Virtual Architecture?

Friday, February 13th, 2004

Virtual Architecture? discusses “Time Warner’s new headquarters, the latest glassy behemoth to open in Manhattan” — and shares some interesting architectural “factlets”:

Interesting architecture-world factlet, by the way: did you know that one of the reasons classical buildings look as solid as they do is because architects and builders of the time took shadows into account? All those ridges and pilasters, all those recessed windows — they’re there partly to help the sun demonstrate how thick and massive the structure is. And did you know that one of the reasons so many modernist and avant-garde buildings look shallow and bleak is that 20th century architects fell out of the habit of taking sun and shadow into account?

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Researcher Uses Formulas for Marriage

Friday, February 13th, 2004

I’m not sure how much the math adds to this analysis, but it adds an air of science to something fairly common-sensical. From Researcher Uses Formulas for Marriage:

John M. Gottman said a 20-year study involving more than 600 married couples shows that by carefully plotting how a husband and wife interact and then reducing those observations to a formula, researchers can tell which marriages will succeed and which are heading for the rocks.
[...]
To gather the data, a team of researchers observed video tapes of couples in interviews by marriage counselors and noted how husbands and wives responded to each other. Gottman said his team found that there basically are three types of stable marriages.

The first is a husband and wife who routinely avoids conflict. When a difference of opinion arises, said Gottman, ‘they will never argue. They will listen to the other, but will not try to persuade.’ Such marriages, which he calls the ‘avoiders,’ may be unemotional and distant, but they endure.

A second type is a volatile relationship ‘like two lawyers in a courtroom,’ said Gottman. ‘They can argue at the drop of a hat. They are the Bickersons,’ he said. Such marriages tend to last even though there are frequent and impassioned arguments.

The third type of stable marriage Gottman calls the ‘validating’ couple. They listen to each other, respect the other’s opinion and only occasionally argue. ‘They pick the issues they fight about,’ he said.
[...]
Researchers mathematically chart the marriage interactions by plotting not just what is said, but also how it is said and the body language and facial expression behind it. Emotions such as anger, harshness and hostility get a negative number, while humor and an eagerness to talk lovingly about the partner get a positive rating.
[...]
He said an “escalating negative affect”, or a steep descent on the chart below the neutral point, predicts a couple will divorce within 5.6 years after marriage.

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Hostile People May Be ‘Born to Smoke’

Friday, February 13th, 2004

Smokers really are hostile. Hostile People May Be ‘Born to Smoke’:

People with hostile or aggressive personality traits may have genetic tendencies that make them ‘born to smoke,’ U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

Brain imaging studies suggest that the same genetic variations that give people hostile personality traits may also make them more likely to become addicted to nicotine, the team at the University of California Irvine reported.

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A Bounty of Science

Friday, February 13th, 2004

I’m not sure what to make of A Bounty of Science; it tries to “scientifically” explain the mutiny on the Bounty:

A count of every lash British sailors received from 1765 through 1793 while serving on 15 naval vessels in the Pacific shows that Bligh was not overly abusive compared with contemporaries who did not suffer mutiny. Greg Dening’s Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language computed the average percentage of sailors flogged from information in ships’ logs at 21.5. Bligh’s was 19 percent, lower than James Cook’s 20, 26 and 37 percent, respectively, on his three voyages, and less than half that of George Vancouver’s 45 percent. Vancouver averaged 21 lashes per man, compared with the overall mean of five and Bligh’s 1.5.

If unusually harsh punishment didn’t cause the mutiny, what did? Although Bligh preceded Charles Darwin by nearly a century, the ship commander comes closest to capturing the ultimate cause: ‘I can only conjecture that they have Idealy assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheitians than they could possibly have in England, which joined to some Female connections has most likely been the leading cause of the whole business.’

Indeed, crews consisted of young men in the prime of sexual life, shaped by evolution to bond in serial monogamy with women of reproductive age. Of the crews who sailed into the Pacific from 1765 through 1793, 82.1 percent were between the ages of 12 and 30, and another 14.3 percent were between 30 and 40. When the men arrived in the South Pacific, the results, from an evolutionary point of view, were not surprising. Of the 1,556 sailors, 437 (28 percent) got the ‘venereals.’ The Bounty’s infection rate was among the highest, at 39 percent.

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Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong

Thursday, February 12th, 2004

In a recent Atlantic article, Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong, Kenneth M. Pollack, a CIA and National Security Council veteran, points out that “the U.S. intelligence community’s belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction pre-dated Bush’s inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure”:

In congressional testimony in March of 2002 Robert Einhorn, Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, summed up the intelligence community’s conclusions about Iraq at the end of the Clinton Administration:
How close is the peril of Iraqi WMD? Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors (albeit attacks that would be ragged, inaccurate, and limited in size). Within four or five years it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing fissile material produced indigenously — and to threaten U.S. territory with such weapons delivered by nonconventional means, such as commercial shipping containers. If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner.

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Professors at war

Thursday, February 12th, 2004

In Professors at War: Searching for Dissent at the MLA, Scott Jaschik describes a recent meeting of English professors and their thoughts on the war in Iraq:

Not that there was much actual debate. In more than a dozen sessions on war-related topics, not a single speaker or audience member expressed support for the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan. The sneering air quotes were flying as speaker after speaker talked of ‘so-called terrorism,’ ‘the so-called homeland,’ ‘the so-called election of George Bush,’ and so forth.”
[...]
The closest public challenge to the prevailing geopolitical views at the MLA came when one professor asked a panel that had derided American responses to 9/11 and Iraq what a good response would have looked like. She didn’t get much of an answer, left the session, and declined to elaborate on her question.

But a young professor of English who followed her out the door to congratulate her did offer some thoughts on politics at the MLA. Aaron Santesso of the University of Nevada at Reno described himself as being “on the left” and sympathetic with much of the criticism of the war in Iraq. But he said that the tenor of the discussion “drives me nuts.” “A lot of people here don’t want the rhetoric to just be a shrill echo of the right,” he said.

Just a few years ago, he noted, the Taliban was regularly attacked at MLA meetings for their treatment of women and likened to the American religious right. Now, there is only talk of how the United States has taken away the rights of the Afghan people.

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Theatres of War

Thursday, February 12th, 2004

Theatres of War discusses Kagan’s new book on the Peloponnesian War:

Twenty-five years ago it was easy to teach Thucydides; all you had to do was talk about the Cold War. For most of the four decades from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union, the parallels between the Peloponnesian War and the Cold War seemed self-evident. You knew, as you read about Athens, about its boisterous democratic politics and fast-talking politicians, its adventurous intellectual and artistic spirit, that these were the good guys. They were clearly our own cultural forebears. And you knew, just as surely, as you read about Sparta, about its humorless militarism, geriatric regime, and deep antipathy to democracy, that these were bad guys. They, too, looked awfully familiar.

You also knew what it was like to live in a world divided between two sides “at the very height of their power and preparedness,” as Thucydides puts it, and how blind adherence to the policies dictated by such polarization could result in fearful illogic. (As Kagan observes, the Spartans went to war to save an alliance they had created precisely to protect themselves from conflict.) In the bipartite world of the Cold War, you could choose to read Thucydides? carefully structured presentation of Athens? decline as a cautionary tale about the moral decay that accompanies abuses of imperial power. Or you might take Thucydides’ apparent detachment to be a cautious endorsement of Machtpolitik as the grim requirement for being a superpower. (“It is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can,” the Athenians blandly opine during their confrontation with the Melians.)

But whichever way you read Thucydides the bipolar structure of his world was instantly recognizable.

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Scrivener’s Palsy

Thursday, February 12th, 2004

I find the placebo effect fascinating. In the London Review of Books‘ Scrivener’s Palsy, Carl Elliott reviews Constructing RSI: Belief and Desire by Yolande Lucire and Meaning, Medicine and the ‘Placebo Effect’ by Daniel Moerman and describes the importance of the doctor‘s belief in the placebo:

Whatever the placebo effect is, it isn’t reliably predictable on the basis of the characteristics of individual patients.

A much better predictor is the characteristics and qualities of individual doctors. The more convinced a doctor is that a drug or a placebo will work, the more likely that it really will. The pioneering study here was conducted almost forty years ago. Physicians were treating anxious outpatients with meprobamate, or Miltown, a popular tranquilliser of the 1950s and 1960s. In two clinics, patients given Miltown became no less anxious than patients given placebos. But in the third, patients on Miltown became much less anxious. The difference was that doctors in this clinic had self-consciously adopted an enthusiastic, confident attitude towards the drug’s effectiveness. When they switched to a more neutral, experimental attitude, Miltown was no better than a placebo.

A more elegant study to the same effect was published by Richard Gracely and his colleagues in 1985. Gracely purported to be studying a pain reliever called fentanyl in patients recovering after having their wisdom teeth removed. But he was more interested in whether a clinician’s attitude relieved pain. So he recruited unknowing clinicians to administer the treatment. Gracely and his colleagues told half the doctors that they would be administering one of three possible treatments: fentanyl (a pain reliever), naloxone (a drug that blocked opiate receptors and could make the pain even worse) or a placebo. But he told the other half of the clinicians that there had been an administrative problem, and none of their patients would be getting fentanyl.

The results were striking. All the patients got placebos, and all were told the same thing about their chances of getting placebos. But their pain response differed tremendously. How it differed depended on what their clinicians thought they were administering. If a doctor thought there was a one-in-three possibility that he was giving the patient fentanyl, the patient was likely to feel a lot better after an hour. But if a doctor thought there was no chance he was giving the patient fentanyl – that he was giving either placebo or naloxone – then the patient’s pain was likely to get worse. Somehow, the clinicians were unknowingly transmitting their attitudes towards the medication to their patients.

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U.S. Security Moves Spur Testiness

Wednesday, February 11th, 2004

Roughly six years ago, I worked at a firm with a number of Indian and Pakistani consultants, and I almost took a few of them up on an offer to bring me back a sword or two from their homeland. From what I’ve read in U.S. Security Moves Spur Testiness, I won’t be bringing back any weapons from the area myself:

Seventy-two-year-old Charles Grader knows how to travel the world — he spent 40 years with the State Department. Yet he ended up in a New Delhi prison cell for a week with 66 other men.

Dr. Grader came out of retirement to head a major agricultural and irrigation development program in Afghanistan for Chemonics International Inc., a Washington-based consulting firm. In Afghanistan, he bought several thousand dollars worth of antique pistols and muskets to bring back to the U.S. as gifts, and secured the proper paperwork from Afghan authorities certifying that they weren’t some sort of looted museum treasure.

From Afghanistan, Dr. Grader flew to New Delhi on Ariana Afghan Airlines to catch a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, and then on to Boston. Code-sharing from Afghanistan isn’t exactly seamless — it’s nonexistent. So Dr. Grader was instructed by Indian authorities to claim his baggage and go through security.

When the muskets went through the X-ray machine, trouble started. Dr. Grader unwrapped the 150-year-old guns and offered his paperwork. Indian authorities accused him of trying to smuggle guns into the country. He was eventually taken to a police station at 2:30 a.m., and then transferred to Delhi’s notoriously overcrowded Tihar Prisons. Dr. Grader’s cell, shared by accused murders, smugglers and others, had a single bathroom that was little more than a hole in the ground.

Charge d’Affaires Robert O. Blake from the U.S. Embassy in Delhi worked to free him. It took a week, during which Dr. Grader says fellow prisoners “treated me as an older man with a lot of respect.” Then he was released to house arrest at a hotel. After three more weeks and paying lawyers close to $10,000, charges were dropped and he was allowed to leave the country — without the muskets.

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The Trend of Vanishing Tech Jobs

Friday, February 6th, 2004

Viriginia Postrel’s latest article, The Trend of Vanishing Tech Jobs, addresses the “outsourcing” crisis in IT:

What’s happening now to software and services has already happened to hardware, with great economic results.

In the late 1980′s, Asian manufacturers began turning out basic memory chips, undercutting American chip makers’ prices and inciting a fierce policy debate. Many industry leaders argued that the United States would lose its technological edge unless the government intervened to protect chip makers.

In a famous 1988 Harvard Business Review article, Charles Ferguson, then a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Technology Policy and Industrial Development at M.I.T., summed up the conventional wisdom: ‘Most experts believe that without deep changes in both industry behavior and government policy, U.S. microelectronics will be reduced to permanent, decisive inferiority within 10 years.’

He denounced the “fragmented, chronically entrepreneurial industry” of Silicon Valley, which was losing market share to government-aided Asian businesses. “Only economists moved by the invisible hand,” he wrote, “have failed to apprehend the problem.”

Those optimistic economists were right. The dire predictions were wrong. American semiconductor makers shifted to higher-value microprocessors. Computer companies bought commodity memory chips and other components, from keyboards to disk drives, abroad. Businesses and consumers enjoyed cheaper and cheaper prices.

Far from an economic disaster, the result was a productivity boom.

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Darwin’s a Tory at heart

Friday, February 6th, 2004

In Darwin’s a Tory at heart, Peter Cuthbertson explains that famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins does not suggest emulating natural selection in our social interactions — but he (Cuthbertson) can’t help but find sociobiology pointing toward conservatism:

It has regularly astounded me when discussing cultural and social issues not that people often disagree with the conservative perspective, but that they tend to do so in such a way as to suggest they think it has all simply been pulled out of the air as an arbitrary edict. Do they really think a father is superfluous in the raising of children?, I ask myself. Do they honestly think marriage is merely a piece of paper, that the link between sex and procreation is a thing of the past? Can they possibly believe that a marriage of multiple men and women would work just as well if social conventions only changed a little? From the Marxist, postmodernist and liberal left to the libertarian right, such blank slate attitudes are commonplace. But then I realise that without a basic grounding in sociobiology, I would likely think the very same.

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A Conversation with Peter Calthorpe

Friday, February 6th, 2004

In A Conversation with Peter Calthorpe, Calthorpe makes it pretty clear that he hates what the automobile has done to society. He also makes a number of interesting points, starting with this point about suburban sprawl’s origins:

Suburban sprawl came about as a result of two major subsidies from the federal government. The first was the Federal Highway Bill which began in 1956 with the interstate system, the largest public works system in the history of mankind. The second is the single-home mortgage deduction, a huge subsidy that moves people toward single-occupancy, single-family homes. We are the only industrialized country in the world that has those deductions, and it skews the marketplace in favor of sprawl.

Ah, government bureaucrats making decisions:

For example, we did a proposal at Laguna West in Sacramento where we wanted to plant trees in the parking lanes. Part of the problem was that the streets were too wide. They had two parking lanes, so the on-street parking basically got used once a year during the Christmas party and the rest of the year the street looked like you could land an airplane on it. So we said, why don’t we “park” some trees in these stalls. Then you can park cars between the trees. The public works official said, “Well, you can’t do that, the cars will run into the trees.” I said, “Well, why don’t they run into the parked cars, they are in the same spot?” And very quickly he said, “Because the cars have reflectors on the back.” We finally got the trees approved by applying reflectors to the trunks, which satisfied him. But the idea of parking a tree in a street is kind of a metaphor for the whole thing. In Sacramento, new suburbs without street trees are on average ten degrees hotter throughout the summer than the old downtown which has a beautiful tree canopy. Trees have a tremendous microclimate impact, especially in hot areas. So that is an example of passive solar design on a community scale.

This description of mass transportation in the Philippines (outside of Manila) both fascinates and frightens me:

We were able to convince them to design it according to a totally different system. It’s a wonderful, ad hoc and completely unplanned bus system where each driver fights for and gets his own space and route and time and customizes his stretched Jeeps to look absolutely gorgeous. It turns out to be one of the most efficient mass transit systems on the globe, because these guys are not on anybody’s schedule. It’s not an engineering problem — they are organically at the right place at the right time because it’s their livelihood. Everybody knows each other, and they all have their own drivers and there is a whole social dimension to it. So we said, “Look, let’s build our city around this idea. This is the culture you have.”

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Modernizing the Mideast

Friday, February 6th, 2004

In Modernizing the Mideast, Michael Blowhard (yeah, that’s a pseudonym) presents his reaction to the Saudi Grand Mufti’s recent statement that “allowing women to mix with men is the root of every evil and catastrophe”:

It seems to me that way too little is made of how, er, nonmodern these people are. Many Westerners seem to be under the impression that mideasterners can be talked to and bargained with as though, under the robes and behind the dark spectacles, they’re just like us.

My impression is different. It’s based on very little experience, admittedly. Still, a zillion years ago I spent a month with friends in Morocco; one of us was Moroccan, so we saw more of the real Morocco than most tourists at the time did. What most impressed me about our adventures was how really primitive the country was. Most of the population seemed to be living in the Dark Ages; I found it terrifying that they had access to any modern technology at all.

(Hey, did you ever read about New Zealand’s Maori people? Ferocious inter-tribal fighters who, for centuries before Euros arrived, inflicted and survived feuds and raids on each other. But when the Euros arrived and the Maori suddenly had access to guns? Well, they just about wiped themselves out.)

I found it terrifying not just that some of these Moroccans had guns; I found it terrifying that so many of them had transistor radios. Who knew what they were making of what they were listening to? I was a kid at the time, but I still remember thinking: “It’s going to take generations, and not decades, for these people to enter the modern world.”

From the FT’s story about the anti-woman Mufti, it sounds like progress is being made at about the rate I guessed it would be.

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Facts from The Economist

Friday, February 6th, 2004

Facts from The Economist:

  • Dairy cows attract 1000 flies per cow.

  • Dairy cows generate 100 pounds of manure per animal per day.

  • Angola, two years out of a civil war, seems to be one fantastically corrupt country. Its rulers have been accused of having ‘filched or misspent $4.2 billion in five years … The missing cash was equivalent to nearly a tenth of GDP each year — as if an American administration had ‘lost’ $5 trillion — and roughly as much as was spent on all social services.’

  • Half of Angola’s children are malnourished while 20 Angolans are worth $100 million or more.

  • Only 23 of Angola’s 168 municipal courts are functioning. The government says it will fix the problem ‘by 2051.’

  • Mexico has an illegal-immigrant problem of its own — people attempting to migrate north from Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. ‘Last year, Mexico deported 147,000 illegal immigrants in all, some 20% more than in 2002.’ Most seem to be trying to make their way to the U.S.

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In the Lead

Thursday, February 5th, 2004

In the Lead takes another look at why women aren’t in senior-executive positions:

A recent study of women in corporate leadership by Catalyst, a New York research organization, found that women accounted for only 15.7% of corporate-officer positions and 5.2% of top earners at Fortune 500 companies in 2002. Even more telling, the vast majority of women in top jobs are in staff rather than line positions, which rarely lead to the very top. Women hold only 9.9% of line corporate-officer jobs — where they would be overseeing a business that earns money for their company — compared with 90.1% for men.

Researchers and female executives cite a variety of reasons for this meager showing: male executives’ reluctance to mentor women, women’s exclusion from informal networks, a hesitancy to consider women for the toughest posts, and women’s own struggle to balance careers and families — sometimes leading them to settle for less-demanding roles at work.

But a big factor holding women back is their good-girl, or good-student, behavior. ‘Women will work themselves to death in the belief that if they do more and more, that will get them ahead, when it isn’t so,’ says Terri Dial, former vice chairman of Wells Fargo, and president and CEO of its Wells Fargo Bank. ‘They think, ‘If I do the work, my bosses will see it and reward me.’ ‘

An interesting anecdote:

Lisa Jacobson, CEO of Inspirica, a New York high-school and college tutoring company, agrees that women often don’t ask for what they deserve. In the 20 years since she founded her company, none of the female lawyers, graphic designers, public-relations experts, accountants or others she has interviewed to do work for Inspirica has ever quoted her as high a fee as their male counterparts. “The women almost always seem to say, ‘I’m $125 an hour, but for you I’d charge $75, when the guy just says flatly that he charges $350,” she adds.

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