As Olivier points out, “The first thing you notice about today’s paper by mirror-neurons famous Giaccomo Rizzolatti’s team, just published in PLoS biology, is that it is sooooooo cute.”
Why? Because it demonstrates that baby monkeys make faces.
Baby monkeys make faces
Thursday, October 5th, 2006Dereliction express
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006In Dereliction express, Roger Sandall looks at why things fall into disrepair in Africa:
Three things are thought to explain much Third World decline and dereliction. In Africa misappropriated funds heads the list — the Big Man at the top plays Winner Takes All — and there’s no question this is fundamental. Others point to the lawlessness of life where nothing gets done because even the smallest investment is always at risk… so, nothing gets done.A third explanation sees communal claims and the parasitism of extended family, clan, and tribe making individual progress impossible and nepotism inevitable. These reasons for the engulfing mess and hopelessness come variously combined in different places — as we find in the reports of Tim Harford, Paul Theroux, and V. S. Naipaul.
He cites a passage from The Undercover Economist:
There’s no point investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So you might as well become a thief yourself.) There’s no point in paying your phone bill because no court can make you pay. (So there’s no point being a phone company.) There’s no point setting up an import business because the customs officers will be the ones to benefit. (So the customs office is under-funded and looks even harder for bribes.) There’s no point getting an education because jobs are not awarded on merit. (And you can’t borrow money for school fees because the bank can’t collect on the loan.)
The Multicultural Persian Wars
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006Roger Sandall looks at The Multicultural Persian Wars, the academic conflict over whether Herodotus was sufficiently magnanimous in his treatment of the Persians, and notes that (a) there are no Persian accounts of the war on Greece, and (b) Herodotus is far more even-handed than most modern academics.
I enjoyed this passage on early Greek democracy versus Persian despotism:
All this was happening in the years between about 520 BC and the year of the Battle of Marathon, 490 BC. So just as a matter of interest, while Darius was using blood and fire to impose on his realm “one immense administrative unit” centered on himself — a system resembling Russia under Stalin or Germany under Hitler — what were the Greeks doing?In Athens, a mercifully different dispensation was laying the foundations of democracy. The reforms of Cleisthenes in 507 BC were nothing less than that. Paraphrasing and summarising Tom Holland’s discussion, on pages 134–135 of Persian Fire, we find the most complete imaginable contrast with Persian imperialism. The new political rules introduced by Cleisthenes made equality before the law the chief political virtue; made Athens a city in which all citizens enjoyed freedom of speech; made government policy something requiring debate in open assembly; and made it impossible to pass new laws except by popular vote.
From an organisational point of view Cleisthenes’ reforms were just as radical. The dynastic feuding of ‘tyrants’ had brought Athens to the point of ruin. It had to be stopped. Cleisthenes’ solution was to firmly suppress a citizen’s political identification with family and neighborhood, with mafia bosses and clan chiefs. He sliced the country into 150 electoral districts called ‘demes’, and it was from these — and no longer from clans and families — that the citizens of Athenian democracy were obliged in future to take their second names. This applied to the haughtiest aristocrat and the humblest plowman alike.
Tom Holland draws a number of historical parallels between the ancient and modern worlds and the continuing clash of East and West. But nothing is more revealing than the determination of Cleisthenes to stamp out despots and despotism by severing the connection between clan power and political representation. This was in 507 BC. Today, 2,500 years later, throughout most of the Middle East and conspicuously so in Iraq, they still haven’t got the point.
Jaguar Cub at La Aurora Zoo in Guatemala City
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006
Today’s dose of cute comes from this Jaguar Cub at La Aurora Zoo in Guatemala City:
A child watches a jaguar cub at La Aurora zoo in Guatemala city, in 2003. The United States announced its biggest ever “debt-for-nature” swap, forgiving 24 million dollars of Guatemala’s foreign debt to Washington in exchange for a pledge to protect tropical forests in the central American nation.
New Book on Nazi-Era Humor
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006A New Book on Nazi-Era Humor shares some of the jokes going around Germany before and during the war:
- Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn’t saluting.
“Why aren’t you saluting like the others?” Hitler barks.
“Mein Führer, I’m the nurse,” comes the answer. “I’m not crazy!”
- Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin’s radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. “Why don’t you just jump?” suggests Göring.
- “A senior Nazi visits a factory and asks the manager whether he still has Social Democrats among his workforce.
“Yes, 80 percent,” comes the reply.
“Do you also have members of the Catholic Center Party?” “Yes, 20 percent,” the manager responds.
“Don’t you have any National Socialists?”
“Yes we’re all Nazis now!”
- “Göring has attached an arrow to the row of medals on his tunic. It reads ‘continued on the back.’”
- “Two Jews are about to be shot. Suddenly the order comes to hang them instead. One says to the other “You see, they’re running out of bullets.”
- Two men meet. “Nice to see you’re free again. How was the concentration camp?”
“Great! Breakfast in bed, a choice of coffee or chocolate, and for lunch we got soup, meat and dessert. And we played games in the afternoon before getting coffee and cakes. Then a little snooze and we watched movies after dinner.”
The man was astonished: “That’s great! I recently spoke to Meyer, who was also locked up there. He told me a different story.”
The other man nods gravely and says: “Yes, well that’s why they’ve picked him up again.”
- “My father is in the SA, my oldest brother in SS, my little brother in the HJ (Hitler Youth), my mother is part of the NS women’s organisation, and I’m in the BDM (Nazi girls group).”
“Do you ever get to see each other,” asks the girl’s friend?
“Oh yes, we meet every year at the party rally in Nuremberg!”
- The German army HQ receives news that Mussolini’s Italy has joined the war.
“We’ll have to put up 10 divisions to counter him!” says one general.
“No, he’s on our side,” says another.
“Oh, in that case we’ll need 20 divisions.”
- “What will you do after the war?”
“I’ll finally go on a holiday and will take a trip round Greater Germany!”
“And what will you do in the afternoon?”
How Not To Dismantle the Caste System
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006Jayant Bhandari explains How Not To Dismantle the Caste System:
I was brought up in a well-off family. I did my schooling in a private, missionary school. We all wore the same kind of uniform. And we had to sing a relatively secular prayer in the mornings. All this meant that our understanding of the caste system of India was mostly academic. This equanimity about the caste system did not last. After school when we went to the state-run university, most of us soon learned to look down on the lower caste — courtesy of the state.After finishing the school, I went through an extremely competitive entrance examination to get admission into engineering. Those who gained admission were to become social heroes. I remember that the minimum required of the higher caste to gain admission was a score over 70 percent. Because of affirmative action, those of the lower caste had reserved seats.
Unfortunately, the state of public school education — in ‘schools’ that often had no buildings or teachers — is so utterly bad that most of the lower-caste people who joined us knew close to nothing. Most of them had entered the university with exam scores under 10 percent. (Even negative scores were not unheard of.)
As a part of the social engineering process, I was not to get my own room in the student hall of residence. I was allotted a room with someone from a lower caste. We had nothing in common. Even our Hindi was so entirely different that we hardly understood each other. My roommate had probably never seen a proper road or slept under a non-thatched roof until he moved in. He certainly had no concept of gas cooking and was unaccustomed to the usage of electricity.
Lioness adopts third baby antelope
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
Lioness adopts third baby antelope:
A lioness in Kenya has adopted another baby oryx — her third in as many months, game wardens at the northern Samburu National Park have reported.The lioness is said to allow a female oryx several minutes each day to feed the new-born calf.
The oryx would normally represent a tasty meal to a lion, but this is not the first time the lioness has placed a calf under her protection.
One was seen in her company in December last year, but it was eaten by other lions after two weeks. Another calf was taken away from her in February and placed in a zoo because it showed signs of malnourishment.
From Far Left to Libertarian
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006Arnold Kling recounts his odyssey From Far Left to Libertarian:
The question of how I became a libertarian ultimately is a question about how I changed my mental model of the political system from one of “good guys vs. villains” to one of the importance of limited government, individual liberty, and personal responsibility. I travelled the route from Far Left to libertarian. I think that quite a few libertarians have travelled that route, and yet I cannot think of anyone who has gone the other direction. This leads me to suspect that:
- Far Leftists and libertarianism have much in common.
- Libertarians know something that Far Leftists do not.
What I believe that Far Leftists and libertarians have in common includes:
- A passion for social and political issues. I grew up in a household where the dinner conversation often was politics. Far Leftists and libertarians both care more than the average person about what goes on in public policy.
- Frustration with political incumbents. Far Leftists and libertarians both have a tendency to exaggerate the flaws in Presidents while in office and to overstate the virtues of past leaders. For example, Presidents Clinton and Kennedy are much more popular with the Far Left today than when they were in office. Similarly, during his Administration, President Reagan was considered a disappointment by libertarians.
- Anti-elitism. Both Far Leftists and libertarians are willing to reject what they see as elitist views among politicians and political pundits.
What I believe that Libertarians have learned is what social psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error. The error is to attribute behavior to a person’s character when this behavior is in fact based on context. In one classic experiment, the subject is asked to watch a person read a speech that the subject knows that the speaker did not write. Subjects attribute to the person the beliefs contained in the speech.
The Far Left believes that bad policies come from evil motives. In this view, villains, such as powerful corporations, oppose good policies, and political incumbents lack the strength and courage to overcome the villains.
Libertarians believe that context is more important. We believe that government power is inherently corrupting, regardless of who holds leadership positions or how they are influenced. We believe that the market does a relatively good job of channelling self-interest toward socially desirable ends.
In my journey from Far Left to libertarianism, studying economics played an important role. My undergraduate economics professor, the late Bernie Saffran, exposed students to a variety of viewpoints, from Marxist to libertarian. But he revelled in showing us cases where policy intentions conflicted with policy results. The point that self-interest in a market context can lead to good outcomes, while good intentions in government regulation can lead to bad outcomes, was driven home.
Read the whole thing.
Neolithic Boyz
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006In Neolithic Boyz, Jay Manifold reviews three books on human nature and shares this amusing point from Lee Silver’s Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life:
Consider the controversy that would attend the introduction of “another high-risk reproductive technology … from 2 percent to 10 percent of women who avail themselves of this technology are seriously harmed by it. The risk of death to embryos is about 50 percent; and of the embryos that survive, 20 percent die during the fetal stage of development. Finally, for babies born alive, the risk of a serious birth defect is 4 percent.” But “this technology is the primary one used by our species since we first came into existence — sexual intercourse, fertilization in a woman’s reproductive tract, and development of the embryo and fetus in her uterus.” (p 342)
Ring-Tailed Lemur and Fennec Fox
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
Today’s dose of cute comes from this Ring-Tailed Lemur and Fennec Fox at the Sunshine International Aquarium in Tokyo.
Parent criticizes book ‘Fahrenheit 451′
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
Alton Verm, of Conroe, objects to the language and content in the book. His 15-year-old daughter Diana, a CCHS sophomore, came to him Sept. 21 with her reservations about reading the book because of its language.
“The book had a bunch of very bad language in it,” Diana Verm said. “It shouldn’t be in there because it’s offending people. … If they can’t find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn’t have a book at all.”
Alton Verm filed a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” Thursday with the district regarding Fahrenheit 451, written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1953. He wants the district to remove the book from the curriculum.
“It’s just all kinds of filth,” said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read Fahrenheit 451. “The words don’t need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class.”
Hole-in-the-Wall Experiment
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research at NIIT in New Delhi, but his passion is for “minimally invasive” education for poor children.
To test his ideas, he launched the Hole-in-the-Wall Experiment:
He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT’s headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company’s grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree.What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.
With access to a computer and the Internet, the children become functionally literate in a subset of English:
At first, I made a Hindi interface for the kids, which gave them links for hooking up with Web sites in their own language. I thought it would be a great hit. Guess what they did with it? They shut it down and went back to Internet Explorer. I realized that they may not understand the dictionary meaning of [English] words, but they have an operational understanding. They know what that word does. They don’t know how to pronounce F-I-L-E, but they know that within it are options of saving and opening up files …The fact that the Internet is in English will not stop them from accessing it.
They invent their own terminology for what’s going on. For example, they call the pointer of the mouse sui, which is Hindi for needle. More interesting is the hourglass that appears when something is happening. Most Indians have never heard of an hourglass. I asked them, “What does that mean?” They said, “It’s a damru,” which is Hindi for Shiva’s drum. [The God] Shiva holds an hourglass-shaped drum in his hand that you can shake from side to side. So they said the sui became a damru when the “thing” [the computer] was doing something.
Education Arbitrage
Monday, October 2nd, 2006Jonathan of Chicago Boyz noted that this is “education arbitrage”:
Private tutors are a luxury many American families cannot afford, costing anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour. But California mother Denise Robison found one online for $2.50 an hour — in India.“It’s made the biggest difference. My daughter is literally at the top of every single one of her classes and she has never done that before,” said Robison, a single mother from Modesto.
Her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, is one of 1,100 Americans enrolled in Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched U.S. services last November with a staff of 150 “e-tutors” mostly in India with a fee of $100 a month for unlimited hours.
Taylor took two-hour sessions each day for five days a week in math and English — a cost that tallies to $2.50 an hour, a fraction of the $40 an hour charged by U.S.-based online tutors such as market leader Tutor.com that draw on North American teachers, or the usual $100 an hour for face-to-face sessions.
“I like to tell people I did private tutoring every day for the cost of a fast-food meal or a Starbucks’ coffee,” Robison said. “We did our own form of summer school all summer.”
His comment:
The real story is that it potentially undercuts the entire govt-schools system. If you have kids going from failure to excellent performance based on a couple of hours’ tutoring per day, how much better would they perform if they spent four or six hours every day with their online tutors and blew off their schools entirely? That’s what parents will be thinking. The teachers’ unions are going to try to make this kind of tutoring illegal or so larded up with mandated bulls*** that it won’t be effective. I don’t think the unions can succeed, however.Yippee. Education arbitrage.
What A Terrorist Incident in Ancient Rome Can Teach Us
Monday, October 2nd, 2006Robert Harris looks at the pirate attack on Ostia in 68 B.C. and explains What A Terrorist Incident in Ancient Rome Can Teach Us:
The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”
What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.
But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.
“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”
Top ten geek business myths
Monday, October 2nd, 2006Ron Garret shares his top ten geek business myths, including Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something:
Reality: The only thing a Ph.D. means is that you’re not a moron, and you’re willing to put up with the bullshit it takes to slog your way through a Ph.D. program somewhere. Empirically, having a Ph.D. is negatively correlated with business success. This is because the reward structure in academia is almost the exact opposite of what it is in business. In academia, what your peers think matters. In business, it’s what your customers think that matters, and your customers are (almost certainly) not your peers.