Crowd Farming

Chris Gaylord in the Christian Science Monitor:

Cwalk_p1In the push to harvest alternative energy, scientists have tapped a number of novel sources: the sun, corn, old cooking oil. But how about the simple act of walking?

For two architecture students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., the sound of footsteps is an echo of energy gone to waste. They figure that the stomp of every footfall gives off enough power to light two 60-watt bulbs for one second.

“Now imagine how many people walk through a train station each morning, or walk down the street in Hong Kong,” says James Graham, who, with fellow MIT graduate student Thaddeus Jusczyk, is helping to develop the growing field of “crowd farming.”

They devised a special floor of sliding blocks that can turn motion energy (such as from a footstep) into electrical energy. As commuters march across the floor, it would collect tiny flickers of power from each stride and channel that energy.

More here.

On Fame

From English comedian, writer, actor, novelist, filmmaker and television personality Stephen Fry’s blog:

Fry_narrowweb__300x4410Fame. It’s an embarrassing thing to talk about, for all that it is a national/global obsession. It is one of the few apparently desirable human qualities that … no, what am I talking about … it is not a quality. It is not like courage, mercy, kindness, strength, beauty or patience; or laziness, dishonesty, greed or cruelty for that matter. What is different about fame, I was going to say, is that it is so contingent. If you are tolerant or strong or wise, you are tolerant and strong and wise wherever you are on the planet that day. You don’t become bigoted, feeble and dim-witted the moment you cross a continent. Famous people however, can become entirely unknown the second they leave their homeland. Only the World Famous are famous everywhere, and there are precious few of them. They used to claim Mohammed Ali was about as well-known as a human could be, the same was said of Charlie Chaplin and Elvis. Who now? Osama bin Laden? Michael Jackson? Robbie Williams can walk around Los Angeles without being recognised and they say Johnny Carson was so surprised/irked/mortified at going unremarked in London whenever he showed up, as he did regularly for Wimbledon Fortnight, that he arranged for British TV to carry his Tonight Show at a reduced rate. Martha Stewart can travel by Tube unspotted, but not by Subway. And so on. As for myself, well, I mean next to nothing in Italy, but seem to strike a chord in Russia. Don’t ask.

Fame has this unusual property. It exists only in the mind of others. It is not an intrinsic characteristic, feature or achievement. Fame is wholly an exterior construct and yet, for all that it is defined by other people’s knowledge of a given person, they cannot dismantle or deactivate the fame that their knowledge engenders. What an ugly sentence. I mean this. We cannot, however much we may want to, make someone unfamous.

More here.  [Thanks to The Knackered Hack.]

Punjabis are poisoning themselves

From The Economist:

Screenhunter_01_oct_02_1614If Indian newspaper reports are to be believed, the children of Punjab are in the throes of a grey revolution. Even those as young as ten are sprouting tufts of white and grey hair. Some are going blind. In Punjabi villages, children and adults are afflicted by uncommon cancers.

The reason is massive and unregulated use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals in India’s most intensively farmed state. According to an environmental report by Punjab’s government, the modest-sized state accounts for 17% of India’s total pesticide use. The state’s water, people, animals, milk and agricultural produce are all poisoned with the stuff.

Ignorance is part of the problem. The report includes details of a survey suggesting that nearly one-third of Punjabi farmers were unaware that pesticides come with instructions for use. Half of the farmers ignored these instructions. Three-quarters put empty pesticide containers to domestic uses.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

testing our limits so that we can more keenly feel our comforts

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I stayed on at the Lotus Guesthouse and struggled with my article for the Major American Adventure-Travel Magazine. Every time I researched some upscale mountain trek in the Nepal Himalayas or two-week scuba diving excursion off the coast of Papua New Guinea, I couldn’t help but ponder how pointless it all was. I began to e-mail my editor pointed questions about how one should define the “extremes of human experience.” How was kayaking a remote Chinese river, I asked, more notable than surviving on its shores for a lifetime? How did risking frostbite on a helicopter-supported journey to arctic Siberia constitute more of an “adventure” than risking frostbite on a winter road-crew in Upper Peninsula Michigan? Did anyone else think it was telling that bored British aristocrats — not the peoples of the Himalayas — were the ones who first deemed it important to climb Mount Everest? My editor’s replies were understandably terse.

more from The Smart Set here.

turning back the clock

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IN THE PAST few weeks, the secretive nation of Burma suddenly landed on the world’s front pages, as small demonstrations by monks spiraled into massive protests and triggered a violent crackdown by the military government. Such an impromptu uprising surprised many observers. Searching for explanations, some have cited the rising price of fuel, which is subsidized in Burma; this summer, the regime allowed the price to skyrocket, adding to the economic misery of average Burmese people.

But behind the unrest also lies a larger explanation, one that makes the isolated country a critical test of foreign policy. Burma’s brutal ruling junta, which has long kept power through force and fear, is taking the next step and transforming itself into one of the world’s few totalitarian regimes.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

The Heritability and Malleability of IQ

Cosma returns to the topic (definitely worth reading):

People seem to be experiencing more than the usual difficulty grasping what I was getting at in my posts on accent and intelligence. This is my fault, for trying to be cute rather than trying to be clear. (I realize I’m too murky even when I am trying to be clear.) I am already heartily sick of the subject, which is turning into the huge time-suck I was afraid it would be, and which presents a depressing prospect from every point of view, not least those which make it clear how rare it is for anyone to change their mind on any aspect of it for any cause at all. (I do wonder if I should’ve stuck with the original title of “Duet for Leo and Razib.”) My aim here is to lay everything out cleanly and explicitly, and be done with this matter.

I was originally going to do just one post, explaining why I called the general factor of intelligence a “statistical myth”, why I don’t put any real faith in what I regard as even the best of the current estimates of IQ’s heritability, and the evidence for IQ’s malleability. But the thing grew unwieldy, and the only thing which I find more dreary, right now, than discussing heritability and malleability is explaining why factor analysis can’t do what people want it to, so I’ll save that for later, and stick to the heritability and plasticity of IQ here. Whether IQ means anything or not, it is, unlike general intelligence, unquestionably something we can measure, so we can consider how heritable and malleable it is. I am going to assume that you know what “variance” and “correlation” are, but not too much else.

To summarize: Heritability is a technical measure of how much of the variance in a quantitative trait (such as IQ) is associated with genetic differences, in a population with a certain distribution of genotypes and environments. Under some very strong simplifying assumptions, quantitative geneticists use it to calculate the changes to be expected from artificial or natural selection in a statistically steady environment. It says nothing about how much the over-all level of the trait is under genetic control, and it says nothing about how much the trait can change under environmental interventions. If, despite this, one does want to find out the heritability of IQ for some human population, the fact that the simplifying assumptions I mentioned are clearly false in this case means that existing estimates are unreliable, and probably too high, maybe much too high.

The Ambivalent Bond With a Ball of Fur

From The New York Times:

Cat A couple of weeks ago, while I was out of town on business, our cat, Cleo, died of liver failure. My husband and daughter buried her in the backyard, not far from the grave of our other cat, Manny, who had died just a few months earlier of mouth cancer. Cleo was almost 16 years old, she’d been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief — not so much its intensity as its specificity. It was very different from the catastrophic grief I’d felt when I was 19 and my father died, and all sense, color and flooring dropped from my days. This was a sorrow of details, of minor rhythms and assumptions that I hadn’t really been aware of until, suddenly, they were disrupted or unmet. Hey, I’m opening the door to the unfinished attic now. Doesn’t a cat want to try dashing inside to roll around in the loose wads of insulation while I yell at it to get out of there?

I’ve just dumped a pile of clean laundry on the bed and I’m starting to fold it. Why aren’t the cats jumping up for a quick sit? Don’t they know everything is still warm? We expect the bonds between children and parents, or between lovers or close friends, to be fierce and complex, and that makes them easy to understand. We expect the bonds between people and their pets to be simple and innocent, an antidote to human judgment and the fog of human speech, and that can make the bond paradoxically harder to track or explain. How do we feel about the nonhuman animals whose company we crave?

More here.

Scientists breed see-through frogs opening new frontier for dissection-free research

From MSNBC:

Frog Scientists at Hiroshima University have succeeded in breeding see-through frogs — an innovation that could cut down on future dissections. Transparent fishes have been around for a long time, but Professor Masayuki Sumida said the new line of frogs were the world’s first transparent four-legged animals.

Sumida, an amphibian specialist who led the university’s research team, said the transparent-skinned frogs could become widely used in scientific research because internal organs and blood vessels can be observed without dissecting the creatures.

More here.

Monday Musing: neo neo

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Everybody thinks that Neo Rauch is doing something special in his paintings but few know why. They can’t put their finger on it. They are, sometimes, even troubled by what they’re seeing.

This is normal when it comes to Romantics. Romanticism bothers people. They don’t believe that the immediacy they are seeing is for real. And they are right to be suspicious. Romanticism is about coming back to the world and seeing it afresh, as it were, with a new sincerity. But that ‘coming back’ is an important part of the Romantic mindset. The immediacy achieved by Romanticism (an immediacy characterized by a kind of wide eyed astonishment before the entirety of the world’s experiences) is not first level immediacy. It is second level immediacy and periods of Romanticism only come about after ‘mediate’ periods. The first great era of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, for instance, came directly after the Age of Reason. The Age of Reason, to paint with a broad stroke, was about standing at arm’s length from the world and trying to get a handle on it. It was about getting some distance and some objectivity. It was an Age generally suspicious of the ‘dive-right-in-with-your-face-right-up-against-it-all’ attitude characteristic of Romanticism.

These days, we’re in the midst of a Neo Romanticism that comes after an Age of critical modernism. And just as in the nineteenth century, there are those who get it and there are those who don’t. There are those still holding on to the instincts and criteria of the past Age, and there are those who simply don’t have a Romantic bone in their body and never will. But the world is large and Romanticism is generous enough to contain them all. That’s one of its strengths: no exclusions. And that’s why Romanticism can have so many different moods and manifestations. Romanticism is interested in exploring every aspect of experience, from the direct apprehension of the objects around us to the world of dreams and fantasy, the limit areas of the rational mind. Romanticism is a kind of infinity, the infinity of a precocious child, a knowing child.

Neo Rauch is a perfect Romantic for the new age because his Romanticism comes from disturbed reflections on the previous era. This gives it a slightly dazed manner and pushes it to a melancholy region of the Romantic universe. Mitteleuropa is a fundamentally strange and compelling place. Beaten on for half a century of war and unspeakable human atrocity it settled into a Soviet era coma that only just ended a decade and a half ago. History is thus a story of gaps and traumas for Mitteleuropa, things you want to forget but can’t and other things it’s very hard to remember. Simply looking at the reality of Mitteleuropa is already to play in a world of dreams and illusions. It is a landscape littered with memories and fragments of lost time. It is broken open and oozing with things-that-might-have-been and options just barely recognized.
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And that’s a pretty good description of what is happening on Neo Rauch’s canvasses. Peter Schjeldahl (The New Yorker art critic) touches on something of this in his review of Rauch’s show at the Met. He says, “I think I’ve never seen an excellent painting that is so masochistically cheerless, to the point of revelling in a contemplation of impotence. I would like to despise the artist for this, but his visual poetry is too persuasive. Present-day reality is a lot more like one of his pictures than I wish it were.”

My only real disagreement with the point is in Schjeldahl’s claim that Neo Rauch is impotent. The paintings, of course, don’t ‘say’ things about contemporary life in ways that critics like Schjeldahl want them to. But that, again, is the nature of Romanticism. It drives people to distraction, especially those who aren’t attuned to it. They know they are seeing something remarkable, a visual poetry that is “too persuasive.” But they don’t have the apparatus to take it up. Usually such individuals, having been raised, without even necessarily realizing it, within the discourse of Critical Modernism, decide that there is something pernicious going on with Romanticism, that they are being duped into enjoying something fundamentally empty. Schjeldahl, for instance, decides that “Rauch’s work provides a cultural moment that seeks legitimacy in art with talismans of rhapsodic complacency.” It’s a nice line, but it isn’t Neo Rauch.

Speaking of the Early Romantics, Jacques Barzun once wrote that, “They [Romantics] were forced, as we know, to take stock of the universe anew, like primitives, because the old forms, the old inter-subjective formulas, had failed them. There was consequently nothing for them to do but report individually on what they saw.” The Neo Romantics are up to essentially the same business. Calling this complacent is strange. It is to ask the Neo Romantics somehow to be doing work that none of the rest of us know how to do either. And it is to ignore what the Neo Romantics are actually achieving, which is working their way back through the elements of experience in the attempt to get in touch with where we are now.

This work is simultaneously difficult and enjoyable. It’s difficult because there is disturbing material to sort through, especially in Mitteleuropa. Neo Rauch’s canvasses are packed full of fragments of Social Realism and vaguely menacing images of war and social collapse. Memory is something you might rather escape, but cannot. But the sense of intrigue in the paintings, the mystery of situation and character is exciting. People are up to things in these paintings, often they are dressed well, and occasionally they carry dangerous objects. Something is afoot, not the game exactly, but something. Perhaps an event is about to occur. In the tension of all this imminence, there is a feeling that Neo Rauch is stitching a world back together solely through the instrument of his painterly skill. And even with the application of all that skill, he cannot get the human beings within the canvass to inhabit the same social space. They are there with each other, and not there with each other at the same time. Again, spend a little time in Mitteleuropa and you’ll see what he means. Space, in Neo Rauch, doesn’t even always live up to its expectations. A wall or a building will suddenly give up on itself and drift off into a smudge or an angle that isn’t strictly possible in the three dimensional world. Since we’re still having so much trouble with time, he seems to be saying, we really shouldn’t be allowed to have space either.
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There is a passage from W.B. Sebald’s Austerlitz that probably serves as a better wall text to Neo Rauch’s paintings than anything else.

“Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut off from the past and the future. In fact, said Austerlitz, I have never owned a clock of any kind, a bedside alarm or a packet watch, let alone a wristwatch. A clock has always struck me as something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, cutting myself off from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back after it, and when I arrive I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have coexisted simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and never-ending anguish.”

This is the psychological landscape in which Neo Rauch is doing his painterly work of remembering and re-imagining. I, for one, would get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art before October 14th.