Thursday, October 23, 2014
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
A Message to the 21st Century
[ed. I don't usually post back-to-back articles from the same source but this and the one following seem to be dishearteningly compatible.]
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words Dickens began his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.
I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors. Yet perhaps I can try.
They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. (...)
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words Dickens began his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors. Yet perhaps I can try.
They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. (...)
Let me explain. If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.
The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. (...)
This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false. Not only because the solutions given by different schools of social thought differ, and none can be demonstrated by rational methods—but for an even deeper reason. The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.
by Isaiah Berlin, NYRB | Read more:
The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. (...)
This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false. Not only because the solutions given by different schools of social thought differ, and none can be demonstrated by rational methods—but for an even deeper reason. The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.
by Isaiah Berlin, NYRB | Read more:
Image: David Williams/Corbis
Afghanistan: ‘A Shocking Indictment’
Ashraf Ghani, who has just become the president of Afghanistan, once drafted a document for Hamid Karzai that began:
Western policymakers still argue, however, that something has been achieved: counterterrorist operations succeeded in destroying al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, there has been progress in health care and education, and even Afghan government has its strengths at the most local level. This is not much, given that the US-led coalition spent $1 trillion and deployed one million soldiers and civilians over thirteen years. But it is better than nothing; and it is tempting to think that everything has now been said: after all, such conclusions are now reflected in thousands of studies by aid agencies, multilateral organizations, foreign ministries, intelligence agencies, universities, and departments of defense.
But Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living shows that everything has not been said. His new and shocking indictment demonstrates that the failures of the intervention were worse than even the most cynical believed. Gopal, a Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor reporter, investigates, for example, a US counterterrorist operation in January 2002. US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, had identified two sites as likely “al-Qaeda compounds.” It sent in a Special Forces team by helicopter; the commander, Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, was attacked by an unknown assailant, broke his neck as they fought and then killed him with his pistol; he used his weapon to shoot further adversaries, seized prisoners, and flew out again, like a Hollywood hero.
As Gopal explains, however, the American team did not attack al-Qaeda or even the Taliban. They attacked the offices of two district governors, both of whom were opponents of the Taliban. They shot the guards, handcuffed one district governor in his bed and executed him, scooped up twenty-six prisoners, sent in AC-130 gunships to blow up most of what remained, and left a calling card behind in the wreckage saying “Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc.” Weeks later, having tortured the prisoners, they released them with apologies. It turned out in this case, as in hundreds of others, that an Afghan “ally” had falsely informed the US that his rivals were Taliban in order to have them eliminated. In Gopal’s words:
Ashraf Ghani is now—after four months of wrangling over electoral fraud—the new president of Afghanistan. His book Fixing Failed States (coauthored with Clare Lockhart) argues that Afghanistan can be fixed through creating ten functions of the state, including the “rule of law,” good governance, and a state “monopoly on the legitimate means of violence.” Along the way he proposes eliminating corruption, disarming and demobilizing militias, and creating a reliable justice system and a prosperous economy. Having spent three decades as a professor, a World Bank official, and an Afghan minister developing this intricate theory, he is now putting it into practice.
The leaders of the US intervention in Afghanistan once had very similar objectives—often directly influenced by Ashraf Ghani, who has been the most tenacious and articulate advocate of this vision of “state-building” since September 11. Similar concepts appear in General David Petraeus’s US Army counterinsurgency manual and in presidential envoy James Dobbins’s The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building. Much of the $1 trillion spent by the US and its allies in Afghanistan, and the more than a million people, deployed over a dozen years, have been justified in such terms. President Obama may in fact have been unconsciously quoting Ghani when he explained that Afghanistan’s problems with narcotics and women’s rights, and even the instability of neighboring states, could be solved through the creation of “a credible, effective, legitimate state.”
State-building, however, is not confined to Afghanistan. Ghani has promoted exactly the same recipe from Nepal to Ethiopia as the copresident of the Institute for State Effectiveness. And it seems to be immensely appealing. For the World Bank in 2013, state-building was the solution to piracy in Somalia. For French President François Hollande in 2013, “restoring the state, improving governance” were the first steps in tackling trafficking and violence in Mali. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon distilled the theory of Afghanistan’s civilian surge in his 2014 bon mot “Missiles may kill terrorists. But good governance kills terrorism.”
Gopal’s book, however, should at least make us question this fashion of state-building under fire. (...)
What future was there for the Afghan economy when, as Gopal shows, it relied on servicing, supporting, and seeking rent from two hundred thousand foreign soldiers and civilian contractors, and where Afghan “businessmen” were often simply warlords profiting from security, supply, and construction contracts generated by US military bases? How would any of this be sustainable after the troops withdrew?
There is a consensus in Afghan society: violence…must end. National reconciliation and respect for fundamental human rights will form the path to lasting peace and stability across the country. The people’s aspirations must be represented in an accountable, broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic, representative government that delivers daily value.That was twelve years ago. No one speaks like that now—not even the new president. The best case now is presented as political accommodation with the Taliban, the worst as civil war.
Western policymakers still argue, however, that something has been achieved: counterterrorist operations succeeded in destroying al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, there has been progress in health care and education, and even Afghan government has its strengths at the most local level. This is not much, given that the US-led coalition spent $1 trillion and deployed one million soldiers and civilians over thirteen years. But it is better than nothing; and it is tempting to think that everything has now been said: after all, such conclusions are now reflected in thousands of studies by aid agencies, multilateral organizations, foreign ministries, intelligence agencies, universities, and departments of defense.But Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living shows that everything has not been said. His new and shocking indictment demonstrates that the failures of the intervention were worse than even the most cynical believed. Gopal, a Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor reporter, investigates, for example, a US counterterrorist operation in January 2002. US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, had identified two sites as likely “al-Qaeda compounds.” It sent in a Special Forces team by helicopter; the commander, Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, was attacked by an unknown assailant, broke his neck as they fought and then killed him with his pistol; he used his weapon to shoot further adversaries, seized prisoners, and flew out again, like a Hollywood hero.
As Gopal explains, however, the American team did not attack al-Qaeda or even the Taliban. They attacked the offices of two district governors, both of whom were opponents of the Taliban. They shot the guards, handcuffed one district governor in his bed and executed him, scooped up twenty-six prisoners, sent in AC-130 gunships to blow up most of what remained, and left a calling card behind in the wreckage saying “Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc.” Weeks later, having tortured the prisoners, they released them with apologies. It turned out in this case, as in hundreds of others, that an Afghan “ally” had falsely informed the US that his rivals were Taliban in order to have them eliminated. In Gopal’s words:
The toll…: twenty-one pro-American leaders and their employees dead, twenty-six taken prisoner, and a few who could not be accounted for. Not one member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the United States had managed to eradicate both of Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership—stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies.Gopal then finds the interview that the US Special Forces commander gave a year and a half later in which he celebrated the derring-do, and recorded that seven of his team were awarded bronze stars, and that he himself received a silver star for gallantry. (...)
Ashraf Ghani is now—after four months of wrangling over electoral fraud—the new president of Afghanistan. His book Fixing Failed States (coauthored with Clare Lockhart) argues that Afghanistan can be fixed through creating ten functions of the state, including the “rule of law,” good governance, and a state “monopoly on the legitimate means of violence.” Along the way he proposes eliminating corruption, disarming and demobilizing militias, and creating a reliable justice system and a prosperous economy. Having spent three decades as a professor, a World Bank official, and an Afghan minister developing this intricate theory, he is now putting it into practice.
The leaders of the US intervention in Afghanistan once had very similar objectives—often directly influenced by Ashraf Ghani, who has been the most tenacious and articulate advocate of this vision of “state-building” since September 11. Similar concepts appear in General David Petraeus’s US Army counterinsurgency manual and in presidential envoy James Dobbins’s The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building. Much of the $1 trillion spent by the US and its allies in Afghanistan, and the more than a million people, deployed over a dozen years, have been justified in such terms. President Obama may in fact have been unconsciously quoting Ghani when he explained that Afghanistan’s problems with narcotics and women’s rights, and even the instability of neighboring states, could be solved through the creation of “a credible, effective, legitimate state.”
State-building, however, is not confined to Afghanistan. Ghani has promoted exactly the same recipe from Nepal to Ethiopia as the copresident of the Institute for State Effectiveness. And it seems to be immensely appealing. For the World Bank in 2013, state-building was the solution to piracy in Somalia. For French President François Hollande in 2013, “restoring the state, improving governance” were the first steps in tackling trafficking and violence in Mali. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon distilled the theory of Afghanistan’s civilian surge in his 2014 bon mot “Missiles may kill terrorists. But good governance kills terrorism.”
Gopal’s book, however, should at least make us question this fashion of state-building under fire. (...)
What future was there for the Afghan economy when, as Gopal shows, it relied on servicing, supporting, and seeking rent from two hundred thousand foreign soldiers and civilian contractors, and where Afghan “businessmen” were often simply warlords profiting from security, supply, and construction contracts generated by US military bases? How would any of this be sustainable after the troops withdrew?
by Rory Stewart, NYRB | Read more:
Image: James Ferguson
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
[ed. I'd say, if you find yourself in Whittier you've taken the wrong turn.]
Jen Kinney, City Under One Roof
via:
Scrunched in Seattle
[ed. See also: Seattle Landlords Are the Weirdest People.]
Ok, so there wasn’t a sink in the bathroom. But the kitchen sink was only four steps away. And so what if the apartment—all 192 square feet of it—was half the size of a budget hotel room? The $822 monthly rent included all utilities plus free Wi-Fi and a double bed.
“I don’t feel like we need bigger spaces,” says Alexa Case, gesturing at the mini-flat screen TV that she’s mounted on the wall, her collection of black shoes and a pan scraped clean of something chocolate—all within easy reach of her bed.
Like many millennials, Case isn’t ready to settle down in the suburbs and commute two hours a day. The 25-year-old hairdresser doesn’t have a lot of stuff—doesn’t want a lot of stuff. She’s just moved out from under her parents’ roof to this, her very first apartment. She spent six weeks scouring Seattle and finally found a place in Capitol Hill—the onetime nucleus of punk and grunge, today the crucible of the city’s metamorphosis, home to funky shops, artisanal breweries and upscale eateries that serve up marrow bones and water buffalo burgers.
“Even though it’s tiny, it’s easy for me to keep organized,” she says, the edges of a tattoo peeking out from under her T-shirt. “I got a sweet deal.”
More than a quarter of all households in the United States today are made up of just one person, up from 17 percent in 1970. This growing demographic is part of an ongoing renaissance of American cities and contributed to a 2.3 million-person jump in the urban population between 2012 and 2013, according to the Census Bureau. Single-person households have also inspired a national movement toward smaller living spaces. And nowhere is this trend more in evidence than in Seattle.
The country’s fastest growing city (population 640,500), Seattle is the pioneer of micro-housing—tiny, one-room dwellings that are in turn hailed as an affordable, sustainable alternative to the high cost of city living, and disparaged as an inhuman experiment in downsizing. They are disruptors—real estate’s version of a high-tech innovator, literally altering the landscape of the city they occupy. But are they are a force for good or ill? Seattle is still figuring that out.
Seattle boasts the highest number of micro-dwellings in the country—3,000 at last count. It also permits the most audaciously minimal units, some as small as 90 square feet. That’s about the size of two prison cells put together.
It’s not for the claustrophobic, but it does come with perks—including the chance for millennials and those with modest incomes to settle in vibrant urban neighborhoods. Their presence, in turn, injects new energy to the heart of the city while tamping down suburban sprawl. Micro-housing reflects a growing zeitgeist—to stop accruing, go minimalist and reduce one’s footprint. Indeed, the name of Seattle’s leading micro-housing development company is called Footprint. (...)
“I’m not aware of any place that has even a tenth as many units as Seattle,” says Alan Durning, author of Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Housing and founder of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit that researches environmental policies in the Northwest. “And that’s because most cities’ rules don’t make it easy.” (...)
Seattle proved an ideal pioneer of micro-housing for a confluence of reasons: a permissive city code; a burgeoning population of millennials; a real estate boom fueled by the incursion of Amazon and other tech giants; and, not least, a visionary developer who early on discerned the pieces of this puzzle and put them all together.
The model—which took off in 2009—also happened to coincide with state and city goals to increase urban density and leave rural and agricultural lands untouched. In doing so, it triggered an unlikely coalition of developers and environmentalists, while turning some longtime progressives into wary NIMBYs, outraged that their residential neighborhoods are being transformed by what many perceive as the rebirth of seedy early 20th century boarding houses. Now, after five years of assuming a hands-off approach, the city is pushing back against micro-housing, putting the future of these tiny dwellings in limbo.
by Sara Solovitch, Politico | Read more:
Image:Mark Peterson/Redux
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 53-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire.
Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.
The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.
But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”
An evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague, Flegr has pursued this theory for decades in relative obscurity. Because he struggles with English and is not much of a conversationalist even in his native tongue, he rarely travels to scientific conferences. That “may be one of the reasons my theory is not better known,” he says. And, he believes, his views may invite deep-seated opposition. “There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet. Reviewers [of my scientific papers] may have been offended.” Another more obvious reason for resistance, of course, is that Flegr’s notions sound an awful lot like fringe science, right up there with UFO sightings and claims of dolphins telepathically communicating with humans.
But after years of being ignored or discounted, Flegr is starting to gain respectability. Psychedelic as his claims may sound, many researchers, including such big names in neuroscience as Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky, think he could well be onto something. Flegr’s “studies are well conducted, and I can see no reason to doubt them,” Sapolsky tells me. Indeed, recent findings from Sapolsky’s lab and British groups suggest that the parasite is capable of extraordinary shenanigans. T. gondii, reports Sapolsky, can turn a rat’s strong innate aversion to cats into an attraction, luring it into the jaws of its No. 1 predator. Even more amazing is how it does this: the organism rewires circuits in parts of the brain that deal with such primal emotions as fear, anxiety, and sexual arousal. “Overall,” says Sapolsky, “this is wild, bizarre neurobiology.” Another academic heavyweight who takes Flegr seriously is the schizophrenia expert E. Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, in Maryland. “I admire Jaroslav for doing [this research],” he says. “It’s obviously not politically correct, in the sense that not many labs are doing it. He’s done it mostly on his own, with very little support. I think it bears looking at. I find it completely credible.”
What’s more, many experts think T. gondii may be far from the only microscopic puppeteer capable of pulling our strings. “My guess is that there are scads more examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we’ve never even heard of,” says Sapolsky.
Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.
But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”
An evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague, Flegr has pursued this theory for decades in relative obscurity. Because he struggles with English and is not much of a conversationalist even in his native tongue, he rarely travels to scientific conferences. That “may be one of the reasons my theory is not better known,” he says. And, he believes, his views may invite deep-seated opposition. “There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet. Reviewers [of my scientific papers] may have been offended.” Another more obvious reason for resistance, of course, is that Flegr’s notions sound an awful lot like fringe science, right up there with UFO sightings and claims of dolphins telepathically communicating with humans.
But after years of being ignored or discounted, Flegr is starting to gain respectability. Psychedelic as his claims may sound, many researchers, including such big names in neuroscience as Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky, think he could well be onto something. Flegr’s “studies are well conducted, and I can see no reason to doubt them,” Sapolsky tells me. Indeed, recent findings from Sapolsky’s lab and British groups suggest that the parasite is capable of extraordinary shenanigans. T. gondii, reports Sapolsky, can turn a rat’s strong innate aversion to cats into an attraction, luring it into the jaws of its No. 1 predator. Even more amazing is how it does this: the organism rewires circuits in parts of the brain that deal with such primal emotions as fear, anxiety, and sexual arousal. “Overall,” says Sapolsky, “this is wild, bizarre neurobiology.” Another academic heavyweight who takes Flegr seriously is the schizophrenia expert E. Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, in Maryland. “I admire Jaroslav for doing [this research],” he says. “It’s obviously not politically correct, in the sense that not many labs are doing it. He’s done it mostly on his own, with very little support. I think it bears looking at. I find it completely credible.”
What’s more, many experts think T. gondii may be far from the only microscopic puppeteer capable of pulling our strings. “My guess is that there are scads more examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we’ve never even heard of,” says Sapolsky.
by Kathleen McAuliffe, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Istockphotos via:
Monday, October 20, 2014
A Prescription for Life’s Final Stretch
[ed. See also: The Best Possible Day.]
Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” introduces its author as a myopically confident medical school student whose seminar in doctor-patient interaction spent an hour on Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” As a young man, he was not ready to understand the title character’s loneliness, suffering and desire to be pitied. He saw medical compassion as a given and Ivan Ilyich’s condition as something modern medicine could probably cure. He and his fellow students cared about acquiring knowledge and competence. They did not see mortality as part of the medical equation.
Now a surgeon (and rightfully popular author) in his 40s, Dr. Gawande sees why that story was part of his training. “I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I’d have as a doctor — and, really, as a human being — would come from helping others deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can,” he writes.
Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” introduces its author as a myopically confident medical school student whose seminar in doctor-patient interaction spent an hour on Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” As a young man, he was not ready to understand the title character’s loneliness, suffering and desire to be pitied. He saw medical compassion as a given and Ivan Ilyich’s condition as something modern medicine could probably cure. He and his fellow students cared about acquiring knowledge and competence. They did not see mortality as part of the medical equation.
Now a surgeon (and rightfully popular author) in his 40s, Dr. Gawande sees why that story was part of his training. “I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I’d have as a doctor — and, really, as a human being — would come from helping others deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can,” he writes.
“Being Mortal” uses a clear, illuminating style to describe the medical facts and cases that have brought him to that understanding. He begins with an anecdote that illustrates how wrong doctors can be if they let their hubris and fear of straight talk meld with a patient’s blind determination to fight on, no matter what. “Don’t you give up on me,” demands a man with cancer, though the surgery he wants cannot possibly cure him. “He was pursuing little more than a fantasy at the risk of a prolonged and terrible death — which was precisely what he got,” Dr. Gawande writes.
Such things happen because modern death-delaying techniques are relatively new in medicine. Which patients have long-term life-threatening conditions and which are really at death’s door? In what Dr. Gawande calls “an era in which the relationship between patient and doctor is increasingly miscast in retail terms,” how easy is it for doctors — trained to solve problems and succeed — to acknowledge that there’s no cure to be had? How many doctors, used to telling their patients how to live, are ready to talk to them about how to die?
Dr. Gawande’s early description of how the body decays with age is nothing if not sobering. It’s one thing to know that arteries harden; it’s another to learn that he, as a surgeon, has encountered aortas so calcified that they crunch. And so it goes with this book’s thorough litany of body parts, from the news that an elderly person’s shrinking brain can actually be knocked around inside his or her skull to the way a tooth can determine a person’s age, give or take five years. Eat and exercise however you want, tell everyone how old your grandparents lived to be: According to “Being Mortal,” none of these factors do much to slow the march of time. (...)
“Mainstream doctors are turned off by geriatrics, and that’s because they do not have the faculties to cope with the Old Crock,” says Dr. Felix Silverstone, a specialist in the field. To summarize: This hypothetical Old Crock is deaf and forgetful, can’t see, has trouble understanding what the doctor says and has no one chief complaint; he has 15 of them. He has high blood pressure, diabetes and arthritis. “There’s nothing glamorous about taking care of any of those things.”
But patients who receive good geriatric care stay happier and healthier, just as old people who can remain at home and aren’t forced into nursing homes are better able to enjoy their lives. This book makes a thorough inquiry into how the idea of the assisted-living facility arose as a supposed improvement on regimented nursing homes but has often become a disheartening place for independent-minded people to have to go. The all-important quality-of-life issue that is used to market such places, Dr. Gawande maintains, is directed more toward the people planning to leave Mom then than toward Mom herself. But he sees a lot of hope in the group living concept, if it is overseen with the residents’ happiness in mind.
Such things happen because modern death-delaying techniques are relatively new in medicine. Which patients have long-term life-threatening conditions and which are really at death’s door? In what Dr. Gawande calls “an era in which the relationship between patient and doctor is increasingly miscast in retail terms,” how easy is it for doctors — trained to solve problems and succeed — to acknowledge that there’s no cure to be had? How many doctors, used to telling their patients how to live, are ready to talk to them about how to die?
Dr. Gawande’s early description of how the body decays with age is nothing if not sobering. It’s one thing to know that arteries harden; it’s another to learn that he, as a surgeon, has encountered aortas so calcified that they crunch. And so it goes with this book’s thorough litany of body parts, from the news that an elderly person’s shrinking brain can actually be knocked around inside his or her skull to the way a tooth can determine a person’s age, give or take five years. Eat and exercise however you want, tell everyone how old your grandparents lived to be: According to “Being Mortal,” none of these factors do much to slow the march of time. (...)
“Mainstream doctors are turned off by geriatrics, and that’s because they do not have the faculties to cope with the Old Crock,” says Dr. Felix Silverstone, a specialist in the field. To summarize: This hypothetical Old Crock is deaf and forgetful, can’t see, has trouble understanding what the doctor says and has no one chief complaint; he has 15 of them. He has high blood pressure, diabetes and arthritis. “There’s nothing glamorous about taking care of any of those things.”
But patients who receive good geriatric care stay happier and healthier, just as old people who can remain at home and aren’t forced into nursing homes are better able to enjoy their lives. This book makes a thorough inquiry into how the idea of the assisted-living facility arose as a supposed improvement on regimented nursing homes but has often become a disheartening place for independent-minded people to have to go. The all-important quality-of-life issue that is used to market such places, Dr. Gawande maintains, is directed more toward the people planning to leave Mom then than toward Mom herself. But he sees a lot of hope in the group living concept, if it is overseen with the residents’ happiness in mind.
by Janet Maslin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tim Llewellyn
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Google Scholar: Making the World’s Problem Solvers 10% More Efficient
Anurag Acharya is the key inventor of Google Scholar, but the real origin of the project lies in his college years at the Khargpur campus of the Indian Institute of Technology. The IIT is India’s version of MIT and Stanford combined, and has produced a long list of now-celebrated engineers and executives at Internet companies here and abroad. But even in that elite school, it was difficult for students to get hold of relevant scholarly materials. For Indian high schoolers, it was nearly impossible. “If you knew the information existed, you would write letters,” he says, “That’s what I did. Roughly half of the people would send you something, maybe a reprint. But if you didn’t know the information was there, there was nothing you could do about it.” Acharya was haunted by the realization that the great minds were deprived of inspiration, and the wonderful works that did have the impact they would have because of their limited distribution.
The eventual solution to this problem would be Google Scholar, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this November. Some people have never heard of this service, which treats publications from scholarly and professional journals as a separate corpus and makes it easy to find otherwise elusive information. Others have seen it occasionally when a result pops up on their search activity, and may even know enough to use it for a specific task, like digging into medical journals to gather information on a specific ailment. But for a significant and extremely impactful slice of the population: researchers, scientists, academics, lawyers, and students training in those fields — Scholar is a vital part of online existence, a lifeline to critical information, and an indispensable means of getting their work exposed to those who most need it. (...)
Google Scholar was revolutionary for a number of reasons. Acharya and his team worked hard to get academic publishers to allow Google to crawl their journals. Since many of the articles unearthed by Scholar were locked behind paywalls, simply locating something in a search would not mean that a user could read it. But he or she would know that it existed, and that makes a tremendous difference. (Imagine setting off on a research project and finding out months later that someone had done the same work.) Google also pushed the paywall publishers to allow users to see abstracts of the work. The world’s biggest online archive of journal articles, JSTOR, offered only scans of articles, and had no way to separate the abstract from the whole piece. (Those accessing JSTOR through subscribing institutions could see full text.) So Scholar convinced JSTOR to provide its users to see the first scanned page of the article for free. “Often the first page has the abstract, or in older articles you have the introduction,” says Acharya, whose job title at Google is Distinguished Engineer. “That at least allows you to get a sense of it so you can decide whether you should put in additional effort.” Google Scholar will then provide the information that will help users get the complete text, whether online for free, downloaded for a fee, or in a nearby library.
(All Google users benefited from all that newly crawled information, too, as the company included those articles and books in its general search index.)
At launch, Google Scholar won wide acclaim, even from those generally skeptical about the company. Two well known library scientists, Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price wrote, “When big announcements come from Google and web engines, we often get nervous…. Not this time, however. This is BIG news and something that should have been around for years.” (There was some criticism, though. One complaint was that Google Scholar had no API to allow other services to access it. Others said that since Google didn’t share information like its ranking algorithm and all its sources, it fell short of a “scholarly” standard.)
Some in the research community favorably contrasted it to Google’s more controversial Book Search, which was launched at the same time. Scholar avoided the sort of copyright controversy that Book Search generated, despite the fact scholarly publishing world is a war zone, with an increasing number of academics lodging protests against powerful publishers who control the major journals. This is a conflict pitting profit against public good. It was the principle of open research that led Internet activist Aaron Swartz to download a corpus of JSTOR documents legally provided to MIT; the government prosecution of that act ended only with Swartz’s suicide. Google Scholar does not officially take a stand on the issue, but its implicit philosophy seems to endorse an egalitarian spread of information. In any case, when possible, Scholar tries to help negotiate around paywalls for non-subscribers by linking to articles in multiple locations — often, authors of paywalled works have free versions on their personal websites. (...)
Only at Google, of course, would the world’s most popular scholarly search service be seen as a relative backwater. Acharya isn’t permitted to reveal how big Scholar’s index is, though he does note that it’s an order of magnitude bigger than when it started. He can also say, “It’s pretty much everything — every major to medium size publisher in the world, scholarly books, patents, judicial opinions, small, most small journals…. It would take work to find something that’s not indexed.” (One serious estimate places the index at 160 million documents as of May 2014.) But like it or not, the niche reality was reinforced after Larry Page took over as CEO in 2011, and adopted an approach of “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Scholar was not discarded — it still commands huge respect at Google which, after all, is largely populated by former academics—but clearly shunted to the back end of the quiver. Not only was Scholar missing from the list of top services (Image Search, News, etc.) but bumped from the menu promising “more” services like Gmail and Calendar. Its new place was a menu labeled “even more.”
Asked who informed him of what many referred to as Scholar’s “demotion,” Acharya says, “I don’t think they told me.” But he says that the lower profile isn’t a problem, because those who do use Scholar have no problem finding it. “If I had seen a drop in usage, I would worry tremendously,” he says. “There was no drop in usage. I also would have felt bad if I had been asked to give up resources, but we have always grown in both machine and people resources. I don’t feel demoted at all.”
The eventual solution to this problem would be Google Scholar, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this November. Some people have never heard of this service, which treats publications from scholarly and professional journals as a separate corpus and makes it easy to find otherwise elusive information. Others have seen it occasionally when a result pops up on their search activity, and may even know enough to use it for a specific task, like digging into medical journals to gather information on a specific ailment. But for a significant and extremely impactful slice of the population: researchers, scientists, academics, lawyers, and students training in those fields — Scholar is a vital part of online existence, a lifeline to critical information, and an indispensable means of getting their work exposed to those who most need it. (...)Google Scholar was revolutionary for a number of reasons. Acharya and his team worked hard to get academic publishers to allow Google to crawl their journals. Since many of the articles unearthed by Scholar were locked behind paywalls, simply locating something in a search would not mean that a user could read it. But he or she would know that it existed, and that makes a tremendous difference. (Imagine setting off on a research project and finding out months later that someone had done the same work.) Google also pushed the paywall publishers to allow users to see abstracts of the work. The world’s biggest online archive of journal articles, JSTOR, offered only scans of articles, and had no way to separate the abstract from the whole piece. (Those accessing JSTOR through subscribing institutions could see full text.) So Scholar convinced JSTOR to provide its users to see the first scanned page of the article for free. “Often the first page has the abstract, or in older articles you have the introduction,” says Acharya, whose job title at Google is Distinguished Engineer. “That at least allows you to get a sense of it so you can decide whether you should put in additional effort.” Google Scholar will then provide the information that will help users get the complete text, whether online for free, downloaded for a fee, or in a nearby library.
(All Google users benefited from all that newly crawled information, too, as the company included those articles and books in its general search index.)
At launch, Google Scholar won wide acclaim, even from those generally skeptical about the company. Two well known library scientists, Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price wrote, “When big announcements come from Google and web engines, we often get nervous…. Not this time, however. This is BIG news and something that should have been around for years.” (There was some criticism, though. One complaint was that Google Scholar had no API to allow other services to access it. Others said that since Google didn’t share information like its ranking algorithm and all its sources, it fell short of a “scholarly” standard.)
Some in the research community favorably contrasted it to Google’s more controversial Book Search, which was launched at the same time. Scholar avoided the sort of copyright controversy that Book Search generated, despite the fact scholarly publishing world is a war zone, with an increasing number of academics lodging protests against powerful publishers who control the major journals. This is a conflict pitting profit against public good. It was the principle of open research that led Internet activist Aaron Swartz to download a corpus of JSTOR documents legally provided to MIT; the government prosecution of that act ended only with Swartz’s suicide. Google Scholar does not officially take a stand on the issue, but its implicit philosophy seems to endorse an egalitarian spread of information. In any case, when possible, Scholar tries to help negotiate around paywalls for non-subscribers by linking to articles in multiple locations — often, authors of paywalled works have free versions on their personal websites. (...)
Only at Google, of course, would the world’s most popular scholarly search service be seen as a relative backwater. Acharya isn’t permitted to reveal how big Scholar’s index is, though he does note that it’s an order of magnitude bigger than when it started. He can also say, “It’s pretty much everything — every major to medium size publisher in the world, scholarly books, patents, judicial opinions, small, most small journals…. It would take work to find something that’s not indexed.” (One serious estimate places the index at 160 million documents as of May 2014.) But like it or not, the niche reality was reinforced after Larry Page took over as CEO in 2011, and adopted an approach of “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Scholar was not discarded — it still commands huge respect at Google which, after all, is largely populated by former academics—but clearly shunted to the back end of the quiver. Not only was Scholar missing from the list of top services (Image Search, News, etc.) but bumped from the menu promising “more” services like Gmail and Calendar. Its new place was a menu labeled “even more.”
Asked who informed him of what many referred to as Scholar’s “demotion,” Acharya says, “I don’t think they told me.” But he says that the lower profile isn’t a problem, because those who do use Scholar have no problem finding it. “If I had seen a drop in usage, I would worry tremendously,” he says. “There was no drop in usage. I also would have felt bad if I had been asked to give up resources, but we have always grown in both machine and people resources. I don’t feel demoted at all.”
by Steven Levy, Medium/Backchannel | Read more:
Image: Talia Herman
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Copywrong
Rod Stewart is being sued over the rights to an image of his own head.
In 1981, a professional photographer named Bonnie Schiffman took a picture of the back of Stewart’s head, which was used, eight years later, on the cover of the album “Storyteller.” Now a different picture of Stewart’s head, also from the back, has been used to promote his Las Vegas act and world tour. Schiffman claims that the resemblance between her photograph and the new image is too close—the legal term is “substantial similarity”—and she is suing for copyright infringement. She is asking for two and a half million dollars.
A copyright is, first and foremost, the right to make a copy. The first products to be protected by copyright—the statutory history begins in Britain, in 1710, with the passage of a law known as the Statute of Anne—were books. Once you buy a book, you can legally do almost anything to it. You can sell it to someone else, you can tear the pages out, you can throw it on a bonfire. God knows you can print terrible things about it. But you cannot make copies of it. The right to do that belongs to the author of the book and his or her heirs and assigns.
As with any right, the right to make a copy is a lot less straightforward than it sounds. As the person who wrote this article, I own the right to make copies of it. Since 1976, in the United States, that right has been born with the article, and there are few formalities still required for me to assert it. The belief that you have irrecoverably forfeited your copyright if you have not sent a copy of your book to the Library of Congress, or put a © on it somewhere, is obsolete.
I have granted The New Yorker an exclusive license to the article for a limited period, after which the magazine retains certain privileges (including printing it in a collection of New Yorker writings and keeping it on its Web site). If, a year from now, someone else, without my permission, reprints my article in a book called “The Most Thoughtful and Penetrating Essays of 2014, ” I can complain that my right to make copies is being violated and, if the court agrees with me, legally suppress the book. Theoretically, the court could compel the publisher to pulp all the unsold copies. Although not the author of this piece, you, too, would likely feel that the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” was a bandit, and you would share my sense of righteous indignation.
But suppose that a Web site, awesomestuff.com, ran an item that said something like “This piece on copyright is a great read!” with a hyperlink on the word “piece” to my article’s page on The New Yorker’s Web site. You wouldn’t think this was banditry at all. You would find it unexceptionable.
This is partly because of what might be called the spatial imaginary of the Web. When you click on a link, you have the sensation that you no longer are at a place called awesomestuff.com but have been virtually transported to an entirely different place, called newyorker.com. A visual change is experienced as a physical change. The link is treated as a footnote; it’s as though you were taking another book off the shelf. The Web reinforces this illusion of movement by adopting a real-estate vocabulary, with terms like “site” (on which nothing can be built), “address” (which you can’t G.P.S.), and “domain” (which is a legal concept, not a duchy).
Some courts have questioned the use of links that import content from another Web site without changing the URL, a practice known as “framing.” But it’s hard to see much difference. Either way, when you’re reading a linked page, you may still be “at” awesomestuff.com, as clicking the back button on your browser can instantly confirm. Effectively, awesomestuff.com has stolen content from newyorker.com, just as the compiler of “Most Thoughtful Essays” stole content from me. The folks at awesomestuff.com and their V. C. backers are attracting traffic to their Web site, with its many banner ads for awesome stuff, using material created by other people.
An enormous amount of Web business is conducted in this manner. Most Web users don’t feel indignant about it. On the contrary, most Web users would feel that their rights had been violated if links like this were prohibited. Something that is almost universally condemned when it happens in the medium of print is considered to be just how digital media work. Awesomestuff.com might even argue that no one is harmed by the link—that it is doing me and The New Yorker a favor by increasing our article’s readership at no cost to us. But the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” could say the same thing, and the court would be unmoved.
This almost instinctive distinction between what is proper in the analog realm and what is proper in the digital realm is at the center of a global debate about the state of copyright law. Statutes protecting copyright have never been stricter; at the same time, every minute of every day, millions of people are making or using copies of material—texts, sounds, and images—that they didn’t create. According to an organization called Tru Optik, as many as ten billion files, including movies, television shows, and games, were downloaded in the second quarter of this year. Tru Optik estimates that approximately ninety-four per cent of those downloads were illegal. The law seems to be completely out of whack with the technology.
The point of Peter Baldwin’s fascinating and learned (and also repetitive and disorganized) “The Copyright Wars” (Princeton) is that the dispute between analog-era and digital-era notions of copyright is simply the latest installment of an argument that goes all the way back to the Statute of Anne. The argument is not really about technology, although major technological changes tend to bring it back to life. It’s about the reason for creating a right to make copies in the first place.
In 1981, a professional photographer named Bonnie Schiffman took a picture of the back of Stewart’s head, which was used, eight years later, on the cover of the album “Storyteller.” Now a different picture of Stewart’s head, also from the back, has been used to promote his Las Vegas act and world tour. Schiffman claims that the resemblance between her photograph and the new image is too close—the legal term is “substantial similarity”—and she is suing for copyright infringement. She is asking for two and a half million dollars.
A copyright is, first and foremost, the right to make a copy. The first products to be protected by copyright—the statutory history begins in Britain, in 1710, with the passage of a law known as the Statute of Anne—were books. Once you buy a book, you can legally do almost anything to it. You can sell it to someone else, you can tear the pages out, you can throw it on a bonfire. God knows you can print terrible things about it. But you cannot make copies of it. The right to do that belongs to the author of the book and his or her heirs and assigns.As with any right, the right to make a copy is a lot less straightforward than it sounds. As the person who wrote this article, I own the right to make copies of it. Since 1976, in the United States, that right has been born with the article, and there are few formalities still required for me to assert it. The belief that you have irrecoverably forfeited your copyright if you have not sent a copy of your book to the Library of Congress, or put a © on it somewhere, is obsolete.
I have granted The New Yorker an exclusive license to the article for a limited period, after which the magazine retains certain privileges (including printing it in a collection of New Yorker writings and keeping it on its Web site). If, a year from now, someone else, without my permission, reprints my article in a book called “The Most Thoughtful and Penetrating Essays of 2014, ” I can complain that my right to make copies is being violated and, if the court agrees with me, legally suppress the book. Theoretically, the court could compel the publisher to pulp all the unsold copies. Although not the author of this piece, you, too, would likely feel that the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” was a bandit, and you would share my sense of righteous indignation.
But suppose that a Web site, awesomestuff.com, ran an item that said something like “This piece on copyright is a great read!” with a hyperlink on the word “piece” to my article’s page on The New Yorker’s Web site. You wouldn’t think this was banditry at all. You would find it unexceptionable.
This is partly because of what might be called the spatial imaginary of the Web. When you click on a link, you have the sensation that you no longer are at a place called awesomestuff.com but have been virtually transported to an entirely different place, called newyorker.com. A visual change is experienced as a physical change. The link is treated as a footnote; it’s as though you were taking another book off the shelf. The Web reinforces this illusion of movement by adopting a real-estate vocabulary, with terms like “site” (on which nothing can be built), “address” (which you can’t G.P.S.), and “domain” (which is a legal concept, not a duchy).
Some courts have questioned the use of links that import content from another Web site without changing the URL, a practice known as “framing.” But it’s hard to see much difference. Either way, when you’re reading a linked page, you may still be “at” awesomestuff.com, as clicking the back button on your browser can instantly confirm. Effectively, awesomestuff.com has stolen content from newyorker.com, just as the compiler of “Most Thoughtful Essays” stole content from me. The folks at awesomestuff.com and their V. C. backers are attracting traffic to their Web site, with its many banner ads for awesome stuff, using material created by other people.
An enormous amount of Web business is conducted in this manner. Most Web users don’t feel indignant about it. On the contrary, most Web users would feel that their rights had been violated if links like this were prohibited. Something that is almost universally condemned when it happens in the medium of print is considered to be just how digital media work. Awesomestuff.com might even argue that no one is harmed by the link—that it is doing me and The New Yorker a favor by increasing our article’s readership at no cost to us. But the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” could say the same thing, and the court would be unmoved.
This almost instinctive distinction between what is proper in the analog realm and what is proper in the digital realm is at the center of a global debate about the state of copyright law. Statutes protecting copyright have never been stricter; at the same time, every minute of every day, millions of people are making or using copies of material—texts, sounds, and images—that they didn’t create. According to an organization called Tru Optik, as many as ten billion files, including movies, television shows, and games, were downloaded in the second quarter of this year. Tru Optik estimates that approximately ninety-four per cent of those downloads were illegal. The law seems to be completely out of whack with the technology.
The point of Peter Baldwin’s fascinating and learned (and also repetitive and disorganized) “The Copyright Wars” (Princeton) is that the dispute between analog-era and digital-era notions of copyright is simply the latest installment of an argument that goes all the way back to the Statute of Anne. The argument is not really about technology, although major technological changes tend to bring it back to life. It’s about the reason for creating a right to make copies in the first place.
by Louis Menand, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Thomas Burden
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