Animal Eyes Provide High-Tech Optical Inspiration

Brian Handwerk in National Geographic News:

051205_animal_eyesLee and Berkeley colleague Robert Szema wrote on the state of animal-eye optics research in a recent issue of the journal Science.

In his lab, Lee is refining three-dimensional polymer structures that can mimic the components of an eye, from lenses to light receptors. He believes soft, flexible polymers may be the key to replicating natural sight systems that outperform their mechanized competition.

“Many, many biologists have studied animals’ eyes,” Lee said. “Some of those studies are decades old. But they didn’t have the tools to make the artificial structures that are now possible.

“[Now is] really a good time to figure out how to make complex three-dimensional structures, like compound eyes.”

More here.



Santiago Calatrava: The Bird Man

Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books:

20051215calatravaGreat architects are often blamed for the sins of their copyists. The twentieth century’s most influential master builder, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, saw his daring reduction of the tall building into glass skin and steel bones debased by postwar developers who quickly grasped how profitable that formula could be if stripped of his fine materials and exquisite details. In the 1960s, the pervasiveness of inferior versions of Mies’s designs incited Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to advocate, in such books as Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas as well as in their own buildings, a richer vocabulary of historical and vernacular allusions; but opportunistic postmodernists perverted their ideas into mere styling tips.

Frank Gehry is the latest to suffer that galling form of flattery. The global ballyhoo that surrounded the debut of his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao of 1991–1997 presaged an outbreak of hideous imitations. Yet Gehry’s idiosyncratic expressionism cannot be mimicked with as much facility as Mies’s minimalism or Venturi and Scott Brown’s mannerism. Indeed, the onus of plagiarism lies most heavily on Gehry himself, as each new client expects the next Bilbao. Gehry’s influence has been less specific in its effects on architectural style but no less significant: the example of Bilbao has encouraged establishment patrons to award commissions to a younger generation of experimental architects whom they never would have considered before. And none of them has benefited more from Gehry’s impact than Santiago Calatrava, architecture’s newest superstar.

More here.

Monday, December 5, 2005

Dispatches: Divisions of Labor II

The strike of graduate students at NYU continues.  The single demand of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee remains unmet: that NYU negotiate with their union, as they did since 2001.   (Once again, discloure: I am a member of GSOC, and striking.)  Currently the single most important labor struggle in the nation involving university teaching, the issue has attracted great amounts of coverage lately, and I believe that those interested in the current state of U.S. universities would do well to pay attention. 

In a previous piece, I summarized the trajectory of disagreement that brought graduate students to the decision to strike.  Here, I’d like to provide an account of the situation at the arrival of a critical juncture.  Tomorrow marks NYU President John Sexton’s ‘deadline’ by which graduate assistants must return to work.  As a carrot, Sexton offers those who return non-union contracts guaranteeing the continuation of the gains and benefits that, ironically, were previously procured by the union (yearly salary increases, health coverage, etc.).

But the sticks are many.  By email, Sexton threatened students who choose not to scab tomorrow with the removal of both their ‘stipends’ (pay) and their spring ‘teaching eligibility’ (jobs)–the disaggregation of the two things being a rhetorical strategy meant to preserve the fiction that the stipends do not represent payment for teaching labor, despite the fact that they are disbursed to graduate teachers in the form of paychecks with taxes and social security withheld.  Of course, despite the fictive bureaucratese, firing workers for striking is illegal and generally considered a vile form of strike-breaking.  In practice it puts NYU’s graduate students in the position of almost all strikers – i.e. without pay. 

Still, it is unclear whether such a threat can be enforced, as many departments have enacted resolutions not to replace each other’s labor, leaving a very real question as to where hundreds of qualified scabs can be found.  In addition, Sexton’s email holds that students who return must pledge not to resume striking their labor, or risk losing an additional year of teaching.  Here again the response of the academic community has been one of outrage: compelling students to sign away their right to protest does not exactly smack of the vaunted ‘academic freedom’ that universities claim to defend. 

In strategic terms, NYU’s actions over the month of the strike have further inflamed many graduate students, and this current ultimatum exacerbates the trend.  No one likes to be intimidated.  As well, it has provoked faculty outrage, not least because the threats erode the faculty’s traditional autonomy when it comes to teaching assignments as well as choosing to censure particular students.  Many chairs and directors of graduate studies are simply refusing to comply with the order from the provost to reassign spring teaching in accordance with the threats.  And the labor movement in New York city has been engaged by the struggle, with Manhattan’s president saying that NYU’s actions have embarrassed the borough, and several City Council members proclaiming that NYU will receive no cooperation on land-use review until they recognize the union.  Although faculty and tertiary support are invaluable, the fate of the union will be determined by the size of the disruption caused by strikers, from which all other support will flow.  However, even were the strike to be ended without a contract, the fairly frightening glimpse into the workings of high-level university administration will have been instructive and induced radicalism in many.

To step back, the philosophical question here is quite a simple one: are graduate students workers, and thus deserve the right to unionize?  Where political discourse is concerned, the Clinton-era National Labor Relations Board held that they were, while the George W. Bush-era board did not.  No surprise there, and the decision is not binding.  But let me offer a counterexample to the view that graduate students are not workers: the fact is, they already are classed as workers at many universities, including all the SUNY schools as well as Rutgers.  The only difference is that these universities are public.  Is there, then, any significance to the distinction between public and private-university graduate students?

I don’t believe that a distinction germane to this issue can be made.  Certainly the argument that unions erode collegiality and interfere with internal academic affairs can be dispelled by a glance at Rutgers, where graduate students have been unionized since 1972 without incident.  It is also very difficult to deny that working conditions at NYU have improved since unionization.  In 2000, students in the English department were paid 12,000 dollars for teaching four classes or discussion sections, with no health benefits.  Today, compensation for the same workload is 19,000 dollars plus health coverage.  Better working conditions make for better teaching; thus the undergraduates are better served by the union as well.  Either we should have a union, or Rutgers shouldn’t.  You make the call.  If you make the one I think you will, come picket with us this morning.

Dispatches:

Divisions of Labor I
Local Catch
Where I’m Coming From
Optimism of the Will
Vince Vaughan…Eve Sedgwick
The Other Sweet Science
Rain in November
Disaster!
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermanence

Rx: SPICING CANCER TREATMENT

The population of India is now over a billion with an estimated 1.5 million cases of cancer diagnosed per year. The population of the United States is 295 million, and yet 1.5 million cancers will be diagnosed this year. The accompanying Table shows that the incidence of breast cancer in the US is 660/million while in India, it is 79/million. Similarly, in the US, prostate cancer accounts for 690 cases/million, while in India, it is 20/million. What is more surprising is that in a country where large numbers of people smoke, and where pollution control is not as good as that in the developed countries yet, the incidence of lung cancer in India is 30/million compared to 660/million in the US. Only Head and Neck, and endometrial cancer rates are comparable between the two countries, the former probably related to the chewing of pan and betel nut in India.

COMPARISON OF CANCER INCIDENCE IN USA AND INDIA:

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The cause of this discrepancy has been debated, and is felt to be multi-factorial including the genetic predisposition of the subjects, their life-styles, a uniqueness of the geography or the environment or any combinations of the above. The weakest factor in this list of possibilities is that of genetic predisposition. While some diseases are clearly more common in or restricted to certain races ( for example, Jews of Eastern European, or Ashkenazi descent carry the Tay-Sachs gene at a rate ten times that of other Americans), cancer incidence is associated with individual or familial pre-disposition rather than racial predisposition. It has also been suggested that there may be serious under-reporting of cancer cases from the third world countries, making the statistics unreliable. Frequently, patients from the remote and rural parts of the country either do not seek treatment at all, or succumb to the disease before a diagnosis is made, many more preferring homeopathic and Aryuvedic remedies. However, differences are also apparent between Asians and Americans living in the US as shown in the example of cancer statistics for males in Massachusetts:

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Similarly, the incidence of cancer differs among the female population:

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It is conceivable that cancers unique to an older age group such as prostate or certain hematologic malignancies may not be as common in India because the percentage of the aged population is comparatively lower, but this does not explain the well documented difference in the incidence of childhood leukemias.

Two thirds of all cancers are related to diet. Associations between the two are difficult, if not impossible, to prove because of the formidable number of variables involved. Problems with the American diet are being increasingly appreciated because of the epidemic of obesity. Meats and poultry obtained from animals that have been fattened up on hormones or chemically preserved foods may be factors that contribute to the early onset of puberty in girls, and increasing incidence of chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer. However, another possibility is that Americans not only consume (in large amounts) what is damaging, they also do not eat what could potentially neutralize and protect them against the carcinogenic effects of the former. That protective effect for Indians may be provided by their diet which is rich in spices. Garlic, onion, soy, turmeric, ginger, tomatoes, green tea and chillies that are the staples of Indian cooking have been shown to be associated with a lower risk of a variety of cancers ranging from colon, GI tract, breast, leukemias and lymphomas.

The benefits of spices have been known for millennia. As Alexander the Great was returning home after conquering the known world, the last such place being India, he fell ill and unexpectedly died in Babylon. The University of Maryland researchers have now successfully proved that he died of typhoid. Upon his death, a fight broke out between the Macedonians who wanted to take their native son home for burial and Ptolemy, Alexander’s powerful General, who was heading the conquered Egyptian territory and who wanted to bury him in Egypt. It took almost a year to build a chariot suitable enough for transporting the body out of Babylon, and during this time, Alexander’s body had to be preserved. Interestingly, even though the secrets of mummification were now known to the Greeks because of the conquest of Egypt, the body was actually preserved in spices, white pepper and honey.

Sir Thomas More was beheaded by the order of King Henry VIII and his head was cooked in water before being impaled on a spike and displayed on London Bridge where it stayed for a month, taken down only as more heads began to arrive, eventually being returned to his daughter. Margaret More kept the head with the greatest reverence as long as she lived, carefully preserving it by means of spices. To this day, it stays in the custody of one of his relatives. Since 1500s, the vault containing the head was last opened in 1837, and it was still in reasonably good shape.

Spices have been used for ages as food preservatives. Mothers knew millennia ago that meat spoils quickly in hot climates, and their children died if they ate left-over food. Being a rich source of protein for their children, meat was a precious commodity, especially in hunting gathering days and needed to be preserved. Mothers learnt through experience that adding spices could accomplish this goal. Geographically speaking, the number of spices in food has been shown to be directly proportional to how hot the weather is. In contrast, food is either chemically preserved or frozen in the Western countries. Spices kill germs, and are therefore highly effective as preservatives.

The precise mechanism by which spices prevent the development of cancer is not well understood. Spices are some of the best natural anti-oxidants, and may be acting by protecting the cells from DNA damage. There is a documented association between germs and cancer; estimates are that ~15% of cancers globally are caused by micro-organisms. It is possible that many cancers are initiated by pathogens and spices prevent this from happening by killing off the germs. More importantly, natural substances like onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, red chilly, tomatoes, and black pepper have now been scientifically proven to interfere with the very intracellular signaling which accounts for the excessive proliferation and loss of maturation in cancer cells. The bio-chemical properties of these substances are being widely investigated now, with over 1000 papers published in highly respected medical journals on curcumin and ginger in the last few years alone. In summary then, spices may act to prevent the various stages of cancer initiation and development through a combination of their anti-oxidant, anti-pathogen and anti-proliferative properties.

Plants of the ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe, Zingiberaceae) family, one of the most heavily consumed dietary substances in the world, have been shown to inhibit tumor promotion in mouse skin. The substance called [6]-gingerol is the main active compound in ginger root and the one that gives ginger its distinctive flavor. A review of recently published studies indicate that among a host of other activities, gingerol induces apoptosis (cell death) in leukemia cells, can prevent the development of colon cancer cells, protects against radiation induced lethality and acts as a blood thinner via platelet activation inhibition (similar to an aspirin-like effect).

Curcuma longa or turmeric, responsible for the yellow color of curry powder, is a herb belonging to the ginger family and curcumin is its most active component. Turmeric has been widely used in India for centuries as a panacea for a variety of ailments. In summary, curcumin has been found to interfere with key cellular signaling pathways to arrest the unchecked proliferation of cancer cells, induce apoptosis, sensitize them to radiation therapy, and stop the formation of new blood vessels, a mechanism by which cancer cells are known to spread. These are the very effects desired to achieve growth arrest and eventual regression in a malignant process.

At least 9 clinical studies with curcumin have now been reported in humans in diseases ranging from cancer to rheumatism, uveitis, inflammatory diseases, leukoplakia, metaplasia of the stomach, and as cholesterol-lowering agents. All studies show that curcumin is extremely well tolerated in doses ranging from 4-8 grams/day, although up to 12 Gm/day have also been administered. Clinical responses of varying degrees have been reported in almost all of these clinical trials. Similarly, gingerol has been widely used for its biologic and chemopreventive effects for centuries, with more controlled clinical trials in recent years.

While spices may prevent cancer initiation and expansion, could they also be of therapeutic benefit in already established tumors, especially if given in very high doses? The intuitive answer is that the earlier the treatment is instituted in the course of the disease, the higher the probability. Two obvious possibilities are the pre-malignant conditions marked by abnormal morphology called dysplasias, or established malignancies such as low grade lymphomas and chronic leukemias where the course is so slow that a watch-and-wait policy is usually practiced. Over the ensuing years, the diseases change character, becoming progressively more lethal, at which time intervention is undertaken with aggressive and toxic approaches like radiation and chemotherapies. A good place to start may be the use of these natural substances in such conditions, especially in the earliest stages of disease evolution. The benefit from natural substances is likely to take time, a luxury which cannot be afforded in the case of rapidly growing malignant diseases, therefore the sooner this intervention occurs, the better.

We were curing malaria long before we knew what caused it. It was an empirical observation that victims of malaria who chewed on the bark of the Cinchona tree improved dramatically which led to the extraction and isolation of quinine. If we wait for a complete understanding of every abnormal signal and molecule in a cancer cell, then effective therapies may be a long way off. On the other hand, taking an observation such as the role of diet in preventing cancer can help develop some novel therapies as well as define preventive measures. As evidenced by the campaign against smoking, it will take a long time to bring about the social change required in making major lifestyle adjustments such as alterations in diet. While such changes are essential in the long run, it may be advisable to combine the best of what the East and West offer by using the natural substances to treat earlier stages of cancers and use the latest DNA microarray technologies and the results of the Human Genome Project to understand the precise mechanism of action of these spices.

Studying age old Eastern remedies, or “complimentary” medicine runs the risk of being branded as voodoo. Upon hearing of my current interest in treating cancers with Masala after so many years in cancer research using the most sophisticated scientific tools, a beloved family member in Pakistan remarked in wonder, “But I thought you went to America to become a rich doctor, not a witch doctor!”

Previous Rx Column:
The War on Cancer

Monday Musings: Exporting Institutions, Comparison, and the Iraq debate

Not too long ago I was struck by how most debates about Iraq that I come across are about exactly what left-liberal hawks (such as Paul Berman, Norman Geras, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, and Bernard Kouchner) say the war was about: the democratization of Iraq. By this, I don’t mean that critics of the war think that it was fought to democratize the country; in fact, many critics of the war, including myself, are skeptical about this motive, given that it has been fought and its aftermath has been directed by a cohort that was remarkably close to many of the thugs of the wars in Central America and Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. But rather the question of whether the war and, more relevantly, the presence of American and coalition troops in Iraq is worth it pivots around what we think the chances of Iraq becoming a democracy happen to be. If you see democracy in Iraq as a likely outcome, or even more likely with American troops than without, then chances are you oppose the withdrawal of American troops.

What I’ve been struck by in these debates in the last few years is the way we argue about how possible democracy in Iraq happens to be; that is, how we assess the chances. These debates revolve around the causal power of institutions. By “institution,” I mean the standard social science understanding of the term: the formal and informal rules and operating practices which structure the interactions between people in a society, an economy or a polity. The institutions that interest debaters here are those that structure and give rise to democracy. The questions they ask are primarily about whether or not institutions that work in current democracies can be exported to Iraq? I don’t want to answer that question, but I do want to look at how people go about trying to answer it.

The issue of whether democracy can be export is itself now at the core of the debate. For example, Barry Posen, a smart observer of international politics, offers this argument in support of a pull-out:

Iraq is a society divided into three groups with strong identities, and ethnically and religiously fissured societies are not easy to democratize. Minorities fear the tyranny of the majority, and majorities have a hard time avoiding the temptation to tyrannize. To the extent that the Bush administration’s ideal political outcome in Iraq can be discerned, it is a stable, pluralist, democratic, unitary state with strong constitutional protections for minority rights that the minorities are willing to rely upon. This goal is implausible, though, because the U.S. government cannot erase Iraqi history, and it cannot undo the political power of sheer numbers. In Iraqi history, to be disarmed is to be violated. In a democracy riven by strong group loyalties, to be outnumbered is to be vulnerable. Sunnis and Kurds won’t live without their own armies. Shiites won’t share political and military power with Sunnis who have been cunning and ruthless enough to rule as an armed minority in the past.

The remark is not quite in passing but it does make a deep assumption about the relationship between institutions and the conditions in which they operate. Specifically, it suggests that institutions are hard things to export largely because they don’t matter so much for outcomes as the conditions which would bring the institutions about. What really matters is the interests and values of people on the ground, and how money and guns are distributed among them. “The best institutions are written on the hearts of men,” and all.

Few people believe that a set of institutions can be put down anywhere and have the same affects in all the places we find it. And at the same time, most of us believe that institution make us act in ways that we would not have in their absence, which is why we try to reform them in the face of stiff opposition. In the debates we hear and have about Iraq—in the media, at lectures, in bars and at parties—we’d be better served with a better understanding about not only institutions but also how we implicitly evaluate whether an institution can succeed.

Here, we’re speaking of a very peculiar set of institutions: the one that make up a democracy. It’s peculiar because under it, the losers of an election accept the outcomes and go home and don’t take to the hills with geuillas or the barracks where they gather the troops to march into Capitol Square. There is certainly no shortage of instances in which losers of an election stormed the palais, or dissolved the constituent assembly. There’s also no shortage of instances in which winners decided they didn’t want to take the chance of losing the next time and ended the system. As a matter of simple fact,

‘One cannot stop a coup d’état by an article in the constitution’, any article in the constitution, Guillermo O’Donnell once remarked . . .

O’Donnell’s comment was mentioned in a talk that Adam Przeworksi, one of the smarter comparativists in political science, gave year and a half ago, entitled “Institutions Matter?”. The talk was about whether institutions really matter and how we can know and, ultimately, whether a science of comparative politics is possible. (It certainly worth a read, and it is an important question for the general public since so many of our political debates draw lessons from elsewhere: the well-functioning of the French health system, the alleged malfunctioning of British national health care.) The importance of the issue isn’t purely methodological.

[T]he issue has practical, policy, consequences. Particularly now, when the United States government is engaged in wholesale institutional engineering in far away lands, skepticism and prudence are in order. The policy question is about whether one can stick any institutions into some particular conditions and expect that they would function in the same way as they have functioned elsewhere. Note that when the US occupying forces departed from West Germany and Japan they left behind them institutions that took root; that were gradually adjusted to local conditions; and continued to organize the political lives of these countries. When the US occupying forces left Haiti in 1934, they also left as their legacy a democratic constitution, authored by the assistant secretary of the navy, who was none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt. Yet this constitution did not prevent President Vincent from becoming an absolute despot one year later. Why, then, did similar institutions succeed under some but not under other conditions?

We don’t know, at least not yet. It is for this reason that debates that rely on what worked in Germany, or what happened in Bosnia, don’t at all convince the side that the examples are aimed at.

We are generally bad at thinking about how institutions win assent, and they must. Can support for democracy be measured by opinion polls in which people are asked whether they support a democracy? Or does its stability depend on other factors—support for liberalism, tolerance, the rights of women? (In this instance, the latter are conditions in which the institutions of democracy operate.) Simply, institutions reflect to a large degree the relations of power found in a society, and they must do so to be self-sustaining.

These conclusions may be too pessimistic, though I agree with them in the context of the debate on Iraq (about which I sincerely hope I am very wrong and the optimists very right given what’s at stake). Large scale social engineering tasks are generally heroic, with the largest ones associated with the largest disasters. But a richer understanding of institutions in the past few decades have helped us to understand the extent to which some of what we had written off as conditions can be understood as institutions and therefore changeable.

I was thinking of Przeworski’s talk while reading our friend Alex Cooley’s new book Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States and Military Occupations. (I recommend it to those interested in these questions of how reform unfolds.) Alex’s claim is that looking at how political hierarchies are organized, specifically, whether they are territorially or functionally structured, will help tell us much about the way reform projects unfold. (His look at the occupation of Iraq focuses on the organization of the United States reconstruction effort—how the reliance of various private and opportunistic companies for the provision of services to Iraq placed vital components of the project outside any meaningful system of accountability.)

I was thinking of Alex’s book because its lessons, while drawn out of comparison, are not about outcomes per se, but rather about what to look for. And if there is anything to a “science” of comparative politics, it is in finding what to look for in these large social processes and changes where society’s history offers less information than we need. A useful comparative politics helps to structure ways of identifying what about Germany allowed defeat and occupation to lead to democracy, and what about Haiti did not? Comparativists themselves have known this for a long time. A popular version of this sensibility can perhaps help the Iraq debate.

Sunday, December 4, 2005

The lion of Zion

Amir Hadad writes for Haaretz.com about the transformation of Matisyahu Miller into the first ultra-Orthodox reggae singer :

Mg01121 “I was 16, I looked like a hippie, I wasn’t into Judaism. I was into music, reggae, Bob Marley, girls. My parents wanted me to travel. They signed me up for this three-month program and paid for it, and that’s how I got to the Alexander Muss High School in Hod Hasharon. The way it worked there was that in the morning you learn about Judaism, about Israel, and in the evening they switched to more general topics and the rest of the time they take you on all kinds of little trips within Israel, to a different place each time, so you’ll feel Israel. It wasn’t something religious. It was more about connecting to your Jewish roots, getting to know Israel a little.

“After a few weeks,” continues the man formerly known as Matthew Miller, “they took us to Mount Scopus to look at the view of Jerusalem. The people who take you there know very well why they’re doing it. It has a big effect on a person to go up to this place, to overlook Jerusalem from above. It sounds a little corny, I know, but it totally does the job. You stand up there, overlooking this incredible city, and you sing `Jerusalem of Gold’ and something big moves in your heart. It was the first time that I felt my soul, that I really felt it. I felt God.”

Thus began the transformation of a non-religious Jewish boy from a wealthy New York suburb to the world’s first and most successful ultra-Orthodox reggae singer, known today as Matisyahu Miller”

More here

How do you transform difficult scientific theories into an evening’s entertainment?

“A leading neuropsychologist explains how he adapted his best-selling book on the brain, soul and ‘self’ for a theatre audience.”

Paul Broks in The Guardian:

I have never bargained with the Prince of Darkness but I do get drawn into wrangles over the soul. They are mostly benign but one woman came to the brink of physical assault. It was during a talk I gave at a literary festival. She told the organisers she just wanted to shake me by the lapels. What had I done to upset her? I’d said that studying brain function and working with brain-damaged people had led me to certain views about the nature of personal identity; that neuroscience had no place for the soul; that the human brain was a storytelling machine, and that the self was a story.

I said that our deepest intuitions about what it means to be a person are based on an illusion. There is no inner essence, no ego, no observing ‘I’, no ghost in the machine. The story is all and, moreover, the story is enough. It was nothing personal. I’ve reeled off my litany of self-annihilation ad nauseam since Into the Silent Land was published. Sometimes I feel like shaking myself by the lapels.

The book explores love, loss and personal transformation through neurological case stories and speculative fiction. But if the scientific assault on the soul is one of its themes, so too is the limitation of science.

More here.

The wild Seinfeldian philosopher

Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

23zizekTo English literary theorist Terry Eagleton, [Slavoj] Zizek stands as “the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe in some decades.”

To Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker, however, “always to take Slavoj Zizek seriously would be to make a category mistake.” His appeal, she wrote, is “accessible absurdity,” a Seinfeldian attention to the “minutiae of popular culture.”

Zizek’s style is to juxtapose highly theoretical notions like Marx’s surplus value or Jacques Lacan’s “big Other” with the down-and-dirty “readings” of pop culture familiar from cultural studies. As critic Scott McLemee, a close Zizek observer, has noted, the famously verbose lecturer once explained “the distinctions between German philosophy, English political economy, and the French Revolution by reference to each nation’s toilet design.”

When people speak (and they do) of Zizek’s reputation preceding him, much of that rep – or rap – comes from articles on him by three American journalists over the years: Robert Boynton’s astute 1998 Lingua Franca profile, Mead’s 2003 New Yorker portrait (headlined “The Marx Brother”), and the “Zizek Watch” conducted a while back by McLemee, now a columnist for Inside Higher Education.

More here.

Terrors of the Table: The Curious History of Nutrition

Jane and Michael Stern review Walter Gratzer’s book in the New York Times:

AtkinsTo eat is basic instinct; how to do it correctly worries humans more than sex. So “Terrors of the Table” is a perfect title for this story of nutritional doctrine’s tyranny up to modern times when, in Walter Gratzer’s words, fear of cholesterol has “supplanted the Devil as the roaring lion who walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” Gratzer, a biophysicist at King’s College, London, who previously put a human face on science in “Eurekas and Euphorias: The Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes,” reels out a historical pageant of science and pseudoscience teeming with remarkable characters who have advanced (and retarded) knowledge about what makes humans thrive.

The faddists on soapboxes are especially amusing, including vegetarians who denounce eating meat as ungodly and an anti-vegetarian cleric who answers that God attached white tails to rabbits to make them easier targets. Gratzer asserts that fashion, not science, rules contemporary diet advice, and he enjoys eviscerating the “gruesome” Duke rice diet, the “probably dangerous” Scarsdale diet and the “grossly unbalanced” Atkins diet.

More here.  [There is also a slide show which includes the picture of Dr. Robert Atkins above.]

Hugh Miles on Al-Jazeera

Johan Ugander writes to me from Sweden:

I would like to share a speech that aired on Swedish television with  the readers of 3qd. In Sweden, we have something called “Stora  Journalistpriset”, or the “Big Journalism Prize”. During this year’s prize ceremony, the keynote speaker was one Hugh Miles, who was 
involved in the 2004 “Control Room” documentary, and author of the  recent book “Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenges America.”

The complete speech is available on the internet, and I found very enlightened. It is linked from http://www.storajournalistpriset.se/, by clicking on “Se Brittiske Journalisten High Miles föreläsning  om al-Jazira.”

The video begins with a 2:05 Swedish Introduction, followed by a 4 minutes excerpt from “Control Room”, followed by a spectacular 34 minute speech by Hugh Miles. This is then followed by 6 minutes of Q&A. After the 2 minute introduction everything is in English, and I 
highly recommend it to you and all your readers.

So if there is any reasonable way you can find to link to a video that has a 2 minute non-English introduction, followed by a gold mine of insight, please do.

The best way I could think of was to include your introduction to the video. Thanks, Johan.

Spike Lee talks about movies, race, and Will Smith

Lee Siegel in Slate:

051201_int_spikelee_tnEver since the romantic comedy-drama She’s Gotta Have It antagonized black women and black men in 1986, Spike Lee’s films have enjoyed the outrage of various groups. Between Do the Right Thing‘s racial and ethnic provocations, however, and last year’s She Hate Me—a sexual farce that offended lesbians and feminists—the social context for Lee’s films has changed. In Hollywood, the bar for racial provocation has been raised to wearying heights. At the same time, nakedly commercial entertainments—blackbusters?—from Barbershop to Get Rich or Die Tryin’ appeal to a black audience that barely existed 20 years ago. Lee’s recently published autobiography, Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It, offered an occasion to talk with the sometimes inflammatory director about movies, money, race, and the gentle art of making enemies.

More here.

An interview with Zygmunt Bauman

openDemocracy has an interview with Zygmunt Bauman on globalization, war, terrorism, and modernity.

Lukasz Galecki: How do you define the borders of globalisation?

Zygmunt Bauman: Globalisation is not a process taking place somewhere far away in some exotic place. Globalisation is taking place in Leeds as well as in Warsaw, in New York and in any small town in Poland. It is just outside your window, but inside as well. It is enough to walk down the street to see it. Global and local spaces can be separated only as an abstraction, in reality they are intertwined.

The main trouble is that the globalisation we are dealing with today is strictly negative. It is based on the breaking down of barriers, allowing for the globalisation of capital, the movement of goods, information, crime, and terrorism, but not of the political and judicial institutions whose basis is national sovereignty. This negative aspect of globalisation has not been followed by the positive aspect, and the instruments of regulation over economic and social processes are not established enough to deal with the reach and consequences of globalisation.

Globalisation and chaos

Lukasz Galecki: Are there any historical precedents for this situation?

Zygmunt Bauman: Two centuries ago our ancestors were frightened by the naked chaos which could not be tamed by the modest powers of local communities – village, parish, and small town. In those days, the big spaces of action that were about to build nations must have seemed as frightening and open to ambush as the forces of globalisation are to today’s nation-states. Yet our ancestors were capable of building the instruments of political representation and the legislative and judicial means to manage chaos, to coordinate rules and procedures in order to tame this chaos, to make it relatively transparent and more or less predictable.

A debate on the grad student strike over at NYU

At Democracy Now!, Mike Palm, chairperson of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee at New York University, and Paul Boghossian, a professor of Philosophy at New York University, debate the NYU grad student strike and the pro’s and con’s of grad student unionization.  (You can listen to the debate as well, there.  Also see Asad’s earlier post on the strike here.)

JUAN GONZALEZ: When you say the grading, when are grades due and what is the role of your union members in that?

MICHAEL PALM: Union members in our union are teaching assistants and also research assistants and some graduate assistants who do administrative type work, but the vast majority are teaching assistants who teach smaller sections for larger lecture classes and do the bulk of the grading in those classes.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your demands?

MICHAEL PALM: Our demand is singular and quite simple, that N.Y.U. sit at the bargaining table with us and negotiate a second contract.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Boghossian, you’re speaking for the N.Y.U. administration. What is your response to that demand?

PAUL BOGHOSSIAN: Well, the basic — the basic thought behind refusing to continue recognizing graduate student union is that we don’t believe that students are employees, and we think that the only people who are really entitled to be represented by a collective bargaining unit and a labor union are people who are primarily employees. Our basic impulse is not to want to lock into place a relationship to our graduate students, whom we treat as developing colleagues, that considers them to be laborers, and we don’t want to institutionalize that relationship.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael, your response?

MICHAEL PALM: There’s no question that we are students. We are enrolled as graduate students at N.Y.U., we take classes, we take exams, we write dissertations. There is also no question that we work at N.Y.U., grading papers, working in the offices, working in the labs is work, and there is also no question that our first contract has made us better teachers, researchers and assistants at N.Y.U.

cybertouching chicken

Rena Thirumalai writes:

Cyberhug “Researchers at Singapore-based Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have discovered a way to ‘cybertouch’ by transmitting tactile movements over the internet. A project presented at the CyberWorld International Conference held last week at NTU demonstrated sending touch through the internet using a live chicken.

The process works by dressing the chicken in a ‘sensory jacket’ that can record and transmit the animal’s movements.”

More here

Illness as More Than Metaphor: Susan Sontag and Myelodysplastic Syndrome

David Rieff in The New York Times:Sontag_pix

My mother, Susan Sontag, lived almost her entire 71 years believing that she was a person who would beat the odds. Even during the last nine months of her life, after she was discovered to have myelodysplastic syndrome, or M.D.S., a particularly virulent blood cancer, she continued to persevere in the belief that she would be the exception. M.D.S. is technically a precursor to acute myeloid leukemia. On average, its survival rates across the generational cohorts are no better than 20 percent, and far worse for a woman in her early 70’s who had had cancer twice before. It wasn’t that she didn’t know that the biological deck was stacked against her; as someone who prided herself on her ability to grasp medical facts, she knew it only too well. In the immediate aftermath of her diagnosis, she went online to learn all she could about M.D.S. and despaired as the fact of its lethality sank in. But that despair was almost the flip side of a lifelong confidence in her ability to defy the odds. “This time, for the first time,” she told me, “I don’t feel special.”

More here.

Lifting the veil

From The Dawn:

Sughra Mehdi, Fahmida Riaz and Sadia Baloch focus on the past history of feminism which many have forgotten or are deliberately trying to erase from memory.

A champion of women’s movement: Khawaja Altaf Hussein Hali
(A few objections and their answers)
By Sughra Mehdi

With the advent of modern thought and the new era, people began to think of the lowly status of women in society. The world over movements for the education and freedom of women were initiated. In English the word “Feminism” began to be used for this movement. Its priorities were varied at different times and in different countries. The reason for this clearly is that the concept of feminism acquired breadth. The feminist movement began in India in the 19th century. The Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj and the Theosophical Society stressed the education and freedom of women. Voices were raised against all those traditions in whose name women were targets of oppression and cruelty. The most barbaric form of this was “sati”.

More here:

South Asian American Art Now

From Ego:

Fatallove_main2 Picasso painted Le Demoiselle d Avignon after seeing an exhibit of African Masks and sculptures at the MOMA. Paul Gauguin’s life’s works come from Tahiti, where he retreated to after his giving up his profession as a stockbroker. Cultures outside their own have often inspired artists to push the boundaries of their work. It is equally engaging see a culture that is known and familiar (by heritage, or place of birth) to artists, re-interpreted, contended with, and assimilated into new contexts. Nostalgia, yearnings for that elusive place called home and the immigrant experience in itself becomes the basis for their art.

This is the nerve that the curators at the Queens Museum have touched with their phenomenal exhibition called “Fatal Love- South Asian American Art Now.” The exhibition follows “Crossing the lines” (also featured at the Queens Museum) in 2001, in which artists were asked to create pieces that focused on their particular communities. The museum takes its responsibility to represent the ethnically diverse community that inhabits New York seriously. It makes a fitting venue, therefore, for “Fatal Love,” which is dedicated solely to the creative and cultural engagements of first and second generation American artists of South-Asian descent.

More here.

Saturday, December 3, 2005

Bees Recognize Human Faces

From Science:

Bees_1 Think all bees look alike? Well we don’t all look alike to them, according to a new study that shows honeybees, who have 0.01% of the neurons that humans do, can recognize and remember individual human faces. For humans, identifying faces is critical to functioning in everyday life. But can animals also tell one face from another? Knowing honeybees’ unusual propensity for distinguishing between different flowers, visual scientist Adrian Dyer of Cambridge University in Cambridge, England, wondered whether that talent stretched to other contexts. So he and his colleagues pinned photographs of four different people’s faces onto a board. By rewarding the bees with a sucrose solution, the team repeatedly coaxed the insects to buzz up to a target face, sometimes varying its location.

Even when the reward was taken away, the bees continued to approach the target face accurately up to 90% of the time, the team reports in the 2 December Journal of Experimental Biology. And in the bees’ brains, the memories stuck: The insects could pick out the target face even two days after being trained.

More here.

Can science survive George Bush?

From The London Times:

Book_6 SCIENTISTS ARE, by and large, left-wing creatures. They opposed the Bomb. They generally oppose the destruction of habitats, which aligns them with the green movement. They have, broadly, chosen not to look at whether we are born geniuses or dunces, hippies or murderers; the spectre of genetic determinism conflicts with the cherished liberal notion that we, with the help of parents and society, shape our talents, opportunities and destinies. They believe that scientific research should be conducted for the sake of truth and the benefit of society, rather than to line the pockets of shareholders; this makes them enemies of big business. They tend to believe in evolution, which puts them at odds with the pious. They aspire above all else to objectivity, impartiality and accuracy, and they respect the power of science to overturn old orthodoxies.

Now consider this: public policy on such topics as climate change and stem-cell research requires a scientific input. In America, public policy is moulded by a conservative, industry-friendly, Christian-sympathising Republican Government. The result, Chris Mooney documents in The Republican War on Science, has been an almighty intellectual clash between scientists and politicians. Despite the sometimes crudely partisan line, he weaves a pretty convincing tapestry.

More here.