From BBC News:

The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said organic food was more of a “lifestyle choice that people can make”. He insisted that food grown with the use of pesticides and other chemicals should not be regarded as inferior. In an interview with the Sunday Times he said: “There isn’t any conclusive evidence either way.”

Mr Miliband: “It’s only 4% of total farm produce, not 40%, and I would not want to say that 96% of our farm produce is inferior because it’s not organic.” He said despite the rise in organic sales being “exciting” for shoppers, they should not think of conventionally-produced food as “second best”.

According to the Soil Association, organic food sales in the UK increased by 30% to £1.6bn in 2006.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Except for brief moments of duress, I haven’t touched a keyboard for years. No fingers were tortured in producing these words — or the last half a million words of my published fiction. By rough count, I’ve sent 10,000 e-mail messages without typing. My primary digital prosthetic doesn’t even have keys.

I write these words from bed, under the covers with my knees up, my head propped and my three-pound tablet PC — just a shade heavier than a hardcover — resting in my lap, almost forgettable. I speak untethered, without a headset, into the slate’s microphone array. The words appear as fast as I can speak, or they wait out my long pauses. I touch them up with a stylus, scribbling or re-speaking as needed. Whole phrases die and revive, as quickly as I could have hit the backspace. I hear every sentence as it’s made, testing what it will sound like, inside the mind’s ear.

More here.

Katy June-Friesen in Smithsonian Magazine:

The faces are “right out of central casting,” says Mark Michaelson. For a decade, the graphic designer collected old mug shots—he got them from a retired cop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, from a file cabinet bought at a Georgia auction and stuffed with pictures, and from eBay—until he had tens of thousands. All of them might have remained the personal collection of this self-described pack rat. But with the growing popularity of vernacular, or found, photographs, Michaelson’s trove suddenly had wider appeal. This past fall, he exhibited the mug shots in a New York City gallery and published them in a book slicker than an L.A. loan shark.

Michaelson, who has worked at Newsweek, Radar and other magazines, got interested in underworld imagery after a friend gave him a Wanted poster of Patty Hearst. For his collection, however, he avoided famous people and notorious criminals in favor of what he calls “the small-timers, the least wanted.”

More here.

Linda Geddes in New Scientist:

Could there be forbidden sequences in the genome – ones so harmful that they are not compatible with life? One group of researchers thinks so. Unlike most genome sequencing projects which set out to search for genes that are conserved within and between species, their goal is to identify “primes”: DNA sequences and chains of amino acids so dangerous to life that they do not exist.

“It’s like looking for a needle that’s not actually in the haystack,” says Greg Hampikian, professor of genetics at Boise State University in Idaho, who is leading the project. “There must be some DNA or protein sequences that are not compatible with life, perhaps because they bind some essential cellular component, for example, and have therefore been selected out of circulation. There may also be some that are lethal in some species, but not others. We’re looking for those sequences.”

More here.

Clyde Haberman in the New York Times Book Review:

Perhaps Rashid Khalidi would have done better calling his book “Cry, the Beloved Country That Never May Be.” That title would have conveyed how glum he is about the likelihood of the Palestinians ever getting their own state. By some calculations, he says, they are worse off than they have been in decades.

“In spite of their vigorous sense of collective national identity,” Khalidi writes, “the Palestinians have never succeeded in creating an independent state of their own, and have no sure prospect in the future of ever having a truly sovereign state or of possessing a contiguous, clearly demarcated territory on which to establish it.”

How did the Palestinians sink into this sorry nonstate of affairs? Principally, in Khalidi’s view, by landing on the wrong side of three Rs: repression, rapaciousness and racism. One power after another used one R or another — sometimes all three — to keep Palestinians in their place. The British did so when they were in charge of Palestine after World War I. The Israelis did so before and, far more aggressively, after they won control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war. The Americans did so with their thorough support of Israel, more unblinking than ever under George W. Bush.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? People have puzzled over that question for at least 2,000 years. In the eternal cycle of natural reproduction, they saw no answer. But the cycle turns out not to be eternal. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively approved the use of cloned animals to make food. Natural reproduction is giving way to artificial reproduction. And with the new era comes a new question: Which came first, the steer or the steak?

Case in point: Elvis. He’s a 19-month-old Angus calf. You can view him on the Web site of ViaGen, a cloning company. In a recent slide presentation from the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the caption below his photo reads, “Elvis was cloned from a side of Prime Yield Grade 1 beef.”

No joke: The calf came from the beef. And Elvis is no freak show. He’s a business plan.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Computational Biology:

I am a science writer, and my chief passion is biology. I spend time with biologists of all stripes—computational biologists, paleontologists, biochemists, ecologists, and all the rest. It is a marvelous privilege. But there are times, I must confess, when I feel like I am watching a blind fistfight.

One of the first bouts I witnessed took place in the late 1990s, when I was researching the origin of whales. Whales descend from terrestrial mammals, and made the transition to water between about 50 million and 40 million years ago. In the 1990s paleontologists began unearthing a series of spectacular fossils documenting that transition, including whales with full-blown legs. Functional morphologists joined forces to investigate the transition, studying swimming otters to understand how proto-whales might have moved through the water. I spent a lot of time with scientists such as these. They are naturalists. They have to know a lot of natural history. They have to memorize the details of many species, to understand how the physiology, behavior, morphology, and ecology of each animal add up into an integrated whole. Yet these naturalists also know that they only have a slippery grasp on all of that embodied complexity.

I put what I learned from those naturalists into my first book, At the Water’s Edge. As I was finishing up my manuscript, I began coming across papers in which scientists were taking a radically different approach to the question of whale origins: they were comparing the DNA of whales to that of other mammals.

More here.

In the BBC’s radio programme In Our Time:

Mathematics from the Indian subcontinent has provided foundations for much of our modern thinking on the subject. They were thought to be the first to use zero as a number. Our modern numerals have their roots there too. And mathematicians in the area that is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were grappling with concepts such as infinity centuries before Europe got to grips with it. There’s even a suggestion that Indian mathematicians discovered Pythagoras’ theorem before Pythagoras.

Some of these advances have their basis in early religious texts which describe the geometry necessary for building falcon-shaped altars of precise dimensions. Astronomical calculations used to decide the dates of religious festivals also encouraged these mathematical developments.

So how were these advances passed on to the rest of the world? And why was the contribution of mathematicians from this area ignored by Europe for centuries?

A discussion among George Gheverghese Joseph, Honorary Reader in Mathematics Education at Manchester University, Colva Roney-Dougal, Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, and Dennis Almeida, Lecturer in Mathematics Education at Exeter University and the Open University, including some takes on why the Kerala school of mathematics failed to spread.

In Prospect magazine, Will Hutton and Meghnad Desai debate whether the future belongs to China. Will Hutton:

It is a commonplace to observe that the rise of China is transforming the world. Extrapolate from current growth rates and China will be the world’s largest economy by the middle of this century, if not before. If it remains communist, the impact on the world system will be enormous and very damaging. Britain and the US are, for all their faults, democracies that accept the rule of law. This is not true of China. If an unreformed China takes its place at the top table, the global order will be kinder to despotism; the fragile emergence of an international system of governance based on the rule of law will be set back and the relations between states will depend even more nakedly on their relative power.

All that, however, is predicated on two very big “ifs”—if the current Chinese growth rate continues, and if the country remains communist. I think there are substantial doubts about each proposition. What is certain is that both cannot hold. China is reaching the limits of the sustainability of its current model, and to extrapolate from the past into the future as if nothing needs to change is a first-order mistake.

Our concern in the west should be to help China face its enormous challenges without damaging us in the process. If Chinese communism can transform itself, then China could, like Japan before it, smoothly integrate into the world power system. If not, severe convulsions lie ahead.

Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon discuss some of the cognitive decision-making biases that favor hawks over doves in the face of potential conflict, in Foreign Policy.

Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics. For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example.

In fact, when we constructed a list of the biases uncovered in 40 years of psychological research, we were startled by what we found: All the biases in our list favor hawks. These psychological impulses—only a few of which we discuss here—incline national leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive them, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations. In short, these biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end.

None of this means that hawks are always wrong. One need only recall the debates between British hawks and doves before World War II to remember that doves can easily find themselves on the wrong side of history. More generally, there are some strong arguments for deliberately instituting a hawkish bias. It is perfectly reasonable, for example, to demand far more than a 50-50 chance of being right before we accept the promises of a dangerous adversary. The biases that we have examined, however, operate over and beyond such rules of prudence and are not the product of thoughtful consideration. Our conclusion is not that hawkish advisors are necessarily wrong, only that they are likely to be more persuasive than they deserve to be.

Several well-known laboratory demonstrations have examined the way people assess their adversary’s intelligence, willingness to negotiate, and hostility, as well as the way they view their own position. The results are sobering. Even when people are aware of the context and possible constraints on another party’s behavior, they often do not factor it in when assessing the other side’s motives. Yet, people still assume that outside observers grasp the constraints on their own behavior. With armies on high alert, it’s an instinct that leaders can ill afford to ignore.

In In These Times, Silja Talvi looks at the music of Linton Kwesi Johnson.

The musical environment that LKJ grew up in was a mix of the Jamaican musical styles of rocksteady, reggae and dub reggae (a version of reggae with heavy echo, unusual sound effects and typically languid pacing), so he gravitated toward that genre. Unlike many of his musical peers, he eschewed—but never disrespected—the spiritual framework of the Rastafarian religion, giving his songs an appeal to audiences uncomfortable with worshipful shout-outs to the deposed Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie.

In the ’80s and ’90s, LKJ focused on his UK audiences, occasionally touring the United States with sold-out shows packed with a dynamic mix of Rastas, punks and left-wing activists. LKJ’s recorded music has been available to U.S. audience on such gems as Dread Beat An’ Blood (Virgin, 1978), Forces of Victory (Mango/Island, 1979), LKJ in Dub (Island, 1981) and Making History (Island, 1983)—as well as a host of records released through his own label, LKJ Records, including Tings an’ Times (1991), LKJ Presents (1996), and More Time (1998)—and most recently in the form of the Island Records CD collection, Independent Intavenshan (1998).

For the first time, LKJ’s poetry has been published in the United States, in a brilliant collection entitled Mi Revalueshanary Fren. The book was released this year by the New York-based poetry publisher Ausable Press, complete with a companion CD of LKJ reading his own poetry—sans musical accompaniment.

From the University of Michigan News Service:

Can you judge a man’s faithfulness by his face? How about whether he would be a good father, or a good provider?

Many people believe they can, according to a University of Michigan study published in the December issue of Personal Relationships, a peer-reviewed academic journal.

U-M social psychologist Daniel J. Kruger conducted a series of on-line experiments showing 854 male and female undergraduate students versions of composite male faces that had been altered to look more or less masculine by adjusting, for example, the shape of the jaw, the strength of brow ridges and the thickness of lips.

Participants were asked which of the men they preferred as mates, dates, parents of their children, or companions for their girlfriends. They were also asked which men were most likely to behave in certain ways—starting a fight or hitting on someone else’s girlfriend, for example.

“It’s remarkable that minor physiological differences lead people to pre-judge a man’s personality and behavior,” said Kruger, a research scientist at the U-M School of Public Health and the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). “But even though physiognomy (the attribution of personality to faces) is thought to be a pseudoscience, a lot of people believe there’s a link between looks and personality.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Freedom Writers,” a true story about a white teacher trying to make a difference in a room crammed with black, Latino and Asian high school freshmen, has the makings of another groaner. Ms. Swank is an appealing actress of, at least to date, fairly restricted range. In her finest roles — a transgender man in “Boys Don’t Cry,” a boxer in “Million Dollar Baby” — she plays women whose hard-angled limbs and squared jaws never fully obscure a desperate, at times almost embarrassingly naked neediness. In “Freedom Writers” Ms. Swank uses that neediness to fine effect in a film with a strong emotional tug and smartly laid foundation. She plays Erin Gruwell, who in 1994 was a 23-year-old student teacher assigned to teach freshman English at Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif.

But while we keep time with Erin, we also listen to the teenagers, several of whom tell their stories in voice-over. Among the most important of those stories is that of Eva (the newcomer April Lee Hernandez), whose voice is among the first we hear in the film. Through quick flashbacks and snapshot scenes of the present, Eva’s young life unfolds with crushing predictability. From her front steps, this 9-year-old watches as her cousin is gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Later her father is arrested; she’s initiated into a gang. One day, while walking with a friend under the glorious California sun, a couple of guys pull up in a car and start firing in their direction. Eva dodges bullets and embraces violence because she knows nothing else; she hates everyone, including her white teacher, because no one has ever given her a reason not to.

In time Eva stops hating Erin, though the bullets keep coming.

More here.

From Scientific American:

It only took 141 years, but researchers report they have finally pinpointed one of the genes that Austrian monk Gregor Mendel manipulated in his pioneering experiments that established the basic laws of genetics–specifically, the gene that controlled the color of his peas’ seeds. A team identified the sequence of a gene common to several plant species, which use it to break down a green pigment molecule, and found that it matches Mendel’s gene.

This marks the third of the monk’s seven genes that researchers have precisely identified, and the first since the late 1990s, before the genome sequencing boom.

More here.

Adam Bly in Seed Magazine:

Read other responses to the 2007 Edge Question here.

I am optimistic that science is recapturing the attention and imagination of world leaders.

Witness, for example, the agendas of the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative, or the African Union Summit; science has made a well-timed transition from a topic of peripheral interest to the leaders of the world to one inextricably tied to issues of development, global health, innovation, competitiveness, and energy. At a time when science is spurring markets, arts and ideas, it is now making its way into our halls of power with considerable momentum.

The critical challenge is for our understanding of science to keep up with our growing interest in science. Our new global science culture demands a new level of science literacy, for general populations and indeed for the leaders that govern them. What constitutes a science literate citizen in the 21^st century is one of the most important questions we need to collectively address today.

More here.

Michael Agger in Slate:

Three weeks ago, Google introduced its new search service, Google Patents. The jokes followed pretty much immediately. Unmentionable medical devices were dragged into the cold light of day. Sex toys and flatulence deodorizers were uncovered and mocked. The inventors of the bong, the keggerator, and the Nerf football were celebrated. It was as though a band of drunken Sigma Chis had crashed a party for patent lawyers.

Now that the buzz is wearing off, it’s time to ask what Google Patents is actually good for. The wizards of Mountain View have stated that their corporate ethos is to organize all of human knowledge. But why is it that Google’s search technology often seems like a killer app for ending pointless conversations? With the debut of Google Patents, a question from a cubicle mate along the line of, “Do you think my American Idol board game idea will make me rich?” can be answered with the near-universal reply, “I don’t know. Google it.”

More here.

“Galileo’s famous metaphor of the “book of nature”, which he used to defend the work of scientists from religious authorities, can be dangerous today.”

Robert P Crease in PhysicsWeb:

In 1623 Galileo crafted a famous metaphor that is still often cited by scientists. Nature, he wrote, is a book written in “the language of mathematics”. If we cannot understand that language, we will be doomed to wander about as if “in a dark labyrinth”.

Like other metaphors, this one has two facets; it is insightful, but it may be misleading if taken literally. It captures our sense that nature’s truths are somehow imposed on us – that they are already imprinted in the world – and underlines the key role played by mathematics in expressing those truths.

But Galileo devised the metaphor for a specific purpose. Taken out of its historical context and placed in ours, the image can be dangerously deceptive.

More here.

3QD friend Pablo Policzer in the New English Review:

The celebrations and tears that followed Augusto Pinochet’s death obscure a little known but important fact: if Pinochet had had his way in the mid-1970s, his dictatorship would have ended only on December 10, when he died.  It ended instead in 1990 because, ironically, the very institutions that Pinochet helped create eased him from power at that time, against his will.  But in this other future – which came close to happening – Chileans would only now be contemplating democracy, after over 33 years of dictatorship.

More here.

Since the war in Chechnya began, one-fifth of its population has died. Andre and Raphael Glucksmann look at Etudes Sans Frontières (studies without borders)–a non-profit organization “founded by a group of French students in 2003 in order to help their counterparts from war-torn societies come and study in western universities”–and their Chechen mission. (Text originally in Corriere della Sera, translated in Signandsight.com)

“Man does not live by bread alone. What I missed most in the basements of Grosny, as the hail of bombs fell, were my school books, my films, and all the things that would have freed my soul from this hell.” Milana Terloeva is 26 years old and Chechen. In Russia, that’s a crime. And for us in France? In September of 2003, she left the rubble of Grosny and came to Paris. Three years later, she finished a journalism degree at the Institute for Political Sciences in Paris (Sciences-Po), published a wonderful book (“Danser sur les ruines, une jeunesse tchetchene” Hachette Litterature, Paris 2006) and is now getting ready to return to her homeland. Milana epitomises the success of Etudes Sans Frontieres (Studies Without Borders).

“Man does not live by bread alone.” How many boys and girls have been deprived of an education by the countless wars and dictatorships that cover this planet with blood? In the face of the current threat of international terrorism, could there be a more worthy goal for Western youth than helping students from decimated countries to gain access to knowledge and culture? What undertaking could be more effective in countering these merchants of hatred who exploit the desperation of those who have been forgotten by the West? The handful of French students who grouped together in March 2003 to found Etudes Sans Frontieres had precisely this in mind: extending a hand to those who have been sent into exclusion by the insanity of human history.

Slavoj Zizek in today’s New York Times:

ONE of the pop heroes of the Iraq war was undoubtedly Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, the unfortunate Iraqi information minister who, in his daily press conferences during the invasion, heroically denied even the most evident facts and stuck to the Iraqi line. Even with American tanks only a few hundred yards from his office, he continued to claim that the televised shots of tanks on the Baghdad streets were just Hollywood special effects.

In his very performance as an excessive caricature, Mr. Sahhaf thereby revealed the hidden truth of the “normal” reporting: there were no refined spins in his comments, just a plain denial. There was something refreshingly liberating about his interventions, which displayed a striving to be liberated from the hold of facts and thus of the need to spin away their unpleasant aspects: his stance was, “Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?”

Furthermore, sometimes, he even struck a strange truth — when confronted with claims that Americans were in control of parts of Baghdad, he snapped back: “They are not in control of anything — they don’t even control themselves!”