tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-119324572024-03-07T22:32:22.548-05:00Life Like It Is....All about interviews of my favorite celebrities and other articles.....Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.comBlogger91125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-72575814990472498292010-01-03T22:26:00.001-05:002010-01-03T23:43:05.684-05:00The Genesis 2.0 Project<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: x-small; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); line-height: 12px; "><h2 id="articleintro" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font: normal normal normal 17px/normal normal; line-height: 22px; ">Source: Vanity fair</h2><h2 id="articleintro" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font: normal normal normal 17px/normal normal; line-height: 22px; "><br /></h2><h2 id="articleintro" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font: normal normal normal 17px/normal normal; line-height: 22px; ">Compared with the market-driven, killer-app insta-culture of the Digital Age, the new Large Hadron Collider exists in a near-magical realm, a $9 billion cathedral of science that is apparently, in any practical sense, useless. Exploring its whizbang machinery, deep underground, the author probes the collider’s brush with disaster last year—and the secrets it may soon unlock.</h2><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px; "><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "><span class="dc" style="font-size: 43px; float: left; margin-right: 2px; line-height: 38px; display: block; ">A</span>mong the defining attributes of <i>now</i> are ever tinier gadgets, ever shorter attention spans, and the privileging of marketplace values above all. Life is manically parceled into financial quarters, three-minute YouTube videos, 140-character tweets. In my pocket is a phone/computer/camera/video recorder/TV/stereo system half the size of a pack of Marlboros. And what about pursuing knowledge purely for its own sake, without any real thought of, um, monetizing it? Cute.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">And so in our hyper-capitalist flibbertigibbet day and age, the new Large Hadron Collider, buried about 330 feet beneath the Swiss-French border, near Geneva, is a bizarre outlier.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span>, is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours. It’s also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, punctuated by shopping-mall-size subterranean caverns and fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but <i>the largest machine ever built.</i> At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field <i>100,000 times as strong as Earth’s.</i> And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. <i>the coldest place in the universe.</i></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">If all has gone according to plan, the physicists at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> by late November will have flipped a switch, and proton beams in each of two pipes will have started shooting around the ring, one beam clockwise and the other counterclockwise, at an energy level of 3.5 trillion electron volts, several times that of the current most-powerful-particle-accelerator-ever-built. And then, any day now, the L.H.C.’s proton streams will be forced to begin colliding head on, at a combined energy of seven trillion electron volts, producing up to 800 million collisions per second.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">So many years, so much effort, so much money and matériel, so much energy and cutting-edge ingenuity. And yet the wizards at the controls aren’t really out to produce anything practical, or solve any urgent human problem. Rather, the L.H.C. is, essentially, a super-microscope that will use the largest energies ever generated to examine trillionth-of-a-millimeter bits of matter and record evanescent blinks of energy that last for only trillionths of a trillionth of a second. It’s also a kind of time machine, in the sense that it will reproduce the conditions that prevailed 14 billion years ago, giving scientists a look at the universe as it existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang. The goal—and it’s a hope, a dream, a set of strong suspicions, rather than a certainty—is to achieve a deeper, better, truer understanding of the fundamental structure and nature of existence.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">In other words, it’s one of the most awesome scientific enterprises of all time, even though it looks like a monumental folly. Or else, possibly, the reverse.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "></p><h4 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font: normal normal normal 17px/normal normal; ">The Quench</h4><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">When the proton beams start shooting around, it will in fact be for the second time. The On buttons of the new super-collider were first punched on September 10, 2008, and for a while everything was going extraordinarily well. The start-up had been preceded by some well-publicized hysteria on the fringes, with alarmists worrying that the L.H.C. would create a black hole that could swallow the earth. (The fear is unfounded.) There was also a <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> subplot in Dan Brown’s <i>Angels and Demons,</i> in which Illuminati steal anti-matter from the L.H.C. in order to evaporate the Vatican. (Also not a concern—it would take an impossible amount of time and energy to produce enough anti-matter to make a bomb.) On September 10, the physicists at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> could not have been more pleased. Within 50 minutes of the start-up the proton beams were firing perfectly. Plus, says Dave Barney, a British physicist who has devoted his professional life to the collider, “the world hadn’t been destroyed. So that was nice.”</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">But then, Barney notes, “the 19th happened.” By September 19, a Friday, the collider had been humming along for nine days, and proton collisions were imminent. In one of its eight two-mile-long sectors, the power had already been raised almost to the maximum with no problems, while seven of the eight sectors were “commissioned,” or fully activated. The last to go was the sector beneath the French villages of Crozet and Échenevex, at the foot of the Jura Mountains. Around noon the power there was cranked up past 5 trillion electron volts, toward 5.5.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The tunnel of the L.H.C. is a 12-foot-wide concrete tube, like a very large sewer pipe but lit and air-conditioned for the technicians who must access the machinery. The accelerator consists of 1,232 cylinders, each of them 50 feet long and 2 feet thick, strung through the tunnel like a 17-mile chain of 35-ton sausage links laid in a circle. The proton beams are fired through three-inch pipes embedded in the center of the sausages. Surrounding those pipes inside the giant sausages are powerful electromagnets, which make the protons travel in their great circles at nearly the speed of light. And surrounding each of the magnets—the sausage casing—is a jacket of liquid helium to cool the super-conducting cables. When they’re turned on, the force inside, pushing out against the super-hardened steel container, is equal to the power of a 747 taking off.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The big magnetic sausages are called dipoles, and the bundled cables connecting each one to its end-to-end neighbor are packed inside copper casings the size of a cigarette lighter. Each casing is filled with solder to make the connection solid. As it happened, that was the source of the problem: one of the copper casings on one of the dipoles had not been properly soldered. And so, around midday on September 19, 2008, the connection “quenched”—which means a super-conducting cable suddenly lost its super-conductivity, turning into an ordinarily conductive wire that couldn’t take the 11,000 amps of electricity.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">Sparks erupted. An intense electrical arc began burning a hole in the dipole’s steel jacket. Pressurized helium turned from liquid to gas and blasted into the tunnel, creating a huge pressure wave. In a domino-like chain reaction, 35-ton dipoles were jerking and smashing against other 35-ton dipoles, some blown two feet off their moorings.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The main damage was done within 20 seconds. It was all over a half-minute after that. Ten of the million-dollar dipoles were wrecked and smoldering. Twenty-nine more were damaged. The destruction extended for more than 2,000 feet, and smoke and soot billowed through the tunnel. In the vicinity of the accident the air had been instantly supercooled by the tons of escaping helium—which meant that several hundred feet underground, sealed off from skies and weather, snow began to fall. “Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice,” wrote Robert Frost, but in this sector of the Large Hadron Collider, the showstopping spectacle involved both at once.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">Up on the surface, in the control rooms, there was in fact no sound, no bump, no rumble. No sirens or Klaxons went off. But in the main control room, someone noticed that green tabs on one of the 300 computer monitors had suddenly turned red: the emergency Stop buttons in the tunnel had been hit. No one had been down there to hit them—the tremendous pressure wave of escaping helium had fortuitously done the job.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">More monitors started turning red. “The beam is gone,” Alick Macpherson, a particle physicist from New Zealand, said to the scientists around him. In many languages at once people quietly muttered “Fuck” and “Shit.”</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "></p><h4 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font: normal normal normal 17px/normal normal; ">A Theory of Everything</h4><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">At <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span>, people generally refer to the catastrophe simply as “September 19.” And they can’t help but think about it as they get ready, more than a year later, to try again. For particle physics, the Large Hadron Collider is pretty much the whole ball game. Its 26-year-old predecessor, the U.S. government’s Tevatron, at Fermilab, outside Chicago—an accelerator less than one-fourth as big and one-seventh as powerful as the L.H.C.—is supposed to be decommissioned at the end of 2010. If this new collider doesn’t produce groundbreaking discoveries, particle physics will have reached a dead end for a generation or more. The theorists would keep theorizing. But without hard experimental data pouring out of the L.H.C., says Jim Virdee, a Kenyan-born British-Indian physicist with the L.H.C., then “particle physics, the whole thing, becomes metaphysics.”</p><img src="http://www.vanityfair.com/images/culture/2010/01/hadron-collider-1001-05.jpg" alt="Collider map" title="Collider map" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; display: block; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; " /><div class="inlineimage right" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 15px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; display: block; float: right; "><p class="caption" style="margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 12px; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Verdana; width: 200px; ">The Large Hadron Collider is the circular structure itself. Four main experiments lie along the path.</p></div><br /><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">To the rest of us, the refinements of knowledge the physicists are after seem supremely abstruse—so beyond ordinary understanding that they might as well be metaphysics, or computer-generated poetry. The mission, for instance, of <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">alice</span> (short for “A Large Ion Collider Experiment”), one of the four experiments at the L.H.C., is “to study vector meson resonances, charm and beauty through the measurement of leptonic observables.” And how many angels <i>can</i> dance on the head of a pin?</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The history of particle physics is like a Russian nested doll, with each new generation of physicists prying open the next, smaller doll. First, a century ago, they opened up the atom and found the most obvious particles, the nucleus and its orbiting electrons. Then they opened up the nucleus and found the protons and neutrons. Inside these they found quarks and gluons. And so on. The buzzing energy “strings” hypothesized by superstring theory for the past couple of decades—and never observed in any experiment so far—may be the last and tiniest of the nesting dolls, the most fundamental components of the universe.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">One of the paradoxes of physics is that as knowledge has dramatically grown—thanks to particle physicists opening the smaller and smaller dolls, and to astrophysicists measuring the distances and movements and energies of stars—so has our awareness of the vastness of our ignorance. That is, physicists now say that all the visible matter in the universe—galaxies, stars, asteroids, comets, gases, planets, you, this magazine—amounts to just 4 percent of the total, and that the remaining 96 percent consists of “dark energy” (about three quarters) and “dark matter” (about one quarter). But those names are really just black-box placeholders (like “God”). The only evidence for their existence is entirely indirect.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">That paradox—knowledge increasing as uncertainty and incompleteness also increase—is problematic when it comes to what particle physicists call their Standard Model. As the name suggests, the Standard Model, developed over the last half-century, is meant to be the definitive diagram of that nested doll. The model’s premises and predictions have been confirmed again and again by experiments at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> and elsewhere. It seems to explain how all the particles that make up visible matter stick together. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it doesn’t say anything about gravity or dark matter or dark energy. James Gillies, an Oxford-educated particle physicist (and <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span>’s P.R. director), puts it this way: the Standard Model is what “quantum physics has been all about testing since the 1970s, and proving. But it can’t be right.” What he really means is: It can’t be all there is.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">With the Large Hadron Collider, the physicists think they will find the last remaining puzzle piece that confirms the Standard Model and, even better, get some glimpses of a vast and tantalizing terra incognita. They hope to be able to move beyond the Standard Model the way Einstein moved beyond Newton with his theories of relativity, not by disproving Newtonian physics wholesale but by correcting and expanding upon it.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">In other words, the L.H.C. is a machine that will really justify itself only if it enables paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. “I hope there will be many eureka moments,” says Fabiola Gianotti, a physicist from Milan who heads the L.H.C.’s big <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">atlas</span> experiment. (That strenuously reverse-engineered acronym stands for “A Toroidal L.<span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">h.c.</span> ApparatuS.”) “Whatever else,” says John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span>, “we should get Higgs and supersymmetry. Higgs is the bread and butter. That’s our core business.” The Higgs boson, named after the British physicist Peter Higgs, who predicted its existence in the 1960s, is the one particle predicted by the Standard Model that hasn’t yet been found. And it’s not just some stray, inconsequential leftover piece but a keystone of the whole structure: the Higgs field, associated with Higgs bosons, is imagined to be a kind of subatomic “molasses” that imparts mass to other particles passing through it. The consensus at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> is that it will probably take a few years to find the Higgs. (A pair of physicists have suggested, winsomely and implausibly, that last year’s snafu was the result of some entity from the future attempting to prevent the L.H.C. from creating Higgs bosons—somehow and for some reason committing sabotage-by-time-travel, Terminator-style.)</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">But then there’s the important question of how big the Higgs boson turns out to be. If it comes in at a certain size, that would mean that the universe is stable and not doomed to decay—which Ellis calls the “massive conceivable disaster scenario.”</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">But wouldn’t such a finding—stability! a never-ending universe!—be a happy outcome? “It’s great for the universe,” Ellis concedes, “but disastrous for theoretical physicists.” Professor Higgs, who is now 80, agrees. “If you find the Higgs and nothing else,” he told Gillies recently, that would be the worst possible result, “because then we have a complete Standard Model—which we know is wrong in fundamental ways.” It would be as if we’d known for the last century that Newton’s picture of the universe was flawed and incomplete, but never had Einstein or his followers to move us along to a bigger, more correct picture. On the other hand, Ellis says, “it would be exciting if we proved Higgs <i>didn’t</i> exist. I’d love to be shocked and surprised.” That is, he’d rather have the last several decades of conventional wisdom in physics upended than have the next several decades rendered inconclusive, impotent, and boring.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "><span class="dc" style="font-size: 43px; float: left; margin-right: 2px; line-height: 38px; display: block; ">A</span>part from discovering (or not discovering) the Higgs, the best odds for a thrilling eureka moment from the L.H.C. would be on discovering that supersymmetry exists. “We have a religion,” an American physicist and <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> lifer named Steven Goldfarb confessed one day over lunch, “and that’s symmetry.” As yin is twinned with yang and Christ with Antichrist, so does matter have its equal and opposite anti-matter, and they destroy each other on contact—so that, according to the guiding principle of symmetry, at the moment of the big bang, all the matter and anti-matter should have canceled themselves out, leaving nothing behind. Not only did that not happen—we are among the evidence that it didn’t—but 14 billion years later there is a lot more matter than anti-matter in the universe. Something has to explain that mysterious imbalance, and the betting is that it’s supersymmetry, the idea that for every known particle there’s an as-yet-undetected “superpartner”—and that dark matter consists of those superpartners. There’s a very good chance that the proton collisions at the L.H.C. will create some of those primordial bits—maybe next year, says Jim Virdee, who runs the collider’s C.M.S. experiment, “if nature is kind.” (C.M.S. stands for “Compact Muon Solenoid”—don’t ask.) If that happens, in one stroke “we’ve figured out 25 percent of the universe,” says Gillies.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The L.H.C. discoveries that would make regular people stand up and pay attention, though, are somewhat longer shots. After the Higgs is found (or not) and supersymmetrical particles of dark matter produced (or not), Ellis says, “we can find extra dimensions, black holes, all sorts of weird and wonderful things.”</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "><i>Wait a second:</i> black holes? Yes, though not the kind that alarmists have been screaming about. The doomsday chatter reached critical mass last year when a high-school teacher and botanical-garden manager in Hawaii named Walter Wagner filed a federal lawsuit to prevent the L.H.C. from operating, on the grounds that it might create a massive, world-destroying black hole. This has been a longtime side career for Wagner, who had also tried to stop the Brookhaven National Laboratory from turning on its own, smaller accelerator. But this time, with the help of cable news channels and the Web, he had a much bigger platform, and mainstream media consistently took the apocalypse possibility seriously. The federal lawsuit was dismissed, but it was left to <i>The Daily Show</i> to definitively call a spade a spade and a loon a loon. Interviewed by the show’s John Oliver last spring, Wagner insisted, moronically, that the chance of the L.H.C. destroying the earth was 50-50, since it will either happen or it won’t.</p><img src="http://www.vanityfair.com/images/culture/2010/01/hadron-collider-1001-03.jpg" class="left" alt="" title="" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 15px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; display: block; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; float: left; " /><p class="caption" style="margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); font: normal normal normal 10px/normal verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; ">The detector for another collider experiment—this one beneath the Swiss town of Meyrin—is known as <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">alice</span>. Particles destined for collisions travel inside the blue pipe.</p><div class="clearb" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; clear: both; font-size: 0.1em; line-height: 0.1em; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; "></div><br /><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The kind of black holes that Ellis has in mind are harmless ones, microscopic and incredibly short-lived, although produced, if they are produced, by the thousands or millions a year. “That will take time,” says<span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span>’s director general, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, and probably only when the L.H.C. is running at maximum power. But if micro black holes do appear, Ellis says, it would be “fantastically exciting,” since they would imply the existence of additional spatial dimensions beyond the three we know. Finding new dimensions would be exciting for us civilians, but, for physicists, it may hold the key to creating, at long last, a unified physics that makes sense of both the tiny-scale forces that hold atoms together and the gravity that pulls on everything we can actually see. Some physicists think the reason gravity is comparatively weak is that it gets diluted as it courses in and out of other, unseen dimensions. If extra dimensions are indeed found at the L.H.C., then string theory—already the leading candidate to become the unified Theory of Everything—would suddenly seem a lot more real.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">Maria Spiropulu, a Greek-born Cal Tech–affiliated physicist who wears scuffed jeans and sneakers without laces (and used to be in a band called Drug Sniffing Dogs), radiates confidence about imminent breakthroughs. When I say that her experiment, C.M.S., is “simulating the conditions” at the beginning of the universe, she emphatically corrects me. “No—we’re <i>re-creating</i> those conditions. We will find out the fundamental nature of how the universe is created.” And even the relatively tentative, low-key Gianotti has little doubt that what they’re about to discover will rank with “Copernicus, Einstein, quantum mechanics. I do expect a revolution.”</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "></p><h4 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font: normal normal normal 17px/normal normal; ">Republic of Wizards</h4><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The quest is as profound as it gets: what are we (and everything else in the universe) made of, what was it like at the beginning of time, and how does it all actually work? The fact that the L.H.C. is a magnificently expensive gamble that has no short-term payoff is what makes it noble and stirring.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">Just before my journey to Geneva, I’d happened to read Richard Holmes’s new book, <i>The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science,</i> a history of a group of scientist-adventurers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who discovered comets and Uranus and Tahiti and hot-air ballooning. As I wandered the subterranean bowels of the L.H.C. and talked with a score of the physicists who have devoted their careers to it, the beauty and terror and romance were everywhere. Just as George III was persuaded by the self-taught astronomer William Herschel 228 years ago to spend an enormous royal sum to build what was then the world’s largest, most powerful telescope, the physicists at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> have their generous patrons in governments all over the world.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The L.H.C. is the largest machine and, after the Manhattan Project, the most elaborate scientific enterprise of all time, but it’s also, to my postmodern eyes, the largest art project ever built, as well as a quasi-religious undertaking. All sorts of people make pilgrimages to the L.H.C. simply in order to be awestruck, the way they visit Stonehenge or Machu Picchu or the pyramids. On one of the days I toured the L.H.C., I was joined by the art collector Francesca von Habsburg and her 12-year-old son, Archduke Ferdinand; the Icelandic pop musician Einar Örn Benediktsson, formerly of the Sugarcubes; and ex–Sex Pistol Glen Matlock. A quarter-century in the making, the L.H.C. is a 21st-century cathedral of science, where thousands of passionately devoted, hardworking physicists—monks by any other name—have gathered to experience epiphany and revelation, and continue writing Genesis 2.0.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">Many of the scientists, not surprisingly, bridle at the suggestion that what they’re doing is gloriously impractical or akin, even in the best sense, to the uselessness of art or religion. But Fabiola Gianotti’s education was focused on music and literature until she took up physics in college, and she totally gets the art part. “We have dreams,” she says. “It’s like art. Is art useless? Yes and no. The concepts [of particle physics] are so beautiful in their simplicity. And they answer the most fundamental questions. Physics and art are two forms of the same wish of human intuition, to understand nature.”</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "><span class="dc" style="font-size: 43px; float: left; margin-right: 2px; line-height: 38px; display: block; ">A</span>bout half the particle physicists on earth are on the L.H.C. team, some 7,200 in all. About 1,500 of them are full-time, working and living around the collider. (One researcher, a young Frenchman of Algerian origin, was arrested in October by French authorities, accused of contacting al-Qaeda.) Although the United States isn’t officially part of the 20-country, all-European <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> consortium, more of the scientists on site are American than any other nationality. (The U.S. government also chipped in $542 million to build the L.H.C. and its detectors.) As a particle physicist, says Rolf-Dieter Heuer, “you have to be flexible. You have to go where the accelerator is.” Now 61, he spent 14 years working on the L.H.C.’s predecessor, the Large Electron Positron collider, which occupied the same 17-mile tunnel before it shut down, in 2000. After a decade back home in Germany, he returned to <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> to start running the place. “They pulled me back in. You don’t say no.”</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">Physically, <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> is charmingly tatty. It was founded in the 1950s, and many of the original office and lab buildings—unfabulous International Style low-rises from the time when particle accelerators were known as atom smashers—are still in use. <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> looks and feels like a cross between an office–cum–industrial park and a university campus—but, except for the casual modern wardrobe (jeans, shorts, no ties), a university in the 1950s or 60s, with few women or people of color, and plenty of cigarette smoking. Because the physicists come from dozens of countries, the lingua franca among the scientists in this French-speaking patch of Europe is English. The streets are named after giants of the past—Route A. Einstein, Route N. Bohr, Route M. Curie—but the big science pursued at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> is of a very 21st-century kind, less a habitat for solitary geniuses than a well-organized hive of thousands of smart people each doing his or her bit for the collective mission.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">I was repeatedly reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s remark that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> may be the closest thing real life has to Hogwarts, an institution where arcane arts amounting to sorcery are pursued by a cultish guild of masters and their young protégés. (Rolf-Dieter Heuer, lanky and white-bearded, witty and wise and a bit stern, makes a fine Dumbledore.) I am a longtime subscriber to <i>Scientific American,</i> follow science pretty closely, and have the journalist’s ability to fake fluency in all kinds of subjects, but on my last afternoon at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> I was exposed as a total Muggle among the wizards. Stephen Hawking arrived to deliver a lecture called “Spontaneous Creation of the Universe” to a standing-room-only audience. For 25 of his 30 minutes I simply had no clue at all what he was saying, none, and it wasn’t because of his electronic voice synthesizer. I realized that the physicists with whom I’d been speaking all week had been radically dumbing down their explanations so that I, a functional fifth-grader, might achieve some tiny glimmer of understanding.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">Another strange thing about the place is the way it’s run. Unlike a college or think tank, at the L.H.C. everyone’s work has the same unambiguous focus: building and running a collider on an unprecedented scale, which involves designing and ordering and assembling millions of incredibly precise, one-off parts from all over the world. You’d think it would need to be governed like a brutally efficient corporate or military enterprise, with strict, top-down command and control. But, amazingly, it’s more or less a direct democracy, maybe the most successful since ancient Athens.</p><img src="http://www.vanityfair.com/images/culture/2010/01/hadron-collider-1001-04.jpg" class="left" alt="" title="" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 15px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; display: block; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; float: left; " /><p class="caption" style="margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); font: normal normal normal 10px/normal verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; ">The venerable Gargamelle bubble chamber (1973), the particle detector used to make the first great discovery at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span>. <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span>’s director general, Rolf-Dieter Heuer (second from left), is flanked by physicists John Ellis, Steve Myers, and Fabiola Gianotti.</p><div class="clearb" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; clear: both; font-size: 0.1em; line-height: 0.1em; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; "></div><br /><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">“The model is: Everyone’s equal,” says Gillies. “It’s management by consensus.” The leaders and deputy leaders of each of the experimental teams are elected by fellow scientists to a fixed term. Team leaders are called “spokespeople.” Heuer says governance is a <i>sui generis</i> crossbreed of a private company and a university, with “the chaos of hundreds of university professors. The top guy”—meaning himself, and the heads of each of the L.H.C.’s experiments—“can only <i>convince</i> the other guys to do what he wants them to do. That I find fascinating. Even with a democratic approach, you need to know where you want to go” and provide “clear line management.” So, I suggest, his job is creating for all these independent-minded brainiacs the illusion of democracy? “‘Illusion’ is too strong, but … ” He laughs. “Of course, you are right to some extent.”</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "></p><h4 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font: normal normal normal 17px/normal normal; ">Collisions by Christmas</h4><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">During the past year, the efforts of everyone have been bent toward a single task: fixing the collider. The repairs have cost nearly $40 million. The pipes have been cleared of soot. All 9,560 solders have been tested. Thirty of the damaged dipoles have been replaced with the entire stock of spares, 600 more have been fitted with new helium-release valves, and all the dipoles have been anchored to the floor more securely. The machinery is now supposed to withstand an accident 20 times the size of the previous worst-case scenario.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">When I visited this past fall, the hard hats were finishing up, replacing components and checking cables. The astonishing physical scale of the space underground makes visitors gasp and grin and gaze openmouthed. The first vertiginous moments of wonder come at the lips of the concrete shafts into which gantry cranes have lowered giant pieces of machinery, piece by Brobdingnagian piece, into the subterranean caverns. At the edge of one 33-story shaft, a tennis-court-size rectangular opening next to a circular one, I had a déjà vu moment: the shaft is a scaled-up, super-duper-size version of Michael Heizer’s (enormous) artwork <i>North, East, South, West,</i> at the Dia:Beacon museum in New York.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The heart of each of the four experiments is a detector, inside which the proton collisions will take place and the resulting splashes of particles will be tracked. The detector for the C.M.S. experiment weighs 28 million pounds, the heaviest instrument ever constructed, heavier than the Eiffel Tower. Its centerpiece magnet alone weighs more than four million pounds and took 10 hours to lower 300 feet, touching the floor within one-twentieth of an inch of its intended place, then nudged to within one-hundredth of an inch. The machine for another main experiment, <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">atlas</span>, is lighter, but in volume it’s the largest scientific instrument in history, 150 feet long and 80 feet high.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">Passing through the electronic security gates (door opens, enter cage, door closes, stand in yellow-painted square, look at iris-scanning ID device, second door opens, proceed), you begin to feel as if you’ve stepped into a movie. The full-color video-surveillance monitors and illuminated signs—<span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">danger: magnetic field</span> and <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">in case of alarm do not go down</span>—seem like slightly stagy props, as do the French and Swiss flags at every point where the 17-mile tunnel crosses the border.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">Down in the caverns, the experience becomes a full-bore cinematic pastiche. I was reduced to monosyllabic Keanu Reevesian awe, repeatedly saying “<i>Whoa</i>” as I encountered the sci-fi vistas—Ernst Blofeld’s volcano fortress crossed with a <i>Star Wars</i> rebel hangar crossed with Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and Zion from <i>The Matrix Reloaded.</i></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); "><span class="dc" style="font-size: 43px; float: left; margin-right: 2px; line-height: 38px; display: block; ">A</span>nd now, once more, it’s showtime. When the L.H.C. starts running again, I wondered, where will the zillions of protons in the beam actually come from? Dave Barney took me for a long walk, down alleys, through parking lots, and into one of <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span>’s nondescript 1950s buildings. “There,” he said, pointing at a red cylinder that looked like the fire extinguisher I keep in my kitchen. He told me it’s a one-liter tank of hydrogen. I was flabbergasted. A $9 billion, 17-mile-long, unfathomably complex contraption meant to unlock the mysteries of the universe … and that’s it, the source, the wellspring? Yes, he said. “That will feed the L.H.C. forever with protons of hydrogen. It’s all fed from that tiny gas bottle.”</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">Atom by atom, the electrons will be stripped from each hydrogen nucleus to create free protons, which will then be beamed into a series of four pre-accelerators of increasing size, one after another, in a kind of loop-de-loop, each pre-accelerator powering the beam up by a factor of 10 or 20 or 30, finally up to 3.5 and—sometime early in the new year—7 trillion electron volts. As the energy increases, the beams will narrow, be steered and focused from the main control room, and then be “injected” into the collider. (I finally indulged my inner 12-year-old, asking one of the top managers of the accelerator team, Paolo Fessia, if I’d feel a proton beam if it were pointed at me. “I’ve never thought about that,” he replied. But he said it would bore a quarter-mile-long hole through any material.) The excitement will peak when the protons start colliding and the machine thereby achieves, in the lovely term of art, “luminosity.” According to Heuer, “We should have collisions before Christmas.” He’s amused enough by his alliterative holiday promise to repeat it: “Collisions by Christmas!”</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The resulting gushers of raw data will be winnowed in real time, both automatically by software algorithms and on the fly by human number crunchers. The distilled one-tenth of 1 percent of the data—the equivalent of 55,000 CDs’ worth of information each day—will be sluiced out to 160 different academic institutions. To be sure, says Gillies, “it wouldn’t be possible without the Web.” How fortunate, then, that at the very moment the L.H.C. was being dreamed up at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span>, 20 years ago, so was the World Wide Web, by a computer programmer at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> named Tim Berners-Lee. The moral: <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span>-style science for science’s sake is not to be pooh-poohed, even when it seems impossibly arcane.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.1em; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); ">The excitement among the scientists at <span class="sc" style="font-variant: small-caps; ">cern</span> is palpable. They are explorers who have prepared for decades and are finally about to set off for uncharted regions. They will work around the clock. “This machine will be giving good science for years,” Heuer says, actually rubbing his hands. Just the other day, Karl Gill, a British physicist on the C.M.S. experiment, started preparing his family for the new rhythms of his life. “I said to my wife, ‘I’ll have to work shifts.’ She asked, ‘For how long?’” He smiled a little sheepishly. “Oh,” he told her, “for 10 or 15 years. For the rest of my life.”</p><p class="caption" style="margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: none; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; color: rgb(46, 43, 30); font: normal normal normal 10px/normal verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; "><b><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/search/query?queryType=nonparsed&sort=score+desc&query=Kurt+Andersen&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&submit=Submit" onclick="s_objectID="http://www.vanityfair.com/search/query?queryType=nonparsed&sort=score+desc&query=Kurt+Andersen&su_2";return this.s_oc?this.s_oc(e):true" style="color: rgb(22, 80, 126); text-decoration: none; ">Kurt Andersen</a></b> is a <i>Vanity Fair</i> contributing editor.</p><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:85%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"><br /></span></span></div></span></div></span>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-7131401561244411412009-11-16T12:10:00.001-05:002009-11-16T12:12:37.902-05:00Bellying up to environmentalismSource: Washington Post<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"> <div id="byline">By James E. McWilliams</div> Monday, November 16, 2009 </span><p> </p> <span id="aptureStartContent"></span> <p> I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. "Plus," he added, "what I eat is my business -- it's personal."<br /></p><p> I've been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I'd never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal? </p> <p>We know more than we've ever known about the innards of the global food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment. We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives -- the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we need. </p> <p>So it's hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal. What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political. </p> <p>This realization changes everything for those who avoid meat. As a vegetarian I've always felt the perverse need to apologize for my dietary choice. It inconveniences people. It smacks of self-righteousness. It makes us pariahs at dinner parties. But the more I learn about the negative impact of meat production, the more I feel that it's the consumers of meat who should be making apologies. </p> <p>Here's why: The livestock industry as a result of its reliance on corn and soy-based feed accounts for over half the synthetic fertilizer used in the United States, contributing more than any other sector to marine dead zones. It consumes 70 percent of the water in the American West -- water so heavily subsidized that if irrigation supports were removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound. Livestock accounts for at least 21 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions globally -- more than all forms of transportation combined. Domestic animals -- most of them healthy -- consume about 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced. Undigested antibiotics leach from manure into freshwater systems and impair the sex organs of fish.<br /></p><p> It takes a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of conventional beef. If all the grain fed to animals went to people, you could feed China and India. That's just a start. </p> <p>Meat that's raised according to "alternative" standards (about 1 percent of meat in the United States) might be a better choice but not nearly as much so as its privileged consumers would have us believe. "Free-range chickens" theoretically have access to the outdoors. But many "free-range" chickens never see the light of day because they cannot make it through the crowded shed to the aperture leading to a patch of cement. </p> <p>"Grass-fed" beef produces four times the methane -- a greenhouse gas 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide -- of grain-fed cows, and many grass-fed cows are raised on heavily fertilized and irrigated grass. Pastured pigs are still typically mutilated, fed commercial feed and prevented from rooting -- their most basic instinct besides sex. </p> <p>Issues of animal welfare are equally implicated in all forms of meat production. Domestic animals suffer immensely, feel pain and may even be cognizant of the fate that awaits them. In an egg factory, male chicks (economically worthless) are summarily run through a grinder. Pigs are castrated without anesthesia, crated, tail-docked and nose-ringed. Milk cows are repeatedly impregnated through artificial insemination, confined to milking stalls and milked to yield 15 times the amount of milk they would produce under normal conditions. When calves are removed from their mothers at birth, the mothers mourn their loss with heart-rending moans. </p> <p>Then comes the slaughterhouse, an operation that's left with millions of pounds of carcasses -- deadstock -- that are incinerated or dumped in landfills. (Rendering plants have taken a nose dive since mad cow disease.) </p> <p>Now, if someone told you that a particular corporation was trashing the air, water and soil; causing more global warming than the transportation industry; consuming massive amounts of fossil fuel; unleashing the cruelest sort of suffering on innocent and sentient beings; failing to recycle its waste; and clogging our arteries in the process, how would you react? Would you say, "Hey, that's personal?" Probably not. It's more likely that you'd frame the matter as a dire political issue in need of a dire political response. </p> <p>Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can make to industrialized food. It's a necessary prerequisite to reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food apparatus at its foundation. </p> <p>Agribusiness has been vilified of late by muckraking journalists, activist filmmakers and sustainable-food advocates. We know that <i>something</i> has to be done to save our food from corporate interests. But I wonder -- are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we've been inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice. </p> <p>Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change. </p> <p> <i>James E. McWilliams, an associate professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos and a recent fellow in the agrarian studies program at Yale University, is most recently the author of "Just Food."</i> </p><p><br /></p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-47697831874897488832009-09-23T14:14:00.001-04:002009-09-23T14:17:38.044-04:00Why Does Music Make Us Feel?Source: Scientific American<br /><br /><h2>A new study demonstrates the power of music to alter our emotional perceptions of other people</h2> <p> By <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/author.cfm?id=2154">Mark Changizi</a> </p><br />As a young man I enjoyed listening to a particular series of French instructional programs. I didn’t understand a word, but was nevertheless enthralled. Was it because the sounds of human speech are thrilling? Not really. Speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire. We don’t wake up to alarm clocks blaring German speech. We don’t drive to work listening to native spoken Eskimo, and then switch it to the Bushmen Click station during the commercials. Speech sounds don’t give us the chills, and they don’t make us cry – not even French. <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> But music <em>does</em> emanate from our alarm clocks in the morning, and fill our cars, and give us chills, and make us cry. According to a recent paper by Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep Bhattacharya from the University of London, music even affects how we see visual images<em>. </em> In the experiment, 30 subjects were presented with a series of happy or sad musical excerpts. After listening to the snippets, the subjects were shown a photograph of a face. Some people were shown a happy face – the person was smiling - while others were exposed to a sad or neutral facial expression. The participants were then asked to rate the emotional content of the face on a 7-point scale, where 1 mean extremely sad and 7 extremely happy. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> The researchers found that music powerfully influenced the emotional ratings of the faces. Happy music made happy faces seem even happier while sad music exaggerated the melancholy of a frown. A similar effect was also observed with neutral faces. The simple moral is that the emotions of music are “cross-modal,” and can easily spread from sensory system to another. Now I never sit down to my wife’s meals without first putting on a jolly Sousa march.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> Although it probably seems obvious that music can evoke emotions, it is to this day not clear why. Why doesn’t music feel like listening to speech sounds, or animal calls, or garbage disposals? Why is music <em>nice</em> to listen to? Why does music get blessed with a multi-billion dollar industry, whereas there is no market for “easy listening” speech sounds?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> In an effort to answer, let’s first ask why I was listening to French instructional programs in the first place. The truth is, I wasn’t just listening. I was <em>watching</em> them on public television. What kept my attention was not the meaningless-to-me speech sounds (I was a slow learner), but the young French actress. Her hair, her smile, her mannerisms, her pout… I digress. The show was a pleasure to watch because of the <em>humans</em> it showed, especially the exhibited expressions and behaviors.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> The lion share of emotionally evocative stimuli in the lives of our ancestors would have been from the faces and bodies of other <em>people</em>, and if one finds human artifacts that are highly evocative, it is a good hunch that it looks or sounds <em>human</em> in some way.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> As evidence that humans are the principal source of emotionality among human artifacts, consider human visual signs. Visual signs, I have argued, have culturally evolved to look like natural objects, and have the kinds of contour combinations found in a three-dimensional world of opaque objects. Three-dimensional world of opaque objects? Nothing particularly human about that, and that’s why most linguistic signs – like the letters and words on this page – are not emotionally evocative to look at.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> But visual signs do <em>sometimes </em> have emotional associations. For example, colors are notoriously emotionally evocative, and arguments about what color something should be painted are the source of an alarming number of marital arguments. And “V” stimuli, such as that yield sign on the street, have long been realized (within the human factors literature) to serve as the most evocative geometrical shape for warning symbols. But notice that color and “V” stimuli are plausibly about human expression. In particular, color has recently been argued to be “about” human skin and the exhibited emotions – which is why red grabs our attention, since it's associated with blushing and blood - and “V” stimuli have been suggested to be “about” angry faces (namely, angry eyebrows). </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> Which brings us back to music and the Logeswaran paper. Music is exquisitely emotionally evocative, which is why a touch of happy music makes even unrelated pictures seem more pleasant. In light of the above, then, we are led to the conclusion that the artifact of music should contain some distinctly human elements.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> The question, of course, is what those elements are. One candidate is our expressive speech – perhaps music is just an abstract form of language. However, most of the emotion of language is in the meaning, which is why foreign languages that we don’t understand rarely make us swoon with pleasure or get angry. That’s also why emotional speech from an unfamiliar language isn’t featured on the radio!</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> But there is a second auditory expressive behavior we humans carry out – our bodily movements themselves. Human movement has been conjectured to underlie music as far back as the Greeks. As a hypothesis this has the advantage that we have auditory systems capable of making sense of the sounds of people moving in our midst – an angry stomper approaching, a delicate lilter passing, and so on. Some of these movements trigger positive emotions – they conjure up images of pleasant activities – while others might be automatically associated with fear or anxiety. (The sound of running makes us wonder what we’re running from.) If music were speech-driven, then it is missing out on the largest part of speech’s expressiveness – the meaning. But if music sounds like human expressive movements, then it sounds like something that, all by itself, is rich in emotional expressiveness, and can be easily interpreted by the auditory system.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> Regardless of whether music is emotional intonation from speech or a summary of expressive movements – or something else altogether – the new research by Logeswaran and Bhattacharya adds yet more fuel to the expectation that music has been culturally selected to sound like an emotionally expressive human. While it is not easy for us to see the human ingredients in the modulations of pitch, intensity, tempo and rhythm that make music, perhaps it is obvious to our auditory homunculus.</p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-53548690925289750502009-06-18T11:42:00.002-04:002009-06-18T11:45:21.869-04:00Fact or Fiction: Dogs Can TalkSource: Scientific American<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px;"><h2 style="margin: 2px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 8px; font-size: 1.4em; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); text-transform: none; font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 15px;">Are human speech-like vocalizations made by some mammals equivalent to conversation--or just a rough estimation of it?</h2><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-size: 1.15em;">By<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/author.cfm?id=2069" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(10, 161, 221); text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Tina Adler</a> <br /></p></span></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">Maya, a noisy, seven-year-old pooch, looks straight at me. And with just a little prompting from her owner says, "I love you." Actually, she says "Ahh rooo uuu!"</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">Maya is working hard to produce what sounds like real speech. "She makes these sounds that really, really sound like words to everyone who hears her, but I think you have to believe," says her owner, Judy Brookes.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;"><br /></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">You've probably seen this<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCYaw5tGYAs" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(10, 161, 221); text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">sort of scene on<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">YouTube</em></a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ERSFuSm4rY" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(10, 161, 221); text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">David Letterman</a>. These dog owners may be onto something: Psychologist and dog expert<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.stanleycoren.com/" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(10, 161, 221); text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Stanley Coren</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of the University of British Columbia tells the story of a colleague who always greeted her dog, Brandy, with a cheerful, two-syllable "Hel-lo!" It wasn't long until Brandy returned the greeting, which sounded very much like her owner's salutation, says Coren, author of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">How to Speak Dog: Mastering the Art of Dog–Human Communication</em>.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">But do dogs really talk? Back in 1912 Harry Miles Johnson of Johns Hopkins University said, emphatically, "no." In a paper in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Science</em>, he generally agreed with the findings of Oskar Pfungst of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Berlin who studied a dog famous for its large vocabulary. The dog's speech is "the production of vocal sounds which produce illusion in the hearer," Johnson wrote.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">He went on to warn that we should not be surprised if "scientists of a certain class…proclaim that they have completely demonstrated the presence in lower animals of 'intelligent imitation'."</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">Nothing in the last century has really changed that scientific opinion. (No one has ever questioned whether dogs communicate with each other, but calling it "talking" is something else.) So what are Maya and her cousins doing? It's more appropriate to call it imitating than talking, says Gary Lucas, a visiting scholar in psychology at Indiana University Bloomington. Dogs vocalize with each other to convey emotions—and they express their emotions by varying their tones, he says. So it pays for dogs to be sensitive to different tones. Dogs are able to imitate humans as well as they do because they pick up on the differences in our tonal patterns.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">Lucas likens this behavior to that of bonobos, primates that can imitate some tonal patterns, including vowel sounds, pitch changes, and rhythms, studies show. "The vocal skills of some of the dogs and cats on<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">YouTube</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>suggest that they might also have some selective tonal imitation skills," he says.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">What's happening between dog and owner-turned-voice-coach is fairly straightforward, Coren says: Owner hears the dog making a sound that resembles a phrase, says the phrase back to the dog, who then repeats the sound and is rewarded with a treat. Eventually the dog learns a modified version of her original sound. As Lucas puts it, "dogs have limited vocal imitation skills, so these sounds usually need to be shaped by selective attention and social reward."</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">In the Letterman video "a pug says, 'I love you' and it's very cute, but the pug has<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">no</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>idea what it means," Coren says. "If dogs could talk, they would tell you, 'I'm just in it for the cookies.'"</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">Scientists have made some progress in their study of this important subject: They've<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Uniquely-Human-Evolution-Selfless-Behavior/dp/0674921836" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(10, 161, 221); text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">learned why dogs, and other animals, have rather poor pronunciation</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and, for example, completely botch consonants. They "don't use their tongues and lips very well, and that makes it difficult for them to match many of the sounds that their human partners make," Lucas says. "Try saying 'puppy' without using your lips and tongue."</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">Despite what they may lack in the elocution department, dogs<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">do<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>communicate their feelings to humans as well as read our cues, thanks to domestication,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.eva.mpg.de/primat/staff/julia_riedel/" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(10, 161, 221); text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Julia Riedel<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></a> and colleagues of the Max Planck Institute (M.P.I.) for Evolutionary Anthropology<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W9W-4R34F48-2&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F31%2F2008&_alid=928960525&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=6693&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=2&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d505971b7e86c1989605a5899b10919d" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(10, 161, 221); text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">reported in March 2008 in<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Animal Behavior</em></a>. Dogs follow people's pointing, body posture, the direction of their gaze, and touches for cues to find hidden food, notes Mariana Bentosela and colleagues at the University of Buenos Aires<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T2J-4S3WWY8-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=097d1356297bdcd99628cfd3046d55a6" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(10, 161, 221); text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">in the July 2008<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Behavioural Processes</em></a>. They also gaze at their trainer when they need more information to find their reward.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">Some dogs learn to understand an impressive number of words, as well. A gifted border collie, Rico, mastered the names of more than 200 objects using a technique called fast-tracking that small children also employ,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.eva.mpg.de/psycho/staff/kaminski/index.htm" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(10, 161, 221); text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Juliane Kaminski</a>, also of M.P.I. Evolutionary Anthropology and colleagues<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/304/5677/1682" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(10, 161, 221); text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">reported in 2004 in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Science</em></a>. The researchers introduced a novel item into Rico's mix of toys then asked him to retrieve it. He did so by associating the unfamiliar name with the unfamiliar object. He even remembered the name of the toy a month later.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;">"That's the kind of fast-tracking or exclusionary learning, which we used to think only human beings and the talking apes—the ones taught language—could use," Coren says. "For the psychologists it was, 'Wow, how did he learn that word?!'"</p></span></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 48, 45); font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 21px;"><br /></p></span></span></p></span></span>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-81491272074095028012009-05-04T09:39:00.001-04:002009-05-04T09:42:59.187-04:00End the University as We Know It<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/04/27/opinion/27opedspan.jpg" alt="" border="0" height="265" width="600" /><br /><nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "> <div class="byline"><br /><br />Source: NYTimes<br /><br /><br /><br />By MARK C. TAYLOR</div> </nyt_byline> <div class="timestamp">Published: April 26, 2009 </div> GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/student_loans/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about student loans.">student loans</a>).<br /><br /><p>Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.” </p><p>Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations. </p><p>The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.</p><p>The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors. </p><p>In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings. </p><p>The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.</p><p>If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps: </p><p>1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural. </p><p>Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises. </p>It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-6489359229020860752009-03-29T00:14:00.000-04:002009-03-29T00:15:56.226-04:00Eyeing change<span class="storyhead" style="font-size:130%;color:blue;"><b></b></span>Source: The Hindu<br /><br /><br />ANANTH KRISHNAN<br />Mumbai <center> <span style="font-size:-2;"> </span><br /> <img src="http://www.hindu.com/2009/03/29/images/2009032950061201.jpg" align="center" border="1" height="120" width="109" /><br /><b> MONA SHAH </b> </center> <p> <b>Party:</b> Professionals Party of India (PPI)</p> <p> <b>Constituency:</b> Mumbai South</p> <p> <b>State:</b> Maharashtra</p> <p> <b>Mission Statement:</b> The time has come to act for change, and stop simply talking about it.</p> <p> From ophthalmic surgery, politics isn’t the most logical career progression. But on November 26, logic went out the window in Mumbai, says Mona Shah.</p><p>Dr. Shah is a candidate in the Mumbai South constituency of the recently-formed Professionals Party of India’s (PPI). An eye surgeon who practises in a South Mumbai municipal hospital, the 38 year-old, like many middle-class residents in this af fluent part of the city, wasn’t the most politically active of citizens.</p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> Terror attacks </span> <p>The November 26 terror attacks that struck South Mumbai changed that. “For me, as well as for a lot of people, 26/11 was the final straw,” Dr. Shah says. “A lot of citizens felt after that day there needs to be a platform for concerned citizens to get involved in governance. There isn’t a forum for that right now. The terror attacks were a final trigger to make citizens more politically aware.”</p> <p>Dr. Shah launched her campaign in December, first intending to stand as an Independent. </p> <p>The PPI, a Pune-based party founded in 2007 by a group of professionals which has a policy of only fielding candidates who have had no prior experience in politics, decided to support Dr. Shah’s candidature.</p> <p>Dr. Shah is clear about her message and her target audience: the educated — and usually politically apathetic — middle-class. She will not have much trouble finding that audience in her constituency — South Mumbai has been the country’s most affluent constituency in previous elections, though delimitation has since considerably changed the constituency’s demographic profile.</p> <p>“We want to reach out to the non-vote bank,” Dr. Shah says. “That is essentially the educated class of society, the people who generally have not taken the time to vote.”</p> <p>Dr. Shah points out that in the last general election, only 37 per cent of the middle-class electorate in South Mumbai came out to vote. “If we can increase that to just 60 per cent or even 70 per cent, and half of them vote for us, who knows we may have a chance,” she says.</p> <p>Her campaign is focusing on two issues that will resonate well with her audience: security and infrastructure. “The biggest challenge for Mumbai now is infrastructure,” Dr. Shah says. “We’re contributing crores of rupees in taxes but infrastructure is a mess. The whole system needs a revamp. Our emphasise will be on bringing in more funds from the Centre that the city has itself been contributing, to bring about change.” </p> <p>Dr. Shah says she has had “amazing feedback” on the campaign trail so far, but is aware that the odds are stacked against her. “The biggest challenge for a new candidate is visibility,” she says. “Those that we get our message out to have been very supportive. But here is the problem. If a fantastic brand of medicine is available, and no one knows about it, well unfortunately, they don’t get to use it.”</p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-67422484820849984822009-03-19T21:52:00.001-04:002009-03-19T21:54:16.410-04:00Why setting goals can backfire<div id="page1"><p>Source: Boston.com</p><p><br /></p><p>IN THE EARLY years of this decade, <org idsrc="NYSE" value="GBM;GM;GMH;GMW;GXM;HGM;RGM;XGM">General Motors</org> had a goal, and it was 29. Determined to boost its flagging profits and reverse a long, steady fall from postwar dominance, the automotive giant did the natural thing: it set a goal. The company pledged to recapture 29 percent of the American market, the share it had ebbed past in 1999. The number 29 became a corporate mantra, and some GM executives took to wearing lapel pins with the number emblazoned on them.</p><div style="display: block;" id="articleEmbed"><div class="embed" id="relatedContent"><div class="relatedBox" style="padding-bottom: 4px;"><table id="commentInviteBox" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td class="commentInvite"><br /></td></tr><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></div>It didn't work. GM never did regain 29 percent of the market, and today, facing the possibility of bankruptcy, it looks even less likely to do so. The lapel pins are gone, and that number isn't much heard from the company.</div></div><p>And while the causes of GM's woes are many - from poor design to high labor costs to a prostrate economy - industry analysts argue that one of the most damaging things the company did was to set that goal.</p><p>In clawing toward its number, GM offered deep discounts and no-interest car loans. The energy and time that might have been applied to the longer-term problem of designing better cars went instead toward selling more of its generally unloved vehicles. As a result, GM was less prepared for the future, and made less money on the cars it did sell. In other words, the world's largest car company - a title it lost to <org idsrc="NYSE" value="TM">Toyota</org> last year - fell victim to a goal.</p><p>It is a given in American life that goals are inseparable from accomplishment. President Kennedy's 1961 promise to put an American on the moon by the end of the decade is held up as an example of a world-changing goal, the kind of inspirational beacon needed to surmount immense societal challenges. Among psychologists, the link between setting goals and achievement is one of the clearest there is, with studies on everyone from woodworkers to CEOs showing that we concentrate better, work longer, and do more if we set specific, measurable goals for ourselves. Goal-setting is one of the seven habits of highly effective people, says self-help guru Stephen Covey, and even Henry David Thoreau, the philosopher of dropping out, celebrates the work of goal setting. "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them," he writes in Walden.</p><p>But a few management scholars are now looking deeper into the effects of goals, and finding that goals have a dangerous side. Individuals, governments, and companies like GM show ample ability to hurt themselves by setting and blindly following goals, even those that seem to make sense at the time. These skeptics draw on a broad array of large-scale failures - the design of <org idsrc="NYSE" value="F;F-B">the Ford</org> Pinto, the <org idsrc="other-OTC" value="ENRNQ">Enron</org> collapse, the rash lending practices of <org idsrc="NYSE" value="FNM;FNM-H">Fannie Mae</org> and <org idsrc="NYSE" value="FRE;FRE-D;FRE-K;FRE-L;FRE-M;FRE-N;FRE-O;FRE-P;FRE-Q;FRE-R">Freddie Mac</org> - as evidence of the pernicious effects of goals. Outside the workplace, these thinkers point to the unintended consequences of high-stakes testing in grade schools, and psychological literature showing that goals and other incentives can constrict our thinking. Even the scarcity of cabs on rainy days, some argue, illustrates the ways that goals can blind people to their own best interests.</p> </div> <div id="page2"><p>The argument is not that goal setting doesn't work - it does, just not always in the way we intend. "It can focus attention too much, or on the wrong things; it can lead to crazy behaviors to get people to achieve them," says Adam Galinsky, a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, and coauthor of "Goals Gone Wild," a paper in the current issue of a leading management journal.</p><p>"Goal setting has been treated like an over-the-counter medication when it should really be treated with more care, as a prescription-strength medication," he says.</p><p>Taking on goals in this way has proven controversial, and Galinsky and his coauthors have earned a withering response from the prominent psychologists responsible for much of the literature on goal setting. But at a time when we're left to wonder how smart, seemingly responsible leaders in business and government could make decisions that helped destroy trillions of dollars in wealth, there's a new appetite for reexamining the things that motivate us - and how they can go awry.</p><p>Our faith in goals long predates the psychological research. "First, have a definite, clear, practical ideal - a goal, an objective," advised Aristotle. Generations of managers and motivators have repeated Abraham Lincoln's line that "A goal properly set is halfway reached."</p><p>It wasn't until the 1960s, though, that scholars of human behavior began to try to figure out how goals really worked. Two organizational psychologists, Gary Latham and Edwin Locke, created a theory of human motivation with goals at its center, drawing on their own extensive research and that of others. They found that goal setting had dramatic positive effects on success in just about any arena: work, school, the playing field, even the doctor's office (people took better care of their own health if they had a goal).</p><p>"When people are asked do their best, they don't," says Locke, now an emeritus professor at the University of Maryland's R.H. Smith School of Business. "It's too vague." Giving people ambitious and specific goals directs their attention, energizes them, and keeps them engaged longer.</p><p>Latham and Locke's theory quickly permeated executive suites and business school classrooms. The success of <org idsrc="NYSE" value="GE">General Electric</org>, for example, was described both by the company and its many admirers as a matter of having set the right goals and made sure people reached them. <org idsrc="NYSE" value="LUV">Southwest Airlines</org> earned a place in the annals of management for its use of the so-called "stretch goal," a theatrically improbable aim announced to jolt employees to new heights of productivity and creativity. In Southwest's case it was a promise to reduce turnaround times at the gate for its planes to an unheard-of 10 minutes. Defying the doubts of the rest of the industry - and many of its own employees - the company pulled it off.</p> </div> <div id="page3"><p>Despite these successes, a few management experts began to wonder what sort of price we pay for our goals. Goals, they feared, might actually be taking the place of independent thinking and personal initiative. Goals gave us GE and Southwest, but they also gave us GM and Enron.</p><p>Two of these skeptics, business professors Maurice Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania and Lisa Ordonez of the University of Arizona, co-wrote a 2004 paper on what people do when they fall just short of their goals. According to Ordonez and Schweitzer's experiment, in which subjects played a word game and then reported how well they did at it, what people do is lie to make up the difference.</p><p>Schweitzer and Ordonez are also two of the coauthors of the "Goals Gone Wild" paper, in Academy of Management Perspectives, which takes the concern about cheating and broadens it. The new paper isn't based on original research but instead juxtaposes findings from the psychology and economics literature with a sort of greatest hits of disasters in goal setting. It recounts the hostile, dysfunctional, and ultimately criminal atmosphere created at Enron by its practice of rewarding executives based on meeting specific revenue targets. It describes how <org idsrc="NYSE" value="S">Sears, Roebuck and Co.</org> started setting sales goals for its auto repair staff in the early 1990s, only to find out that its mechanics were overcharging customers and making unnecessary repairs to hit their numbers.</p><p>Narrow corporate goals can keep employees from asking important questions that they otherwise might. Take the notoriously combustible Ford Pinto. In the late 1960s, Ford CEO Lee Iacocca, determined to take back the market share the company was losing to smaller imports, announced a crash program to create a new car that would be under 2,000 pounds, under $2,000, and would go on sale in 1970. Desperate to meet the conditions and the deadline, company executives ignored and then played down questions about the safety of the car's design. As a result, the Pinto, with a fuel tank just behind the rear axle, was uniquely prone to igniting upon impact, and 53 people died in such fires.</p><p>The vaunted "stretch goals," meanwhile, come with their own red flags. Sim Sitkin, a business school professor at Duke University, has found in reviewing the management literature that stretch goals are most likely to be pursued by desperate, embattled companies - the sort least equipped to deal with the costs of ambitious failures.</p><p>These findings will come as happy reassurance to workers who have chafed, Dilbert-like, at the imposition of companywide goals that they found a nuisance and a distraction from the real job at hand. But we often embrace goals voluntarily, too, and even outside the business world there's evidence that goals can have strong and often negative effects on how well we perform basic tasks. In a famous 1999 study by the psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, subjects watching a video clip were told to count the number of times people in a group pass a basketball among themselves. Most concentrate so hard on the goal that they become blind to other information, utterly failing to notice when a woman in a gorilla suit walks through the middle of the group.</p> </div> <p>Other work suggests that goals with rewards, if not carefully calibrated, can short-circuit our intrinsic enthusiasm for a task - or even interrupt our learning process. Barry Schwartz, a social psychologist at Swarthmore College who has studied decision making, found that subjects paid money to complete a slightly confusing task were significantly worse at figuring out the rules, even after completing it, than those who had received no reward.</p><p>One seminal economics study even argued that the difficulty of finding a cab on a rainy day can be blamed on the personal goals of cabbies. The 1997 paper found that cab drivers tend to have a set amount of money they aim to make every day. When it's raining they hit that target faster, since more people want cabs, so the cabbies quit earlier in the day. This narrow focus on a goal hurts everybody in the system - it shrinks the taxi supply just when demand is highest, leaving more people standing on the curb getting wet, and it hurts the cabbies themselves, who miss a chance to maximize their income on their most lucrative days.</p><p>The new criticism of goals has elicited a spirited defense from several scholars of human motivation. Latham and Locke, among others, see the newfound skepticism about goals as an overreaction. Though their own work acknowledges that goals come with risks, they dismiss the Ordonez paper as an inflammatory hodgepodge of cherry-picked anecdotes. The other work, as they see it, doesn't indict all goals, just bad ones. The problem, Latham and Locke argue, is that ultimately goals can't protect us from ourselves.</p><p>"You know how Shakespeare wrote that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves?" asks Latham, a professor at the University of Toronto. "Well, the fault is not in our goals but in our values."</p><p>Even the most vehement critics admit that sometimes nothing works like a goal. But ensuring that it doesn't backfire requires care.</p><p>Although simple numerical goals can lead to bursts of intense effort in the short term, they can also subvert the longer-term interests of a person or a company - whether it's a pharmaceutical firm that overlooks safety in the rush to get a drug approved, or a dieter who resumes smoking to help lose 20 pounds. In work requiring a certain amount of creativity and judgment, the greatest risk appears to lie in overly simplified goals. Reducing complex activities to a bundle of numbers can end up rewarding the wrong behavior - with engineers concentrating on less promising but more straightforward research, for example, to rack up more patents.</p><p>If you are GM, argues Schweitzer, "You clearly don't want 29 percent market share, you want something much more complicated than that."</p><p>To combat this, Latham, among others, argues that what's often required is a "learning goal" - one where someone pledges to come up with, for example, five approaches to a thorny problem - rather than a performance goal that assumes that the problem will automatically be solved.</p><p>And whatever they are, goals need to be flexible when circumstances change. Francis Flynn, an organizational psychologist at Stanford, says he always tells his students that "the best goal you can have is to reevaluate your goals, semi-annually or annually, to make sure they remain rational."</p><p>Rather than reflexively relying on goals, argues Max Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor and the fourth coauthor of "Goals Gone Wild," we might also be better off creating workplaces and schools that foster our own inherent interest in the work. "There are lots of organizations where people want to do well, and they don't need those goals," he says. Bazerman and others hold up Google as an example of a company that manages to do this, in part by explicitly setting aside time for employees to pursue their own projects and interests.</p><p>Today, as the economic situation upends millions of lives, it is also forcing the reexamination of millions of goals - not only the revenue targets of battered firms, but the career aims of workers and students, and even the ambitions of the newly installed administration. And while it never feels good to give up on a goal, it may be a good time to ask which of the goals we had set for ourselves were things we really needed to achieve, and which were things we only thought we should - and what the difference has been costing us.</p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-37664205121613822662009-03-13T22:36:00.000-04:002009-03-13T22:37:15.952-04:00“Law can’t turn a blind eye to breakdown of marriage”Source: The Hindu<br /><br />J. Venkatesan <p>New Delhi: The Law Commission has recommended to the Centre that ‘irretrievable breakdown of marriage’ be incorporated as an additional ground for grant of divorce under the Hindu Marriage Act (HMA), 1955.</p> <p> The <em style="">suo motu </em>suggestion for immediate action comes within days of the Supreme Court denying divorce to a husband on the ground of ‘irretrievable breakdown.’ A Bench held that it was for Parliament to amend the law and that the court could not add new grounds in the statute.</p> <p>In its report to be submitted to the government next week, the Commission, headed by A.R. Lakshmanan, said: “The foundation of a sound marriage is tolerance, adjustment and respecting each other. Tolerance of each other’s fault to a certain extent has to be inherent in every marriage. The court does not have to deal with ideal husbands and ideal wives. It has to deal with the particular man and woman before it.”</p> <p>The report said: “Once the marriage has broken down beyond repair, it would be unrealistic for the law not to take notice of that fact, and it would be harmful to society and injurious to the interest of the parties. Where there has been a long period of continuous separation, it may fairly be surmised that the matrimonial bond is beyond repair. The marriage becomes a fiction, though supported by a legal tie; by refusing to sever that tie, the law in such cases does not serve the sanctity of marriage; on the contrary, it shows scant regard for the feelings and emotions of the parties.”</p> <p>The Commission said: “The public interest demands not only that the married status should, as long as possible and whenever possible, be maintained, but where a marriage has been wrecked beyond the hope of salvage, the public interest lies in the recognition of that fact. Since there is no acceptable way in which a spouse can be compelled to resume life with the consort, nothing is gained by trying to keep the parties tied forever to a marriage that in fact has ceased to exist.” </p> <p>At present ‘irretrievable breakdown of marriage’ was not one of the grounds for divorce mentioned in Section 13 of the HMA. Citing earlier Supreme Court judgments which pointed out the lacuna in the law, the Commission said the legislature had not thought it proper to provide for dissolution of marriage on this ground. </p> <p>It said: “Whenever the question of inclusion of ‘irretrievable breakdown of marriage’ as a ground for divorce is mooted, the opponents argue that ‘divorce’ by mutual consent introduced in the HMA in 1976 more than covers the situation. It is important to note that mutual consent requires the consent of both parties and if one or the other does not cooperate, the said ground is not available.”</p> <p>“Irretrievable breakdown of marriage, on the other hand, is a ground which the court can examine and if the court, on the facts of the case, comes to the conclusion that the marriage cannot be repaired or saved, divorce can be granted. Law cannot turn a blind eye to such situations, nor can it decline to give adequate response to the necessities arising therefrom,” the Commission said. </p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-12469796928863712012009-02-28T11:38:00.001-05:002009-02-28T11:39:29.515-05:00The Indian Railway KingSource: The American<br /><br /><div class="documentDescription">How did India’s Huey Long become its Jack Welch?</div> <img id="bernarticle-featured-image" src="http://american.com/archive/2009/the-indian-railway-king/FeaturedImage" class="image-left" /> <p><strong><span style="color: black;">NEW DELHI</span></strong><strong><span style="color: black;">—</span></strong><span style="color: black;">In his boyhood, long before Lalu Yadav became India’s most unlikely management guru, he sometimes strayed from his cows and scampered barefoot to the railroad tracks. Dodging crowds and porters, he made his way to the first-class cars and, for a few glorious moments, basked in the air conditioning that blasted from the open door. Then the police would spot him and shoo him away, into the moist trackside cowflap where he belonged.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">The boy has grown up, but when I meet him in his New Delhi office, he’s still barefoot, and a headache for train conductors everywhere. Lalu Yadav, 61, is now the boss of all 2.4 million Indian Railways employees. When he wants air conditioning, he nods, and a railway employee hops up to twist the dial. As minister of railways, he rules India’s largest employer—one with annual revenues in the tens of billions—from a fine leather sofa, his sandals and a silver spittoon on the floor nearby and a clump of tobacco in his cheek.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">Lalu is a happy man: happy to have risen to become rich, beloved, and reviled all over India; happy that a grateful nation credits him with whipping its beleaguered rail system into profitability; and happy that he’s managed to do all this and somehow stay out of jail. Under his leadership, Indian Railways has gone from bankruptcy to billions in just a few years. When Lalu presented his latest budget to Parliament on February 13, he bragged, "<span style="font-style: italic;">Hathi ko cheetah bana diya</span>" ("I have turned an elephant into a cheetah"). What’s his secret? </span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">“Cow dung,” he says. “I have 350 cows, including bulls. Cow dung—no need of gas.” Everyone tells me about Lalu’s “rustic common sense,” though I’m unsure how burning manure for fuel has made Indian trains suddenly run profitably. But his point is a broad one, about systems efficiency and country wisdom and resourcefulness. “Railways is like a Jersey cow. If you do not milk it fully, it gets <em>tenail</em>,” a swollen and infected udder. Milk every last drop out of Indian Railways, Lalu told his subordinates, and it will prosper.</span></p> <blockquote class="pullquote">Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways.</blockquote> <p><span style="color: black;">The folksiness is no pose. Lalu really did begin as a cow-boy, and he has spent (or misspent) a 40-year career in politics exploiting his bovine roots. Since he became nationally famous in the 1980s, Lalu has been known throughout India as a corrupt and unapologetic yokel, eerily canny in his political maneuvering and cleverer than he looks and sounds.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">In his home state of Bihar, where he first rose to power, the common touch served him well. Bihar is India’s poorest and most backward state. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lalu knitted together a coalition of poor Biharis that elected him chief minister. The Lalu years wrecked Bihar further. When corruption allegations surfaced, critics demanded that Lalu resign on moral grounds. The scandal that brought him down, known as the “Fodder Scam,” effectively amounted to a government-wide ruse under which taxpayers paid for nonexistent hay. But Lalu held on for a long time. “I have heard of football grounds and cricket grounds, but not moral grounds,” he said. When the pressure became too great for him to stay in office, he responded with a nepotistic masterstroke, bold even by his standards, and appointed his wife, Rabri Devi, to rule in his place. (“Who do you want me to appoint?” Lalu asked. “<em>Your</em> wife?”)</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">Lalu may have been corrupt, but he was also a laugh riot. He speaks in an outrageously backwoods Hindi dialect, full of barnyard metaphor and hick wisdom. Even his detractors admit his speech is often charming. “He’s a hugely charismatic man,” says Sankarshan Thakur, a Bihari journalist and Lalu critic. “His ability to reach out beyond language barriers is amazing. He charmed the pants off the Pakistanis,” Thakur says, during government-to-government talks in 2006. On any given day on India’s flourishing array of cable channels, the chances are high of seeing Lalu’s face on a news show, or even on an entertainment show. I clicked randomly to see him guest-judging what looked like an Indian knock-off of “American Idol.” In 2005, a popular Indian film based on “A Fish Called Wanda” took Lalu’s name for its title—“Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav”—even though it had nothing to do with Lalu, other than having main characters with his names.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">The rest of India chuckled at Lalu, and more often with him. But Bihar remained the most lawless state in the country. “He never tried to do serious business in Bihar regarding development,” says Sushil Kumar Modi, Bihar’s current deputy chief minister, and a Lalu acquaintance for nearly 40 years. “Lalu Yadav is not a serious man. Not a single state-sponsored scheme happened under his rule. He thought, ‘If I can rig the elections, there is no need to do any work.’” Thakur is more damning: “He arrived promising to dismantle the Establishment, an anti-hero out to snatch power from Patna’s bungalows and deliver it to the people, but he ended up a creature of the Establishment himself.” By the time Rabri—a semiliterate buffalo herder who did Lalu’s bidding, and whose name, incidentally, means “Custard Goddess”—left office in 2005, everyone in India knew Lalu, and his name was a byword for incompetence, cronyism, and the abject failure of government.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">Even then, Lalu commanded enough of a following among his coalition of “extremely backward castes” (or, in the wonderful semiofficial abbreviation, “EBCs”) and desperately poor Muslims to secure a role for himself in India’s 2004 Congress Party government. He wanted the interior ministry, but the new government wasn’t ready to have a rube in charge of such a powerful portfolio. They gave him the railways ministry, and many expected the same pitiful misrule that had characterized his time in Bihar.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">Indian Railways was in trouble: in 2001, a report by the BJP—a government dominated by the Brahmins who are Lalu’s permanent foes—predicted it would hemorrhage cash at a rate of $12 billion annually by 2015. (The whole budget of the Indian government, by comparison, is $128 billion.) Indian Railways was barely managing to cover its daily operating costs, to say nothing of paying for the new equipment and strengthening bridges. The report concluded: “It is very likely that Indian Railways would be a heavily-loss-making entity—in fact one well on the path toward bankruptcy, if it were not state owned.” Outsiders whispered the word “privatization” but were hushed: Indian Railways has been a source of national pride since before independence, and statist sentimentalists could never let it fail.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">Lalu’s term as railways minister has been shockingly successful. Instead of turning India’s most prized national institution into a basketcase and a ruin, Lalu has led one of most spectacular economic turnarounds in a country bursting with economic miracles. Indian Railways began raking in cash and posting <em>surpluses</em> in the billions. And the intelligentsia and technocracy, at first shocked and dismayed that a shameless populist had seized a fragile and unwieldy national institution, have largely come around to acknowledging that India Railways has been transformed into a respected institution—and so, possibly, has Lalu.</span></p> <div align="center"><span style="color: black;">***</span></div> <p><span style="color: black;"><br />Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief: every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China. (The third-largest employer is the British National Health Service.)</span></p> <p>The cerebral cortex of the whole system is the Rail Bhavan, a pinkish monolith near Parliament in New Delhi. The Rail Bhavan is, in a way, surrounded by its own competition: its street is permanently filled with the traffic of taxis, trucks, buses, and rickshaws that for a time seemed poised to steal away the rails’ business altogether. Outside, a decommissioned green locomotive and the railways’ mascot, Bholu the Elephant, announce to the mess of traffic that the railways are not to be counted out.</p> <p>Inside, the conditions do not inspire confidence. The building is big, disordered, and honeycombed with offices that bear stultifying bureaucratic titles (“Manager, Zonal Railways, Deputy”). The hallways all have torn-up ceilings. Some are so dark that I have to use a pocket flashlight to read names on the doors, and inside the offices the level of technology is shockingly low. Employees’ business cards have Yahoo! addresses. P.K. Sharma, the bright and competent director of personnel, has on his desk a foot-high pile of green folders bound together with shoelaces. From that desk, 2.5 million lives are managed, and there is not a computer in sight.</p> <blockquote class="pullquote">The world has few centrally managed organizations as large as Indian Railways, and surely none maintains the same level of performance.</blockquote> <p>Indian Railways is a government enterprise, and it has the dead weight characteristic of state organs. Employees live in housing provided by the Railways, send their kids to Railways schools, and visit Railways doctors when sick. Nearly a million are pensioners, and therefore provide no value to the ministry at all. Those who do work encounter predictable bureaucratic headaches: the ministry’s departments (six in total, for electrical, staff, engineering, mechanical, traffic, and financial concerns) operate in a stovepipe fashion, with minimal cross-pollination and little effort to coordinate and ensure that the railways as a whole run well. And ultimately Indian Railways has to answer to the taxpayers and citizens who support it, and who quite understandably want assurances that their train set will keep its fares low enough for them to afford.</p> <p><span style="color: black;">Somehow it all works out. The world has few centrally managed organizations as large as Indian Railways, and surely none maintains the same level of performance. Delays are inevitable. But even when disaster strikes—as when terrorists bombed tracks in Mumbai in 2006—the railway heals itself quickly, usually within days, like a starfish growing back its arm. To grasp the difficulty of the operation, just imagine running a much bigger version of Wal-Mart, and then add a few wild cards, such as an employee literacy rate of 60 percent and terrorists trying to blow up your stores.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 4.3pt 0.0001pt;" align="center">***</p> <p><span style="color: black;">As chief minister of Bihar, Lalu may have been a buffoon and a grifter, but he didn’t fail entirely. And the ways in which he courted failure, but didn’t quite succumb to it, offer a clue as to how Lalu has succeeded at the railways ministry.</span></p> <p>He plundered Bihar like every Bihari leader before him. Lalu’s great innovation was to entertain the masses, and to dignify their suffering with a show of attention. He held court at the chief minister’s residence and listened to common people’s grievances. Even if he ultimately did nothing to ease their pain, they left knowing that they had spoken to the most powerful man in the state, and he had responded in the same dialect they spoke to their own friends and family. When his children fell sick, Lalu himself stood in line with them at the public clinic. Never mind that the lines were long, and the treatment horrifying, because kleptocrats had looted the public coffers: Biharis saw their chief minister waiting like a poor, ordinary man, so they forgave him for being rich and extraordinary.</p> <p>At Indian Railways, Lalu retained that popular touch and remade the passenger experience accordingly. A key feature of train travel, even in the cheap seats, is tea service. Lalu banned plastic teacups, which had been littering the countryside, and replaced them with peasant-made <em>kullhars</em>—earthen mugs that after a single use can be smashed on the ground, where they then return to the mud from which they are fired. He employed weavers to make bedding out of <em>khadi</em> (homespun cloth). And to avenge his childhood eviction from the air-conditioned cars, he introduced a new class of service: <em>garib rath</em>, “the poor man’s chariot,” on which the single frill is air conditioning. Despite boasting this once unimaginable luxury, <em>garib rath</em> is extremely cheap, within reach of even the backward castes from which Lalu himself hails.</p> <p>But his single most important innovation at Indian Railways was not a populist move at all. It was an elite one: the hiring of a prodigiously talented civil servant named Sudhir Kumar. Kumar, 50, is from a Gujarati family in Punjab. The family knows business: “If there is money lying around, we can smell it,” Kumar says<span style="font-size: 11pt; color: black;">. </span><span style="color: black;">His father was a clothing wholesaler, and his brothers and sisters have, according to Sudhir, made a fortune in business for themselves. Sudhir takes pride in having given up the joys of free enterprise to work for the government, a calling he regards as nobler and more satisfying than work done for personal gain. He clambered over thousands of competitors to land in his current job as a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), a sort of Delta Force for Indian civil servants. Every year, out of 300,000 aspirants, no more than 60 make the grade. They fan out all over India to solve the subcontinent’s most intractable problems, before heading back to New Delhi to regroup and take their next assignment.</span></p> <p>Kumar’s first big assignment was Bihar. Bihar broke up into two smaller states in 2000: Jharkhand, which contained rich mineral and coal deposits, and Bihar, which had the larger population by far. Bihar stood to lose over half its tax revenue. (When Japanese businessmen expressed interest in the mineral wealth and promised to bring prosperity to the stricken region, a joke circulated: “Give us mineral rights,” the businessmen told Lalu, “and within six months, Bihar will be like Japan.” “That’s nothing,” Lalu said. “Give me Japan for six weeks, and it will be like Bihar.” It’s a testament to Lalu’s brazenness that this exchange seems plausible.) Kumar’s job had been to separate the two states in a way that allowed each to establish a sufficient tax base within seven years. He did it in 30 months by closing loopholes in the tax code, cutting deals with tax cheats, and in general collecting taxes with an intensity most Indians would reserve for a cricket match or a ground war.</p> <p><span style="color: black;">Lalu noticed. When he ascended to the railways ministry in 2005, he requested Kumar as his deputy. Kumar had risen to an IAS position so elite that his move required parliamentary approval, which quickly arrived. The Congress Party’s coalition government, now led by the Oxford-trained economist Manmohan Singh, prized technical competence and was happy to appoint a shrewd bureaucrat to watch over its most unlettered cabinet member.</span></p> <blockquote class="pullquote">Lalu plundered Bihar like every Bihari leader before him. His great innovation was to entertain the masses, and to dignify their suffering with a show of attention.</blockquote> <p><span style="color: black;">Since then, Kumar has labored in an office immediately opposite Lalu’s, but completely unlike the minister’s opulent, wood-paneled lair. The minister lounges on his sofa, watching NDTV, a TV news network. Kumar’s two flat-screens show real-time data on the country’s main routes. Periodically, a minion walks into Kumar’s command center to present a 20-page stack of papers that represent the day’s statistics on passengers, freight, and on-time arrivals. “Like Jack keeps a daily tab, I also keep a daily tab,” Kumar says, referring to Jack Welch, one of his idols. The contrast with Lalu’s own listless inattention is jarring. When Lalu tells me about his success, mumbling vaguely about winning “the confidence of the business classes,” Kumar shouts from the back of the room, citing revenue figures from memory. And when Lalu drifts off on earthy tangents about dung or latrine systems (“urine—it fall all over the platform”), Kumar winces.</span></p> <p>Lalu and Kumar rule the railways ministry as twin consuls, and they rule it well. Officers snap to attention and salute when they pass in the corridors. In his relatively spartan office, Kumar’s sole concessions to luxury are a private bathroom, an attendant who refreshes his tea constantly, and an unshakeable air of dry superiority that would be less tolerable, were he not the brains behind several industry-changing decisions.</p> <div align="center"><span style="color: black;">***</span></div> <p><span style="color: black;"><br />None of the innovations was original. All sound, in retrospect, like no-brainers: make the trains faster, heavier, and longer. Kumar wrinkled his nose when I pointed this out. “A five-billion-dollar no-brainer!”<br /><br />Political considerations precluded hiking fares, which in any event were often so low that a huge increase would bring in only a little more revenue. (With unlimited-travel passes in Mumbai costing as little as $2 per month, it’s a mystery why Indian Railways collects passenger fares on some routes at all.) And none of the standard remedies for weak businesses—selling off under-performing assets, or laying off employees—could happen, because Lalu forbade anything that could make him look unfriendly to the poor. “People used to say about Jack that he will nuke every damn thing which is not profit-making,” Kumar complains. “But I can’t nuke anything, because of the political imperatives. I had to serve an omelet to the nation without breaking any eggs whatsoever.”</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">The first and most crucial change was born from the minister’s own whimsy. In his first month as railways chief, Lalu visited a railway stop in Danapur, Bihar, for a spot inspection of the freight. The demand was ridiculous: since the station lacked an in-motion weigh bridge, railwaymen had to remove every item from a train and weigh it on a small industrial scale. Lalu lounged nearby, supervising the workmen from his chair, like a zamindar in the days of the Raj. The scale pinned at just a couple hundred kilos, and the train was rated for a thousand tons of freight. “My minister was new,” Kumar says, “and no one had the courage to tell him that this wasn’t the way it could be done.” Eventually, the station manager mustered the courage to inform Lalu that he would have to sit for a full week watching the operation, and that he should give up, go home, and rest. Lalu, showing the stubbornness of a newcomer, instead demanded that the whole train re-route to Muri, roughly 250 miles away, whose station had a larger scale.</span></p> <p>When the workers weighed the car and found it overloaded, Lalu demanded that every train in India be weighed at once, at one of the 30 weigh bridges. Overloading turned out to be rife, and the minister, incensed at the possibility that employees and customers were defrauding the railways, visited Kumar. “If you are carrying this load in any case, and I haven’t seen your tracks damaged, why are you not charging for it? If your locomotives are in any case carrying this load, why the hell you can’t increase the axle load?”</p> <p><span style="color: black;">“The only disgruntled element in this exercise was the employees and customers who were part of this hanky-panky,” Kumar says. (Lalu himself is more triumphant: “Some mafias were working in this business. I caught them and punished them!”) The spot inspection served as a pivot from which Indian Railways as a whole could reform itself. The change ultimately became a billion-dollar improvement in the revenues of the railways.</span></p> <p>The decision did entail some risk: heavier axle loads mean greater wear on tracks and bridges, and therefore greater need to replace infrastructure. If a train derailed, the public would blame heavier axle loads, and the minister would have to resign. But Kumar says Lalu’s friendly relationship with his public gave him more room to accept risk. “My mother has taught me to take the bull by the horns,” Lalu said. “If you try to take it by the tail, it will kick you in the ass.” “No other minister could summon the courage to do this,” Kumar explains.</p> <blockquote class="pullquote">His single most important innovation at Indian Railways was not a populist move at all. It was an elite one: the hiring of a prodigiously talented civil servant named Sudhir Kumar.</blockquote> <p><span style="color: black;">The move to heavier axle loads looks like an obvious move in retrospect, but similar actions at other railways have required years of study and bureaucratic maneuvering, says Steve Ditmeyer, an American railroad expert who has studied the Indian Railways turnaround. To move to heavier loads means making sure the part of the surge in revenue from the extra freight—really the same amount of freight, just more paid freight—needs to be set aside for a faster rate of track replacement. Lalu demanded from on high that axle loads increase. Kumar studied the problem and implemented the order, coordinating with department heads and India’s independent safety commissioner.</span></p> <p>“The Railways was struggling with this problem for the last 25 years, but they didn’t have the consensus” necessary to make the change, Kumar says. “This one small inspection brought about that consensus.”</p> <p><span style="color: black;">In addition, Kumar and his team began examining the competition more closely. In the 1990s, Indian Railways had so exasperated customers that even cement manufacturers, whose dense product is perfect for rail travel, had shifted their share of the logistics market to trucking. Indian Railways’s share of their business fell from 71 percent in 1991 to 30 percent in 2004—even though Indian roads are terrible, and unlike trains, trucks must clear customs, pay taxes, and pay off tax inspectors at the borders between each of India’s 33 mainland states and union territories.</span></p> <p>The system had been rigged to handicap trucks by imposing bureaucratic requirements at borders. But in most other respects, trucks were simpler: Indian Railways maintained a complex tariff card, which the British drafted in the 1860s and which still included a range of archaic commodities. With corrigenda, it fattened to the size of a phone book.</p> <p>“If you have to hire a truck driver, he’ll just ask, ‘If you want to hire my truck, I’ll charge 40 thousand rupees,’” Kumar says. “Even if you’re carrying an empty box, you have to pay full charge. So we said, ‘Why the hell Railways are getting into this mess?’” The tariff card shrunk to the size of a postcard (even though it still specifies rates for jute and “edible salts”). With that reform Kumar and Lalu began working closely with industry to recapture market share, and to outsource the difficulty of filling freight cars efficiently to their customers. “Whatever you carry,” Kumar says, using a favorite phrase, “it’s your funeral.”</p> <p><span style="color: black;">In previous regimes, Indian Railways assumed a monopoly position. “We are not in the business of railways,” Kumar says. “We are in the business of transportation. And we have competitors.” Industry members echoed the position. One told me that the previous leadership of the ministry had rationed out the railways’ services, whereas now close attention is paid to customer demand. A logistics manager at a Calcutta manufacturing giant likened the succession of business-friendly measures to the succession of record-setting pole vaults by the Soviet athlete Sergei Bubka—an endless series of efforts to outdo oneself.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">At the same time, Kumar engineered a system under which inspections of trains took place after a fixed number of kilometers of service, rather than after every trip. Trains languished for shorter times in railyards. And increased freight and passenger business—in part the result of cozier relations with industry and passenger enthusiasm for innovations such as Lalu’s <em>garib rath</em>—meant that each train could add several extra cars, and unit cost plummeted by as much as 50 percent. Adding cars generated plenty of bottom-line revenue: the trains were already going, so the cost of adding an extra car was marginal.</span></p> <p>Underlying all this, Kumar tells me with undisguised pride, working off a PowerPoint presentation seemingly designed to show up the BJP committee that predicted doom for Indian Railways seven years ago, is an insight borrowed from India’s telecom boom: bigger is better. “Which is a bigger play on scale or volume?” he asks. “If you were to build Indian Railways today, it would cost you not less than a trillion dollars. But once the network is laid”—like the initial outlay for India’s mobile towers—“the less one unit costs. What applies to telecom equally applies to me.”</p> <div align="center"><span style="color: black;">***</span></div> <p><span style="color: black;">Lalu’s success owes everything to Kumar, but Kumar deflects the praise back to the minister—most of it, anyway. “This is a democracy. I have only the power and clout that he gives me, and I am a big zero without him. The day he decides he does not need the services of Sudhir Kumar, within hours I am gone.”</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">But there’s glory in the turnaround for Kumar, too. During our conversations, a bespectacled young doctoral student from Columbia University interrupts us to show Kumar manuscript pages from a book they are coauthoring about the turnaround. And Kumar’s agenda included a meeting with a major commercial publisher. Kumar has brought in American and French experts on railway management—including Ditmeyer—and solicited reports from them that invariably mention his own role in the transformation.</span></p> <blockquote class="pullquote">‘Boys and girls from Harvard, they come to me,’ Lalu bragged, slapping the soft sole of his bare foot with a crack to stress the irony.</blockquote> <p>I asked Kumar whether the temptation of private-sector work would eventually draw him out of the IAS. His response was curt. “There is no temptation, <em>sir</em>. The kind of satisfaction you get there is nothing compared to the satisfaction of serving my country.” He put down his papers, and his offended expression melted into a look of pain. “My father,” the prosperous clothier, “said, ‘Go to serve the people.’ He uttered these words, and within four hours, he was no more. I am living with that every single day.” He put down his stack of papers. “When you are giving shape to the dream of your father—what better way to self-actualize?” Even in the language of Tony Robbins, the speech is affecting. At this the tears welled up, and the prince of the railways wept into his tea.</p> <p><span style="color: black;">Bringing in Kumar clearly helped Lalu instill professionalism in the ministry. But it was equally vital that he did <em>not</em> bring the crew his critics expected. Lalu’s first acts included an outright ban on his own cronies and family members in the Rail Bhavan. In Bihar, they had lurked on the sidelines, awaiting patronage from the chief minister. The corruption reached ridiculous levels: when I visited in 2001, media murmured about malfeasance in the state’s smallpox eradication program. It was regarded as suspect that the state employed several people to guard against a disease that since the 1970s had existed only in heavily guarded vials in Atlanta, Georgia. Bandits (“dacoits,” in Indian English) plagued the countryside and kidnapped anyone with money. Sometime, they put obstacles on the train tracks, so they could plunder the cars, each a curry-scented movable feast of defenseless passengers and freight.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">In 2008, I returned to see how Bihar had fared under three years of rule by Nitish Kumar, a longtime Lalu foe and, not coincidentally, the minister of railways who preceded Lalu. I mentioned to Lalu that I planned to visit Bihar. He seemed unconcerned about dirt I might dig up, and said I should greet the manager of the Maurya Patna, the city’s only international-standard hotel. “They buy my milk.” When I added that I would not fly, but would take his “poor man’s chariot,” he jerked to attention and warned me gravely, with a wag of the finger, to hold my belongings tightly and to avoid accepting food from strangers on the train, lest I be poisoned and robbed.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">I arrived in Patna safely. In Lalu’s absence, everything had improved—even the railway station itself. It is still no Grand Central, and if it had an Oyster Bar I’d probably skip the raw ones. But its third-class waiting room can no longer be described (in the words of my old guidebook) as “an underground car-park for human bodies.” The city of Patna had once resembled a medieval warren. Now, in the busy streets, pissy stenches singe the nose not constantly, but only in a few informally designated areas. The hotels have sold out their rooms for wedding parties. And at night, the Mayfair Ice Cream Parlor is packed with kids, and the ice cream probably won’t give you the runs.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">Years after Biharis voted him out, Lalu’s picture is still everywhere—in shops, on banners over the road, and even, I am told, on bathroom doors (in lieu of men’s and women’s stick figures, they sometimes use portraits of Lalu and Rabri). But the people who speak to me do not remember Lalu fondly. In the years since Nitish Kumar came to power, the city has flourished, and the state government has fought against the gangsterism that pervaded the countryside. Eight years ago, in Patna and the rural areas alike, murders and kidnappings were common. Now, as in most Indian cities, the greatest safety risk is the traffic. On the train back to New Delhi, a man in my railway berth offered me raisins, and I felt safe enough to try one.</span></p> <p align="center"><span style="color: black;">***<br /></span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">Lalu mismanaged Patna terribly. So how has he managed a gargantuan state organ so well that students from Kellogg and Wharton are taking notice?</span></p> <p>Part of the answer lies in India’s recent economic growth spurt: Lalu stood on the shoulders of an economy that never grew by less than 6 percent per year during his whole tenure as railways minister. (India’s economy has slowed considerably since the global downturn began.) With a boom like that to fuel demand, how could he fail? All he had to do was sit back and let the market propel him forward. Indeed, Sushil Kumar Modi, the politician who claims to be picking up after Lalu’s mess in Bihar, notes that Lalu still spends all his time in Bihar, and rarely visits his own New Delhi office. The railway turnaround began before he took over the ministry, during Nitish Kumar’s reign, although few predicted that it would continue as it has. The most cynical of his critics expect to discover after Lalu has left the ministry that safety corners have been cut, and that his successor will have to deal with a series of derailments and bridge collapses. But outsiders such as Ditmeyer say that Lalu’s management has been fundamentally sound, assuming he’s making the proper investments in maintenance.</p> <blockquote class="pullquote">‘If he is held responsible for failure,’ Kumar complained, ‘he should be responsible for success as well.’</blockquote> <p>The other half of the explanation, though, seems to be a simple case of democracy and markets working. One of the salutary effects of India’s recent boom is that people such as Lalu have more opportunities to be measured, and even civil servants such as Kumar are eventually subjected to the same pitiless bottom-line scrutiny that businesses face. Only recently did India really begin to shake off its penchant for state-owned enterprise. By the time Lalu took over, it was no longer possible for Indian Railways to run as if it were a monopoly in the transportation sector, or as if it were a Lalu fiefdom, as Bihar was for so long.</p> <p><span style="color: black;">Sankarshan Thakur, the journalistic gadfly who wrote a caustic account of Lalu’s failure in Bihar, says Lalu is managing the railroads competently as penance for his mismanagement of Bihar. “Lalu got insecure,” Thakur says. “He was sorely wounded by defeat in Bihar, and he needed to recover.” The railways ministry is a constituency-building ministry, one that allows a politician to be observed succeeding. He had failed in Bihar, and if he hoped ever to recover the leadership he once enjoyed, he had to run the railways ministry with exemplary competence. Everyone is watching, including the peasants. Lalu’s constituents are now not only voters but customers. Biharis kicked him out once already, and he’s acting responsibly so they don't do it again.</span></p> <p><span style="color: black;">Lalu is aware of his new publicity, and he courts it. David Blair, a railways expert from Washington, D.C., brought a delegation of students to meet Lalu and was shocked to discover that a camera crew lay waiting to record their visit. “Boys and girls from Harvard, they come to me,” Lalu bragged, slapping the soft sole of his bare foot with a crack to stress the irony.</span></p> <div align="center"><span style="color: black;">***</span></div> <p><span style="color: black;">After our conversation, Kumar joined me for lunch at the Shangri-La Hotel. The Shangri-La competes with Imperial and the Oberoi for New Delhi’s business visitors, and on that summer day, foreigners in navy and black suits waited with us for the buffet to open. To wear a suit in India during the summer bespeaks either total ignorance of the oppressive humidity, or—surely the case with these men—an expectation of door-to-door travel from one four-star air-conditioned paradise to the next. These men lived the life Kumar passed up when he joined the civil service, and which his brothers and sisters apparently still enjoy.</span></p> <p>While a waiter filled our glasses with ice water, Sudhir kept making the case for his boss. Be wary of Lalu’s critics, he said. They’re a jealous bunch, and hypocrites to boot. They criticize him for his Bihar failures, but then overlook his railway success. “When Lalu presented his first budget to Parliament, everyone said Lalu had been busy campaigning in Bihar, so Dr. Manmohan Singh”—India’s current prime minister and former finance minister—“had drafted this budget. They could not internalize that it came from Lalu-ji, because he’s a shepherd or farmer or whatever.”</p> <p>“If he is held responsible for failure,” Kumar complained, “he should be responsible for success as well.” Kumar was pleased with that line, and nodded across the table to the Columbia economist, as if to remind him to save it for their book. And as for Lalu’s successors, Kumar warned, they’ll be subjected to a higher standard than before. “If they revert back to two-percent growth, Parliament will not accept it. A democracy will not accept it.”</p> <p>Lalu, in all his rustic ignorance, had chosen not only a shrewd businessman but a political philosopher, self-actualized equally by his business savvy and patriotic self-abnegation. Kumar stood up grandly, strode to the vegetarian entrees, inserted his shoulder firmly amid the businessmen, and triumphantly spooned out some korma.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold;">Graeme Wood is a staff editor at The Atlantic.</p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-48647528510474533412009-02-28T11:24:00.000-05:002009-02-28T11:26:45.127-05:00Philosopy's great experimentSource: Prospect<br /><br /><span class="leadtext">Philosophers used to combine conceptual reflections with practical experiment. The trendiest new branch of the discipline, known as x-phi, wants to return to those days. Some philosophers don’t like it<br /><br /><br /></span>Katja Wiech is a cheerful young German researcher who is fascinated by pain. She’s discovered many things—for example, when devout Catholics are given electric shocks while looking at a picture of the Virgin Mary they feel less pain than atheists do when administered the same unpleasant treatment.<br /> <br />She works in a set of rooms at the end of a maze of corridors in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. In one room sits a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. The magnet of this machine is so powerful it can seize a mobile phone from your hand,sending it flying through the air.<br /> <br />Her subjects lie flat on the scanner’s bed, their head inside its white tube. A computer by their feet provides various stimuli—images, questions and so on—and is operated from an adjacent room divided off by a glass screen. The noise is very loud. There’s a panic button if her subjects freak out.<br /> <br />Wiech is a neurologist. But here’s the strange thing: she is working with philosophers. The caricature of a philosopher is of an otherworldly professor sitting in a comfy armchair in an Oxbridge college, speculating on the nature of reality using only his or her intellect and a few books. This has some basis in reality. Chemistry requires test tubes, history needs documents. In recent years, the main tool of the philosopher has been grey matter. The subject’s evolution can be painfully slow, tiptoeing forward from footnote to footnote. But not always. Every so often a new movement overturns the orthodoxies of received opinion. We might just be entering one of those phases.<br /> <br />A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility.<br /> <br />Philosophers have always been informed by scientific research, history and psychology. Indeed, most of the giants of pre-20th century philosophy combined empirical and conceptual studies. Some drew on the research of others, while René Descartes and John Locke performed their own experiments; this was a time when science had not entirely split from philosophy. David Hume mixed reason with experience, including psychological and historical observations alongside more abstract reasoning—A Treatise of Human Nature was subtitled “Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Methods of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.”<br /> <br />But for many philosophers today the idea of experimental philosophy still grates. Conceptual analysis has been a dominant strain of Anglo-American philosophy in the past 100 years. Philosophy of this kind considers not so much how things are, but rather how we think about them: the way we carve up the world, the frontiers of meaning, of what makes sense. But for the x-phi fan, empirical research is not a mere prop to philosophy, it is philosophy.<br /> <br />Under the x-phi banner it’s possible to distinguish three types of activity. The first uses new brain-scanning technology, for which philosophers teaming up with neuroscientists, like Katja Wiech, to look for patterns of neuronal activity when subjects are presented with philosophical problems. In the second type, philosophers devise questionnaires to discover people’s intuitions and go out in the street with the trusty clipboard. In the third, they conduct field experiments, observing how people behave in particular situations, often without their knowledge. All three aim to test the philosophers’ assumption that they know from introspection what people are likely to say or believe. The traditional philosophical assertion, “we have strong intuitions that…” or “we can all agree that…” now have to be tested against the evidence. The idea of who “we” are is being challenged, for instance by surveys suggesting broad cultural differences about intuitions. The philosopher in his Oxford study may not share intuitions with the shopper down the road in Queen’s Street, whose intuitions, in turn, may differ from those in Queen’s Road, Hong Kong. Such research raises big issues about our moral education.<br /> <br /> <div style="text-align: center;">***<br /> </div><br /> <img style="margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 10px;" alt="" src="http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/usr/feature-warburton.jpg" align="right" border="0" />It takes most people decades to reach guru status. But Joshua Knobe managed it within a few years of being awarded his PhD in philosophy from Princeton in 2006. He has an infectious excitement for his research. In between his undergraduate and graduate days he published a few articles. One was about “intentionality”: when did people judge that behaviour was intentional? He and a collaborator tried to establish this by running a few experiments. Knobe says that his eureka moment occurred when a philosopher, Alfred Mele, responded to the article. Although he disagreed with Mele, the point was that Mele had “treated our work as a contribution to philosophy… I was too boneheaded to see for myself that the two disciplines [psychology and philosophy] could be brought together in this way.”<br /> <br />His work on intention soon attracted attention. Take one of his cases. A company chairman is told a new project will increase profits but harm the environment. He says, “I don’t care about harming the environment. Let’s start the new project. I just want to make as much profit as possible.” Meanwhile another company chairman is faced with a similar choice, except this time it will help the environment. He says, “I don’t care about helping the environment. Let’s start the project. I want to make as much profit as possible.” When asked whether the chairman intentionally harmed the environment in the first scenario, most people say “yes.” But did the chairman intentionally help the environment in the second scenario? Most people think not. This is weird. It led Knobe to conclude that people’s moral judgements play a role in their concept of intentional action.<br /> <br />Another of Knobe’s experiments—a collaboration with fellow philosopher Shaun Nichols—demonstrates x-phi’s ambition, and how widely its methodology can be applied. The issue of free will is a perennial of western philosophy. Is the world entirely governed by causal laws and, if so, in what sense can humans be said to be free? Is moral responsibility compatible with a causally determined world? The range of possible responses is mind-bogglingly complex. But researchers, using surveys, now know what people think.<br /> <br />Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the majority of people turn out to be “non-determinists”—that is, they think that humans are free to choose. But science seems to reveal a world in which every event is explained in terms of prior causes and prevailing conditions, with no apparent room for free will. So, are we responsible for our actions even in a determinist world? Those who believe we are, and see no contradiction between our actions being causally determined and our having free will are known, in the jargon, as “compatibilists.”<br /> <br />Oddly, however, the more details—or causes—survey respondents are given about a particular case, the more likely people are to deem an agent responsible. Thus, asked to imagine Universe A, where everything is fully determined, almost all subjects say that in this universe people can’t be held fully morally responsible. But when told about the same universe in which there’s a man named Bill who fancied his secretary and in order to be with her decided to bump off his wife and children (philosophical thought experiments tend to involve a lot of death), nearly three out of four subjects insisted that Bill was morally responsible. What we are witnessing here is believed to be an emotional response to the scenario or “affective impact.”<br /> <br />Knobe and Nichols tentatively suggest that people’s judgement in such cases results from “performance error,” Our rational response to determinism and free will is distorted; our emotional response leads us astray. If true, then they believe compatibilism loses some of its force.<br /> <br />In Oxford, philosopher Neil Levy is experimenting on a different topic, but along similar lines. Advances in medical science make it possible to improve ourselves both physically and mentally. Surveys show that we’re more squeamish about cognitive changes: more of us object to using psychotropic drugs to improve our brain functioning (although we don’t object to coffee), than, say, surgery such as tummy tucks or breast enlargements.<br /> <br />So why the difference? To access our intuitions, Levy and a collaborator use a technique called cognitive load, in which they ask questions while subjects are occupied on another task (such as subtracting three from 1,000, then three from 997, and so on). This supposedly allows a deeper and more accurate mapping of our intuitions because our cognitive capacities are otherwise engaged. The research is still at an early stage, but Levy suspects that most of us are intuitive dualists: we think mind and matter are distinct substances. This intuition contradicts the dominant view among philosophers of the mind, who believe (put simplistically) that there is no fundamental difference between mind and matter. If the philosophers are right and our intuitions just wrong it could change attitudes to cognitive and physical enhancements. Intuitions—even strongly held and apparently “natural”—can be misguided.<br /> <br /> <div style="text-align: center;">***<br /> </div><br />The 20th century saw an explosion in applied ethics—moral philosophers contributed to all manner of contemporary debates, from abortion to euthanasia, from the rules of engagement in war to the justification of punishment. In drawing out arguments, a traditional tool for the philosopher has been the thought experiment. These experiments tend to abstract from real cases to reveal the pertinent features of moral reasoning.<br /> <br />One of the most famous examples is the trolley problem. You are standing by a railway line when you see a train hurtling towards you, out of control; the brakes have failed. In its path are five people tied to the tracks. Fortunately, the runaway train is approaching a junction with a side spur. If you flip a switch you can redirect the train onto this spur, saving five lives. That’s the good news. The not-quite-so-good news is that another person is tied down on the side spur of the track. Still, the decision’s easy, right? By altering the train’s direction only one life will be lost rather than five.<br /> <br />Call this Trolley A. Now vary the scenario a little. This time you’re on a footbridge overlooking the railway track. You see the train hurtling towards you and five people tied to the rails. Can they be saved? Again, the moral philosopher has arranged it so they can. There’s an obese man leaning over the footbridge. If you were to push him he would tumble over and squelch onto the track. He’s so fat that his bulk would bring the train—Trolley B—to a juddering halt. Sadly, the process would kill the fat man. But it would save the other five people. Should you shove him over? Again, apparently an easy decision. Surely you shouldn’t. That would be an outrage. But what’s the difference? Both cases involve killing one person to save five.<br /> <br />Philosophers have pondered this for over three decades. One possible explanation for our different intuitions in the two cases is this: in Trolley A, if you were to turn the train onto the spur and the person on the track were somehow to untie themselves and escape in time, you’d be delighted. Not only would you have avoided crashing into the five, but no one else would have got hurt. But with Trolley B, you need to lead the fat man to his death to save the five. It would be a noble sacrifice if the fat man jumped of his own accord. But if you push him you are using him as if he were an object.<br /> <br />The doctrine of double effect—which says that it may be acceptable to do something good when there is a foreseeable bad side effect, so long as this bad side effect is not intended—is much debated. The literature on runaway trains has become so vast that it’s even been given a name of its own: “trolley-ology.” To an outsider it may all seem like harmless fun—crossword puzzles for philosophers. But it is designed to tease out whether we should ever sacrifice one person to save many and has numerous practical applications (for example, the issue of “collateral damage” in war).<br /> <br />Whether the doctrine justifies our conflicting intuitions over the trolley problem remains disputed. But what’s interesting is the twist that experimental philosophers have brought to the debate. Trolley-ologists of the past assumed that their intuitions coincided with those of others, including non-philosophers—civilians, perhaps we should call them. But now there are easy ways to check. The BBC conducted an online poll in which 65,000 people took part. Nearly four out of five agreed that Trolley A should be diverted. Only one in four thought that the fat man should be shoved over the footbridge. (Nobody has yet looked for a link with the fact that nearly one in four Britons are obese.)<br /> <br />Neuroscientists and psychologists have also jumped on the trolleywagon. Brain scans allegedly indicate that when people are confronted with Trolley A, the part of the brain linked to cognition and reasoning lights up; whereas with Trolley B, people seem to use a section linked to emotion. The few people who are prepared to use the fat man as a buffer take longer to respond than those aren’t, perhaps because they experience the emotional impulse and then reason their way out of it. Other experiments suggest people who have sustained damage to the prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate various emotions, are far more likely than the rest of us to favour sacrificing the fat man.<br /> <br />Much of this work has been carried out in Harvard and Princeton. Meanwhile back in Oxford an Israeli philosopher, Guy Kahane, is poring over Katja Wiech’s scans. On his monitor are images of the brain showing parts lit up like stars on a dark night. He has devised and tested subjects on a set of moral dilemmas and questions the Harvard findings. He is unconvinced that emotion is the driving force behind our judgments in these cases. But he too is using the tools of neuroscience and MRI scans to build his case.<br /> <br />There’s a lot at stake. Peter Singer, the controversial utilitarian thinker and animal rights advocate, believes that while there are evolutionary explanations for why most of us recoil from pushing the fat man, reason should lead us to overcome our squeamishness. For him, there is no overriding moral difference between the two trolley examples, or between intentionally killing civilians in war and their deaths as a byproduct of a military objective. Other philosophers strongly disagree. If x-phi research could settle this debate, it would be quite an achievement.<br /> <br /> <div style="text-align: center;">***<br /> </div><br />Using state-of-the-art gadgetry to cast light on philosophical mysteries sounds like a breakthrough, and grand claims are being made on the basis of neuroscientific observations. But Raymond Tallis, a philosopher and medical scientist who used MRI machines for years to study strokes and epilepsy, is not so sure. He thinks that the accuracy and relevance of brain scanning has been overestimated. MRI technology is excellent for investigating physical damage to the brain, Tallis explains, but when it comes to more complex matters, such as localising particular thought processes, it is too crude. The data from these scans, for example, reflects average activity. When a section of a brain is illuminated this is because it is operating at a heavier load than usual compared with other areas. Changes happening over the whole brain are not picked up. And even sophisticated neural imaging cannot distinguish between physical pain and social rejection—they “light up” the same areas.<br /> <br />There’s a more fundamental problem still, says Tallis. The magnetic tube can never replicate the real world—so answers given inside it are of limited value in predicting decisions that would be taken outside. The hypothetical scenarios presented to volunteers are ingenious but implausible. Even when suspending disbelief, subjects are not gripped by the same panic, indecision, fear and anguish that genuine moral dilemmas produce. Real decisions depend on the particular situation; ethical choices are not like T-junctions, where there are only two choices.<br /> <br />Some philosophers quietly dismiss the movement as a cynical step by researchers to appear cutting edge and to tap into scientists’ funding. Interdisciplinary research can be a shrewd career move: it can, as Tallis notes, allow you to “rise between two stools.” David Papineau, professor of the philosophy of science at King’s College London, says that philosophers who want to know about the real nature of categories like mind, free will, moral value and knowledge should on occasion abandon their armchairs and pay attention to relevant findings. But that doesn’t mean that they should be in the street handing passersby questionnaires: “I don’t see that they’ll learn anything worthwhile from asking ordinary people what they think about these things.”<br /> <br />A philosophical problem is not an empirical problem, a fact is not an interpretation, an “is” is not an “ought,” a description of how we actually behave and think is not a rationale for how we should behave and think. Yet despite the critics, the clipboards and scanners are multiplying, with sometimes surprising effects on ancient debates. In the past few decades there has been a renewed interest in Aristotelian ethics and the notion that ethics is a matter of cultivating virtue. Many recent papers in moral psychology stress the ways situations and unconscious influences affect what we do. These seem more reliable predictors of our actions than our underlying character. There’s a link here with behavioural economics, which stresses our irrational and often hidden impulses.<br /> <br />Moral philosophy appears to be especially fertile ground for combining the conceptual and the empirical. Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his recent book Experiments in Ethics, cites some experiments demonstrating the degree to which situations affect how we behave. Aristotelian virtue theorists stress consistency across situations: an honest person is likely to be honest when presented with different temptations in different circumstances, a compassionate person compassionate wherever appropriate, and so on. Is this, though, the way things really are? Empirical research suggests not. People asking for change for a dollar got a much better response outside a pleasant-smelling bakery than a neutral-smelling hardware store; unwitting subjects in an experiment who found a dime in a phone booth were far more ready to help someone pick up dropped papers than those who hadn’t had that tiny piece of good luck.<br /> <br />Situations have a bigger influence on how we behave than we think they do. Perhaps, then, rather than worrying so much about character building in an Aristotelian vein we should be making people more aware of how easily apparently irrelevant factors can shape what we do. As Appiah asks: “Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”<br /> <br />Is this all a storm in a common room? The repercussions of the experiments cannot be so easily dismissed. Think of the impact on political liberalism. At the heart of liberalism is the idea that an educated adult is and should be capable of choosing how he or she lives. But if, for example, situations affect us more than the reasons we give for our actions, and we use those reasons to rationalise them retrospectively, this assumption may need revision. This branch of x-phi might be nudging us towards Nietzsche’s view that what we take to be the inexorable conclusions of clear rational thought are nothing but reformulations of our innermost desires—disguised as the products of logic. We are not as in control of our thoughts as we thought. Nietzsche fully grasped how profoundly unsettling this notion was.<br /> <br />Experiments in moral psychology may be making back-to-Aristotle ethics less plausible. But in another sense, the experimental philosophy enterprise is eminently Aristotelian. In Raphael’s famous painting, The School of Athens, Plato points up to the otherworldly realm: true reality, the world of the suprasensual Forms that can be understood only by pure thought. Aristotle, however, is reaching out to the world in front of him. X-phi looks like it’s here to stay, and contemporary philosophy should surely take notice.Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-10743097155844565512009-01-19T06:46:00.000-05:002009-01-19T06:47:52.476-05:00'Just the beginning’Source: The Hindu<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">ZIYA US SALAM <p> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <table bgcolor="#ffeedd" border="0"><tbody><tr><td> What the maestro had to say after the news broke. </td></tr></tbody></table><p align="justify"> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <p align="justify"> </p> <p> </p> <p> In the finest hour of Indian film music, the Mozart of Madras is smiling. As accolades come in thick and fast, he soaks in the real meaning of becoming the first Indian to win the Golden Globe for the Best Original Score in Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire”. </p> <p>No loud pronouncements, no yelling out after attaining glory. Just a wave of the hand, and a solemn promise that tomorrow will be better, even if today is better than all yesterdays for the Indian film industry.</p> <p>Really, A.R. Rahman makes it difficult not to like him. He is endearingly simple even at a time when he can afford to brag! But isn’t the ’Slumdog Millionaire’ the best thing to have happened not just to him but to the country and its film industry? Rahman merely says that it is just the first step. “It is just the beginning...I hope that this would happen sooner. I want to do it for my countrymen who all crave for Golden Globe and Oscars.”</p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> Cautious as ever </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>As all music-lovers celebrate, we seem just a shot away from the much-coveted Academy Awards. After Golden Globe, isn’t it realistic to focus on the Oscars? Again Rahman is cautious “The score has won six reputed awards already...It is better to keep the hype on Oscars low since it is a very unpredictable!”</p> <p>But at least at the Golden Globe night, did he expect the award to come his way considering the film had got rave reviews the world over? “I didn’t want to feel confident because I would have been dejected if they had not given it for the music. But the award has affirmed my faith that music has no barrier.”</p> <p>And pray what does his first Golden Globe read? “It is just a trophy. There is nothing on it.” Of course, a lot comes with it: pressure of expectations, for instance. “Umm. But I am not looking that far ahead.”</p> <p>As the ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ team, including director Danny Boyle besides Indian actors Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Mahesh Manjrekar, Madhur Mittal and Dev Patel prepares for the Oscars, how did the project start for Rahman?</p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> Addictive score </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p> </p> <p>How did he prepare for the music score; surely it would have been different from say, “Roja”?</p> <p>“The award has actually brought back memories of ‘Roja’,” he admits, adding, “I just went by my instincts for ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. This is a score that blurs the line between songs and a score. That is one of the reasons it became very addictive to the viewers.”</p> <p>He should know. He knew his mind when he dropped out of school after eleventh standard to go to Trinity College of Music. He knew his mind when he played the keyboard for Illaiyaraja. He knew his mind when he decided to cross the barrier of the Vindhyas and give music with equal felicity to Tamil and Hindi films. He knows he is on the threshold of something even bigger! <em style="">Jai Ho!</em> </p></span>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-61748876203966347812009-01-17T17:55:00.001-05:002009-01-17T17:57:01.266-05:00Take My Kidney, PleaseSource: The Daily Beast<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><strong><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Divorce settlements have always cost an arm and a leg, but as the shocking Batista case demonstrates, vital organs are now fair game. Can altruism ever be regulated?</span></strong></span> <p>She stole his heart so he gave her his kidney. And now he wants it back.</p> <p>So goes the story of 49-year-old Long Island physician Richard Batista and his estranged wife. In 2001, Batista gave one of his kidneys to Dawnell, 44, who had suffered from renal disease for many years. According to the <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/01/07/2009-01-07_long_island_doctor_richard_batista_to_es.html" target="_blank">NY Daily News</a>, he said that Dawnell initiated an affair with her physical therapist two years later. She then filed for divorce in 2005 to end their 15-year marriage. "I saved her life," Batista told the Daily News. "But the pain is unbearable." At a news conference in Garden City on January 7, Dr. Batista's lawyer said his client was demanding return of the kidney or $1.5 million (its estimated worth).</p> <p>It is not difficult to sympathize with Dr. Batista. He is having an extreme form of donor remorse. While the vast majority of donors report a lasting feeling of self-worth and experience a deep sense of gratification from the act—according to surveys, about 95 percent of donors say they would do it again—some regret having donated. It may be that a hoped-for closeness with the recipient failed to materialize, an anticipated demonstration of gratitude was not forthcoming, or the donor felt he did not get the social recognition he deserved. These dynamics prompted sociologists to coin the phrase "the tyranny of the gift." It represents the dark side of altruism; the sense of entitled reciprocity that can be a burden to both donor and recipient. This is not part of the standard gift-of-life storyline, however, and few people are aware of it.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><span class="PullQuote">It is easy to get carried away with the comic potential of the Batista drama. Should pre-nuptial agreements now specify the fate of a kidney given during the marriage?</span></p> <p>For Dr. Batista, the betrayal he felt led to outrage and a demand for restitution. But it is easy to get carried away with the comic potential of the Batista drama. Should pre-nuptial agreements now specify the fate of a kidney given during the marriage? Should human organs be counted as marital assets akin to bank accounts and property? The cynical side of organ donation was laid bare two years ago with the Dutch television program <em>The Big Donor Show</em> which had the feel of a sick parody of <em>Survivor.</em> In the show a terminally ill woman, Lisa, was to select which of three needy contestant-patients would receive one of her kidneys after she died. Viewers could express their preference by voting over the Internet. Dutch lawmakers were outraged.</p> <p>To international relief, the show was a hoax. As Lisa was about to announce her choice, viewers learned that she was really an actress, not a cancer patient looking for a worthy recipient. Lisa and the potential recipients, all of whom were real people in need of kidney transplants and aware of the subterfuge, were part of an enactment to dramatize the shortage of transplantable organs.</p> <p>The Batista tale touches the same issues highlighted on <em>The Big Donor Show</em>. There are now over 100,000 Americans waiting for a new kidney, liver, heart or lungs. Kidney patients represent more than three-fourths of the national waiting list, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which collects and distributes organs from the newly deceased under contract with the Department of Health and Human Services.</p> <p>Only one in four people on the list will get a kidney transplant this year. The rest will languish on dialysis while their names crawl to the top of the list, an ordeal that can take five to eight years in big cities. Every day, 12 people die waiting for a kidney that never arrives.</p><p>Last year 6,000 people gave a kidney to a loved one—the lowest number since 2000. Policy makers must face the fact that altruism alone isn't enough. The government should devise a safe, regulated system in which would-be donors are offered incentives to donate a kidney. The sick person would not personally reward the donor; rather the government would provide the benefit, perhaps a tax credit or lifelong health insurance. And, in keeping with the current system for distribution of organs from the newly deceased, the kidney would go to the next person in line.</p> <p>Organ brokering and remuneration to donors from patients are illegal, but there has never been an explicit prohibition on the government's use of incentives to encourage organ donation. These misconceptions have prompted Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) to draft the Organ Donor Clarification and Anti-Trafficking Act. The bill clarifies that it is not a criminal offense for state and federal governments to encourage organ donation through the use of non-cash incentives, and maintains existing bans on organ brokering and direct patient-donor payments.</p> <p>Which brings us back to the Batistas. Within hours of Dr. Batista's news conference, his story was making international tabloid headlines. But if this episode is to serve any purpose greater than satisfying our inevitable thirst for the scandalous, we need policy makers willing to press for reforms in transplant policy that can bring hope and life to thousands in need.</p> <p><em><a href="http://sallysatelmd.com/" target="_blank">Sally Satel</a> is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a practicing psychiatrist. In 2006 she received a kidney from a friend. She is editor of When Altruism Isn't Enough—The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors (AEI Press, 2009)</em></p><p><br /></p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-821509826902867442009-01-07T22:42:00.000-05:002009-01-07T22:43:37.272-05:00One Movie Composer Who Knows the ScoreSource: Wall Street Journal<br /><br /><p>When British director Danny Boyle needed a composer to capture the frantic and violent hustle and bustle of Mumbai for his film "Slumdog Millionaire," he turned to A.R. Rahman, Bollywood's best-known composer, whose dozens of film scores span romantic symphonic themes, classical Indian music, and catchy pop confections. In India, Mr. Rahman is a megastar, having sold an estimated 100 million albums, or roughly the same number as Madonna or Billy Joel. Not only has he scored such Bollywood film classics as "Roja" and "Lagaan," but he has a growing slate of international credits, including the 2002 Andrew Lloyd Webber-produced London stage musical "Bombay Dreams" and last year's film "Elizabeth: The Golden Age."</p> <p>Mr. Boyle's exuberantly paced story -- about an orphan from the Mumbai slums who gets a shot at winning a fortune on India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" -- is a distant cry from Bollywood, where Mr. Rahman has worked for nearly two decades. "He didn't want any sentimental or sad stuff. He wanted only throbbing and edgy and pulsating sounds," Mr. Rahman said of Mr. Boyle's request to avoid emotion-tugging themes and maudlin arrangements.</p> <div class="insetContent embedType-image imageFormat-DV"><div class="insetTree"><div class="insettipUnit"><img src="http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AI779_ccrahm_DV_20081229174229.jpg" alt="[A.R. Rahman]" vspace="0" width="262" border="0" height="394" hspace="0" /> <cite>Ken Fallin</cite></div></div></div><p>"The music came as a kind of counterpoint actually," added the soft-spoken 42-year-old composer. "When there's something really serious happening on screen there was a fun soundtrack underneath. It would make the movie more enjoyable."</p> <p>With its intoxicating Indian rhythms blended with Western hip-hop beats, the "Slumdog Millionaire" soundtrack has received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score, making Mr. Rahman the first Indian composer to receive such an honor. (Music from the film is collected on a new soundtrack release.)</p> <p>Mr. Rahman said that after receiving Mr. Boyle's commission, he had just three weeks to study early DVD cuts of the film and compose the cues (the musical themes that correspond to moments in the plot). On two tracks, he quotes well-known Bollywood tunes, while in one of the film's most talked-about sequences -- the rousing chorus "Jai Ho" -- he pays homage to splashy Bollywood song-and-dance routines. Mr. Rahman also worked with M.I.A., the British-born, Sri Lankan-reared rapper to create "O . . . Saya," which is heard in a pivotal scene. "She speaks my language, but her sensibility is completely different," noted Mr. Rahman, who grew up speaking Tamil.</p> <p>While a typical Bollywood music director may score up to 150 movies a year, Mr. Rahman limits his annual commissions to between five and 10 films (still a considerable number by Hollywood standards). In popular films like "Kadhalan," "Rangeela," "Dil Se," "Taal" and "Rang de Basanti," Mr. Rahman introduced styles relatively foreign to Bollywood -- including dancehall reggae, hip-hop, hard rock and Baroque counterpoint. Even so, he acknowledges that experimentation often bows to commercial pressures.</p> <p>"The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater," Mr. Rahman said. "You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing. However, the good thing about Indian cinema is because there are so many ragas in it, you can take a raga and make it a little bit funkier and people can relate to it. Half of the stuff I get away with is like that."</p> <p>Mr. Rahman identifies with the rags-to-riches tale of "Slumdog Millionaire." "A lot of people write you off when you have an idea or something good to say," he said. "This is to give hope to those kind of people. Take the right road and you will definitely be there."</p> <p>Mr. Rahman was born into a middle-class Hindu family that fell on hard times after his father, the film arranger and conductor R.K. Sekhar, died when he was 9. The young Rahman, who began studying the piano at the age of 4, began helping to support his family as a keyboardist for television productions. As a teenager he performed with Indian musical luminaries like tabla maestro Zakir Hussain and violinist and singer L. Shankar. These gigs led to a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, where he earned a degree in Western classical music.</p> <p>Returning to Madras (now Chennai), Mr. Rahman worked as a jingle writer for an ad agency. A turning point came in 1991, when at age 25, he was hired to write and direct music for the Mani Ratnam film "Roja." The film and soundtrack became smash hits, and Time magazine listed it as one of the top 10 movie soundtracks of all time. Today, Mr. Rahman remains based in Chennai, although he considers Mumbai his second home -- feelings that intensified after the November terrorist attacks.</p> <p>"We were all affected by that," he said, noting the many press events that he's attended at the Taj Mahal hotel, the site of one of the attacks. "For me, it was a shock. I could have been there with my family. Some of my friends had a dinner reservation there. Then 10 minutes before they heard the news they stopped going. They could have been victims."</p> <p>Even as the Mumbai attacks signaled growing religious and ethnic strife, Mr. Rahman, whose family converted to Islam in 1989, sees music as having the power to cut across class and religious divisions. "When I listen to Bach or Beethoven, I don't see them as Christians," he explained. "And when people listen to my music, or that of [the late Qawwali singer] Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, they don't see the religious element in it; they just see the spiritual element. At this chaotic time in the world, music can play a very important role as a spiritual force."</p> <p>Mr. Rahman said that despite Hollywood's allure, he has no plans to leave the Indian film industry, although he's ready to work with any director who appreciates his music. In 2002, Sony Pictures hired him to write the score for "Warriors of Heaven and Earth," a costume epic by Chinese director He Ping that included songs in Chinese, English and Hindi. Coming to movie theaters are his scores for "Paani" (Water), by "Elizabeth" director Shekhar Kapur, and "19 Steps," an English-language martial-arts film co-produced by Walt Disney and starring a Japanese actor.</p> <p>"It's very difficult to get a director who understands what you're capable of," said Mr. Rahman. "Danny Boyle was definitely good luck for me. He could get what I was trying to do, and in my own little way I could get what he wanted. So if I can get another director like that I would definitely love to work in Hollywood."</p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-69800615350328962352008-12-21T18:33:00.001-05:002008-12-21T18:35:09.631-05:00Whose media? Which people?Source: The Hindu, Magazine<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">NISSIM MANNATHUKKAREN <p> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <table bgcolor="#ffeedd" border="0"><tbody><tr><td> The coverage of the terror attacks showed that when the media becomes a purely business enterprise, news becomes a commodity, serving the interests of the few. It ceases to be the guardian of democracy or the protector of public interest. </td></tr></tbody></table><p align="justify"> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <hr color="#ddeeff" noshade="noshade"><i> </i><p><i>Walter Cronkite of the CBS takes off his glasses while announcing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He puts them back on slowly, and takes about seven seconds to read the next sentence in a voice struggling to regain its composure. </i></p><hr color="#ddeeff" noshade="noshade"> <p align="justify"> </p> <center> <span style="font-size:-2;"> </span><br /> <img src="http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/12/21/images/2008122150060101.jpg" width="350" align="center" border="1" height="200" /> </center><p> </p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. </span></p> <p style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">Alexander Solzhenitsyn</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;"> On November 22, 1963, some 38 minutes past two p.m., Eastern Standard Time, Walter Cronkite of the CBS takes off his glasses while announcing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He puts them back on slowly, and takes about seven seconds to read the next sentence in a voice struggling to regain its composure. Those few seconds of time, which are an eternity for live television, surely would rank among the most poignant moments of television journalism. Reams of pages could not have evoked the same pathos as those moments of silence. Contrast these with the plasticity and obscenity that characterised the 60 hours of visual media coverage of the terror in Mumbai, especially in English. As Jean Baudrillard puts it, the obscenity of media events “is no longer the traditional obscenity of what is hidden, repressed, forbidden or obscure; on the contrary, it is the obscenity of the visible, of the all-too-visible, of the more-visible-than-visible”. What the terror exposed was not just the underbelly of the Indian State but also the innards of the institution of media in India.</span></p> <p> </p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> Role of commercial media </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">But the few critical responses to the terror coverage do not go beyond the superficial and technical aspects of this phenomenon to understand the deeper question, which is the role of a commercial media in a democratic society. The real issue, therefore, is the systematic erosion of the concept of the press as the fourth estate: the belief exemplified by people like the 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle that “invent Writing” and “Democracy is inevitable”; the belief that the press is the guardian of democracy and the protector of the public interest. And this erosion is the inevitable culmination of the long process of the appropriation of the concept of public press for the private interests of a few, in short, the turning of the press into a business enterprise. The news here becomes like any other commodity in the market. Of course, the media in India has hardly assumed the scale and the depth of corporatisation in countries like the United States. But the signs are ominous and these are hardly encouraging for the miniscule number of media outlets that seek to be a real “public press”. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">The most problematic aspect of the recent coverage is the media’s posturing as an “objective” and “neutral” entity — above all kinds of power interests — which merely seeks to bring the “truth” to the public. This posturing is seen in the shrill rhetoric of the blaming of the State and the political class for the tragedy. In this simplistic formulation of the “good” press versus the “evil” politicians, the media panders to something called the “public opinion” instead of acting as a critical catalyst of the latter. Public opinion must be the most abused term in a democracy. But what we forget in the aura of Obama is that it is public opinion that sanctioned the U.S. war in Iraq and it is public opinion that elected George Bush back to power. So a public opinion uncoupled from higher universal principles of justice and ethics is merely a mob stoning an alleged adulteress to death. Walter Cronkite went on to become the “most trusted man in America” for often going against the public opinion, even from within the confines of a commercial media. When he, against the logic of television ratings, delivered the verdict against the American war in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously remarked: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.” With hundreds of debates on television in the last few days, it was reprehensible that not even one proposed a political solution, rather than a technical or military solution, to the problem of terrorism. </span></p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> A modern myth </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">The moral superiority of the media in relation to the political class and the State is the biggest myth in any capitalist democracy. The recent politician-bashing undertaken by the media hides the deep need of both for one another. Such a synergy could not be better illustrated than by the media celebrity status attained by politicians like the late Pramod Mahajan. The same goes for the media’s harmonious and mutually beneficial relationship with capitalist interests which include the entertainment industry. It is almost laughable that the media, after 60 hours of shameless voyeurism, chose to call Ramgopal Varma’s visit to the Taj as “disaster tourism”. The media’s defence that the lack of coverage of the victims at the CST railway station as compared to those at the five-star hotels was not “because of some deliberate socio-economic prejudice” but an aberration and imbalance that crept into the chaos of covering live tragedy ignores the deeper systemic problems hinted above. Even after the tragedy was over, the sanity of the studios could still not restore the imbalance. For instance, NDTV’s “We the People”, telecast on November 30, had among its expert panellists, Simi Grewal, Kunal Kohli, Ratna Pathak, Ness Wadia and Luke Kenny! These people are supposed to represent us, citizens, against the inept and carnivorous State. Through the magic wand of the media, the rich and the famous transmogrify into “we the people”. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek had noted that the “close door” button in the elevator is actually inoperable: it does nothing to hasten the closing of the door, but gives the impression that it does. The presumed power of the media as the representative of the people is something similar: it merely gives the illusion that we are all participating in it. And it has always been this way. That is why the suffering and tragedies of the few elites who lost their lives in the terror attack become more important than that of the other victims. That is why the media spectacle of terror has the habit of ignoring the systematic horrors and tragedies undergone by millions of Indians on a day-to-day basis. And that is why the Taj and the Oberoi will enter our wounded collective consciousness, unlike Kambalapalli and Khairlanji. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;"> It is shocking that a slogan like “enough is enough” is bandied about in the media now after a terror attack. The moral angst of the media could not be roused all these years even when 1.5 lakh farmers committed suicide in a period of mere eight years from 1997 to 2005. How many channels did exclusive “breaking news” stories when India, the second fastest growing economy in the world, secured the 94th position, behind even Nepal, in the Global Hunger Index Report? Where were the Shobha Des and Ness Wadias then, who are now out on the streets mouthing revolutionary slogans like “boycott taxes”? Where were the candle light vigils and demonstrations when policemen rode on a motorbike with a human being tied to it? Or when a father and a child were crushed under a bus after being thrown off it for not being able to pay two rupees for the ticket? For the 40 crore Indians who live like worms, the prospect of being shot dead by terrorists would seem like a dream come true. At least it is more glorious and patriotic than swallowing pesticide! </span></p> <center> <span style="font-size:100%;"> PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES<br /><img src="http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/12/21/images/2008122150060102.jpg" width="275" align="center" border="1" height="200" /><br /><b> POIGNANT MOMENT: Walter Cronkite announcing John F. Kennedy's Assassination. </b></span> </center><p> </p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">The clamour for the accountability of the State and political class that has been occasioned by the terror was long overdue. And the media has played a role in giving a stage to vent this anger. But ultimately, it hides the fact that commercial media is just another partner in the State-corporate alliance. Otherwise, how can you explain the lopsided coverage in the English media about poverty, hunger, health, nutrition and violation of human rights (which would not exceed 10 per cent of the total number of stories and reports)? While a lot of questions have been raised about democracy after the terror attack, there is none about the need for a real independent media which is free not only from the clutches of the State but also from profit and commercial considerations. Enforcing some security guidelines for the media for wartime and emergency coverage does not address the larger question of the freedom of the press and its accountability to the public which can happen only if the latter are treated as citizens and not as consumers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">Blaming the media alone for our problems or not acknowledging some of the benefits of even a commercial media is naïve and one-sided. Nevertheless, the “public debates” that were staged on television in the last few days operated on a thoroughly emasculated notion of democracy and security. What the urban middle classes and the elite want is not democracy but Adam Smith’s night watchman State which does nothing more than the strong and efficient protection of the life, limbs and property of the people (read the classes). Once that is accomplished, whether the masses sell their blood, kidneys or their bodies to make a living is none of their problem. Despite the clamour for democracy, even the media is aware that if real democracy is established, it will not be able to sell many of the things that it is selling now, including terror as a packaged product. Until then, it will continue to be the vulture in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of photojournalist Kevin Carter: the Sudanese toddler, all skin and bones, lies slumped on the ground in her attempt to crawl to the feeding centre, while it waits in the background, for her to die. At least, Kevin Carter had the conscience to end his life. </span></p> <p align="justify"> </p><p><i>The author is Assistant Professor with Dalhousie University, Canada.</i></p></span>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-83187655890926438312008-12-17T23:36:00.002-05:002008-12-17T23:40:19.389-05:00Faith equals fertilitySource: intelligentlife.com<br /><br /><img src="http://moreintelligentlife.com/files/children.jpg" alt="children.jpg" title="children.jpg" class="imagefield imagefield-field_main_illustration2" width="470" height="656" /><br /><img src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/DiviAvi/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot.jpg" alt="" /><img src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/DiviAvi/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.jpg" alt="" /><br /><br />Religious people have more babies than non-believers--and not just for the obvious reasons. Anthony Gottlieb looks into a philosophical puzzle ...<br /><br />From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2008<br /><br />If a Martian were to look at a map of the Earth’s religions, what he might find most surprising is the fact that such a map can be drawn at all. How strange--he might say to himself--that so many of the world’s Hindus are to be found in one place, namely India. And how odd that Muslims are so very numerous in the Middle East. With the disconcerting curiosity that is so typical of Martians, he might wonder what explains this geographical clustering. Do people move countries in order to be close to others of the same faith? Or do people simply tend to adopt the religion they grew up with?<br /><br />The answer, of course, is the latter--on the whole. There are exceptions: Jews moving to Israel, for example, and there are many other cases of religious migration. Still, the huddling of the faithful is mainly explained by the fact that religion runs in families. If you have a religion, it is probably the same one as your parents. Earlier this year <a href="http://religions.pewforum.org/">a survey</a> by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly three-quarters of American adults professed the religion in which they were raised. But instead of finding this glass to be three-quarters full, newspapers preferred to notice that it was one-quarter empty. It was the minority of Americans who either switched religions, or abandoned religion altogether, who were highlighted in reports of the survey (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/26religion.html?ref=us">Poll Finds a Fluid Religious Life in US</a>”, ran a headline in the <em>New York Times</em>). Plainly it does not count as news that religion remains largely a family affair. Yet it should do, because of its largely unnoticed consequences. Some religious groups are dramatically outbreeding others, in ways that have an impact on America, Europe and elsewhere.<br /><br />Consider the Mormons, who grew from six people in a log-cabin in upstate New York in 1830 to 13.1m adherents around the world in 2007. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mormons were a fringe sect in America, with decidedly unusual beliefs. (They officially hold that God once had a body; that people exist as spirits before they are physically conceived; and that Jesus will one day commute between somewhere in Israel and somewhere in the United States.) Today Mormons are about to overtake Jews in America; in fact, they may already have done so. And they almost had their own presidential candidate, in the person of Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts. The rapid rise of Mormons in America, growing by an average of 40% every decade in the 20th century, is mainly due to their large families. The American state with the highest birth rate is Utah, which is around 70% Mormon. In America, on average, Mormon women have nearly three times more children than Jewish women. <br /><br />Ultra-Orthodox Jews, however, do have plenty of offspring. This fact is changing the face of Israel, where such families have three times more children than other Israelis. As a result, at least a quarter of Israel’s population of under-17s is expected to be ultra-Orthodox by 2025, according to <a href="http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7913">Eric Kaufmann at Harvard</a>. A similar but more gradual increase in the religious right has been taking place in America for decades, and not just because of Mormons. Conservative Protestant denominations as a whole grew much faster than liberal ones in 20th-century America, and it has been estimated that three-quarters of this growth is due simply to higher birth rates. Were it not for the fact that Evangelical Christians reproduce faster than other Protestants, George Bush--who attracted most of the Evangelical votes--probably could not have made it back to the White House in 2004. <br /><br />Like other demographers, Eric Kaufmann expects western Europe to become markedly more religious in the course of the 21st century, as a result of the relatively low fertility of unbelievers and immigration from more pious places. Not only do denominations with traditionalist values tend to have higher birth rates than their more liberal co-religionists, but countries that are relatively secularised usually reproduce more slowly than countries that are more religious. According to the World Bank, the nations with the largest proportions of unbelievers had an average annual population growth rate of just 0.7% in the period 1975-97, while the populations of the most religious countries grew three times as fast.<br /><br />If they want to spread their gospel, then, one might half-seriously conclude that atheists and agnostics ought to focus on having more children, to help overcome their demographic disadvantage. Unfortunately for secularists, this may not work even as a joke. Nobody knows exactly why religion and fertility tend to go together. Conventional wisdom says that female education, urbanisation, falling infant mortality, and the switch from agriculture to industry and services all tend to cause declines in both religiosity and birth rates. In other words, secularisation and smaller families are caused by the same things. Also, many religions enjoin believers to marry early, abjure abortion and sometimes even contraception, all of which leads to larger families. But there may be a quite different factor at work as well. Having a large family might itself sometimes make people more religious, or make them less likely to lose their religion. Perhaps religion and fertility are linked in several ways at the same time.<br /><br />Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/7827212.html">has suggested several ways in which the experience of forming a family might stimulate religious feelings among parents</a>, at least some of the time. She notes that pregnancy and birth, the business of caring for children, and the horror of contemplating their death, can stimulate an intensity of purpose that might make parents more open to religious sentiments. Many common family events, she reasons, might encourage a broadly spiritual turn of mind, from selfless care for a sick relation to sacrifices for the sake of a child’s adulthood that one might never see. <br /><br />Eberstadt argues that part of the reason why western European Christians have become more secular is that they have been forming fewer stable families, and having fewer children when they do. This, she suggests, may help to explain some puzzles about the timing of secularisation in certain places. In Ireland, for example, she notes that people started having smaller families before they stopped going to church. And, she argues, if something about having families can incline one to religion, this might shed some light on another mystery: why the sexes are not equally religious.<br /><br />According to Rodney Stark, an American sociologist of religion, <a href="http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=2539">the generalisation that men are less religious than women</a> “holds around the world and across the centuries”. In every country--both Christian and non-Christian--analysed by Dr Stark, based on data from the <a href="http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/organization/background.html">World Values Survey</a> in the 1990s, more women than men said they would describe themselves as religious. There is no agreed explanation for this striking difference. Perhaps the fact that women play a rather larger role than men in the production and rearing of children has something to do with it. If family life does contribute to religiosity, then having larger families might backfire on unbelievers. It might make them more religious. And since faith is still largely a family affair, their children would then be more likely to be religious, too.Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-61704898868447357952008-11-30T19:48:00.000-05:002008-11-30T19:49:57.997-05:00The toilet revolutionSource: The Hindu<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">KALPANA SHARMA <p> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <table bgcolor="#ffeedd" border="0"><tbody><tr><td> Villages in Kurukshetra district, Haryana, are showing that providing clean sanitation to everyone is not an impossible task. </td></tr></tbody></table><p align="justify"> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <hr color="#ddeeff" noshade="noshade"><i> <p>In government schools around this country, adolescent girls are dropping out, or missing school, because there are no toilets.</p> </i><hr color="#ddeeff" noshade="noshade"> <p align="justify"> </p> <center> <span style="font-size:-2;"> Photo: Kalpana Sharma </span><br /> <img src="http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/11/30/images/2008113050070301.jpg" width="350" align="center" border="1" height="225" /><br /><b> Changed lives: Rekha in front of the toilet in her compound. </b> </center><p> </p><p> </p> <p> Rekha is a landless labourer in the village of Bishangarh in Haryana’s Kurukshetra district. All around her poorly constructed open brick house, where the rain pours in through the rafters, are lush fields of potato and wheat. She lives there w ith her husband, an agricultural worker like her and her three children, a girl and two boys. Between the two of them, on the days they get work, they bring in around Rs. 150 a day. Her husband gets paid twice as much as her.</p> <p>Rekha’s pride is her outdoor toilet, built on the corner of her small plot. She has no money to build a door. A jute curtain does the job. But she has a constant source of water. So the toilet remains clean and there is no smell. The design is a simple one, easy to maintain, with a soak pit that we are told will not pollute the water table.</p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> Talking point </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>The toilet revolution in Bishangarh and other villages in Kurukshetra district has become a talking point. It draws visitors from around India and the world who look on in wonder as well-built Haryanvi women lustily shout “Jai Swatchatha” (Long live cleanliness) and show off the toilets attached to their homes. Each costs around Rs. 1,200. The poor, like Rekha, get a subsidy. The others pay what they can and the rest comes from an NGO run by the local MP, young Navin Jindal, whose beaming countenance greets you at every street corner as you drive through the district. </p> <p>Bishangarh has received the Nirmal Gram Puraskar, the prize instituted by the central government in recognition of villages that are free of open defecation. It is one of hundreds of villages across the country that are qualifying for this award. The women in the village, who are part of the Nigrani (vigilance) Samitis, go around with torches, sticks and whistles early in the morning. If they catch anyone defecating in the open, they blow the whistle and shine the torch on the crouching figure. This, they believe, embarrasses the individual to the point that they will not do it again.</p> <p>There is no question that the toilet revolution has made a huge difference to the lives of women, as well as elderly men and children. No more do they have to scramble in the dark in the nearby fields. Women, especially, would have to go before dawn or wait until after dusk. The absence of toilets assaults their dignity, lays them open to sexual harassment and has a direct impact on their health. Not anymore. </p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> Is it sustainable? </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>But questions remain. Can this be sustained without policing? Will people change their habits so easily, particularly men who feel no embarrassment defecating in the open? Can it work without a subsidy? Is it possible in villages where there is no water? Where there is no electricity? In Kurukshetra district, out of 418 villages, 412 are electrified. And will it work in villages with caste and communal divides, where the villagers are not willing to cooperate? In Bishangarh, the majority belongs not just to one caste, but even one <em style="">gotra</em> (clan). The woman Sarpanch is also from the same caste and <em style="">gotra</em>. Hence, getting everyone to work together is a little easier. Women I spoke to acknowledged that the situation would have been different if they had been a “mixed” village, in terms of caste.</p> <p>One also hopes this will the first step in enhancing women’s status. For, women are visible in their support of the toilet revolution. Yet in Haryana, and Kurukshetra district, the sex ratio remains skewed in favour of boys. And dowry has not disappeared although some women insist it is declining. If one goes by what Rekha’s 18-year-old, college-going daughter Babita has to say, it has increased. “People pay upto Rs. 10 lakhs”, she says ruefully. And marriage, of course, is inevitable, she adds. What other option is there? </p> <p>Babita is lucky that she has got as far as she has in her education. In government schools around this country, adolescent girls are dropping out, or missing school, because there are no toilets. So when they get their monthly period, they simply don’t go to school. In Kurukshetra district, all the schools have toilets, claims the indefatigable Sumedha Kataria, the Additional District Collector who is also the force behind the sanitation movement in the district.</p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> Bigger challenge </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>Of course, urban sanitation is an even bigger challenge and intimately linked to the almost insurmountable problem of providing housing for millions of urban poor. You can build community toilets but until you solve the housing crisis in cities, you really will not be able to deal effectively with sanitation. For women especially, the absence of toilets is a far more traumatic experience in cities than in villages as there are practically no secluded places.</p> <p>Some of the more innovative projects on show at the recent Sacosan III (South Asian Conference on Sanitation) in New Delhi — which incidentally was virtually ignored by the “national” media in the capital — were those where village self-help groups are using simple technology to manufacture sanitary napkins at low cost. This is being done in several States and in at least one location in Tamil Nadu, the increase in school attendance of adolescent girls has been dramatic.</p> <p>Toilets, sanitation, sanitary napkins, defecation — these are not things we like to talk about. Yet, this is such a fundamental issue that affects all our lives — especially if we happen to be poor and women. Half of India defecates in the open. The government hopes to get all these 600 million people to start using toilets by 2012. That’s a lot of toilets to build in just four years. </p></span>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-47940431868568903032008-11-04T18:35:00.001-05:002008-11-04T18:39:06.841-05:00Start-Up Teaches Math to Americans, Indian-StyleSource: New York Times.<br /><br /><br /><address class="byline author vcard">By <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/author/claire-cain-miller/" class="url fn" title="See all posts by Claire Cain Miller">Claire Cain Miller</a></address> <!-- Summary --> <!-- The Content --> <div class="w480"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/04/technology/bits_indianmathonline.190.jpg" alt="Indian Math Online" /><span class="caption"><br />Screen shot of Indian Math Online.</span></div> <p>The New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/education/10math.html">recently reported on a study</a> that found, once again, that the United States is failing to develop the math skills of its students, particularly girls, especially compared to other countries where math education is more highly valued. </p> <p><a href="http://www.indianmathonline.com/">Indian Math Online</a> is a start-up that aims to take on that disparity by teaching math to American kids using techniques from Indian schools. </p> <p>Bob Compton, an Indianapolis-based venture capitalist and entrepreneur who co-founded Indian Math Online, hatched the idea when he was producing <a href="http://2mminutes.com/index.html">Two Million Minutes</a>, a documentary comparing high school education in India, China and the United States. He realized that Indian teenagers who were the same age as his daughters were three years ahead of them in math. </p> <p>“If you don’t get mathematics to the highest level you possibly can in high school, your career options shrink dramatically in the 21st century,” Mr. Compton said. “Our society basically tells girls they’re not good at math. I was determined that was not going to happen to my daughters.” <span id="more-1781"></span></p> <p>Mr. Compton and Indian Math Online’s co-founder, Suresh Murthy, hired a team of math teachers and software developers in India to build the site and its curriculum. At first, the site was meant for their daughters, but soon friends started asking if they could use it and word gradually spread. It has lessons for students in grades one through 12 and offers several packages for $12.50 to $20 a month. </p> <p>Two-thirds of the students using it are children of Indian and Chinese immigrants. Mr. Murthy’s children are an example. “He grew up in India, and he worried about his daughters falling behind in the global competition to be educated for the 21st century,” Mr. Compton said. </p> <p>The site’s curriculum is based on some crucial differences between math education in India and the United States, Mr. Compton said. Math homework in India consists of math problems that students work through, as opposed to the United States, where homework is heavy on reading about math topics in a textbook. Math teachers in India have college or graduate degrees in the topic, he said. Meanwhile, most American students in grades five through eight learn math and science from teachers without degrees or certification in these topics, according to a National Academies report. </p> <p>Indian Math Online gives students a diagnostic test for their grade level and then breaks down the results by topic area, such as factors or prime numbers. It sends parents a report showing the topics in which their children are strong and weak and sends students learning modules full of practice problems. It will soon add online chat and live tutoring from math teachers in India for an extra fee. </p> <p>By testing specific subject areas, Indian Math Online picks up weaknesses that a typical school test would miss, Mr. Compton said. When his youngest daughter was in seventh grade, for example, she took the diagnostic test and discovered she missed every question on prime numbers. Yet she had always received good scores on school math tests. </p> <p>“It identified and diagnosed a missing fundamental math concept that her teachers hadn’t noticed,” he said. “And yet, it would have caught up with her later on, and we wouldn’t have known why she was struggling.” </p> Mr. Compton said that children of Indian and Chinese parents use the site consistently, but American children often lose interest after a couple months. He compares math to athletics — youths must practice a bit every day to master it. “For some reason, American kids seem to be willing to put in the work with athletics, but not put it in with the one subject that’s going to matter more to their lives than any other activity.”Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-68026694644656364172008-09-14T23:31:00.001-04:002008-09-14T23:32:58.545-04:00A 1-in-1,000 Chance of GötterdämmerungSource: Reason online<br /><br /><p>Will the world come to an end on September 10? That fear is motivating two lawsuits—one American, another European—that aim to stop the physicists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) from switching on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on that day. The LHC is a $10 billion 17-mile long particle accelerator lying in a circular tunnel beneath the border of France and Switzerland. Its massive superconducting magnets cooled with liquid helium accelerate two beams of protons and lead nuclei to nearly the speed of light. These particle beams will eventually be crashed into each other to produce temperatures and particles not seen since microseconds after the Big Bang <a href="http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_age.html">13.7 billion years</a> ago. </p> <p>One of the chief goals of the LHC experiments is to find the elusive <a href="http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/cern/ideas/higgs.html">Higgs boson</a>, the only fundamental particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics that has not been directly observed. The Higgs boson plays a key role in explaining the origins of mass in other elementary particles. Exciting, if esoteric research, to be sure, but why oppose it? </p> <p>Walter Wagner, a former nuclear safety officer, and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho, have <a href="http://www.lhcdefense.org/">filed a civil suit</a> in federal district court in Hawaii asking for a temporary restraining order to stop the researchers at CERN from switching on the LHC until further safety analyses are completed. In Europe, Professor Otto Rössler, a chemist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/2650665/Legal-bid-to-stop-CERN-atom-smasher-from-destroying-the-world.html">filed a similar suit</a> with the European Court of Human Rights. </p> <p>These LHC opponents fear that the Earth could be destroyed by vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, microscopic black holes, or strangelets produced by the high-energy proton-proton collisions planned by CERN physicists. Vacuum bubbles have been described as a kind of "cosmic cancer." If it turns out that there is a lower energy state into which the universe could settle, then the LHC might produce "bubbles" of such a state which would then expand, ripping apart the Earth and eventually the entire universe. If magnetic monopoles were produced they might induce protons to decay and thus destroy normal matter. Microscopic black holes might grow by gobbling up the Earth. And strangelets are combinations of quarks that theoretically interact with normal matter and transform it into strange matter. </p> <p>At the <a href="http://www.global-catastrophic-risks.com/index.html">Global Catastrophic Risks</a> conference at Oxford University this past July, CERN's Michelangelo Mangano described the findings of a report released in June by the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG). The bottom line: "There is no basis for any conceivable threat from the LHC."</p> <p>While the <a href="http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf">LHC safety report</a> goes through a number of scenarios, its chief point is that the energies produced in the LHC are "far below those of the highest-energy cosmic-ray collisions that are observed regularly on Earth." In fact, cosmic rays produced by phenomena in the universe "conduct" more than 10 million LHC-like experiments per second. If such energies actually produced vacuum bubbles, microscopic black holes, magnetic monopoles, or strangelets that could destroy planets and stars, physicists wouldn't be here to perform experiments in the LHC now. </p> <p>At the Global Catastrophic Risk conference, Future of Humanity Institute research associate Toby Ord asked an interesting question: How certain should we be about safety when there could be a risk to the survival of the human species? As Ord <a href="http://www.global-catastrophic-risks.com/abstracts/ab_hillerbrand_ord_sandberg.html">argued</a>, "When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in their modeling of the problem, or a mistake in their calculations." </p> <p>In other words, for the argument that the LHC poses no existential risk to humanity to be sound, the theory underlying it must be adequate. But physical theories have been upended in the past. Ord pointed out that Lord Kelvin had calculated the age of the sun. Using the best physics of his time, Lord Kelvin concluded that the <a href="http://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/on_the_age_of_the_suns_heat.html">sun was 100 million years old</a>. It was not until the discovery of radioactivity that the current estimate of 4.6 billion years could be calculated. So Ord argued that it's not unreasonable to think that there is a 1-in-1,000 chance that the theories underlying the LHC are flawed in some important details. </p> <p>In addition, the model of the problem itself could be flawed. As an example of how flawed models can impact the real world, Ord cited the <a href="http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Castle.html">Castle Bravo</a> 15-megaton thermonuclear bomb test in 1954, the explosive yield of which was two and half times what had been calculated by the bomb's designers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Those experts had missed the fact that the lithium-7 isotope, when bombarded by high energy neutrons, decomposes into tritium and boosts neutron production. As a more recent example, Ord claimed that Lloyds of London's insurance models for New Orleans had failed to consider the risk that the city's levees might fail. </p> <p>And finally, it's possible that errors in calculation could slip into errors of analysis. Ord cited the frequency of miscalculations in <a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/94061854g5358l35/">medication dosages</a> as an example of such errors. To get an estimate of argument failure, Ord cited survey evidence which found that 1-in-1,000 to 1-in-100 articles are retracted from high-impact scientific journals. For an article to be retracted something must be found to be seriously wrong with it. "If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect," argued Ord. He suggested that multiplying the probabilities that the theory, model, and/or calculations on which the operation of the LHC rests are wrong dramatically increases the probability estimates that switching it on will destroy the world. Thus Ord concluded that the LHC should not be switched on. </p> <p>Mangano from CERN objected furiously to Ord's presentation, arguing, "I can apply that estimate of a 1-in-1,000 chance to everything." Ord responded that his analysis should only apply to experiments that pose an existential risk to humanity, not to experiments whose outcomes can be ameliorated later. I asked Ord if he could think of another experiment or situation to which he would apply his analysis. He looked surprised for a moment and then reluctantly said, "No." Over canapés after Ord's talk, several of his colleagues expressed glee at the prospect that a philosopher's arguments might derail a $10 billion physics experiment. Personally, I estimate the probability of that happening at less than 1-in-1,000. </p> <p>As intriguing as Ord's argument is, I am ultimately unpersuaded by it. Why? Largely because the empirical evidence is that the universe has been running trillions of these high-energy physics "experiments" for billions of years without disastrous results. In fact, Ord's colleagues Nick Bostrom and Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculate that the empirical evidence suggests a conservative estimate of the annual risk that LHC-like experiments would destroy the earth is <a href="http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0512/0512204v2.pdf">1-in-a-trillion</a>. At the end of his talk, Mangano reminded the Oxford conferees, "Jeopardizing the future of scientific research would be a global catastrophe." Any theory, model, or calculation that suggests otherwise is clearly flawed. </p> <p><a href="mailto:rbailey@reason.com" target="_blank"><em>Ronald Bailey</em></a><em> is </em><strong>reason</strong><em>'s science correspondent. His book </em><a href="http://www.reason.com/lb/">Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for </a><a href="http://www.reason.com/lb/">the Biotech Revolution</a><em> is now available from Prometheus Books.</em></p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-3054190128724274642008-09-14T23:25:00.001-04:002008-09-14T23:28:09.829-04:00Pathetic handling of blasts' aftermath<span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:180%;">Source: Rediff<br /><br />H</span>alf an hour after the first blast in New Delhi on Saturday, the NDTV 24/7 telecast telling visuals that said it all. We just don't know how to handle the aftermath of the terror attacks which we don't know how to forestall. </span></span><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Take, for example, the young woman in a yellow top and black trousers, hurt in the bombing of the Connaught Place's Central Park. She was shown being carried away, four persons holding a limb each to a police vehicle several yards away in Connaught Place. She was dripping blood, her head snapped back under its own weight and in agony. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">No stretcher in sight, no ambulance within miles and crowds who should have scattered to safety and enable the police to do their job, such as the job they do -- ham-handed, impulsive, not to a drill that would maximise results. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">One does not know what happened to the poor young woman who later. such victims, are threatened with death less because of the injuries but more due to the way she was handled by well-meaning but perhaps misguided people. We may actually be pushing up the death toll and bolster the designs of the terrorists. And the State owes something better to its citizens. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Cut to the train blasts in Mumbai on July 11, 2006. Scores of people, badly mauled, were seen carried away in bed sheets thrown at the impromptu rescuers from homes along the railway tracks. Persons with a limb torn away were carted away in auto-rickshaws by good Samaritans, the ride being given free. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Speed, one accepts, is of the essence. But the means also has to be proper so that the good intent does not translate to death or further complications. It is as if the disaster managers don't even know that there is something called the Golden Hour when best support is required, even before the person is reached to the hospital. That is why modern civilisations -- we are living in one, aren't we? -- has the concept called an ambulance. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">This kind of speedy but amateurish shift of the hurt, dying and the dead has been seen in every location where the terrorist struck by seting off explosions -- Hyderabad, Bangalore, Jaipur, Ahemedabad and now Delhi. This mishandling and the delays in being attended to on reaching the hospitals, I bet, are the causes of several deaths. Or permanent damage to the body. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Why? </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Because, we have just not got our act together, despite the country having had a high-powered committee, headed by Sharad Pawar to outline how disaster management ought to be because of his experience of handling the aftermath of the March 12, 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Now cut to the scenes outside the various train stations in London after the July 7, 2005 train bombings. Not an individual who needed medical help was just carried away any which way. Fully equipped ambulances with paramedics on board moved in with stretchers and ensured that help was fully professional. Within minutes plastic tents for on-the-spot support was set up. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">It is here that we fall short; grievously so, in fact. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">There are other critical phases of post-terrorist attacks where we fail abysmally, though there have been a few instances of positive gains made in policing. Here is the brief, very brief, positive list: </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">One, the Indian security agencies have now learnt to zero-in on the suspect computers or their routers used to send out terror threats or claims owning up attacks and IP addresses are located. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Two, in Surat<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 10px; color: rgb(117, 117, 119);"></span>, bomb after bomb which did not go off were found and defused, bomb by bomb, without any untoward collateral damage. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">However, and unfortunately, there is not much to be added to this list because, apart from Afzal Guru and those convicted in the Mumbai's 1993 blasts, how many terrorists have been brought to book? Even Afzal Guru's death sentence remains to be carried out. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Now, let us look at the negative list of our so called anti-terror policing. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">In Surat, in their hurry to unload and defuse the bombs found in the cars left on Surat roads, the police obliterated every fingerprint on it. These prints would have been valuable to fixing the involvement of people who otherwise would get the benefit of doubt and be let off for want of evidence. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">They made a villain of Kenneth Haywood, feeding the media stories about sinister dimensions to some religious activities of his. He even left the country, returned and said he had not fled but only gone away to take a break from the stressful moments he was plunged into. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Often, and in most cases, the police establishments across the country speculate about the involvement of some faction or the other of the militants, pin the blame on the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence -- which well might be the real thing -- and announce the name of an outfit as the culprits. If they know it within the hour of an event even before the first clue is gathered, then pray, why did the police which was so close to the culprit's identity, not pre-empt the bombing? </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">This sleight of hand is now a thing of the past because the Indian Mujahedeen has made it a habit to announce its ownership of the dastardly acts. Now, it has even started sending e-mails minutes the blasts it sets off, saving the police the task of speculating as to who did it. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Take again the failure of the close-circuit cameras set up on the toll plazas on the highways going out of Mumbai. They caught not a single car that was stolen from Navi Mumbai for use in Ahmedabad and Surat because, as a senior police official of Thane district adjoining Gujarat explained, 'They were all at angles to photograph trucks' and not cars which are low-slung in comparison. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Equally galling was the -- yes, well meaning but potentially hazardous -- way a constable grabbed the plastic bag containing a bomb from two rag pickers in Delhi on Saturday, using a stone to crush the clock that was a timer. He saved lives, but he may have jeopardised those in the vicinity. Who knows, instead of disarming, he may have even set off an explosion. Where, pray, were the bomb disposal squads? </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Policemen just do not have the means to chase the clues, and my feeling is that if there are suspects who have been brought to courts, then they are those who have confessed because of the third degree and those confessions found their way to the charge sheets. The good old policing is just dead. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">They do not even go by the forensic laboratory findings. They begged to differ with the forensics who said the August 26, 2003 blasts near Gateway of India were carried out using RDX. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Fact, you see, has to fit a theory, not otherwise. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">For, the police have to find someone, tell the media that they have a terrorist in the bag, damn and tar him/her in the media that's what trial by the media, trial in the media is all about, isn't it? and claim successes. And then what? The next terrorist attack and a few shibboleths like the one spouted by Union Home Minister, Shivraj Patil<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 10px; color: rgb(117, 117, 119);"></span>. The country would find the criminals and punish them. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">That is an assertion the country, now angry at the spate of bombings, in city after city, can digest. Find something more credible to say, Mr Home Minister or you would be laughing stock. They are already saying enough was enough and time we stopped depending on these incompetents. Strong sentiment, that. </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">And in this posturing, he is not alone. He has L K Advani <span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 10px; color: rgb(117, 117, 119);"></span>for company. He demands stringent laws like the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 be brought back to the statute. He forgets the simple fact that for a terrorist driven by passion, laws are no deterrent. Before any stringent law is used against the criminals, they have to be caught. But have we caught enough of them? </span></span></p><p><span class="sb13"><span style="font-family:ARIAL;font-size:85%;">Therefore, I have a more humane suggestion. Before we learn to catch the terrorist and then use any law against them, let us learn to handle those innocents who fall victim to the terrorists. Or else, we would be only shadow boxing.</span></span></p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-42437755067603767782008-09-06T22:42:00.000-04:002008-09-06T22:43:04.679-04:00A heart that can feelSource: The Hindu<br /><br /><table bgcolor="#ffeedd" border="0"><tbody><tr><td>We need to reach out with compassion to help people in pain. </td></tr></tbody></table><p align="justify"> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <blurb1> Ahimsa teaches us that having a heart that can feel not only brings pain, but also great joy. </blurb1> <p align="justify"> </p> <center> <span style="font-size:-2;"> </span><br /> <img src="http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/09/07/images/2008090750110401.jpg" width="134" align="center" border="1" height="204" /> </center><p> </p><p> </p> <p> The concept of ahimsa comes wrapped up with the idea of compassion. Although today we have hijacked it by concentrating mainly on non-violence, we need to remember that it was the idea of compassion that gave way to that of non-violence. It is an amazing fact that this idea of love and caring not just for one’s own family and one’s own little circle, but also extending the same care and love to one who has done you harm, originated and was practised in our country centuries ago, by both kings and the common person alike. Just imagine how revolutionary this idea must have been at the time when hurting the person who hurt you, or being indifferent to those who were weak or poor or sick, was the norm. The first people who practised this kind of ahimsa with compassion as its main component, not just towards people, but also towards animals and all of Creation must have been people with great hearts. </p> <p> </p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> Importance of empathy </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>Compassion flows straight from one heart to another and reaches out to those who deserve it, and those who don’t. Often we think that compassion is that feeling which makes us feel sorry for someone who is poor, sick or suffering in some way. On a superficial level, we toss a coin, give away an old sari, or write a cheque. Ahimsa teaches us that real compassion is more than just this.</p> <p>It is using our hearts to feel someone’s pain, insecurity, fears, injustices, and reaching out to support, relieve and help them through this. </p> <p>The compassion that ahimsa brings is active. We need not only to open our eyes, but also open our hearts and reach out with our hands. To do this one needs a heart that can feel. One of the lessons I learnt from a Vietnamese doctor was to actually want a heart that I could feel. This might seem strange as, in today’s world, it is easier not to feel. The mechanical way in which we live today makes us harden our hearts to any kind of feeling. When we stop feeling, we stop connecting. When we stop connecting, we become himsa people, caring only about ourselves. My Vietnamese friend who was a doctor was chased and hunted by the army and spent some rough times in refugee camps rife with TB, malaria, fevers and malnutrition. One night, in desperation, he caught a boat to America and found his freedom — or so he thought. </p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> Unnerving experience </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>When he found a job again as doctor, he found that he was listening to well-fed people talking about wanting to lose weight; healthy people wanting surgery to change their noses and other parts of their bodies; very young girls wanting to abort their children; children who were abused in a variety of ways. He became angry and hard and very mean as he listened day after day to such people. He became short tempered with his patients and did not like the person he was becoming. So he went away for a few days and forced himself to remember how the people he had met and treated in the refugee camps felt. He forced himself to remember their anxieties, pain, and fears. Then he came back to work and began to look at his obese patients and neurotic patients in the same way. He put himself in their shoes and tried to understand their fears and worries and over time found that his clinics were busier than his colleagues’ and were always overflowing with patients. The reason? The patients found this doctor was compassionate and much more caring than the others. He had discovered that having a heart that could feel anger, pain, fear, worry, were the skills he needed to being not just a good doctor, but a good person as well. </p> <p>Compassion is a much-needed ingredient in life for all of us, but more so for those in the healing and teaching professions. And somehow, it is here that it also seems to be missing the most in today’s life. A gardener’s children who go to local school were punished for not bringing Rs. 50 for something and the parents were scolded. “If you can’t afford to pay such a small amount of money even, then you are not fit to educate your child. ” The poor parent came away in great agony and went back to borrow some money. </p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> Need of the hour </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>A woman I know had great difficulty when she was a young mother. Her boss was a spinster and could not understand why this woman took a day off when her baby was sick, or was teething. When this woman herself became the boss, I thought she would be more compassionate and understanding to her female staff. But sadly, she was just like her old boss. Hard and sometimes very mean. A truly himsa person. When we experience himsa behaviour, it becomes even more important that we practise ahimsa, to prevent our families and workplaces from disintegrating into ugly places. </p> <p> </p> <p>Ahimsa teaches us that having a heart that can feel not only brings pain, but also great joy. </p> <p>If you are an ahimsa person and have a story to share please write to the author at <a href="mailto:ushajesudasan@gmail.com">ushajesudasan@gmail.com</a> </p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-31773633910470101872008-09-04T21:45:00.000-04:002008-09-04T21:47:50.278-04:00Life of the Mind<div id="articleGraphs"> <div id="page1"><p>Source: BostonGlobe<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>ON A SUNDAY morning in 1974, Arthur Fry sat in the front pews of a Presbyterian church in north St. Paul, Minn. An engineer at 3M, Fry was also a singer in the church choir. He had gotten into the habit of inserting little scraps of paper into his choir book, so that he could quickly find the right hymns during the service. The problem, however, was that the papers would often fall out, causing Fry to lose his place.</p><div style="display: block;" id="articleEmbed"><div class="embed" id="relatedContent"> <div id="relatedPhoto"><div class="imgSimple"><div class="imgCapCred"><img src="http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Globe_Graphic/2008/08/30/1220082342_6888.jpg" alt="Daydream achiever" title="Daydream achiever" class="imageSimple" width="178" border="0" height="220" /> <span class="attr">(David Flaherty for the Boston Globe)</span> </div></div> </div> </div></div><p>But then, while listening to the Sunday sermon, Fry started to daydream. Instead of focusing on the pastor's words, he began to mull over his bookmark problem. "It was during the sermon," Fry remembers, "that I first thought, 'What I really need is a little bookmark that will stick to the paper but will not tear the paper when I remove it.' " That errant thought - the byproduct of a wandering mind - would later become the yellow Post-it note, one of the most successful office products of all time.</p><p>Although there are many anecdotal stories of breakthroughs resulting from daydreams - Einstein, for instance, was notorious for his wandering mind - daydreaming itself is usually cast in a negative light. Children in school are encouraged to stop daydreaming and "focus," and wandering minds are often cited as a leading cause of traffic accidents. In a culture obsessed with efficiency, daydreaming is derided as a lazy habit or a lack of discipline, the kind of thinking we rely on when we don't really want to think. It's a sign of procrastination, not productivity, something to be put away with your flip-flops and hammock as summer draws to a close.</p><p>In recent years, however, scientists have begun to see the act of daydreaming very differently. They've demonstrated that daydreaming is a fundamental feature of the human mind - so fundamental, in fact, that it's often referred to as our "default" mode of thought. Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections. Instead of focusing on our immediate surroundings - such as the message of a church sermon - the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings. As a result, we're able to imagine things that don't actually exist, like sticky yellow bookmarks.</p><p>"If your mind didn't wander, then you'd be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now," says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "But instead you can engage in mental time travel and other kinds of simulation. During a daydream, your thoughts are really unbounded."</p><p>The ability to think abstractly that flourishes during daydreams also has important social benefits. Mostly, what we daydream about is each other, as the mind retrieves memories, contemplates "what if" scenarios, and thinks about how it should behave in the future. In this sense, the content of daydreams often resembles a soap opera, with people reflecting on social interactions both real and make-believe. We can leave behind the world as it is and start imagining the world as it might be, if only we hadn't lost our temper, or had superpowers, or were sipping a daiquiri on a Caribbean beach. It is this ability to tune out the present moment and contemplate the make-believe that separates the human mind from every other.</p> </div> <div id="page2"><p>"Daydreaming builds on this fundamental capacity people have for being able to project themselves into imaginary situations, like the future," Malia Mason, a neuroscientist at Columbia, says. "Without that skill, we'd be pretty limited creatures."</p><p>Teresa Belton, a research associate at East Anglia University in England, first got interested in daydreaming while reading a collection of stories written by children in elementary school. Although Belton encouraged the students to write about whatever they wanted, she was startled by just how uninspired most of the stories were.</p><p>"The tales tended to be very tedious and unimaginative," Belton says, "as if the children were stuck with this very restricted way of thinking. Even when they were encouraged to think creatively, they didn't really know how."</p><p>After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of "empty time," or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. "It was a very automatic reaction," she says. "Television was what they did when they didn't know what else to do."</p><p>The problem with this habit, Belton says, is that it kept the kids from daydreaming. Because the children were rarely bored - at least, when a television was nearby - they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. "The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere," Belton says. "But that's a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice."</p><p>While much of the evidence linking daydreaming and creativity remains anecdotal, rooted in the testimony of people like Fry and Einstein, scientists are beginning to find experimental proof of the relationship. In a forthcoming paper, Schooler's lab has shown that people who engage in more daydreaming score higher on experimental measures of creativity, which require people to make a set of unusual connections.</p><p>"Daydreams involve a more relaxed style of thinking, with people more willing to contemplate ideas that seem silly or far-fetched," says Belton. While such imaginative thoughts aren't always practical, they are often the wellspring of creative insights, as Schooler's research shows.</p><p>However, not all daydreams seem to inspire creativity. In his experiments, Schooler distinguishes between two types of daydreaming. The first type consists of people who notice they are daydreaming only when asked by the researcher. Even though they are told to press a button as soon as they realize their mind has started to wander, these people fail to press the button. The second type, in contrast, occurs when subjects catch themselves daydreaming during the experiment, without needing to be questioned. Schooler and colleagues found that individuals who are unaware of their own daydreaming while it's happening don't seem to exhibit increased creativity.</p> </div> <div id="page3"><p>"The point is that it's not enough to just daydream," Schooler says. "Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative insight."</p><p>In other words, the reason Fry is such a good inventor - he has more than twenty patents to his name, in addition to Post-it notes - isn't simply because he's a prolific daydreamer. It's because he's able to pay attention to his daydreams, and to detect those moments when his daydreams lead to a useful idea.</p><p>Every time we slip effortlessly into a daydream, a distinct pattern of brain areas is activated, which is known as the default network. Studies show that this network is most engaged when people are performing tasks that require little conscious attention, such as routine driving on the highway or reading a tedious text. Although such mental trances are often seen as a sign of lethargy - we are staring haplessly into space - the cortex is actually very active during this default state, as numerous brain regions interact. Instead of responding to the outside world, the brain starts to contemplate its internal landscape. This is when new and creative connections are made between seemingly unrelated ideas.</p><p>"When you don't use a muscle, that muscle really isn't doing much of anything," says Dr. Marcus Raichle, a neurologist and radiologist at Washington University who was one of the first scientists to locate the default network in the brain. "But when your brain is supposedly doing nothing and daydreaming, it's really doing a tremendous amount. We call it the 'resting state,' but the brain isn't resting at all."</p><p>Recent research has confirmed the importance of the default network by studying what happens when the network is disrupted. For instance, there is suggestive evidence that people with autism engage in less daydreaming than normal, with a default network that exhibits significantly reduced activity during idle moments. In addition, more abnormal default networks in autistic subjects correlated with the most severe social deficits. One leading theory is that atypical default activity interferes with the sort of meandering memories and social simulations that typically characterize daydreams, causing people with autism to instead fixate on things in their environment.</p><p>The exact opposite phenomenon seems to occur in patients with schizophrenia, who exhibit overactive default networks. This might explain the inability of schizophrenics to differentiate properly between reality and the ideas generated by the imagination.</p><p>Problems with daydreaming also seem to afflict the aging brain: Harvard researchers recently discovered that one of the main symptoms of getting older is reduced coordination in the default network, as brain areas that normally operate in sync start to fire at different times. Scientists speculate that this deficit contributes to the inability of many elderly subjects to control the duration and timing of their daydreams.</p><p>"It's very important to use the default network at the right time," says Jessica Andrews-Hanna, a researcher at Harvard who has studied the network in older subjects. "When you need to focus" - such as during stop-and-go traffic, or when engaged in a conversation - "you don't want to let your mind wander off."</p><p>What these studies all demonstrate is that proper daydreaming - the kind of thinking that occurs when the mind is thinking to itself - is a crucial feature of the healthy human brain. It might seem as though our mind is empty, but the mind is never empty: it's always bubbling over with ideas and connections.</p><p>One of the simplest ways to foster creativity, then, may be to take daydreams more seriously. Even the mundane daydreams that occur hundreds of times a day are helping us plan for the future, interact with others, and solidify our own sense of self. And when we are stuck on a particularly difficult problem, a good daydream isn't just an escape - it may be the most productive thing we can do.</p><p><i>Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large at Seed magazine and the author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist." He is a regular contributor to Ideas.</i><img class="storyend" src="http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/File-Based_Image_Resource/dingbat_story_end_icon.gif" alt="" width="6" border="0" height="8" /></p> <div class="copyright">© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.</div></div></div>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-52174867216958284992008-08-28T22:15:00.000-04:002008-08-28T22:19:49.701-04:00Where have all the real men gone?Source: Timesonline<br /><br /><br /><p> I know. Saving the males is an unlikely vocation for a 21st-century woman. Most men don’t know they need saving; most women consider the idea absurd. When I tell my women friends that I want to save the males, they look at me as if noticing for the first time that I am insane. Then they say something like: “Are you out of your mind? This is still a male-dominated world. It’s women who need saving. Screw the men!” </p><p> Actually, that’s a direct quote. The reality is that men already have been screwed – and not in the way they prefer. For the past 30 years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life’s ills. Males as a group – not random men – are bad by virtue of their DNA. </p><p> While women have been cast as victims, martyrs, mystics or saints, men have quietly retreated into their caves, the better to muffle emotions that fluctuate between hilarity (are these bitches crazy or what?) and rage (yes, they are and they’ve got our kids). </p><p><br /></p><p> In the process of fashioning a more female-friendly world, we have created a culture that is hostile towards males, contemptuous of masculinity and cynical about the delightful differences that make men irresistible, especially when something goes bump in the night. </p><p> In popular culture, rare is the man portrayed as wise, strong and noble. In film and music, men are variously portrayed as dolts, bullies, brutes, deadbeats, rapists, sexual predators and wife-beaters. Even otherwise easy-going family men in sitcoms are invariably cast as, at best, bumbling, dim-witted fools. One would assume from most depictions that the smart, decent man who cares about his family and pats the neighbour’s dog is the exception rather than the rule. </p><p> I am frankly an unlikely champion of males and that most hackneyed cliché of our times – “traditional family values”. Or rather, I’m an expert on family in the same way that the captain of the Titanic was an expert on maritime navigation. </p><p> Looking back affectionately, I like to think of home as our own little Baghdad. The bunker-buster was my mother’s death when she was 31 and I was three, whereupon my father became a serial husband, launching into the holy state of matrimony four more times throughout my childhood and early adulthood. We were dysfunctional before dysfunctional was cool. </p><p> Going against trends of the day, I was mostly an only child raised by a single father through all but one of my teen years, with mother figures in various cameo roles. I got a close-up glimpse of how the sexes trouble and fail each other and in the process developed great em-pathy for both, but especially for men. </p><p> Although my father could be difficult – I wasn’t blinded by his considerable charms – I also could see his struggle and the sorrows he suffered, especially after mother No 2 left with his youngest daughter, my little sister. </p><p> From this broad, experiential education in the ways of men and women, I reached a helpful conclusion that seems to have escaped notice by some of my fellow sisters: men are human beings, too. </p><p> Lest anyone infer that my defence of men is driven by antipathy towards women, let me take a moment to point out that I liked and/or loved all my mothers. In fact, I’m still close to all my father’s wives except the last, who is just a few years older than me and who is apparently afraid that if we make eye contact, I’ll want the silver. (I do.) </p><p> My further education in matters male transpired in the course of raising three boys, my own and two stepsons. As a result of my total immersion in male-dom, I’ve been cursed with guy vision – and it’s not looking so good out there. </p><p> At the same time that men have been ridiculed, the importance of fatherhood has been diminished, along with other traditionally male roles of father, protector and provider, which are increasingly viewed as regressive manifestations of an outmoded patriarchy. </p> <p> The exemplar of the modern male is the hairless, metrosexualised man and decorator boys who turn heter-osexual slobs into perfumed ponies. All of which is fine as long as we can dwell happily in the Kingdom of Starbucks, munching our biscotti and debating whether nature or nurture determines gender identity. But in the dangerous world in which we really live, it might be nice to have a few guys around who aren’t trying to juggle pedicures and highlights. </p><p> Men have been domesticated to within an inch of their lives, attending Lamaze classes, counting contractions, bottling expressed breast milk for midnight feedings – I expect men to start lactating before I finish this sentence – yet they are treated most unfairly in the areas of reproduction and parenting. </p><p> Legally, women hold the cards. If a woman gets pregnant, she can abort – even without her husband’s consent. If she chooses to have the child, she gets a baby and the man gets an invoice. Unarguably, a man should support his offspring, but by that same logic shouldn’t he have a say in whether his child is born or aborted? </p><p> Granted, many men are all too grateful for women to handle the collateral damage of poorly planned romantic interludes, but that doesn’t negate the fact that many men are hurt by the presumption that their vote is irrelevant in childbearing decisions. </p><p> NOTHING quite says “Men need not apply” like a phial of mail-order sperm Continued on page 2 Continued from page 1 and a turkey-baster. In the high-tech nursery of sperm donation and self-insemination – and in the absence of shame attached to unwed motherhood – babies can now be custom-ordered without the muss and fuss of human intimacy. </p><p> It’s not fashionable to question women’s decisions, especially when it comes to childbearing, but the shame attached to unwed motherhood did serve a useful purpose once upon a time. While we have happily retired the word “bastard” and the attendant emotional pain for mother and child, acceptance of childbearing outside marriage represents not just a huge shift in attitudes but, potentially, a restructuring of the future human family. </p><p> By elevating single motherhood from an unfortunate consequence of poor planning to a sophisticated act of self-fulfilment, we have helped to fashion a world in which fathers are not just scarce but in which men are also superfluous. </p><p> Lots of women can, do and always will raise children without fathers, whether out of necessity, tragedy or other circumstance. But that fact can’t logically be construed to mean that children don’t need a father. The fact that some children manage with just one parent is no more an endorsement of single parenthood than driving with a flat tyre is an argument for three-wheeled cars. </p><p> For most of recorded history, human society has regarded the family, consisting of a child’s biological mother and father, to be the best arrangement for the child’s wellbeing and the loss of a parent to be the single greatest threat to that wellbeing. There’s bound to be a reason for this beyond the need for man to drag his woman around by her chignon. </p><p> Sperm-donor children are a relatively new addition to the human community and they bring new stories to the campfire. I interviewed several adults who are the products of sperm donation. Some were born to married but infertile couples. Others were born to single mothers. Some reported well-adjusted childhoods; some reported conflicting feelings of love and loss. </p><p> Overall, a common thread emerged that should put to rest any notion that fathers are not needed: even the happiest donor children expressed a profound need to know who their father is, to know that other part of themselves. </p><p> Tom Ellis, a mathematics doctoral student at Cambridge University, learnt at 21 that he and his brother were both donor-conceived. Their parents told them on the advice of a family therapist as their marriage unravelled. </p><p> At first Tom did not react, but months later he hit a wall of emotional devastation. He says he became numb, anxious and scared. He began a search for his biological father, a search that has become a crusade for identity common among sperm-donor children. </p><p> “It’s absolutely necessary that I find out who he is to have a normal existence as a human being. That’s not negotiable in any way,” Tom said. “It would be nice if he wanted to meet me, but that would be something I want rather than something needed.” </p><p> Tom is convinced that the need to know one’s biological father is profound and that it is also every child’s right. What is clear from conversations with donor-conceived children is that a father is neither an abstract idea nor is he interchangeable with a mother. </p><p> As Tom put it: “There’s a mystery about oneself.” Knowing one’s father is apparently crucial to that mystery. </p><p> Something that’s hard for many women to admit or understand is that after about the age of seven, boys prefer the company of men. A woman could know the secret code to Aladdin’s cave and it would be less interesting to a boy than a man talking about dirt. That is because a woman is perceived as just another mother, while a man is Man. </p><p> From their mothers, boys basically want to hear variations on two phrases: “I love you” and “Do you want those fried or scrambled?” I learnt this in no uncertain terms when I was a Cub Scout leader, which mysteriously seems to have prompted my son’s decision to abandon Scouting for ever. </p><p> My co-Akela (Cub Scout for wolf leader) was Dr Judy Sullivan – friend, fellow mother and clinical psychologist. Imagine the boys’ excitement when they learnt who would be leading them in guy pursuits: a reporter and a shrink – two intense, overachieving, helicopter mothers of only boys. Shouldn’t there be a law against this? </p><p> We had our boys’ best interests at heart, of course, and did our utmost to be good den mothers. But seven-year-old boys are not interested in making lanterns from coffee tins. They want to shoot bows and arrows, preferably at one another, chop wood with stone-hewn axes and sink canoes, preferably while in them. </p><p> At the end of a school day, during which they have been steeped in oestrogen by women teachers and told how many “bad choices” they’ve made, boys are ready to make some really bad choices. They do not want to sit quietly and listen to yet more women speak soothingly of important things. </p><p> Here’s how one memorable meeting began. “Boys, thank you for taking your seats and being quiet while we explain our women’s history month project,” said Akela Sullivan in her calmest psychotherapist voice. The response to Akela Sullivan’s entreaty sounded something like the Zulu nation psyching up for the Brits. </p><p> I tried a different, somewhat more masculine approach: “Boys, get in here, sit down and shut up. Now!” And lo, they did get in there. And they did sit. And they did shut up. One boy stargazed into my face and stage-whispered: “I wish you were my mother.” </p><p> Akela Sullivan and I put our heads together, epiphanised in unison and decided that we would recruit transients from the homeless shelter if necessary to give these boys what they wanted and needed – men. </p><p> As luck would have it, a Cub Scout’s father was semi-retired or between jobs or something – we didn’t ask – and could attend the meetings. He didn’t have to do a thing. He just had to be there and respire testosterone vapours into the atmosphere. </p><p> His presence shifted the tectonic plates and changed the angle of the Earth on its axis. Our boys were at his command, ready to disarm landmines, to sink enemy ships – or even to sit quietly for the sake of the unit if he of the gravelly voice and sandpaper face wished it so. I suspect they would have found coffee tins brilliantly useful as lanterns if he had suggested as much. </p><p> But, of course, boys don’t stay Cub Scouts for long. We’ve managed over the past 20 years or so to create a new generation of child-men, perpetual adolescents who see no point in growing up. By indulging every appetite instead of recognising the importance of self-control and commitment, we’ve ratified the id. </p><p> Our society’s young men encounter little resistance against continuing to celebrate juvenile pursuits, losing themselves in video games and mindless, “guy-oriented” TV fare – and casual sex. </p><p> The casual sex culture prevalent on university campuses – and even in schools – has produced fresh vocabulary to accommodate new ways of relating: “friends with benefits” and “booty call”. </p><p> FWB I get, but “booty call”? I had to ask a young friend, who explained: “Oh, that’s when a guy calls you up and just needs you to come over and have sex with him and then go home.” </p><p> Why, I asked, would a girl do such a thing? Why would she service a man for nothing – no relationship, no affection, no emotional intimacy? </p><p> She pointed out that, well, they are friends. With benefits! But no obligations! Cool. When I persisted in demanding an answer to “why”, she finally shrugged and said: “I have no idea. It’s dumb.” </p><p> Guys also have no idea why a girl would do that, but they’re not complaining – even if they’re not enjoying themselves that much, either. </p><p> Miriam Grossman, a university psychiatrist, wrote Unprotected, a book about the consequences of casual sex among students. She has treated thousands of young men and women suffering a range of physical and emotional problems related to sex, which she blames on sex education of recent years that treats sex as though it were divorced from emotional attachment and as if men and women were the same. Grossman asserts that there are a lot more victims of the hookup (casual sex) culture than of date rape. </p><p> Casual sex, besides being emotionally unrewarding, can become physically boring. Once sex is stripped of meaning, it becomes merely a mechanical exercise. Since the hookup generation is also the porn generation, many have taken their performance cues from porn flicks that are anything but sensual or caring. </p><p> Boys today are marinating in pornography and they’ll soon be having casual sex with our daughters. According to a study by the National Foundation for Educational Research issued in 2005, 12% of British males aged 13-18 avail themselves of “adult-only” websites; and American research findings are similar. The actual numbers are likely to be much higher, given the amount of porn spam that finds its way into electronic mailboxes. If the rising generation of young men have trouble viewing the opposite sex as anything but an object for sexual gratification, we can’t pretend not to understand why. </p><p> The biggest problem for both sexes – beyond the epidemic of sexually transmitted disease – is that casual sex is essentially an adversarial enterprise that pits men and women against each other. Some young women, now fully as sexually aggressive as men, have taken “liberation” to another level by acting as badly as the worst guy. </p><p> Carol Platt Liebau, the author of Prude, another book on the havoc that pervasive sex has on young people, says that when girls begin behaving more coarsely so, too, do boys. </p><p> “And now, because so many young girls have been told that it’s ‘empowering’ to pursue boys aggressively, there’s no longer any need for boys to ‘woo’ girls – or even to commit to a date,” she told me. “The girls are available [in every sense of the word] and the boys know it.” </p><p> Men, meanwhile, have feelings. Although they’re uncomfortable sorting through them – and generally won’t if no one insists – I’ve listened to enough of them to know that our hypersexualised world has left many feeling limp and vacant. </p><p> Our cultural assumption that men only want sex has been as damaging to them as to the women they target. Here is how a recent graduate summed it up to me: “Hooking up is great, but at some point you get tired of everything meaning nothing.” </p><p> Ultimately, what our oversexualised, pornified culture reveals is that we think very little of our male family members. Undergirding the culture that feminism has helped to craft is a presumption that men are without honour and integrity. What we offer men is cheap, dirty, sleazy, manipulative sensation. What we expect from them is boorish, simian behaviour that ratifies the antimale sentiment that runs through the culture. </p><p> Surely our boys – and our girls – deserve better. </p><p> As long as men feel marginalised by the women whose favours and approval they seek; as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts; as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honour; and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide. </p><p> In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes. </p><p> Unprogressive though it sounds, the world in which we live requires no less. </p><p> Saving the males – engaging their nobility and recognising their unique strengths – will ultimately benefit women and children, too. Fewer will live in poverty; fewer boys will fail in schools and wind up in jail; fewer girls will get pregnant or suffer emotional damage from too early sex with uncaring boys. Fewer young men and women will suffer loneliness and loss because they’ve grown up in a climate of sexual hostility that casts the opposite sex as either villain or victim. </p><p> Then again, maybe I’m completely wrong. Maybe males don’t need saving and women are never happier or more liberated than when dancing with a stripper pole. Maybe women should man the barricades and men should warm the milk. Maybe men are not necessary and women can manage just fine without them. Maybe human nature has been nurtured into submission and males and females are completely interchangeable. </p><p> But I don’t think so. When women say, “No, honey, you stay in bed. I’ll go see what that noise is” – I’ll reconsider.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>© Kathleen Parker 2008</b></p><p><i>Extracted from Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care by Kathleen Parker, published by Random House New York </i></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-50962930504261569402008-08-16T15:22:00.001-04:002008-08-16T15:22:54.471-04:00India’s indigenous speak-and-see phone<span class="storyhead" style="font-size:130%;color:blue;"><b>Source: The Hindu<br /><br /> </b></span>Anand Parthasarathy <table bgcolor="#d0f0ff" border="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td><i> Make local/international calls through Internet connection </i></td></tr></tbody></table> <center> <span style="font-size:-2;"> </span><br /> <img src="http://www.hindu.com/2008/08/17/images/2008081751591201.jpg" align="middle" border="1" height="289" width="227" /><br /><b> <em style="">BREAKING BARRIERS: </em>D-Link’s Internet Video Phone is the first to be designed and developed in India. </b> </center> <p>Bangalore: The Internet allows telephone voice calls to be digitised and sent as packets of digital ones and zeroes. There is no reason why the video images of the speakers cannot be sent in the same fashion as long as the Net connection is reasonably fast.</p> <p>Broadband has become a reality in India (with the public sector BSNL playing a crucial role in lowering the price barrier so that all of us could afford it). So a video telephone call, harnessing what is known as Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP technology, has been a real possibility for some time — but it tethered the users to a PC or laptop with an Internet connection. And wearing a headphone-mike combo is not every one’s idea of a simple phone experience.</p> <p>Last week, all that changed. India-based engineers in Bangalore and Goa of the Taiwanese networking products leader D-Link have created the first truly indigenous IP or Internet Protocol-based Video Phone — the GVC 3000. It looks and feels exactly like any standard landline handset — except that you can see the person you are speaking to, on a 5-inch liquid crystal screen. It bypasses the conventional telephone circuits and rides over the Internet — so in addition to the huge advantage of seeing as you speak, you can make local, national or international calls at the cost of just your Net connection.</p> <p>How can two phones connected to an Internet cable or a wireless network, talk to each other without opening a browser? We put that question to S. Natarajan, vice president (R&D) for D-Link India. He suggested that readers could sign up at one of the many free IP Phone services available which allocates numbers to registered Net Phones like the GVC-3000. (examples: <a href="http://www.iptel.org/">www.iptel.org</a> , <a href="http://www.voiptalk.org/">www.voiptalk.org</a> , <a href="http://www.freeworlddialup.com/">www.freeworlddialup.com</a>, <a href="http://www.sipphone.com/">www.sipphone.com</a> ) </p> <p>You can then call any one by dialling his or her number, just as you dial landline phones now. You can call any one with a similar IP Phone — it doesn’t have to be a D-Link — as long it meets a standard called Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).</p> <p>A team of 15 engineers worked for over two years to create India’s own video phone, but D-Link is likely to market it worldwide as well. It should be available in electronic and lifestyle stores in India within three months as well as through D-Link’s own reseller networks and is likely to cost around Rs.23,000. (watch the “Where to buy” link at <a href="http://www.dlink.co.in/">www.dlink.co.in</a>). </p> <p>If you want the convenience of an IP phone without the video, D-Link has also created a non-video version the GLV-540 that will set you back Rs.7,000. Either way this is a telephone technology whose time has come—for India.</p>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-41090009083089284882008-07-05T23:34:00.000-04:002008-07-05T23:35:31.095-04:00The crime merchantsSource: The Hindu<br /><br /><br /> SEVANTI NINAN <p> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <table bgcolor="#ffeedd" border="0"><tbody><tr><td> If crime and real-life violence are easy ways of increasing the consumer base for news channels today, it is because the demand is there, with new viewers bringing in different expectations. Why this obsession with morbidity? </td></tr></tbody></table><p align="justify"> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <blurb1> </blurb1> <p align="justify"> </p> <p> </p> <p> We now have the statistics to quantify just how much of an overkill the Aarushi-Hemraj double murder case saw from the media. A study by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS) says that six channels beamed news and special programmes on the double murder for 39.30 hours out of a total 92 hours prime time — from 19:00 hrs to 23:00 hrs — between May 16 and June 7.</p> <p>That’s 42 per cent of prime time over 23 days. The following channels — DD News, Zee News, Aaj Tak, Star News, NDTV 24x7 and CNN-IBN — telecast 234 news reports and 62 special programmes during the period. While Zee News topped the list with a coverage of close to 11 hours with 48 reports and 21 special programmes, DD News’ coverage of the crime was at the bottom with 24 reports running into just 41 minutes over the 23 days under review. Thank the Lord for small mercies. </p> <b> When crime pays </b> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>What are the ways in which to live off a crime story? Here is a random but authentic sampling.</p> <span style="font-size:85%;"><li> Times Now tracking her calls from cell phone call records leaked to them. Run numbers and times on the screen of who called Aarushi when, whom she called when. </li><li> NDTV showing a video of the dead girl doing normal things when she was alive. </li><li> Zee News informing us that this is the day when the CBI’s remand over Krishna ended. So? So nothing, just reminding you, that’s the news. </li><li> India TV conducting a monologue on a TV tower. Intoning, “<em style="">Yeh</em> mobile tower <em style="">sab jaanta hai</em>. Sector 25 <em style="">ka</em> tower. Sector 19, 20, 21 <em style="">ke range mein hai</em>.” This is the mobile tower that knows it all. Show it rising above the rooftops and say, Who was where? What was their location? This tower knows it all. </li><li> Headlines Today’s long feature on unsolved murders which enables them to dwell on each one, and fill a half hour slot. </li><li> Cyrus Broacha being funny on CNN IBN: “The CBI is looking for a <em style="">khukri</em>. Why look for a <em style="">khukri</em> when you already have a Talwar?” </li><li> Aaj Tak showing two presenters going around a flat which they said was exactly similar to the Talwars’ and was in the same complex. They show us the location of Arushi’s room and her parent’s room and Hemraj’s room. There is a model lying on the bed in Aarushi’s “room” placed exactly like it reportedly was, and there are blood stains on the door. (They kept saying this was reconstructed from CBI information) Then build a case for the fact that there was no way her parents could not have heard noises, despite the AC. Ergo, the Talwars’ testimony is fishy. </li><li> India TV’s amateur sleuthing: Krishna is lying when he says he flushed the <em style="">khukri</em> down the toilet. But look, we’ll show you how 10 minutes of repeated flushing does not flush a <em style="">khukri</em>! So a potty was there for 10 minutes on the TV screen, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background, flushing away. </li><li> The judgment is announced in the Bijal date rape case. Headlines Today reconstructs the case with alacrity, using music and taglines like “Love Destroyed”. The anchor has an unhurried conversation with the victim’s sister. Then it goes off into Date Rape as an issue and live off that for several minutes. </li><li> News 24, Breaking News: No evidence against Rajesh! No evidence against Nupur! Wow. That really is breaking news, isn’t it? <p>Did we become crime junkies overnight? Or are we seeing the multiplier effect of a trend that has been for some time in the making? </p> <b> Commercial compulsions </b> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>Selling crime (and through it morbidity) are the route to widening the consumer base for news. Hindi newspapers emphasised crime when they were catering to first-time subscribers and trying to create readers in places where there had been none. Back in 2003, sitting in the office of the <em style="">Hindustan</em> in Patna, I got my first lesson in the importance of crime news and criminals. Said the resident editor: “Gangsters have become MLAs. Every political leader, every criminal wants to be covered in the <em style="">Hindustan</em>.” And the chief executive of the paper said that they worked hard to figure out what new readers in small towns and villages wanted to read about: “Crime news they want of whole State. Political news they do not want. Crime is on top of everybody’s concern, crime has to be there.”</p> <p>It takes demand to create supply. Crime would not trigger the media imagination the way it does without a society which hankers for such coverage. So what is it about middle class TV consumers the world over which makes crime coverage so irresistible to them? One answer is that it affects their lives. It has immediacy. As the owner of News 24 said in an interview a couple of years ago, to a man in Bahraich, it’s far more important that a local criminal has been caught than the talk about government formation in Bihar.</p> <p>That’s one part of the argument. The other is that with the steady influx of new news consumers into the viewer universe, there are constant shifts in a country like India in what people want to see on a news channel. A Star News executive commenting on news trends in 2007 said that the last few years had seen more new viewers added, many of whom have non-traditional preferences. A new news consumer is inevitably a less sophisticated news consumer, more attracted to neighbourhood crime and bizarreness than matters of State.</p> <p>Channels responded by adding reality show content news. The Star executive said, in 2007, news became more encompassing than ever before. “Thus, it was no coincidence that the year of experimentation was also the year that saw genre expansion.” (On Indiantelevision.com.) Get that: when news stretches to encompass the bizarre and freakish, it is called genre expansion. Such expansion has now taken India TV to the top of the ratings chart.</p> <b> Changing definitions </b> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>Statistics illustrate the broader trend of shifts in the content of news. The Centre for Media Studies in Delhi did a study which showed that the time spent on political news in the year 2007 has come down by more than 50 per cent. Political news coverage by Hindi news channels dipped from 23.1 per cent in 2005 to 10.09 per cent in 2007. </p> <p>But sports, entertainment, crime and human interest news coverage almost doubled from 27.9 per cent in 2005 to 53.1 per cent in 2007. At the same time, agriculture, education, health and environment-related news have not seen any net change; their coverage has been as insignificant in 2007 as earlier. Corruption, TV executives report, is no longer of interest to their audiences. </p> <p>Another important catalyst has been competition itself. With each new channel that breaks into the market, the distribution costs rise because DTH bouquets and cable operators increase their carriage fees. This now runs into a few crores per channel. When competition increases and distribution costs increase you balance your budget by cutting on news gathering costs. India TV recently spent a good 15 to 20 minutes showing how a magician had made a prostrate girl rise into the air without visible support. </p> <p>Think of what it would have cost to substitute that time period with hard news from several locations, and you will know why we see the news we do. </p> <p align="justify"> </p> <b>The assault on young minds</b> <p align="justify"> </p> <center> <span style="font-size:-2;"> Photo: G.R.N. Somashekar </span><br /> <img src="http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/06/29/images/2008062950010101.jpg" align="middle" border="1" height="281" width="349" /><br /><b> <em style="">Growing up with the TV:</em> When children are the audience, channels need to be discriminating. </b> </center><p> </p><p> </p> <p> Television is called The Other Parent because of the amount of time children spend in its company. In a book titled <em style="">The Other Parent: The Inside Story of the Media’s Effect on our Children</em>, Stanford professor James P. Steyer argues that the lack of social responsibility in many media companies as they cater to stockholders over children has meant that children are exposed to sex, coarseness, violence, and commercialism long before they are ready to understand them.</p> <p>In the Aarushi murder case, middle and upper middle class children too were sufficiently exposed to the crime’s coverage for the following to be noticed: </p> </li><li> Children who reported a new fear of servants in the house. </li><li> Children who developed a fear of what their own parents could do to them. </li><li> Older children who were disturbed at the loss of privacy suffered by a dead teenager. <p>Steyer suggests the following are essential for parents to do:</p> </li><li> Putting kids on a media diet </li><li> Finding alternative activities for them besides television and the Internet. </li><li> Discovering what they think about the commercials, programmes and music they encounter on a daily basis. </li><li> Organising advocacy groups, contacting government leaders, and boycotting media outlets that target children with inappropriate content. <p>Our news channels would argue that they do not target children. But the majority of Indian homes are one-room homes where children watch what adults watch. Parents will need to make more of an effort to understand what children absorb from the media they consume.</p></li></span>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11932457.post-90476025199018344042008-07-05T23:27:00.000-04:002008-07-05T23:28:23.148-04:00Can you keep a secret?Source: The Hindu<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"> VIJAY NAGASWAMI <p> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <table bgcolor="#ffeedd" border="0"><tbody><tr><td> If you are living life in victim mode, some essential reading to get you going on a positive, fulfilling path. </td></tr></tbody></table><p align="justify"> </p><p align="justify"> </p> <blurb1> </blurb1> <p align="justify"> </p> <center> <span style="font-size:-2;"> </span><br /> <img style="width: 155px; height: 226px;" src="http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/07/06/images/2008070650170401.jpg" align="middle" border="1" /> </center><p> </p><p> <b>The Secret,</b> Rhonda Byrne, Beyond Words Publishing, Simon and Schuster, </p> <p>Rs. 550. ISBN 9781582701707</p> <p> <b>Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, </b> </p> <p>David Burns, Avon Books, Rs 246. </p> <p>ISBN: 9780380810338</p> One unquestionable axiom of contemporary existence is that life is noisy. There is pressure all around us. Television, the print media and the Internet dictate our opinions, thought processes and general lifestyles. The morning commute sets the tone for our emotional state through the day. Relationships that we enter into in all good faith and with lots of good intent, make us envy Robinson Crusoe. The stock market’s capriciousness defeats our belief in rational processes. Add to this, our own ambitions and aspirations to achieve the kind of success that all those high-energy motivational speakers tell us is within our easy reach, and you have a potentially deadly recipe for early burnout. Little wonder then that most urban professionals feel they lead treadmill-lives, not knowing why their cheese keeps on moving and unsure if when they finally get to it, it will turn out to be stale and smelly. <p>Forgive me if I’m depressing you on a perfectly pleasant Sunday morning. I am ordinarily a reasonably positive person, and am only trying to portray the experience of a state of existence described by psychologists as “the victim mode”. Individuals in this state see themselves as victims of an unpredictable environment and therefore retreat into a state of what Martin Seligman, an American psychologist, described as “learned helplessness”. To them, it appears that they have little control over their lives. As it did to an Australian lady in 2004. Rhonda Byrne’s life appeared to have fallen apart. She had overworked herself into a state of exhaustion, was traumatised by the death of her father and her personal relationships were in turmoil. Around this time, her daughter gave her a book called <em style="">The Science of Getting Rich</em> by Wallace D. Wattles, published in 1910. Reading it, Rhonda had something of an epiphany and discovered what she calls “The Secret”. Her search of The Secret’s origins led her to living masters and practitioners of The Secret and with their help and support, she made a documentary film, “The Secret”, which took the United States by storm, resulting, as such unqualified successes usually do, in an entire industry surrounding it (<em style=""> <a href="http://www.thesecret.tv/">www.thesecret.tv</a> </em>). And in 2006, the book version of <em style="">The Secret</em> made its best-selling appearance. </p> <p> </p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> New life to an old idea </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>So, what then is Rhonda Byrne’s Secret? It is based on what has been described as a Universal Law — The Law of Attraction, an idea that has been around for millennia. Based on the principle that “Like Attracts Like”, it spawned what can be referred to as the Positive Thinking Movement that prevailed over the latter part of the 20th century. In 2004, it received a fresh shot in the arm with the publication of a whole series of books like <em style="">Ask, And It Is Given</em>, <em style="">The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham</em> etc by Esther and Jerry Hicks. Byrne’s video, book and seminars, as well as a much-publicised interview on the Oprah Winfrey show, have brought the concept bang into the mainstream of American, and in recent times Indian, popular thought. </p> <center> <span style="font-size:-2;"> </span><br /> <img style="width: 154px; height: 254px;" src="http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/07/06/images/2008070650170402.jpg" align="middle" border="1" /> </center><p> </p><p> </p> <p>The Law of Attraction basically postulates that human beings are rather like thought magnets. In other words whatever thoughts we think, we tend to attract similar thoughts to us. So if we think negative thoughts, we are encouraging the Universe to send negative thoughts our way. But if we think positively, we attract positive energy. Some quantum physicists have described the law as functioning by displacing energy and magnetic fields in as yet incompletely understood ways. In <em style="">The Secret</em>, Byrne, along with the several other gurus who are also credited with the book’s authorship (including, among others, Jack Canfield, the creator of the <em style="">Chicken Soup for the Soul</em> series) describes the three steps involved in making the law work for you. The first of these is that you should Ask or command the Universe for whatever you want. This should be stated in a positive way, otherwise you would attract something negative to you. The next step is to truly Believe that what you have asked for is already yours and behave as if you have already got it. Visualise it clearly and experience the sense of fulfilment that you expect from it. The final step is to Receive it. You can receive it only when you are prepared to and allow yourself to receive it. You need to recognise that it’s coming your way and embrace it. </p> <p>This, in a nutshell, is <em style="">The Secret</em>. If you want to understand this better and with examples and clear descriptions of each step of the process, I would recommend you invest Rs. 550 and read it. Handsomely produced, <em style="">The Secret</em>, even though a tad cheesy in places and sometimes a bit evangelical in its approach, serves to communicate the essentials of the Law of Attraction very effectively and can be inspiring to someone who is feeling victimised by life. I have found that some of the people I have recommended the book to have responded positively to it. Whether or not all their questions have been answered, I do not know. Whether they are really thought magnets, I cannot tell. Whether the Universe has conspired to make their dreams come true, I have little idea, even though this seems to stretch my rational mind somewhat. But I do know that they have felt better for having read it and have given themselves a jumpstart towards greater positivity in their lives. For those who require more pragmatic processes to get themselves out of their state of Learned Helplessness, I have also recommended, with some success <em style="">Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy</em> by David Burns.</p> <p> </p> <span class="subsectionhead" style="font-size:100%;color:red;"> A different approach </span> <p align="justify"> </p> <p>The new mood therapy that Burns describes in his best selling classic is based on the principles of Cognitive Therapy, developed by an American psychiatrist called Aaron T. Beck. Where <em style="">The Secret</em> approaches the issue of positive thinking from an emotional-spiritual perspective, <em style="">Feeling Good</em> looks at it from the end of thought or cognition. Based on the understanding that negative thoughts result in negative feelings rather than the other way round, the book helps the reader to understand how these negative thoughts form automatically in one’s mind, thereby leading one in the direction of negative feelings and eventually negative actions. Burns goes into exhaustive detail and discusses a number of techniques that one can use to identify one’s negative thought processes and correct them by replacing negative automatic thoughts with more positive and healthy ones. Unlike <em style="">The Secret</em>, <em style="">Feeling Good</em> is not a curl-up sort of book. It demands more time, more application of thought, and some paper and pencils if you are going to get the best out of it.</p> <p>Probably the most important insight that both these books provide is that to make your life better, you have to want to make it better. You are the master of your destiny and it is only when you get your act together, will you be able to overcome life’s speed breakers, even if you are not the one that put them there in the first place. I would suggest that if you feel you have hit a bit of a roadblock and are feeling victimised and helpless, you might consider reading both the books. Then perhaps The Secret of Feeling Good will be yours for life.</p></span>Sri Harshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10751428472525371401noreply@blogger.com0