatically in older tissues. In some cases, older mice had as much as 50 times more than younger ones. Scientists already knew that in as many as a third of human cancers, p16^ink4a, known colloquially as p16, was mutated. At low levels, it allows cancer to proliferate; at high levels it suppresses tumors. In aging, however, its role was fuzzier. P16, it was thought, might grow more prevalent with age in order to prevent cancer to which an older mouse–or person–becomes more and more susceptible. But might it also be inhibiting tissue repair? Three teams set out to learn more.

More here.

From Time:

President Bush’s announcement that 13 top al-Qaeda suspects are to be moved to Guantanamo Bay to face military tribunals, and his call for Congress to prioritize legislation to beef up the legal foundation of those tribunals, is aimed at bolstering the legal basis of U.S. detainee policy. But the President’s timing — some two years after the Supreme Court first challenged the legal basis for the practices at Guantanamo, and on the eve of an election season in which his own party is expected to suffer losses at the polls, partly because of the situation in Iraq — will be widely viewed as politically motivated.

The President’s speech, filled with graphic details of terror plots, is clearly part of the ongoing White House campaign to shift the terms of the political debate over national security issues. (Picture).

More here.

From The New Yorker:

AMY DAVIDSON: Sy, in your first article after 9/11—just a few weeks after—you quoted a senior C.I.A. official who, you wrote, “confirmed that the intelligence community had not yet developed a significant amount of solid information about the terrorists’ organization, financing, and planning.” He said, “One day, we’ll know, but at the moment we don’t know.” Has that day arrived?

SEYMOUR M. HERSH: No, not in my view. He also said at the time that there was a debate about whether the attacks were a long-planned, deep-cell operation, and we were going to be looking at cell operations like this throughout the country—major embedded groups of Al Qaeda, what you will. The other possibility was that the nineteen hijackers were the equivalent of a pickup basketball team that made it to the Final Four. His guess was the latter. I think that’s true. I think the nineteen guys, however skilled, were more lucky than anything else, because of our lack of preparation. But we really know very little about how that operation worked, even now.

More here.

From RedLightChildren.org:

The REDLIGHT CHILDREN Campaign is the latest phase of a journey that began in 2002 with New York Lawyer Guy Jacobson. While traveling in Phnom Penh, Jacobson encountered a barrage of young girls, some just 5-years old, aggressively soliciting prostitution. The horror was not lost on him. Shortly thereafter, he began gathering together a passionate group of advocates determined to protect young children in danger of becoming part of the global sex trade.

Their efforts include The K11 Project – three films created and produced by an ambitious group of filmmakers, stars and activists. Each film is based on real-life experiences in the underage sex trade. Learn more.

Today, “Expose it. Fight it. End it.” is our rallying cry. It inspires us as we raise awareness via mass media, emboldens us as we pressure governments for more effective legislation; and reawakens us during our never-ending search for additional public and private resources.

More info here.  Also, my friend Reshma Alva has sent me the following message:

If you are available this Friday, September 8, from 6:00pm-8:00pm, I hope you will join me and the RedLight Children campaign at the United Nations for a film screening and panel discussion on the global problem of child sexploitation.

As some of you know, this was originally going to be our launch event for the campaign, but because a few high-level people had last minute scheduling conflicts, we thought it better to postpone the launch and use this opportunity to show extended excerpts about Priority Films’ three full-feature films about child trafficking and child prostitution in Cambodia, followed by a rich discussion by a high level panel who are experts on the subject.

The event is free to the public.  Because of the security at the UN, you must rsvp at [email protected] by noon on Friday, September 8, and bring a valid ID with you.  Please pass this on to as many people as you know.  This is going to be a really interesting evening at the UN, and you don’t have to be a politician or activist to get something out of it.  We have a very large UN conference room, and we want to get the word out to a lot of people as this kind of opportunity and capacity does not come up that often!

WHEN: Friday, September 8, 2006: 6:30 pm-8:00 pm (non-UN pass holders, please arrive a half-hour before the event with a valid ID to pass through security)

WHERE: UN Headquarters, New York, New York, 46th St & 1st Ave visitor’s entrance

Mummy dearest? Recent scholarship is changing thinking about female pharaoh Hatshepsut, whom Egyptologists once called “the vilest type of usurper.”

Elizabeth B. Wilson in Smithsonian Magazine:

It was a hot, dusty day in early 1927, and Herbert Winlock was staring at a scene of brutal destruction that had all the hallmarks of a vicious personal attack. Signs of desecration were everywhere; eyes had been gouged out, heads lopped off, the cobra-like symbol of royalty hacked from foreheads. Winlock, head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s archaeological team in Egypt, had unearthed a pit in the great temple complex at Deir el-Bahri, across the Nile from the ancient sites of Thebes and Karnak. In the pit were smashed statues of a pharaoh—pieces “from the size of a fingertip,” Winlock noted, “to others weighing a ton or more.” The images had suffered “almost every conceivable indignity,” he wrote, as the violators vented “their spite on the [pharaoh’s] brilliantly chiseled, smiling features.” To the ancient Egyptians, pharaohs were gods. What could this one have done to warrant such blasphemy? In the opinion of Winlock, and other Egyptologists of his generation, plenty.

The statues were those of Hatshepsut, the sixth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, one of the few—and by far the most successful—females to rule Egypt as pharaoh. Evidence of her remarkable reign (c. 1479-1458 b.c.) did not begin to emerge until the 19th century. But by Winlock’s day, historians had crafted the few known facts of her life into a soap opera of deceit, lust and revenge.

More here.

Margaret Cook in The New Statesman:

Much is made in the west of China’s booming economy. But there are inevitable downsides to what has been described as the “greatest mass urbanisation in the history of the world”. In China Syndrome, Karl Taro Greenfeld probes one of them: the Sars (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic of 2003, in which an estimated 884 people died, and which only narrowly escaped becoming a devastating pandemic of 15-20 per cent mortality.

It is thought that Sars originated in the city of Shenzen, in southern China’s Guangdong province. Early on, Greenfeld swoops in on the aptly named Fang Lin, an illegal immigrant to the city from the countryside, who finds a job handling and slaughtering exotic wild animals for restaurants. “Wild flavour”, as it is known, is an important ingredient in China’s new culture of conspicuous consumption. Thanks to lax regulation, the trade in snakes, camels, otters, monkeys, badgers, bats, pangolins, geese, civets, wild boars – anything that can be trapped or hunted – has become a multimillion-dollar industry. Animals are kept in filthy conditions in the backs of restaurant kitchens, where they are butchered only after diners have made their choice. Fang Lin would emerge after a night’s work covered in the blood and excreta of panicked animals, and would chain-smoke to kill the stench.

It is in this overcrowded, pollution-ridden environment that a virus hops over the species barrier, from civet cats to humans.

More here.

John Nichols in The Nation:

Net Neutrality, which has until now been the guiding principle that preserves a free and open Internet, ensures that everyone who logs on can access the content or run the applications and devices of every site on the world wide web. The neutrality principle prevents telephone and cable companies that provide internet service from discriminating against content based on its source or ownership…

The Anchorage Daily News concluded that, “Net Neutrality is hardly a heavy-handed government intrusion into the free-wheeling world of the Internet. It is a simple antitrust rule that protects consumers by keeping Internet companies from exploiting their control over connections. Congress should get ahead of the curve and ensure net neutrality before abuses begin to spread.”

That’s the right position. And it is summed up by a measure that the Senate should pass before its members go out and ask Americans for their votes this fall: The Internet Freedom Preservation Act. Sponsored by Maine Republican Olympia Snowe and North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan the act would provide meaningful protection for Net Neutrality.

While the machinations in the Senate this month are troubling, they also provide a critical opening for the debate that America should be having on media policy. No incumbent senator or candidate for a senate seat should be allowed to make it to November without addressing the issue of Net Neutrality and the broader question of whether media policy in this country should serve a few telecommunications giants or the the great mass of Americans and the great potential of American democracy.

More here.

From the AP via the International Herald Tribune:

Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged students Tuesday to push for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from universities, in another sign of his determination to stamp a strong Islamic fundamentalist revival on the country.

Ahmadinejad’s call was not a surprise — since taking office a year ago, he also has moved to replace pragmatic veterans in the government and diplomatic corps with former military commanders and inexperienced religious hard-liners.

Earlier this year, dozens of liberal university professors and teachers were sent into retirement, and last November, Ahmadinejad’s administration for the first time named a cleric to head the country’s oldest institution of higher education, Tehran University — drawing strong protests from students.

His administration also has launched crackdowns on independent journalists, web sites and bloggers.

More here.

George Scialabba reviews God’s Universe by Owen Gingrich, in the Boston Globe:

The eminent Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich also covers a lot of ground in comparatively few pages, but “God’s Universe” (coming in September) is an argument rather than a history. Gingerich is a theist and a believer in intelligent design, though not in Intelligent Design, which poses as an alternative to Darwinism. Gingerich accepts Darwinism. But he denies that either Darwinism or modern cosmology makes the existence of God less likely. On the contrary, by demonstrating the extreme improbability, the sheer fortuitousness, of cosmic and biological evolution, both Darwinism and cosmology make the existence of a creator more plausible. The likelihood that a complex protein, for example, will form by accident, by hit-or-miss evolution, is, according to one calculation, 1 in 10{+3}{+2}{+1}. Science has revealed an astoundingly “finely textured tapestry of connections.” It might all be chance, he concedes, but mightn’t there be a smidgen of purpose, an occasional shaping touch?

Gingerich pleads for separating physics from metaphysics, efficient causes from final causes, how from why. He is more earnest, less jaunty, than Vilenkin, but just as likable and as knowledgeable. In the end, he persuaded even a hardened skeptic like me that there might, possibly, be more to the cosmos than is dreamt of in my philosophy.

More here.

In the Boston Globe:

[A] growing number of neuroscientists and psychologists are starting to ask exactly that question. Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, for example, have scanned musicians’ brains and found that the “chills” that they feel when they hear stirring passages of music result from activity in the same parts of the brain stimulated by food and sex.

As evidence mounts that we’re somehow hard-wired to be musical, some thinkers are turning their attention to the next logical question: How did that come to be? And as the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel Levitin writes in his just-published book, “This is Your Brain on Music,” “To ask a question about a basic, omnipresent human ability is to implicitly ask questions about evolution.”

The fact that music is universal across cultures and has been part of human life for a very long time-archeologists have found musical instruments dating from 34,000 BC, and some believe that a 50,000-year-old hollowed-out bear bone from a Neanderthal campsite is an early flute-does suggest that it may indeed be an innate human tendency. And yet it’s unclear what purpose it serves.

[Hat tip: Chandan]

From The Chicago Tribune:

Five years after Sept. 11, seven out of 10 first responders and workers who toiled at the World Trade Center suffer from chronic lung ailments that probably will last the rest of their lives, doctors said Tuesday in announcing the largest-ever study of Sept. 11 health effects.

The study of nearly 9,500 police, paramedics, construction workers and others by physicians at Mt. Sinai Medical Center represents the first scientific evidence linking dust and debris to those health woes, vindicating doctors and patients who for years insisted the connection was undeniable. The study focused mostly on the so-called World Trade Center cough, the main concern of health experts and advocates. Doctors at Mt. Sinai also said they expect to find cancer among the study’s participants in coming years. (Image)

More here.

From Scientific American:

Young doctors in their first year out of medical school regularly toil beyond highly publicized new limits on their working hours, according to newly published results from a Web-based survey. The work limits, which went into effect three years ago, were meant to address the concern that hospitals overburdened these physicians in training, or residency, thereby putting patients at risk of serious medical errors. Another survey finds that the extended hours made first-year residents more likely to jab or cut themselves with a needle or scalpel.

Working 80 to 100 hours a week or even more was long considered normal for residents, on the grounds that such training taught them to operate under stress and provide complete patient care. Of course, grueling hours also double a resident’s chance of getting into a car crash and make them one third more likely to commit a serious error, studies had found. In June 2003, prompted by proposed legislation to restrict residents’ hours, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education began limiting residents to 30 consecutive hours and 80 hours a week, averaged over four weeks.

More here.

Anne Casselman in Seed Magazine:

The female mosquito is a deadly blood-seeking machine, armed with finely attuned antennae and a proboscis serrated for easy entry. In some species, she’ll fly as far as 50 miles to find her blood meal, which she needs to lay her eggs. Her offspring later emerge to breed, feed and continue their life cycle—as well as those of the parasites and viruses that they transmit. One bite is all it takes to contract disease.

No wonder the battle against them has reached the level of high-tech devices and chemical warfare. Legions of scientists are hard at work to foil their blood-letting by figuring out how to best repel, trap or simply disable their ability to hunt us down.

Each year mosquitoes infect some 700 million people worldwide with disease. Malaria alone killed more than a million people in 2005. The first human case of West Nile virus (which is also spread by mosquitoes) hit New Mexico in 2004, and it’s since popped up in all 48 continental states.

More here.

Lorrie Moore in the New York Review of Books:

That Welty had charismatic friendliness in abundance—her combination of shyness and gregariousness won over everyone—was never in her lifetime in doubt. She was a natural storyteller, a wit, and a clown. “If this sofa could talk,” she said once to Reynolds Price, looking at the bedraggled plastic furnishings of the only rental room Price could find for them in Tuscaloosa, “we would have to burn it.” All of Welty’s endearing qualities are underscored by Suzanne Marrs’s recent biography of her, the only one ever authorized by Welty. An unauthorized one appeared in 1998, Eudora: A Writer’s Life, by Ann Waldron (who without Welty’s approval began to feel shunned by Welty’s fiercely protective friends and a bit sorry for herself, perceiving that she was rather literally disapproved of, the perennially “uninvited guest”). Welty at the time of Waldron’s completed book was eighty-nine and unable to read for long spells. (Thank goodness, suggests Jacksonian Marrs, the anointed biographer.) Still, despite the biblical saying, a prophet is not often without honor in her own country: Welty was a goddess in Jackson. What a prophet is often without is privacy, peace, and any real depth of comprehension among her fellow citizens. And although this is not the task or accomplishment of literary biography, that Suzanne Marrs has waited until after Welty’s death to publish Eudora Welty is certainly a beginning to all three.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting? column at ABC News:

…the standard [creationists’] argument goes roughly as follows. A very long sequence of individually improbable mutations must occur in order for a species or a biological process to evolve.

If we assume these are independent events, then the probability of all of them occurring and occurring in the right order is the product of their respective probabilities, which is always an extremely tiny number.

Thus, for example, the probability of getting a 3, 2, 6, 2, and 5 when rolling a single die five times is 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 or 1/7,776 — one chance in 7,776.

The much longer sequences of fortuitous events necessary for a new species or a new process to evolve leads to the minuscule numbers that creationists argue prove that evolution is so wildly improbable as to be essentially impossible.

This line of argument, however, is deeply flawed.

More here.  [Improbable photo shows Paulos with llamas in Peru.]