The Unlikely Writer: Atul Gawande

From Harvard Magazine:

Atul If Gawande is an unlikely surgeon, envisioning a career in medicine, more generally, was easy. He grew up in Athens, Ohio, the son of a urologist father and a pediatrician mother, and he has often said that following them into the field seemed so inevitable that he tried every way he could think of to avoid it. Careers he considered along the way included philosophy and politics; they did not include writing. His first published writing for a popular audience, in 1996, came at the invitation of Jacob Weisberg, a friend from Gawande’s time at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Despite Gawande’s lack of writing experience, Weisberg, who helped found the online magazine Slate and later edited it, had a hunch that his friend would be good at explaining medicine to a lay audience. Besides, he was encouraged by what he knew of Gawande’s personal qualities: “Atul goes at everything in an incredibly focused, driven way. The odds of him not making something work are a lot lower than they would be with anybody else.”

More here.

Are the Brains of Reckless Teens More Mature Than Those of Their Prudent Peers?

From Scientific American:

Are-teens-who-behave-reck_1 Thrill seeking and poor judgment go hand in hand when it comes to teenagers—an inevitable part of human development determined by properties of a growing but immature brain. Right? Not so fast. A study being published tomorrow turns that thinking upside down: The brains of teens who behave dangerously are more like adult brains than are those of their more cautious peers. Psychologists have long believed that the brain's judgment-control systems develop more slowly than emotion-governing systems, not maturing until people are in their mid-20s. Hence, teens end up taking far more risks than adults do. Evidence supporting this idea comes from studies looking at functional and structural properties of gray matter, the important part of the brain that contains the neurons that relay brain signals.

At least two observations undermine this theory, however. First, American-style teen turmoil is absent in more than 100 cultures around the world, suggesting that such mayhem is not biologically inevitable. Second, the brain itself changes in response to experiences, raising the question of whether adolescent brain characteristics are the cause of teen tumult or rather the result of lifestyle and experiences. Because brain research is virtually always correlational in design, determining whether brain properties are causes or effects is impossible.

More here.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Remembering Ted Kennedy

1251296493-largeRobert Scheer in The Nation:

Unable to move with his brothers' intellectual alacrity, sometimes plodding in impromptu expression but smooth and skillful while reading from a script, the youngest Kennedy made up for his shortcomings early in his Senate career by resolutely working the substance of issues. His principled determination, plus his capacity to truly care about the real-world outcomes of legislation for ordinary people rather than its impact on his or anyone else's election, became his signature qualities as a lawmaker. But for those same reasons, he also wanted legislation passed, and his ability to work with the opposition, as he did three years ago with John McCain on immigration reform, now grants him a legacy as one of the nation's great senators.

Oddly enough, for one born into such immense familial expectations, he was a surprisingly accessible and down-to-earth politician in the eyes of most journalists who covered him. I think of him as always authentic and never oily. As opposed to most politicians, the offstage Ted Kennedy was the more appealing one.

Although he excelled as an orator, never more so than delivering the speech that Bob Shrum crafted for him at the 1980 Democratic Convention but which was informed by Kennedy's own deeply felt passion, it was in his less choreographed moments that he was at his best.

Are Heavily Computational Complex Systems Approaches Killing Science?

88-avatar-nieXV79Zus_-8TxW1C79_Michael White makes the case over at Adaptive Complexity (via Sci Tech Daily):

Many of these researchers don’t understand what it means to test a theory. They build these complex models, which involves making important assumptions that could easily be wrong, and then if their models fit existing data, they think the model is right.

Hence you get this McColloh guy claiming that his network analysis model was responsible for a big drop in sniper attacks, ignoring the much more obvious and plausible causes for the drop in violence: the addition of 30,000 troops and the US Military’s major new approach to counterinsurgency implemented by Petraeus. The network researchers can’t justify ruling out the more obvious explanation; their only retort is to say that their critics don’t understand their fancy methods. (Which is not true in many cases – there are plenty physicists, biologists, and economists who understand the mathematical/statistical/computational techniques, who are bothered by the scientific culture of complex systems research.)

This a dangerous mindset to have in science. What these researchers are doing is practicing a sham form of science called by Feynman Cargo Cult Science:

There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

And no, that does not mean simply training your model on half of your data set and showing that you can effectively explain the other half of your data.

space, again

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Four decades have passed since the first small step on the dusty surface of our nearest neighbor in the solar system in 1969. It has been almost that long since the last man to walk on the Moon did so in late 1972. The Apollo missions were a stunning technological achievement and a significant Cold War victory for the United States. However, despite the hope of observers at the time—and despite the nostalgia and mythology that now cloud our memory—Apollo was not the first step into a grand human future in space. From the perspective of forty years, Apollo, for all its glory, can now be seen as a detour away from a sustainable human presence in space. By and large, the NASA programs that succeeded Apollo have kept us heading down that wrong path: Toward more bureaucracy. Toward higher costs. And away from innovation, from risk-taking, and from any concept of space as a useful place. In a sense, Apollo occurred too soon. Had you asked the boldest science fiction writers in, say, 1954 whether men would walk on the Moon within a decade and a half, they would have scoffed—and justifiably so. Even though writers of fiction and nonfiction alike had theorized for decades about putting objects into orbit, and even though work was already underway in 1954 to put the first small unmanned satellites into orbit, the notion that we could develop so rapidly the capability to put men on the Moon on a politically feasible budget would have seemed ludicrous.

more from Rand Simberg at The New Atlantis here.

frankly

Seetheusa090831_560

With all due respect to the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, the Left Bank literati, and the Rent guy, the only version of bohemianism that has ever mattered to me came from Robert Frank. I discovered The Americans, his book of photographs, in 1986, after fleeing the suburbs for New York. I was wallowing in the music of the Replacements and the films of Jim Jarmusch, and Frank’s 1959 work captured my feelings of being part of the world yet estranged from it. The pictures of rural-Mississippi riversides and ravaged Montana mining towns beckoned toward a country I had yet to explore; his subjects—bummed-out lunch-counter patrons, business-suited fat cats, religious crazies—evoked the fantastic hodgepodge I saw on the Lower East Side. And Frank’s unapologetically critical view of cozy Eisenhower-era consumerism resonated with my own hysterical alienation from Reagan’s eighties. In The Americans, the rich are gargoyles; the poor, the outsiders—queers, blacks, Hispanics—radiate pride and authenticity. They are, to cop one of his friend Jack Kerouac’s favorite words, “holy.”

more from Karen Schoemer at New York Magazine here.

berlin 2009

Risen-Bohemian

Most Berliners I know—a generally liberal bunch and pretty typical for the city—tell me the police are playing up the leftists’ role, and they downplay conservative chatter about a coming wave of leftwing violence. But they don’t deny that the city is restless. Many Berliners in the central districts are unhappy over the city government’s support for commercial development, high-end condo construction, and everything else that falls under the rubric of gentrification. Berlin suffers from all the same problems faced by once-derelict, suddenly trendy cities worldwide: rising rents, capricious developers, rezoning. But unlike residents in, say, Portland, Ore., many Berliners place little faith in the legislative process. Direct action, at least for the young, is still a preferred form of social activism. Earlier this summer more than 1,000 protesters clashed with police outside the shuttered Tempelhof airfield; developers and allies in the government want to turn much of the 450 acres into mixed-use neighbourhoods, while local activists want it to be a new city park. And there are recurrent street fights over Mediaspree, a public-private effort to turn a stretch of riverbank southeast of the city center that is currently home to a bevy of artist collectives and dance clubs, into a home for IT, media, PR, and graphic design firms, with a heavy dollop of corporate entertainment on top—the newly opened hockey stadium, sponsored by the O2 cell phone company, was christened with a concert by Tina Turner.

more from Clay Risen The Morning News here.

Wednesday Poem

When we Lean Against Each Other . . .

A man on the edge of the bath. A shoe, defenseless
on the floor. Her head wrapped in a towel.
Two arms with a dress in the air. Two dimples in a back.

A telephone with a flashing display: I can hear you . . .
please listen to me . . . I can feel your hands on our cheeks . . .
please feel my hand on your heart . . .

A man on the edge of the bed. A woman on her belly.
An arm, dangling over the edge. Mouth-to-mouth every millimetre
of her back in to life
– eyeball, spinning under the eyelid:

a man and a woman lean against each other. The woman tilts her head,
breathes in and closes her eyes, gently presses an auricle to his chest
as if she may listen to the coming of age
of the avalanche.

by Peter Verhelst

Translation: Astrid van Baalen, 2009

Getting at the Heart of Kindness

From The Washington Post:

Book “On Kindness” is just a little over 100 pages long, but those pages are tightly packed with insights into our riven human heart. More accurately, I should say “the human psyche,” because one of the authors, Adam Phillips, is a distinguished psychoanalyst who has written about his work in scores of elegant essays collected in a dozen slender volumes, among them “Side Effects,” “On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored” and “Going Sane.” The other author, Barbara Taylor, is an award-winning historian whose books include “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination” and “Eve and the New Jerusalem.” How the pair actually worked together isn't explained, but the resulting text — an essay in five chapters — is seamless and a pleasure to read, though it does demand close attention.

“Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers.” But Phillips and Taylor show that kindness — “the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself” — is essential to our humanity. “Indeed it would be realistic to say that what we have in common is our vulnerability; it is the medium of contact between us, what we most fundamentally recognize in each other.” What kindness does is “open us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread.” I'll come back to that “dread.”

More here.

Frog serenade foiled

From Nature:

Frog Frogs in the Australian metropolis of Melbourne are having trouble getting together to mate, and the culprit is traffic noise, according to Kirsten Parris, an ecologist at the University of Melbourne. One species of frog is even changing the pitch of its love song to be heard above the roar of the road, she reported on 20 August at the International Congress of Ecology in Brisbane, Australia.

Parris visited many urban ponds and pools inhabited by frogs, measuring traffic noise, which is, unfortunately, at the same low frequencies as many frog mating calls. For a frog such as the onomatopoeic 'pobblebonk' (Limnodynastes dumerilii), she found that a call that could originally be heard by a female 800 metres away may only carry 98 metres above 60 decibels of traffic noise, an average value for Melbourne. She has also discovered that the southern brown tree frog (Litoria ewingii) seems to be compensating for the traffic noise by increasing the pitch of its calls (listen to before and after calls).

More here.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice

SenjusticeIn the Economist, a review of Amartya Sen’s new book:

Two themes predominate [in The Idea of Justice]: economic rationality and social injustice. Mr Sen approaches them alike. He can, when he wants, theorise without oxygen at any height. But he believes that theory, to be of use, must keep its feet on the ground. Modern theorists in his view have drifted too far from the actual world.

Economists have tended to content themselves with a laughably simple picture of human motivation, rationality and well-being. People are not purely self-interested. They care for others and observe social norms. They do not always reason “instrumentally”, seeking least-cost means to given ends. They question the point of their aims and the worth of their wants. Well-being, finally, has no single measure and is not inscrutable to others. Its elements are many and do not boil down to “utility” or some cash-value equivalent.

Complexity, though, need not breed mystery. Well-being’s diverse elements (freedom from hunger, disease, indignity and discrimination, to name four) are generally observable and, he believes, measurable. They are, to put it crudely, matters of fact, not taste, even if his philosophical story—that what underpins the several elements of well-being is that they all extend people’s “capabilities”—is still argued over.

Rawls held that social justice depended on having just institutions, whereas Mr Sen thinks that good social outcomes are what matter. Strictly both could be right. The practical brunt of Mr Sen’s criticism, however, is that just institutions do not ensure social justice. You can, in addition, recognise social injustices without knowing how a perfectly fair society would arrange or justify itself. Rawlsianism, though laudable in spirit, is too theoretical, and has distracted political philosophers from corrigible ills in the actual world.

Race and Class, What Matters

Walter Benn Michaels reviews Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson in the LRB:

In the US, there is (or was) an organisation called Love Makes a Family. It was founded in 1999 to support the right of gay couples to adopt children and it played a central role in supporting civil unions. A few months ago, its director, Ann Stanback, announced that, having ‘achieved its goals’, Love Makes a Family would be ceasing operations at the end of this year, and that she would be stepping down to spend more time with her wife, Charlotte. Our ‘core purpose’, she said, has been ‘accomplished’.

It’s possible of course that this declaration of mission accomplished will prove to be as ill-advised as some others have been in the last decade. Gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, where Love Makes a Family is based, but it’s certainly not legal everywhere in the US. No one, however, would deny that the fight for gay rights has made extraordinary strides in the 40 years since Stonewall. And progress in combating homophobia has been accompanied by comparable progress in combating racism and sexism. Although the occasional claim that the election of President Obama has ushered us into a post-racial society is obviously wrong, it’s fairly clear that the country that’s just elected a black president (and that produced so many votes for the presidential candidacy of a woman) is a lot less racist and sexist than it used to be.

But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home.

Kidneys for Sale?

Singer_265x331Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

To those who argue that legalizing organ sales would help the poor, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, founder of Organ Watch, pointedly replies: “Perhaps we should look for better ways of helping the destitute than dismantling them.” No doubt we should, but we don’t: our assistance to the poor is woefully inadequate, and leaves more than a billion people living in extreme poverty.

In an ideal world, there would be no destitute people, and there would be enough altruistic donors so that no one would die while waiting to receive a kidney. Zell Kravinsky, an American who has given a kidney to a stranger, points out that donating a kidney can save a life, while the risk of dying as a result of the donation is only 1 in 4000. Not donating a kidney, he says, thus means valuing your own life at 4000 times that of a stranger – a ratio he describes as “obscene.” But most of us still have two kidneys, and the need for more kidneys persists, along with the poverty of those we do not help.

We must make policies for the real world, not an ideal one. Could a legal market in kidneys be regulated to ensure that sellers were fully informed about what they were doing, including the risks to their health? Would the demand for kidneys then be met? Would this produce an acceptable outcome for the seller?

To seek an answer, we can turn to a country that we do not usually think of as a leader in either market deregulation or social experimentation: Iran.

the other history

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If one wants to survey the Soviet anti-fascist vista that imposed itself both physically and metaphorically throughout Communist Eastern Europe after 1945, there is no better vantage point than the Treptow Monument in central Berlin. Situated in the Treptower Park on the banks of the River Spree, the monument’s centrepiece is an immense 40-ton statue of a Red Army soldier. Saviour, liberator, protector, this imposing figure – head fixed nobly high, trampling a swastika underfoot and shielding a small girl in his arms – exudes an aura of principled ferocity that was an emphatic statement about Communism’s victory over Nazism. Sculpted by Yevgeny Vuchetich (1908-74), the monument, whose upkeep was one of the Soviet Union’s stipulations for agreeing to German reunification, was officially unveiled on May 8th, 1949 at the height of the Cold War. Flanked by a series of frescoes glorifying the struggle of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War and bearing quotations from Joseph Stalin in Russian and German, Treptow overlooks a mass grave containing the remains of 5,000 Soviet soldiers who died during the final Battle of Berlin in spring 1945. Its symbolism casts the arrival of the Red Army as an act of fraternal liberation: Soviet heroes freeing captive populations from the grip of fascism. In this way it stood as a constant reminder of a debt of gratitude. It was also deliberately selective. Distilling the war on the Eastern Front into a simple story of the good (the Soviet Union) against evil (Nazi Germany), the Treptow Monument conveniently overlooked the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 to focus the narrative on the military achievements of the Red Army

. more from Martin Evans at History Today here.

is europe something?

Europa

Imagine we are invited to answer two questions: Is it possible to speak of a Chinese identity, formed in history, which makes China different from the rest of the world? Can the Chinese find an inspiration in it for their future? For an average Chinese person, an affirmative answer to both questions would be so obvious as to obviate the need to ask them. For an average European looking at China from the outside, the answers would be no less self-evident. But the same European would be much more hesitant if posed the questions with respect to Europe. Where does this difference between Chinese and European identity arise? The answer is easily given. A Chinese person is accustomed to thinking of China as a unified cultural and political entity; as an empire. Europeans, on the other hand, think in terms of plurality: a plurality of idioms, cultural regions, religions, and inside religions, confessions. Not to mention, of course, the plurality of nations.

more from Krzysztof Pomian at Eurozine here.

Nancarrow

Dolven_2

Sixty-four pages into his 1930 manifesto of rhythmic experimentation, New Musical Resources, the composer and music theorist Henry Cowell made a passing suggestion about how his more extravagant ideas might be realized: “Some of the rhythms developed through the present acoustical investigation could not be played by any living performer; but these highly engrossing rhythmical complexes could easily be cut on a player piano roll.”1 As far as­ we know, onl­y one man took him up on the proposal, an expat American card-carrying communist jazz trumpeter and polyrhythmic prodigy named Conlon Nancarrow. But this man made it his life’s work.­ ­Nancarrow’s early years are­ s­ummarized in a laconic biography from the January 1938 edition of New Music: “Born 1912, Texarkana, Ark­a­nsas. Studied at Cincinnati Conservatory for two years. Worked way to Europe in 1936. No j­ob since return. Went to Spain to help fight Fascism.” “There is nothing to do but hope for his safe return,” wrote a sympathetic Aaron Copland at the time.

more from Jeff Dolven at Cabinet here.

Money can improve your life, but not in the ways you think

Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe:

ScreenHunter_02 Aug. 25 16.19 Can money buy happiness? Since the invention of money, or nearly enough, people have been telling one another that it can’t. Philosophers and gurus, holy books and self-help manuals have all warned of the futility of equating material gain with true well-being.

Modern research generally backs them up. Psychologists and economists have found that while money does matter to your sense of happiness, it doesn’t matter that much. Beyond the point at which people have enough to comfortably feed, clothe, and house themselves, having more money – even a lot more money – makes them only a little bit happier. So there’s quantitative proof for the preachings of St. Francis and the wisdom of the Buddha. Bad news for hard-charging bankers; good news for struggling musicians.

But starting to emerge now is a different answer to that age-old question. A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can – it’s just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not.

More here.

Pakistan’s Kashmir problem

Alok Rai in the Daily Times:

20090703_ed05 (The present article grew out of a series of exchanges between two friends, one Indian, the other Pakistani. “Kashmir” is a problem with far-reaching consequences for both societies. It is important that members of civil society on both sides of the border talk to each other in a spirit of serious engagement, and so carry forward the people-to-people dialogue beyond the not insignificant level of biryani and banter. It is in that spirit that this view from India is offered.)

My proposition is simple — despite the proclamations of generations of Pakistani leaders, Pakistan’s Kashmir problem has nothing to do with Kashmir. It is a fact that the transfer of power in Kashmir way back at the time of Independence and Partition was a messy business — but that is over and done with.

As far as the UN Resolution is concerned, there is simply no possibility of a return to the status quo ante. Even if it were possible to imagine Pakistani forces vacating “Azad Kashmir” — a.k.a. POK, but why bother to go that way? — and of Indian forces vacating Indian Kashmir, there is no possibility of returning to that time in which the plebiscite was supposed to be held.

More here. [Thanks to Manisha Verma.]