I posted earlier about The Valve’s online seminar on Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees. Now, Cosma Shalizi’s piece is up and it’s definitely worth a read.

One thing Moretti does not do, anywhere, is construct models linking individual behavior to aggregate patterns. Economists and sociologists already make such models, and anthropologists are starting to do so. It may be premature here, but ultimately it will be vital. If different social groups have different beliefs, is that because those beliefs express their relations to the mode of production, or is it because they tend to talk more with in the group than across group boundaries? Adaptationist theories of culture tend to go for the first choice, but we don’t really know whether the latter could account for the specific patterns of cultural difference and change that we see.

How Not to Learn from the Natural Sciences

What I said above about not mindlessly imitating biology deserves some amplification.

Evolution ought to have a bad name in the study of literary history. Reading Rene Wellek’s “The Concept of Evolution in Literary History” (or his article for the Dictionary of the History of Ideas) is actually quite depressing. (It brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s line “they deserved to fail, because they were all so stupid”.) The many post-Darwinian ventures in this direction went, essentially, nowhere, at least as far as understanding literature better goes. It surely didn’t help that their understandings of biological evolution were often very bad, generally some kind of Spencerian or even Lamarckian belief in tendencies of progressive development — perhaps inspiring, but hopelessly un-explanatory. (This has vitiated far too much evolutionary theorizing about social processes; cf. Toulmin’s chapter 5.) As for the more recent wave, since the 1980s, the people who seem to think that literature exists because humanity craves dramatizations of Daly and Wilson’s Sex, Evolution and Behavior drive me up the wall. (Their idea makes no sense even if you are very sympathetic to evolutionary psychology, which I am.)

Which said, this is not at all what Moretti is proposing, and I don’t see the harm in trying to make this all fit together as another instance of a general pattern, alongside biological evolution, because they have similar causally-relevant features, and so similar mechanisms are at work. . .

Excerpt from The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography by Luke Eric Lassiter:

We might sum up collaborative ethnography as an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it—from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and, especially, through the writing process. Collaborative ethnography invites commentary from our consultants and seeks to make that commentary overtly part of the ethnographic text as it develops. In turn, this negotiation is reintegrated back into the fieldwork process itself. Importantly, the process yields texts that are co-conceived or cowritten with local communities of collaborators and consider multiple audiences outside the confines of academic discourse, including local constituencies. These texts can—and often do—include multiple authors; but not exclusively so. Collaborative ethnography, then, is both a theoretical and a methodological approach for doing and writing ethnography.

More here.

An exchange between Alan Wolfe and Franklin Foer in Slate:

To get to the important question first: Did I mind that Bernard-Henri Lévy chose not to make his conversations with me into a mise-en-scène? No; given what you say about him, how could I? I have no way of knowing whether he would have treated me with kindness à la Fukuyama or with rolled-up fists à la Kristol. Besides, I am not enough of a celebrity, and compared to Sharon Stone, my looks are—how shall I put it?—just not very outré.

On celebrity worship, you get BHL right, even if you run the risk of treating Lévy the way Lévy treats Los Angeles. (Bernard-Henri attracted to Hollywood types? I never would have imagined it.) And it is not just celebrities. Russell Means? Refugee from Wounded Knee and one-time friend of Marlon Brando he may be, but now he is a pathetic anti-Semite. “I am happy and proud to meet him,” Lévy writes. Clearly BHL lives not only in Paris but in the 1960s, and the latter is actually more damaging to one’s critical sensibilities than the former.

More here.

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad writes in Prospect:

Kumarila claims that something that is called an “I” exists, established by the fact that an I is constantly present in thinking. Sankara, however, argues that this only shows that there is subjectivity —the presence of consciousness—not that there is an object named “I.” The apparent existence of an objective self is an illusion, created by the logic of the grammatical use of “I” in language.

Strange names, certainly. Strange thoughts? Anybody who has read philosophy in the west will not think so—provided that Kumarila (7th century) is replaced with Descartes (17th) and Sankara (8th) with Kant (18th). The point is not the polemical one about whether it was Indians or Europeans who had these thoughts first (the ancient Greeks and early Islamic thinkers are also in the running). The point is not that the Indians deserve study because they thought like Europeans. The point is simply that, for many reasons, the Indian thinkers are unknown to contemporary western philosophy, and are likely to remain so. The same is true of Chinese thinkers.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Memory enhancement, IQ boosters and drugs designed to attack genetic weaknesses may increase competition in the future and create a playing field that is far from equal, scientists at the World Economic Forum said Wednesday. But alongside such ethically complex issues, other forms of human enhancement — organ replacement, drug therapy and genetic mapping — could make the difference between life and death as well. Within a decade, many common illnesses such as cancer are likely to be pinpointed according to their genetic variables, and some others that have been difficult to crack — such as autism and bipolar disorder — might be better understood, Collins said. Also on the horizon is technology that will allow people to know their genetic makeup for about $1,000, he said.

Outside the big questions of whether humans should be enhanced and at whose and what cost is the perhaps bigger question of whether enhancement brings happiness, says Richard Matthieu, co-director of the Schechen Buddhist Monastery in Nepal and a molecular geneticist who also serves as an interpreter for the Dalai Lama. Most recently he’s looked at how the brain changes when people meditate.

“Happiness can be enhanced but isn’t just about genomes,” he said. “It’s about the mind, which I think is vastly underestimated and underused.”

More here.

“Understanding how liberals and conservatives differ, from conception on…”

Eric O’Donnell in Harvard Magazine:

How did Franklin Delano Roosevelt ’04, born in 1882 to a privileged, aristocratic life in New York’s Hudson River Valley, become a liberal reformer? Historians have proposed several possibilities. It may have been the example of his father, who stood alone as one of the only Democrats in the Roosevelt family at the time. Perhaps it was the influence of his headmaster at Groton, who preached the gospel of social responsibility. Some say it was his struggle with polio, which gave him knowledge of suffering. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ’38, Jf ’43, believes that one of the most powerful forces was FDR’s admiration for his larger-than-life fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. 1880. “FDR was a Democrat, whereas Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican, but TR was a progressive Republican,” Schlesinger says. “He believed in government, he believed in public action to open up careers and to expand opportunities for the not-so-well-off. I think FDR imbibed that from TR.”

But the forces at work were unpredictable. “TR’s own sons, for example, did not assume the progressive Republicanism of their father,” Schlesinger says. What caused them to adopt different politics? After a pause, Schlesinger proposes an answer: “A mysterious chemistry, if you will.”

At Harvard and elsewhere, researchers in political science, sociology, psychology, and even genetics are attempting to assay this mysterious chemistry.

More here.

About ten days ago I had posted an article here from The Economist about the Chinese admiral Zheng He, and a map of the world that he supposedly produced 70 years before Columbus set sail which showed the Americas. Well, it seems that the map is probably fake.

Stefan Lovgren in National Geographic:

A recently unveiled map purporting to show that a Chinese explorer discovered America in 1418 has been met with skepticism from cartographers and historians alike.

The map depicts all of the continents, including Australia, North America, and Antarctica, in rough outline.

An inscription identifies the map as a copy made in 1763 of an original drawn in 1418.

Antiquities collector Liu Gang, who unveiled the map in Beijing last week, says it proves that Chinese seafarer Zheng He discovered America more than 70 years before Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World.

But experts have dismissed the map as a fake.

More here.

Steve Connor in The Independent:

A planet similar to Earth has been found orbiting a distant star by astronomers who believe they are getting closer to discovering an alien world inhabited by extraterrestrial life.

The new planet is five times the size of Earth but is itself unlikely to harbour life because it is probably covered in frozen oceans with average temperatures of around minus 220C.

However, the scientists behind the discovery believe the find marks a breakthrough in the search for relatively small, rocky planets such as Earth where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for life.

The scientists said that the discovery showed it was technically possible to discover a planet in a temperate “habitable zone” around a far-away sun that would permit the existence of liquid water, which is believed to be necessary for life.

More here.  And more here by Ker Than at Space.com.

John Leonard reviews The Diviners by Rick Moody, in the New York Review of Books:

Yes, I know, before one reviews a new book by Rick Moody, it seems now to be obligatory to cough up a couple of fur-ball paragraphs about the author and his animadverters. This is because, ever since the publication more than three years ago of his rehab/guilt-trip memoir, The Black Veil, “Rick Moody” has turned into something about which it is necessary to have a position, like sport-utility vehicles, stem cell research, or waterboarding. Permit me to hold these paragraphs in reserve until we have actually read what he’s written.

Before it raptures up and wimps out, Moody’s most recent novel, The Diviners, is not only longer and funnier than his previous three but also more accommodating. While he may still rev his motor too much, he is thinking out loud about larger matters than the substance abuse, sexual dysfunction, and sudden death in the northeast suburbs that preoccupied Garden State, The Ice Storm, and Purple America. In developing a Marx Brothers meet Thomas Pynchon plot about a frantic search, in the weeks immediately following the dead-heat presidential election of November 2000, for a much-hyped but mysteriously missing television script on dowsing through the ages, he explores the American thirst for something, anything, to believe in, our national hunger for the latest trumped-up or knocked-off meanings.

More here.

Helen Pearson in Nature:

Avian flu ravages tissues throughout the body, confirms an autopsy of infected cats. The finding suggests that the virus might infect people’s guts through what they eat, and spread via contaminated faeces.

Fears about bird flu continue to balloon, and with its arrival in Turkey, the disease has a foot in the door in Europe. The H5N1 strain of the virus has killed more than half of those people it is known to have infected.

Because of fears that the virus will spark a human pandemic, researchers want to know how it is likely to attack the body and jump between people. But they have had little opportunity to answer these questions, in part because only a handful of human victims have been autopsied.

More here.

An excerpt from Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine by Andrzej Szczeklik, from the University of Chicago Press website:

It is not just the world that sends its rhythms coursing through us. There are also rhythms inside us. There are so many rhythmic processes happening in our bodies, from the obvious ones, like sleeping and waking, to the most well hidden, like the secretion of hormones into the blood, that to explain their uncanny regularity and synchronicity we have adopted the figurative idea of the biological clock. Long before it was discovered, everyone agreed that if this extraordinary chronometer really did exist, then every last cell of our bodies would be able to tell the time from it.

Nowadays we locate it in the brain, in the part called the hypothalamus. The biological clock runs in two concentrations of gray matter, known as the hypothalamic nuclei, and so does its most essential part—the circadian oscillator. The clock’s mechanism appears to be determined by a cycle of recurring reactions: the transcription of genes and the synthesis of proteins. These reactions form a feedback loop: so-called clock genes code proteins, which accumulate and retroactively obstruct the transcription of genes. As protein disintegrates, transcription gets going again, and the protein production cycle is resumed. This “clockwork” system, characterized by rhythmicality, is common to all species, from the fruit fly to man. It is teamed with the emission of circadian signals, which depend on changes in the cell’s membrane potential. Once in existence, they spread into the nearest vicinity and to other areas of the brain as well.

But what use would a watch be if you couldn’t set it to local time?

More here.

3QD columnist Ker Than in Space.com:

A spinning black hole in the constellation Scorpius has created a stable dent in the fabric of spacetime, scientists say.

The dent is the sort of thing predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It affects the movement of matter falling into the black hole.

The spacetime-dent is invisible, but scientists deduced its existence after detecting two X-ray frequencies from the black hole that were identical to emissions noted nine years ago. The finding will allow scientists to calculate the black hole’s spin, a crucial measurement necessary for describing the object’s behavior.

More here.

Jai Singh in The New Republic:

Two weeks ago, Chad’s authoritarian president Idriss Déby effectively revoked a law requiring his government to spend 80 percent of the country’s oil revenues on health, education, and infrastructure while placing 10 percent of the revenue in a fund for future generations. The law was part of a 2000 agreement in which the World Bank and an ExxonMobil-led oil consortium agreed to fund a massive project to extract Chadian oil and pipe it through Cameroon for export.

Wolfowitz, now in his eighth month on the job, responded to Déby’s move by ending all future Bank disbursements for its eight projects in the country, which would have totaled $124 million over several years. He also froze a bank account that held millions in Chadian oil revenue. Playing hardball with a small and impoverished country may seem like overkill, but in reality this is a high-stakes dispute that will have key ramifications. Firms are combing Africa in search of new oil fields, and the best hope for staving off the corruption and abuse that is bound to result from future projects is good revenue management.

More here.

The Economist provides its own kind of look at CUNY’s history and renewal.

Until the 1960s, a good case could be made that the best deal in American tertiary education was to be found not in Cambridge or Palo Alto, but in Harlem, at a small public school called City College, the core of CUNY. America’s first free municipal university, founded in 1847, offered its services to everyone bright enough to meet its gruelling standards.

City’s golden era came in the last century, when America’s best known colleges restricted the number of Jewish students they would admit at exactly the time when New York was teeming with the bright children of poor Jewish immigrants. In 1933-54 City produced nine future Nobel laureates, including the 2005 winner for economics, Robert Aumann (who graduated in 1950); Hunter, its affiliated former women’s college, produced two, and a sister branch in Brooklyn produced one. City educated Felix Frankfurter, a pivotal figure on the Supreme Court (class of 1902), Ira Gershwin (1918), Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine (1934) and Robert Kahn, an architect of the internet (1960). A left-wing place in the 1930s and 1940s, City spawned many of the neo-conservative intellectuals who would later swing to the right, such as Irving Kristol (class of 1940, extra-curricular activity: anti-war club), Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer.

What went wrong? Put simply, City dropped its standards. It was partly to do with demography, partly to do with earnest muddleheadedness.

From the BBC:

An American professor has developed a theory that Germans are bad-tempered because pronouncing German sounds puts a frown on the face.

Professor David Myers believes that the facial contortions needed to pronounce vowels modified by the umlaut may be getting the Germans down in the mouth.

The umlaut is the two dots which modify the sound of the vowels a, o and u – dots which many foreigners omit altogether, but which give the German language three alternative vowel sounds.

Saying “u” – one of German’s most recognisable sounds – causes the mouth to turn down.

. . . A spokesperson for the German Embassy said: “We can give no comment on this as it is too scientific.”

(Hat tip: Linta Varghese)

I got my things and left.

This, the opening line to Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger, apart from being the coolest opening line in African fiction, is a fair summary of the writer’s life. He was always getting his things and leaving; not that he had many things to get—in his last years, homeless and reduced to sleeping on park benches in Harare, Zimbabwe, all he had were his typewriter and a few books. He died at thirty-five, an age when most writers are just publishing their first novels. It is a mark of his genius that, with only three novellas, some short stories, poems, and essays published during his lifetime, he is regarded today as one of the most influential postcolonial African writers.

more from The Virginia Quarterly Review here.

From despardes.com:

“Water” caused a spark in a tinderbox in 2000. It had to be doused. So its locale was moved from Varanasi to Sri Lanka. There, its production was kept secret until completed. India’s Uttar Pradesh (UP) government had to withdraw the film’s location permits when mobs stormed the ghats along the Ganges, destroying the film’s sets and burning effigies of Mehta. “I’ve gone through an ordeal by fire – no pun intended. In fact (Pakistani litterateur) Bapsi Sidhwa has written a book on the making of ‘Water’, which will be published when the film is released,” said Deepa Mehta – Water’s Indo-Canadian desi filmmaker and director. Its commercial release in India still remains a big question mark though. But a motley crowd of Delhi’s crème de la crème, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s wife, watched it recently in rapt attention as her Water had its first screening in the capital. At the end loud sobs were heard from various corners of the auditorium. “It was unreal! I had a great deal of insecurity about the reactions to Water in India. They were all laid to rest that evening,” said the relieved filmmaker. In Dubai and Karachi, its recent screening drew accolades too. “I’m so glad I’ve got it out of my system. Now I feel I could just retire. I’m that satisfied with ”Water”,” she has been quoted saying.

Mehta lives in a villa in suburban Toronto, Canada. Last year the Toronto Film Festival screened her Water. She and her film got standing ovations. “‘Water’ was the last of my elemental trilogy after ‘Fire’ and ‘Earth’. I felt incomplete without it. I just had to make ‘Water’,” the director said, whose script had sparked violent protests and even death threats in India. When asked what her next project was, Mehta wryly replied: “I refuse to do a film about Air”. Recently, an eclectic crowd of Pakistanis assembled in Karachi to watch it. The movie reportedly brought a packed auditorium of Muslims to forget their differences, sympathize with each other and take a moment to ponder that which has divided Indians and Pakistanis for so long.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows. And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view. Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered. “We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say. Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

More here.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

According to surveys, most of the people in the world say that religion is very important in their lives. Many would say that without it, their lives would be meaningless. It’s tempting just to take them at their word, to declare that nothing more is to be said — and to tiptoe away. Who would want to interfere with whatever it is that gives their lives meaning? But if we do that, we willfully ignore some serious questions. Can just any religion give lives meaning, in a way that we should honor and respect? What about people who fall into the clutches of cult leaders, or who are duped into giving their life savings to religious con artists? Do their lives still have meaning, even though their particular “religion” is a fraud?

More here.

Helen Phillips in New Scientist:

WHAT if there was a drug that helped you do your job better, and your boss was pressuring you to take it, even though it could be bad for your health? There are already drugs that can boost memory or alertness, but whose long-term effects are unknown. Or what if scientists could tell what you were thinking or planning to do before you knew it yourself? Brain scans can now do this.

Should these drugs and procedures be regulated – or permitted at all? That is the inspiration for the “Meeting of minds” project, a brainchild of Belgian organisation the King Baudouin Foundation.

For the past two years, a citizens’ panel of 126 Europeans from different age groups and backgrounds has been considering the ethical dilemmas emerging from brain science research. This weekend they are meeting in the Belgian capital, Brussels, to finalise their recommendations before presenting them to the European Parliament on 23 January (see “Causes for concern”).

More here.