Friday, January 22, 2010
Chess and the human mind
Garry Kasparov in NYRB:
Eleven years later I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its efforts—and doubled Deep Blue's processing power—and I lost the rematch in an event that made headlines around the world. The result was met with astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind's submission before the almighty computer. ("The Brain's Last Stand" read the Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world.
It was the specialists—the chess players and the programmers and the artificial intelligence enthusiasts—who had a more nuanced appreciation of the result. Grandmasters had already begun to see the implications of the existence of machines that could play—if only, at this point, in a select few types of board configurations—with godlike perfection. The computer chess people were delighted with the conquest of one of the earliest and holiest grails of computer science, in many cases matching the mainstream media's hyperbole. The 2003 book Deep Blue by Monty Newborn was blurbed as follows: "a rare, pivotal watershed beyond all other triumphs: Orville Wright's first flight, NASA's landing on the moon...."The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force. As Igor Aleksander, a British AI and neural networks pioneer, explained in his 2000 book, How to Build a Mind:
By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives.It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.
The rest here.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Kimchi increasing in popularity in the US
Jane Black in The Washington Post:
My kimchi habit will no doubt be a great relief to the government of South Korea, which has made spreading the word about the country's national dish an official policy. The Korea Food Research Institute has a traditional-foods division charged with the "scientific research of Korean fermented foods such as sauces, alcohols, and kimchi for their globalization," according to its Web site.
At first, such a policy might seem odd; Americans have a fierce love affair with hamburgers, but I'm unaware of any government program to evangelize them. We've left that job to McDonald's. But in Korea, kimchi is a national obsession. Seoul has a kimchi museum with a vast collection of cookbooks, cooking utensils and storage jars. Families around the country own special refrigerators designed to maintain the optimal temperature for the stinky vegetables' fermentation and preservation. Perhaps the most famous example of the nation's kimchi fever is that South Korean scientists spent years developing a recipe for a bacteria-free "space kimchi" to accompany their first citizen's visit to the international space station.
"This will greatly help my mission," Ko San, then a 30-year-old computer scientist, said in a statement quoted by the New York Times before he was to blast off in 2008. "Since I am taking kimchi with me, this will help with cultural exchanges in space."
The rest here [via Eating and Living].
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Strategy after MA: The House should pass the Senate's health care bill
Political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Daniel Hopkins in The Washington Post:
Forget the question of whether a Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts spells the end of health reform. It doesn't -- unless Democrats let it. The Senate has already passed a bill that is far from perfect but far better than nothing. If Democrats lose a Senate seat, the House should simply enact it in return for strong commitments from President Obama and Democratic leaders that they will fight to improve the bill in the future, including through the filibuster-proof budget process.The real question is what message politicians and pundits will take out of the Massachusetts surprise. (As of this writing, we do not know whether that surprise will be a near-loss for Democrats or a GOP triumph.) Many argue it means Democrats should run from reform. But that would not just be disastrous for American health care. It would misread the results and ignore the lessons of history. Not passing health reform would guarantee that dire predictions about the Democrats' fate will come true.
The bills in Congress hardly enjoy runaway popularity. But the problem isn't that health-care reform itself is unpopular. It is that people are turned off by the current debate about it. And those repelled by what is happening in Washington include a lot of liberals as well as conservatives. In a recent nationwide CNN poll, for example, 10 percent of respondents opposed reform from the left because they felt it was not liberal enough. Another 40 percent supported reform outright, bringing the total supporting the current bills or something more liberal to 50 percent -- compared with 45 percent who oppose the bills because they think they are too liberal.
The rest here.
NSFW Philosophy Page
Details and link here [This link itself is safe for work and provides a link to the NSFW site].
Monday, January 18, 2010
Firearms of Jesus Christ
Joseph Rhee, Tahman Bradley and Brian Rossin for ABC News:
The rest of the story here.Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious "Crusade" in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."
Other references include citations from the books of Revelation, Matthew and John dealing with Jesus as "the light of the world." John 8:12, referred to on the gun sights as JN8:12, reads, "Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."
Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions "have always been there" and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is "not Christian." The company has said the practice began under its founder, Glyn Bindon, a devout Christian from South Africa who was killed in a 2003 plane crash.
A conversation about Facebook with an anonymous employee
At Rumpus:
Rumpus: You said they’re changing the policy of keeping all information.
Employee: No. They’re never changing that policy. We still keep all information. What I was referring to, is that if anything, we’re going to start deleting more photos for performance reasons. We are the largest photo distributor in the world.
Rumpus: Really? Is that obvious?
Employee: I don’t know the exact figures off the top of my head, but I want to say upwards of a trillion photos, and then think about six copies of each. This is the epitome of a needle in a haystack. When we need to load a webpage in half a second, we need to go and find upwards of a thousand photos — think about your newsfeed — in one get [snaps], and instantaneously. It’s hard to do.
[...]Rumpus: Would you suppose that Facebook employees might read people’s messages?
Employee: See, the thing is — and I don’t know how much you know about it — it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.
Rumpus: So the master password is basically irrelevant.
Employee: Yeah.
Rumpus: It’s just for style.
Employee: Right. But it’s no longer in use. Like I alluded to, we’ve cracked down on this lately, but it has been replaced by a pretty cool tool. If I visited your profile, for example, on our closed network, there’s a ‘switch login’ button. I literally just click it, explain why I’m logging in as you, click ‘OK,’ and I’m you. You can do it as long as you have an explanation, because you’d better be able to back it up. For example, if you’re investigating a compromised account, you have to actually be able to log into that account.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
A veteran conservative makes the case for gay marriage
Ted Olsen in Newsweek:
My involvement in this case has generated a certain degree of consternation among conservatives. How could a politically active, lifelong Republican, a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, challenge the "traditional" definition of marriage and press for an "activist" interpretation of the Constitution to create another "new" constitutional right?My answer to this seeming conundrum rests on a lifetime of exposure to persons of different backgrounds, histories, viewpoints, and intrinsic characteristics, and on my rejection of what I see as superficially appealing but ultimately false perceptions about our Constitution and its protection of equality and fundamental rights.
Many of my fellow conservatives have an almost knee-jerk hostility toward gay marriage. This does not make sense, because same-sex unions promote the values conservatives prize. Marriage is one of the basic building blocks of our neighborhoods and our nation. At its best, it is a stable bond between two individuals who work to create a loving household and a social and economic partnership. We encourage couples to marry because the commitments they make to one another provide benefits not only to themselves but also to their families and communities. Marriage requires thinking beyond one's own needs. It transforms two individuals into a union based on shared aspirations, and in doing so establishes a formal investment in the well-being of society. The fact that individuals who happen to be gay want to share in this vital social institution is evidence that conservative ideals enjoy widespread acceptance. Conservatives should celebrate this, rather than lament it.
The rest here.
Friday, January 15, 2010
The humanities and the democratic self
Mark Slouka in Harper's:
What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important. That much seems undebatable. How “the culture” decides, precisely, on what matters, how openly the debate unfolds—who frames the terms, declares a winner, and signs the check—well, that’s a different matter. Real debate can be short-circuited by orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.
In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it. There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits; everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including—in the last, last analysis—our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I’m not aware of it.
That education policy reflects the zeitgeist shouldn’t surprise us; capitalism has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism’s success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for “success,” the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. It’s a neat trick. The problem, of course, is that by its success we are made vulnerable. By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe.
We’re pounding swords into cogs. They work in Pyongyang too.
Granting TPS to Haitians
Amanda Taub writes:
If you want to give money, Chris Blattman and Laura Freschi both have good ideas and useful information. However, if you can't give as much as you would like, or find yourself wanting to do more, then I have one further suggestion: contact the White House and tell them that you support granting Haitians Temporary Protected Status (TPS) immediately.
TPS is a form of temporary humanitarian immigration relief given to nationals of countries that have suffered severe disasters, natural or man-made. (For example, El Salvador got TPS was after the country was hit by a terrible earthquake in 2001, Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1999, and Burundi, Liberia, Sudan, and Somalia were designated because of ongoing armed conflicts.)
Once a country has been given TPS, its nationals who are in the United States can apply for work authorization (a very useful thing to have if, say, one needs to send money home to family members in need of medical care or a house that has not been reduced to rubble), can't be deported or put into immigration detention (also quite handy if you're trying to work and send money home), and can apply for travel authorization, which allows them to visit their home country and return to the US, even if they wouldn't otherwise have a visa that would allow them back into the country (incredibly important if you have loved ones who have been badly hurt and need to visit them, or if you need to go home to attend funerals).
Designating Haiti for TPS status would provide an immediate, tremendously valuable benefit to Haitian immigrants in the United States. But, more importantly it would benefit their loved ones who remain in Haiti and are in desperate need of their assistance. TPS would increase and stabilize remittances at a time when they are absolutely vital. Equally significantly, especially in the quake's immediate aftermath, it would allow immigrants to return to Haiti to find and help their loved ones, or to mourn those who they have lost, without jeopardizing their ability to return to the United States and support their surviving family members.
The pending fall of Europe to Islam
Justin Vaïsse in Foreign Policy:
By 2050, Europe will be unrecognizable. Instead of romantic cafes, Paris's Boulevard Saint-Germain will be lined with halal butcheries and hookah bars; the street signs in Berlin will be written in Turkish. School-children from Oslo to Naples will read Quranic verses in class, and women will be veiled.
At least, that's what the authors of the strange new genre of "Eurabia" literature want you to believe. Not all books of this alarmist Europe-is-dying category, which received its most intellectually hefty treatment yet with the recent release of Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, offer such dire and colorful predictions. But they all make the case that low fertility rates among natives, massive immigration from Muslim countries, and the fateful encounter between an assertive Islamic culture and a self-effacing European one will lead to a Europe devoid of all Western identity.
Despite their Europe-focused content, these books are a largely North American phenomenon. Bat Ye'or (or Gisèle Littman), an Egyptian-born British author, wrote one of the first of the genre in 2005, with Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, which argued that political subservience to a Muslim agenda was turning Europe into an appendage of the Arab world. But most of her recent followers, including Caldwell, the jocular and hyperbolic Mark Steyn, the shallow Bruce Thornton, the more serious Walter Laqueur, and the high-pitched Claire Berlinski and Bruce Bawer, write from the other side of the Atlantic.
It's not that Europeans don't produce books in the same vein. Consider Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci's The Rage and the Pride, a rabid attack on Muslim immigrants, or British columnist Melanie Phillips's Londonistan, castigating the British left for handing over the country to the Muslim Brotherhood. Still, there is no real European version of the Eurabia panic, and the books that do exist tend to be country-specific, and part of a fringe far right. They do not dominate the market, while works by a range of serious scholars, including Italian sociologist Stefano Allievi's work on European Muslims, German cultural anthropologist Werner Schiffauer's studies of political Islam among Turkish immigrants, British sociologist Tariq Modood's Multicultural Politics, and French political scientist Olivier Roy's Globalized Islam, have offered important, data-driven analyses that undermine the facile dichotomies of the Eurabia myth.
The rest here.
A strategy for Afghanistan
Rory Stewart in NYRB:
What can now be done to salvage the administration's position? Obama has acquired leverage over the generals and some support from the public by making it clear that he will not increase troop strength further. He has gained leverage over Karzai by showing that he has options other than investing in Afghanistan. Now he needs to regain leverage over the Taliban by showing them that he is not about to abandon Afghanistan and that their best option is to negotiate. In short, he needs to follow his argument for a call strategy to its conclusion. The date of withdrawal should be recast as a time for reduction to a lighter, more sustainable, and more permanent presence. This is what the administration began to do in the days following the speech. As National Security Adviser General James Jones said, "That date is a 'ramp' rather than a cliff." And as Hillary Clinton said in her congressional testimony on December 3, their real aim should be to "develop a long-term sustainable relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan so that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, primarily our abandonment of that region."
A more realistic, affordable, and therefore sustainable presence would not make Afghanistan stable or predictable. It would be merely a small if necessary part of an Afghan political strategy. The US and its allies would only moderate, influence, and fund a strategy shaped and led by Afghans themselves. The aim would be to knit together different Afghan interests and allegiances sensitively enough to avoid alienating independent local groups, consistently enough to regain their trust, and robustly enough to restore the security and justice that Afghans demand and deserve from a national government.
What would this look like in practice? Probably a mess. It might involve a tricky coalition of people we refer to, respectively, as Islamists, progressive civil society, terrorists, warlords, learned technocrats, and village chiefs. Under a notionally democratic constitutional structure, it could be a rickety experiment with systems that might, like Afghanistan's neighbors, include strong elements of religious or military rule. There is no way to predict what the Taliban might become or what authority a national government in Kabul could regain. Civil war would remain a possibility. But an intelligent, long-term, and tolerant partnership with the United States could reduce the likelihood of civil war and increase the likelihood of a political settlement. This is hardly the stuff of sound bites and political slogans. But it would be better for everyone than boom and bust, surge and flight. With the right patient leadership, a political strategy could leave Afghanistan in twenty years' time more prosperous, stable, and humane than it is today. That would be excellent for Afghans and good for the world.
The rest here and a collection of links to articles on Afghanistan and Yemen at Bookforum.
Philosophers needed in business?
David Seidman in Business Week:
The financial and climate crises, global consumption habits, and other 21st-century challenges call for a "killer app." I think I've found it: philosophy.
Philosophy can help us address the (literally) existential challenges the world currently confronts, but only if we take it off the back burner and apply it as a burning platform in business.
Philosophy explores the deepest, broadest questions of life—why we exist, how society should organize itself, how institutions should relate to society, and the purpose of human endeavor, to name just a few. The Wealth of Nations, a book that serves as the intellectual platform for capitalism, lays out how markets should be organized and how people should behave in such markets. The book's author, Adam Smith, was not an economist, as many believe, but a philosopher. Smith was chairman of the Moral Philosophy Dept. at Glasgow University when he wrote the book.
[...]
When I say we need to return to a philosophical approach in relation to problem-solving, I mean that we need to broaden our understanding of problems by looking deeper at our own beliefs, values, ethics, and character, and then understand how they relate to those of others who share a stake in our problem-solving efforts.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Haiti
At 3Quarks:
The devastation in Haiti seems to be extensive. Please consider a donation to a relief agency like the Lambi Fund of Haiti, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam or the Red Cross.
David Rothkopf writes:
The disaster in Haiti did not occur yesterday.
While the nation's latest tragedy was triggered by yesterday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake, its real roots were not 10 kilometers beneath the earth's surface as seismologists concluded. Rather, they were in two centuries of misfortune that have plagued the country and most heart-breakingly in the particular failures of the international community and the country's leaders to help the country during the most recent decade and half -- a period when real hope backed with real money seemed to bloom and then, just as quickly, fade.
It was the crushing poverty in the hemisphere's poorest nation that resulted in Port-au-Prince being a city of ramshackle homes of unreinforced concrete or worse, shanties assembled of odd-shaped bits of rusty, corrugated metal, scrap wood, cardboard and old packing crates. It was decades of neglect that made rebar an unaffordable luxury for virtually all on the island or that left communications, power and water systems so underdeveloped that even prior to the earthquake they were operating at what even other poor nations would consider crisis levels.
While it would have been impossible to know precisely when an earthquake of this magnitude would hit or that when it did it would hit so close to this hemisphere's most fragile city, it was known that such a calamity was possible, and not only by seismologists. We have watched repeatedly as hurricanes have battered Haiti and left it staggered because just a few hundred miles away from the richest country on earth was one so deprived that it was ill-equipped even for the predictable weather that came with so many autumns.
We knew all this and yet with every failure to act or to follow through on a good intention, we assured yesterday's outcomes.
The rest here.
And more from Renard Sexton at FiveThirtyEight:
Yesterday's earthquake opens the door to some obvious questions for the Obama administration, who have pledged to make major changes in U.S. policy towards neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. As discussed this summer, Obama stated in an April speech that, "while the United States has done much to promote peace and prosperity in the hemisphere, we have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership."
The key question will be if that partnership for Haiti entails simply a year or two of above-average food-aid and reconstruction assistance, then a drop off the radar screen until the next hurricane, coup or food shortage, or instead something that more fundamentally changes the equation.
For example, what is to be done about the American and European agricultural subsidies that make farming in Haiti (among most of the developing world) economically infeasible for so many? And as well, how will the devastated natural environment, including degraded land and polluted water and air be revitalized to support a sustainable society, economy and government?
These are the key elements of soft power and "equal partnership." And it is yet to be seen if the Obama administration seeks to make a true break from the past, or prefers to ignore it, portending decades more of the same cycle of poverty, conflict and political chaos.
The rest here.
The financial sector's dependence on government
Dean Baker in Boston Review:
Wall Street bankers, along with the rest of the players in the financial industry, like to think of themselves as swashbuckling capitalists. They battle cutthroat competition with one hand and oppressive government bureaucracy with the other. In reality, the financial industry is deeply dependent on the government. Far from the rugged, go-it-alone types they wish they were, they are more like well-dressed, coddled adolescents. And this is true in good times and bad.
The industry’s dependency takes five main forms:
• an explicit safety net provided by government deposit insurance;
• an implicit safety net provided by “too big to fail”;
• a special privilege of being the only untaxed casino;
• an open invitation to raid state and local governments for fees;
• a right to change contract terms after the fact.
These dependencies are entrenched, and, despite loud protests to the contrary, the removal of government from the financial sector is not really on the agenda. The issue up for debate is not the virtues of the free market versus government regulation. The industry wants government regulation, just not in a way that curtails its profits.
The rest here.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
"The Trials of Tony Judt"
Evan R. Goldstein in the Chronicle:
By last February, Judt could no longer move his hands. "I thought it would be catastrophic," he recalls matter-of-factly. How would he write? He discovered that a lifetime of lecturing—often without notes and in complete sentences and full paragraphs—had trained him to think out loud. He can now, "with a bit of mental preparation," dictate "an essay or an intellectually thoughtful e-mail." Unable to jot down ideas on a yellow pad, Judt has taught himself elaborate memorization schemes of the sort described by the Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence in his 1984 book, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. Like Ricci, a 16th-century Jesuit missionary to China, Judt imagines structures in his head where he can store his thoughts and ideas. The basic principle: Picture entering a large house; turn left and there is a room with shelves and tables; leave a memory on each surface until the rooms fills. Now head down the hall into another room. To retrieve your memories, to reconstruct a lecture or recall the content and structure of an article, you re-enter the building and follow the same path, which should trigger the ideas you left behind."It works," Judt says. In fact, he tells me, his mental acuity has grown stronger over the past year. He compares his situation to that of a blind person with uniquely sensitive ears, or of a deaf person with extraordinary eyesight. "I knew it to be theoretically true that when you are deprived of everything else, the thing you are not deprived of gets better," he says. "But it has been very odd to experience that in practice." After a moment, he goes on: "I'm a 61-year-old guy, I'm not as sharp as I was when I was 51. But the things I could do last year I can do better this year."
He recently signed a contract to expand his lecture on social democracy into a short book, which he hopes will be published in the late spring. "I've got a huge amount of mental energy," he says. Colleagues and friends are understandably protective of Judt and are wary of commenting on his physical decline. ("You're not going to write about his illness or the fact that he's dying," Sennett says at the outset of our conversation, more as an order than a question.) The life expectancy of an ALS patient averages two to five years from the time of diagnosis.
The rest here.
The man behind Whole Foods
Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker:
His vows of discretion apparently allow for a great deal of latitude. He talks openly about his fixations and eccentricities—most of them, anyway. (“I am not going to talk about my sex life,” he told me, without my having asked him to.) His blend of guile and guilelessness is peculiar. “I no longer drink alcohol around journalists,” he said. He worries that he reveals too much. He can’t help but speak his mind, out of which spring confounding ideas and conventionally irreconcilable contradictions. The man who has perhaps done as much as anyone to bring the natural-foods movement from the crunchy fringe into the mainstream is also a vocal libertarian, an orthodox free-marketer, an admirer of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Ayn Rand. In the 2008 Presidential election, he voted for Bob Barr—Ron Paul wasn’t on the ballot.
The right-wing hippie is a rare bird, and it’s fair to say that most of Whole Foods’ shoppers have trouble conceiving of it. They tend to be of a different stripe, politically and philosophically, and they were either oblivious or dimly aware of Mackey’s views, until the moment, this summer, when Mackey published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal asserting that the government should not be in the business of providing health care. This was hardly a radical view, and yet in the gathering heat of the health-care debate the op-ed, virally distributed via the left-leaning blogs, raised a fury. In no time, liberals were organizing boycotts of Whole Foods. (Right-wingers staged retaliatory “buy-cotts.”) Mackey had thrown tinder on the long-smoldering suspicion, in some quarters, that he was a profiteer in do-gooder disguise, and that he, and therefore Whole Foods, was in some way insincere or even counterfeit. No one can say that he hasn’t brought it on himself.
Friday, January 8, 2010
A good decade for much of the world?
Tyler Cowen in the NYT:
IT may not feel that way right now, but the last 10 years may go down in world history as a big success. That idea may be hard to accept in the United States. After all, it was the decade of 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the financial crisis, all dramatic and painful events. But in economic terms, at least, the decade was a remarkably good one for many people around the globe.
The raging economic growth rates of China and India are well known, though their rise is part of a broader trend in the economic development of poorer countries. Ideals of prosperity, freedom and the rule of law have probably never been more resonant globally than they’ve been over the last 10 years, even if practice often falls short. And for all of the anticapitalistic rhetoric that has emerged from the financial crisis, national leaders around the world are embracing the commercialization of their economies.
Putting aside the United States, which ranks third, the four most populous countries are China, India, Indonesia and Brazil, accounting for more than 40 percent of the world’s people. And all four have made great strides. Indonesia had solid economic growth during the entire decade, mostly in the 5 to 6 percent annual range. That came after its very turbulent 1990s, marked by a disastrous financial crisis and plummeting standards of living.
Brazil also had a consistently good decade, with growth at times exceeding 5 percent a year. There is lots of talk that the country has finally turned the corner, and, within its borders, there is major worry that its currency is too strong — a problem that many other countries would envy.
The rest here.
The copyright on the texts of Freud and WB Yeats expires
In the Telegraph:
Under European Union law all books, poems and paintings pass into the public domain 70 years after the death of their creator.
At midnight last night the works of artists and thinkers who died throughout 1939 slipped out of copyright, meaning they can be reprinted and posted on the internet without incurring royalties.
In addition to Yeats and Freud, the list includes Arthur Rackham, the illustrator whose drawings appeared in early versions of children's books such as Peter Pan and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the novelist Ford Madox Ford, and Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt.
A selection of works by the artists will be available on Wikisource, a sister website of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, from today.
The rest of the story here.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The motives behind terror
Glenn Greenwald in Salon:
In the wake of the latest failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines, one can smell the excitement in the air -- that all-too-familiar, giddy, bipartisan climate that emerges in American media discourse whenever there's a new country we get to learn about so that we can explain why we're morally and strategically justified in bombing it some more. "Yemen" is suddenly on every Serious Person's lips. We spent the last month centrally involved to some secret degree in waging air attacks on that country -- including some that resulted in numerous civilian deaths -- but everyone now knows that this isn't enough and it's time to Get Really Serious and Do More.
For all the endless, exciting talk about the latest Terrorist attack, one issue is, as usual, conspicuously absent: motive. Why would a young Nigerian from a wealthy, well-connected family want to blow himself up on one of our airplanes along with 300 innocent people, and why would Saudi and Yemeni extremists want to enable him to do so? When it comes to Terrorism, discussions of motive have been declared more or less taboo from the start because of the dishonest equation of motive discussions with justification -- as though understanding the reasons why X happens is to posit that X is legitimate and justifiable. Causation simply is; it has nothing to do with issues of morality, blame, or justification. Yet all that is generally permitted to be said in such situations is that Terrorists try to harm us because they're Evil, and we (of course) are not, and that's generally the end of the discussion.
[...]
As always, the most confounding aspect of the reaction to the latest attempted terrorist episode is the professed confusion and self-righteous innocence that is universally expressed. Whether justified or not, we are constantly delivering death to the Muslim world. We do not see it very much, but they certainly do. Again, independent of justification, what do we think is going to happen if we continuously invade, occupy and bomb Muslim countries and arm and enable others to do so? Isn't it obvious that our five-front actions are going to cause at least some Muslims -- subjected to constant images of American troops in their world and dead Muslim civilians at our hands, even if unintended -- to want to return the violence? Just look at the bloodthirsty sentiments unleashed among Americans even from a failed Terrorist attempt. What sentiments do we think we're unleashing from a decade-long (and continuing and increasing) multi-front "war" in the Muslim war?
The rest here.
'The Odds of Airborne Terror'
At FiveThirtyEight:
Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.The rest here.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Korean drama a hit in Iran
In the Global Post:
Visiting family members as often as possible is a well-established tradition in Iranian society. Usually nights are spent sipping freshly brewed tea and eating fresh fruits and salted nuts. This goes on for long hours into the night, especially in summertime when children and college students are free from school schedules.
Things have changed, however, since state TV started broadcasting a Korean TV drama called “Jumong.”
Now, in many homes after dinner, whole families race to huddle around the TV. Photos of the main characters grace everything from stationary to serving trays. Fans have set up blogs and forums to exchange news and discuss episodes.
"Jumong" is produced by MBC Korea. The series follows the life of the hero Jumong from childhood, when king Gumua takes on his guardianship, after thinking that his father He Mu So had been killed by the Han Dynasty. The series ends with Jumong’s biggest achievement: building a nation called Goguryeo and marrying his second wife, Susano.
Story here.
Sarah Palin's missing appetite for betterment
Sam Tanenhaus in the New Yorker:
To an extent unmatched by any recent major political figure, she offers the erasure of any distinction—in skill, experience, intellect—between the governing and the governed. As one supporter told Conroy and Walshe, “If she can run a home, she can run the government.” Palin agrees: “There’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.” Describing the responsibilities of managing Alaska’s budget, she makes the same argument in fancier language: “Lessons learned on the micro level still apply to the macro. Just as my family couldn’t fund every item on our wish list, and had to live within our means as well as save for the future, I felt we needed to do that for the state.” Her insistent ordinariness is an expression not of humility but of egotism, the certitude that simply being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough.
In her speech at the Republican Convention, Palin cited the example of Harry Truman, “a young farmer and haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the Vice-Presidency.” But Truman’s early years were spent in preparation for some future exemplary role, and for the historical destiny that he hoped, against all odds, he might someday fulfill. He regarded his ordinariness as something to be overcome, not celebrated. Though often derided in his day as a “little man,” he closely studied the lives of the greats, with special emphasis on antiquity—Hannibal, Cincinnatus, Scipio, Cyrus the Great—and consciously patterned himself after them. “Reading history, to me, was far more than a romantic adventure,” he said. “It was solid instruction and wise teaching which I somehow felt that I wanted and needed.” As President, he formed a strong bond with his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, a product of Yale and Harvard, and a bugbear of Joseph McCarthy and his congressional allies, whom Acheson described as “political primitives.”
The appetite for betterment that drove Truman is strangely absent in Palin. Though she says that she was a voracious reader in childhood, she nowhere indicates what she learned about politics or governance from books, from the college courses she took, or even from more experienced officeholders in Alaska. She (or her collaborator) sprinkles nuggets from Plato and Pascal, but is more convincing when she cites a motivational maxim from “author and former football coach Lou Holtz.” When the call came from John McCain to discuss her possible place on the ticket, Palin, in her favored idiom, didn’t blink. It was confirmation of her self-assessment. “I certainly didn’t think, Well, of course this would happen. But neither did I think, What an astonishing idea. It seemed more comfortable than that, like a natural progression.” It may have seemed less natural to advisers who, prepping her for interviews and debates, were startled by the gaping holes in her knowledge. When Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard editor and writer, asked Palin who her favorite thinker was, she replied, “You.” Barnes has observed that Palin’s “Republican heroes, besides McCain, come to a grand total of two, Reagan and Lincoln.”
The rest here.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Asserting Congress's war powers
Bruce Ackerman and Oona A. Hathaway in Slate:
President Obama's Afghan initiative represents a new kind of American war, one that shatters the existing constitutional framework. Our tradition divides America's wars into two categories: unlimited wars (World War II) and momentary interventions (Grenada). But Afghanistan fits into neither of these neat boxes. It is of limited duration and purpose, but far from momentary—we will call it a limited war. As such, it challenges the conventional way in which the president and Congress have shared power during the modern era. And so the war in Afghanistan is a reason for Congress to change the way it handles war and peace. While it should approve Obama's 18-month surge, Congress should take steps to guarantee that it will have an equal say when the time comes to make the fateful decision about what happens next as the
Since World War II, the notion of a truly unlimited war has increasingly come under pressure. While Korea, Vietnam, or the two Gulf Wars were clearly different from Grenada, they weren't total wars like the struggle against Nazism. Nonetheless, the War Powers Resolution, passed in the wake of Vietnam, continued to suppose that wars came in only two sizes. It distinguished between very short-term interventions and the rest. The resolution authorized the president to make brief interventions abroad unilaterally—giving him 60 days to use military force without legislative approval. But the president had to go to Congress for explicit authorization during this period if he wanted to sustain his offensive for any battle that lasted longer.
[...]
Under the reform we envision, the House and Senate would change their rules for authorizing and funding wars. The new rules should state that any authorization of military force will specify the term during which it may lawfully continue before triggering further congressional review. The choice of the expiration date is entirely up to the House and Senate—it could be a year, or two, or 10. Or Congress could explicitly authorize an unlimited engagement. But if Congress's authorization is silent on the matter, a two-year period would be presumed. After that, the war-making authorization would expire unless Congress extended it. The president could ask to continue the limited war, but Congress would have to expressly agree. The House and Senate should back up the time limit by passing procedural rules that prohibit all future war appropriations after the deadline, except for money needed to wind down the mission over one year.
The rest here.
Audio: Bookstore Night in Buenos Aires
From the NPR Transcript:
Some of the busiest streets in Buenos Aires, Argentina were recently closed to traffic, but for a party. The city hosts the biggest book fair in the Spanish-speaking world every April, and when summer comes to the Southern Hemisphere, as it does in December, Buenos Aires blocks off some of its biggest thoroughfares for a special evening devoted to the city's many book lovers. Brian Byrnes has this story from a big bash in honor of books.Listen to the story here.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Laredo, Texas: The largest US city without a bookstore
AP:
The final chapter has been written for the lone bookstore on the streets of Laredo.With a population of nearly a quarter-million people, this city could soon be the largest in the nation without a single bookseller.
The situation is so grim that schoolchildren have pleaded for a reprieve from next month's planned shutdown of the B. Dalton bookstore. After that, the nearest store will be 150 miles away in San Antonio.
The B. Dalton store was never a community destination with comfy couches and an espresso bar, but its closing will create a literary void in a city with a high illiteracy rate. Industry analysts and book associations could not name a larger American city without a single bookseller.
"Corporate America considers Laredo kind of the backwater," said the city's most prolific author, Jerry Thompson, a professor at Texas A&M University International who has written more than 20 books.
The daily routines of artists, intellectuals, etc.
Here. Charles Darwin:
7 a.m. Rose and took a short walk. 7:45 a.m. Breakfast alone 8–9:30 a.m. Worked in his study; he considered this his best working time. 9:30–10:30 a.m. Went to drawing-room and read his letters, followed by reading aloud of family letters. 10:30 a.m.–
12 or 12:15 p.m.Returned to study, which period he considered the end of his working day. 12 noon Walk, starting with visit to greenhouse, then round the sandwalk, the number of times depending on his health, usually alone or with a dog. 12:45 p.m. Lunch with whole family, which was his main meal of the day. After lunch read The Times and answered his letters. 3 p.m. Rested in his bedroom on the sofa and smoked a cigarette, listened to a novel or other light literature read by ED [Emma Darwin, his wife]. 4 p.m. Walked, usually round sandwalk, sometimes farther afield and sometimes in company. 4:30–5:30 p.m. Worked in study, clearing up matters of the day. 6 p.m. Rested again in bedroom with ED reading aloud. 7.30 p.m. Light high tea while the family dined. In late years never stayed in the dining room with the men, but retired to the drawing-room with the ladies. If no guests were present, he played two games of backgammon with ED, usually followed by reading to himself, then ED played the piano, followed by reading aloud. 10 p.m. Left the drawing-room and usually in bed by 10:30, but slept badly.
Monday, December 21, 2009
A profile of the leading Conservative Christian intellectual, Robert George
David D. Kirkpatrick in the NYT:
The rest here.In the American culture wars, George wants to redraw the lines. It is the liberals, he argues, who are slaves to a faith-based “secularist orthodoxy” of “feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism and lifestyle liberalism.” Conservatives, in contrast, speak from the high ground of nonsectarian public reason. George is the leading voice for a group of Catholic scholars known as the new natural lawyers. He argues for the enforcement of a moral code as strictly traditional as that of a religious fundamentalist. What makes his natural law “new” is that it disavows dependence on divine revelation or biblical Scripture — or even history and anthropology. Instead, George rests his ethics on a foundation of “practical reason”: “invoking no authority beyond the authority of reason itself,” as he put it in one essay.
George’s admirers say he is revitalizing a strain of Catholic natural-law thinking that goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas. His scholarship has earned him accolades from religious and secular institutions alike. In one notable week two years ago, he received invitations to deliver prestigious lectures at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Harvard Law School. His critics, including many of his fellow Catholic scholars, argue that he is turning the church into a tool of Republican Party. They say he is too focused on the mechanics of sex and morality, neglecting the other sides of the Christian message: the corruption of human reason through original sin, the need for forgiveness and charity and the chance for redemption. Citing George’s comparison of Catholic scholars who support abortion rights to defenders of chattel slavery, Cathleen Kaveny of the Notre Dame Law School, another scholar of law and theology in the Thomistic tradition, has called George and his allies “Rambo Catholics” and “ecclesiastical bullies.”
An interview with translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
At Millions:
The rest here.Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: Quite simply because these later stories are among Tolstoy’s greatest works. In fact, the short novel Hadji Murat is perhaps the finest thing he wrote, and he seems to have known it. After all his storming against the notion of beauty, he could not help himself, being a born artist, and “in secret from himself” (as he put it) wrote his most perfectly beautiful work – “beautiful” in the way that The Iliad is beautiful. “Master and Man” is also a perfect work of a very different sort, vividly told and deeply moving. But even the opening story of the collection, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” which he wrote for a children’s reading book in the simplest style possible, is gripping and unforgettable. How could we not want to translate them?
TM: Having also translated War and Peace and Anna Karenina, what have you found to be unique about how Leo Tolstoy worked in short fiction, compared to his novels?
RP and LV: Tolstoy’s two big novels, like almost all of his work before 1880, portrayed people of his own class, the landed aristocracy, and their social milieu. Most often his heroes were self-conscious men, seekers of the meaning of life – in other words, self-portraits to one degree or another. In his later stories, there is much more variety: one hero is a narrow-minded bureaucrat, another is a well-to-do peasant, still another is a sort of holy fool, and finally there is the Chechen chief Hadji Murat. “The Forged Coupon” portrays people from all levels of Russian society, from the tsar to the lowest criminal. And there is a corresponding variety of “worlds.” That’s one thing. Another is the effort Tolstoy made to rid his art of what he considered the “superfluous detail” of the novels. His compositions became tighter, more formal, without losing any of the sensual immediacy that was the essence of his art.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Just war conditions for continuing a war
Avishai Margalit at NYRblog:
For a war to be just, there must be moral grounds for going to war and moral conduct in the war. Thus, going to war requires having a just cause, whereas correct behavior in the war requires discriminating between combatants and civilians. Obama mentioned both conditions as well as some others. But then there are also conditions that must be met for continuing a war, among them having a reasonable prospect of success. Yet in his Nobel speech, Obama omitted this important condition for continuing the war in Afghanistan. It is not only stupid, but it is also immoral, to go to war, or to continue a war, when there is no prospect of victory. Having the right cause on your side is not enough; your chances of winning are just as important.
As an admirer of President Obama I have listened attentively to his recent speeches on Afghanistan. But at no point has he made a plausible case for how he will win the war. He counts on our taking a leap of faith to support his strategy, but leaps should be reserved for frogs, whereas we should subject our faith to critical thinking.
The main declared objective of the war—defeating al-Qaeda—is not a matter for helmeted marines but for bespectacled bank accountants, computer whiz-kids, and people who can speak the relevant languages. The war in Afghanistan, by now, has very little to do with defeating al-Qaeda. Vice President Joe Biden got it right when he argued that fighting al-Qaeda is not the same thing as fighting in Afghanistan. Moreover, the conflict in Afghanistan bears little relevance to the problem of keeping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons out of the hands of radical Islamists; the Pakistani army is as much of a problem as the Taliban.
The rest here.
Anxiety's effect on penalty kicks
At EurekAlert:
The rest here.A new study may explain why the England soccer team keeps losing in penalty shootouts – and could help the team address the problem in time for the World Cup 2010. Research by the University of Exeter shows for the first time the effect of anxiety on a footballer's eye movements while taking a penalty.
The study shows that when penalty takers are anxious they are more likely to look at and focus on the centrally positioned goalkeeper. Due to the tight coordination between gaze control and motor control, shots also tend to centralise, making them easier to save. The research is now published in the December 2009 edition of the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.
The researchers attribute this change in eye movements and focus to anxiety. Author Greg Wood of the University of Exeter's School of Sport and Health Sciences said: "During a highly stressful situation, we are more likely to be distracted by any threatening stimuli and focus on them, rather than the task in hand. Therefore, in a stressful penalty shootout, a footballer's attention is likely to be directed towards the goalkeeper as opposed to the optimal scoring zones (just inside the post). This disrupts the aiming of the shot and increases the likelihood of subsequently hitting the shot towards the goalkeeper, making it easier to save."
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Myths about independent voters
John Sides at The Monkey Cage:
A prefatory apology: some of the material in here is in previous posts (e.g., here), and all of this material will be very familiar and therefore unexciting to many political scientist readers. But elsewhere, people don’t get it, and so attention must be paid.
The three myths are:
1) Independents are the largest partisan group.
2) Independents are actually independent.
3) Change in the opinions of independents is always consequential.
See the evidence against the myths here.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
President Obama's mother's dissertation to be published by Duke UP
Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle:
The rest here.The scholarly book getting the most buzz at the American Anthropological Association's annual conference this week is likely to be a doctoral dissertation published 15 years after its author's death. Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia is by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, a connection noted on the book's front cover. The publisher, Duke University Press, will unveil the book on December 3 at the conference, to be followed by a special session devoted to Dunham and her life and work.
[...]
The book runs about 300 pages and focuses on a blacksmithing village called Kajar, in the province of Yogyakarta on the island of Java. The work has been whittled down significantly from its original form, which ran more than a thousand pages and investigated the socioeconomics of several village-based handicrafts, including batik, pottery, and the making of puppets used in shadow theater.
Krugman remembers Samuelson
In the NYT:
Which brings me, finally, to Samuelson’s great contribution to economic policymaking: the Keynesian synthesis. Samuelson was, intellectually, a Depression baby: he came of intellectual age in an environment of mass unemployment. His textbook brought Keynesian thinking to a broad audience. And he never forgot that markets can malfunction terribly. How, then, could economic theory on the virtues of markets be of any real-world use?
Samuelson’s answer was that good macro policies come first. Monetary and fiscal policy had to be employed to assure more or less full employment (and as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Samuelson appreciated the limits of monetary policy in a way that seems incredibly prescient today). Exchange rates had to be adjusted to assure competitiveness. Only then could the virtues of markets come into play.
It was a lesson that too many economists forgot, as they immersed themselves in the lovely math of perfect markets. But Samuelson’s realism – his understanding that markets are great things, but need to be supported by government activism — has never seemed more relevant than it does now.
So let us praise Paul Anthony Samuelson, the incomparable economist. There has never been, and will never be, anyone to match him.
Scholars study the virtues of the Old South
Ben Terris in the Chronicle:
In 1991, Donald W. Livingston threw a party—well, a conference—and nobody showed up.
It was during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Mr. Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and raised in South Carolina, decided there should be more thoughtful discourse on the topic of secession.
A political philosopher who specializes in David Hume, he searched philosophy papers published since 1940 and turned up only seven on the matter of secession from federal unions: five reviews of a book and two articles about Quebec. Thinking he had the market to himself, he held a conference on secession at the 1991 meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
He was right about his share of the market. Nobody came.
Today Mr. Livingston is drawing slightly larger crowds. In 2003 he started the Abbeville Institute, named after the South Carolina birthplace of John C. Calhoun, seventh vice president of the United States and a forceful advocate of slavery and states' rights. The institute now has 64 associated scholars from various colleges and disciplines. They gather to discuss topics about the South that they feel are misrepresented in today's classrooms. Feeling a chilly reception to its ideas—officials of the Southern Poverty Law Center say its work borders on white supremacy—the group has kept a low profile. Mr. Livingston's own department chair, as well as a number of Emory history professors, say they have never heard of it.
[...]
Heidi Beirich, research director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, stops short of calling Abbeville a hate group, but pointed to a passage in its mission statement that troubles her greatly. It quotes Eugene D. Genovese, a Marxist-turned-conservative historian: "Rarely these days, even on Southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of white people in the South."
That line speaks volumes about the goals of organization, says Ms. Beirich, who adds that the idea that white people are America's underappreciated stepchildren is ludicrous. "At the end of the day, they are just trying to revise the history of the South in favor of whites," she says.
The rest here.
Thomas Friedman calls for 'civil war' in Islam
In the NYT:
Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things — namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.The rest here.
Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims — “infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority — but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
"We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man"
Text of U.S. leaflets dropped over Japan during WWII:
TO THE JAPANESE PEOPLE:
America asks that you take immediate heed of what we say on this leaflet.
We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man. A single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what two thousand of our giant B-29s can carry on a single mission. This awful fact is one for you to ponder, and we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate.
We have just begun to use this weapon against your homeland. If you still have any doubt, make inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima when just one atomic bomb fell on that city.
Before using this bomb to destroy every resource of the military by which they are prolonging this useless war, we ask that you now petition the emperor to end the war. Our president has outlined for you the thirteen consequences of an honorable surrender. We urge that you accept these consequences and begin the work of building a new, better, and peace-loving Japan.
You should take steps now to cease military resistance. Otherwise, we shall resolutely employ this bomb and all our other superior weapons to promptly and forcefully end the war.
EVACUATE YOUR CITIES
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