Culture is a Weapon

Anon Fags and Information Warfare, the Praxis of Anonymity

2011-05-03T05:37:00.000-07:00

I want to first of all be quite clear: I am not a member of Anonymous and I sure as hell speak for no one but myself, Kenneth Lipp, kenneth.lipp@gmail.com. I will continue to add info to this post throught, etc, selah, amen___

This will nicely round out my three-P's of social history theme. I've hit Parrhesia , Panopticon , and now time for my namesake her, Praxis.

My concern is with Karl Marx's systematic theory of values; and his fundamental assumption concerning human nature, namely that human beings can be rational, for the significance of the dialectic in its "rational form" is that it enables them to comprehend the contradictory nature of reality as a prerequisite to changing it.

Intro to Das Kapital:

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income. Now-a-days atheism is culpa levis, as compared with criticism of existing property relations. Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable advance. I refer, e.g., to the Blue book published within the last few weeks: "Correspondence with Her Majesty's Missions Abroad, regarding Industrial Questions and Trades' Unions". The representatives of the English Crown in foreign countries there declare in so many words that in Germany, in France,to be brief, in all the civilised states of the European Continent, radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour is as evident and inevitable as in England. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Wade, vice-president of the United States, declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day. These are signs of the times, not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling-classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.

Specifically, the rational form would eventually enable the working class to understand the contradictory nature of capitalist reality. Indeed, the "ultimate aim" of Capital was to "lay bare the economic motion of modern society" in order to "shorten and lessen the birthpangs" of its transformation into communism. It is human rationality that under-pins Marx's well-known emphasis on the unity of theory and practice, in other words, his notion of "praxis": The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary praxis [Marx and Engels 1970, 121].

Thus, Capital can be seen as a contribution to the revolutionary praxis of the working class in he]ping it to achieve its historic mission via an appreciation of the contradictions of modern capitalism.

Marx's portrayal of humankind as potentially rational also resolves the puzzle as to why Marx could simultaneously entertain the idea of an historical telos, with its deterministic implications, and uphold the voluntaristic and reflexive notion of praxis or practical activity. He assumes that workers-through rational thought, through reflecting on their experience of capitalism, and notably through their increasing immiseration and growing collective strength, will inevitably want and be able to overthrow it . Moreover, this solution to the puzzle would also unite the historical teleology in Marx, which Hunt rejects, with the individual teleology, which he accepts. It is relevant to note briefly at this juncture that Marx's conception of rationality arguably was not based on the notion of hedonistic self-interest as claimed by Veblen, since Marx explicitly rejected Bentham. Rather, it stemmed from a need for individual and collective self-realization and for individual and collective telos, which required "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" [Marx] and to develop in accord with their "human nature."

Marx, however, sought to locate this "historic mission" of the 'working class and his understanding of capitalism in a broader historical context. Thus, in the Communist Manifesto, he and Engels present the proletariat as the first potential ruling class in history to be a genuine "universal class."

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority .

And in Marx's famous Preface, arguably his most definitive statement on history, he suggests that the capitalist era can be considered within a wider historical sweep. The regulative principle that determines whether different modes of production-ancient, feudal, capitalist-rise and fall is whether they are conducive to the development of the productive forces. At some stage, given production relations, instead of advancing production, they become fetters. Capitalist relations are no exception to this general rule. Furthermore, each mode of production creates within itself new social classes that are bearers of the new social relations of production. Again, capitalism is no exception; it generates within itself a working class-the social agent that will transcend capitalist relations. Marx's intellectual project was predicated on the notion that the working class had the capacity to be an effective source of change, which was in turn derived from the assumption of human rationality. Even if the Preface is not regarded as Marx's definitive account of history--and we stress instead his more open-ended, empirical interpretation, as some commentators have done --we are still left with a highly teleological theory of capitalism, with its downfall being the inevitable result of its inner contradictions.

This is from IndyMedia

Anonymous | 26.01.2008 20:40 | Repression | Social Struggles | Technology | London

You may have heard in some of the news outlets that a group of "Hackers" have declared war on Scientology. Firstly, we're not hackers. We are an autonomus group of individuals who have come together to fight a common cause. It is our aim to make people aware of the wrongdoings and cult-like nature of this organisation, and ultimately reduce their ability to take and destroy lives. We are known as Anonymous.

When and Where

This began when the now notorious Tom Cruise video was leaked. When the scientologists attempted to have the video removed, it created a back lash within several large Internet communities who value free speech. Projet Chanology was formed. As a part of our new, and ongoing operation UK members are organising a protest at the scientology offices in London.

While I have attended Mayday and the G8, and so have some past experience, many of us are geeks, not activists. I am writing to you to request any help or presence you can offer. We believe that the media attention we have received is enough to validate our effectiveness and numbers. Thousands of Anonymous have already been engaged in direct action against the church.

I am anonymous, and I speak only for anonymous - but any help would be greatly appreciated. Our plans are publicly available, and there is much information to be found online.. an outline of our plan currently exists here:
http://beatarod.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32

You may also find our open messages to scientology here:
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ujR3DJ308

See the attached image for details of when and where.

I thank you kindly for your time.

We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

Expect us.

Anonymous.

Anonymous

At war?

Most mass exposure to Anonymous is one-dimensional. For the more academically inclined, you'll find the field of information warfare exceedingly rich. Where information warfare was once a distinct discipline with military underpinnings, it has increasingly become fused with both the computer security and intelligence disciplines. Information warfare is still defined in some quarters as “information operations conducted during time of crises or conflict to achieve or promote specific objectives over a specific adversary or adversaries” (IWS, n.d.). Hutchison and Warren (2001) defined the essence of information warfare as where information “has to be manipulated to the advantage of those trying to influence it”.

These principles have not changed, yet the extent to which the application of these principles has infiltrated the contemporary corporate environment has shifted and extended. Whilst the definition is primarily military, the application of it has diverged into the corporate environment. Similarly, its composition and implication for the armed forces has also altered with the advancement of technology.

The military are increasingly dependent on communication systems, networks and electronic sensors, reflecting a change in the characterisation war from a physical battlefield to a modern digitized one, supported by information and executed remotely (Frater & Ryan, 2001). Related to this is the application in the commercial environment where competitive business wars are waged with knowledge and control of communication networks. The changes driven by new technology reflect both a transformation in the command and control of military forces, and in how they are organised and trained. Perhaps what is key to this discussion is not that the focus of information warfare should move away from the its military basis, but that firstly its objectives and techniques now apply increasingly to the corporate environment, and secondly that the manner in which warfare is waged will evolve and change because of the advances in technology. Therefore, there is a shift in both application and execution of information warfare.

Of help can be a little research with your trusty Googler: (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group) , Wikipedia's entry on Anonymous)

Anonymous (used as a mass noun) is an Internet meme originating 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain.^[2] It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known.^[3]In its early form, the concept has been adopted by a decentralized on-line community acting anonymously in a coordinated manner, usually toward a loosely self-agreed goal, and primarily focused on entertainment. Beginning with 2008, the Anonymous collective has become increasingly associated with collaborative, international hacktivism, undertaking protests and other actions, often with the goal of promoting internet freedom and freedom of speech. Actions credited to "Anonymous" are undertaken by unidentified individuals who apply the Anonymous label to themselves as attribution.^[4]Although not necessarily tied to a single on-line entity, many websites are strongly associated with Anonymous. This includes notable imageboards such as 4chan, Futaba, their associated wikis, Encyclopædia Dramatica, and a number of forums.^[5] After a series of controversial, widely-publicized protests and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by Anonymous in 2008, incidents linked to its cadre members have increased.^[6] In consideration of its capabilities, Anonymous has been posited by CNN to be one of the three major successors to WikiLeaks.^[7]

The following text can be found here:

http://pastebin.com/FQg59cff

Persona management, 'sock puppet' -- Surveillance

I want to draw attention to the fact that this is not some far off possibility, or pure conjecture. The Guardian reported in March 2011 on a

“US spy operation that manipulates social media-

Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

This is a very tangible example, perhaps harbinger, of the kind of surveillance which state and /or corporate interests might be expected to insinuate into pop culture, with ease, on a level playing field with legitimate users (or “openly clandestine” agents. There needs to be a means to speak fearlessly, and anonymity is a valuable resource to enable public candor).

Further documentation http://www.scribd.com/doc/54119385/HBGary-Federal-Berico-Palantir-Private-Corporate-Surveillance-Program-on-Activists

“Persona management: The deployment of entirely fake online personas controlled en masse by a human operator. Increasingly, this process is software-assisted, allowing a single individual to control fifty "people," at least in the case of the apparatus requested by the USAF when putting out bids to federal contractors such as HBGary. Such personas tend to be equipped with biographical data sufficient to present a front of legitimacy even to those with whom the personas communicate.
Those communications in turn are regulated via software-based filters that aid in maintaining situational integrity throughout the entirety of each persona's interactions with its human targets; as is described at great length in this 2007 patent (hilariously portrayed as a method by which busy executives might better ensure that they do not say anything bizarre or insulting when dealing with foreign nationals despite that the fact that the authors happen to be working out of U.S. military installations in Virginia in conjunction with IBM, which itself does not seem to have ever gotten around to releasing any such product), linguistic and geographical considerations are taken into account automatically, along with a variety of others, in order to streamline the age-old internet practice of sockpuppeting."

From http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page

No longer do governments, multinational corporations, or politicians need to exert force when trying to maintain social control. Co-opting of powerful minority groups through the fear of observation makes it possible to eliminate the perception of tyranny. Tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die.He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us. Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically, and therefore spiritually, to be self employed. If self-oppression and conformity become the normal course of behavior for individuals who wish to avoid punishment, then the culpability of oppression shifts from the oppressor to the oppressed

Critical Pessimism & Media Reform Movements: #FreeSpeech TV at the National Conference on Media Reform

2011-04-20T18:40:00.000-07:00

Critical Pessimism & Media Reform Movements
by Adam Fish on April 19th, 2011
from Savage Minds
Free Speech TV at the National Conference on Media Reform

From its inception in 1995, Free Speech TVâ€™s goal has been to infiltrate and subvert the vapid, shrill and corporately controlled American television newscape with challenging and unheard voices. Fast forward to 2011, and in the age of viral videos, social media and ubiquitous computing, the same issues persist.

An excellent young pro-freedom-of-speech organization, Free Press, called all media activists to Boston for the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), April 8-10, to celebrate independent media and incubate strategies to fight the tide of corporate personhood, monopolization in communication industries, and the denial of access to the public airwaves.

These are issues FSTV has long fought, first with VHS tapes of radical documentaries shipped to community access stations throughout the nation, then through satellite carriage in 30 million homes, and now via live internet video and direct dialogues with the audience through social media.

FSTV was at NCMR in full force, covering live panels on everything from the role of social media in North African revolutions to mediaâ€™s sexualization of women; developing strategic relationships with print, radio, internet and television collaborators; interviewing luminaries like FCC Commissioner Copps; and inspiring the delegates by opening up the otherwise closed and corporatized satellite television world to the voices of media activists fighting for access and diversity during a frankly terrifying period in American media freedom.

One question haunted the many stages, daises and dialogues at the NCMR: Is the open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet â€“ by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized â€“ becoming closed, centralized and homogenous as it begins to look and feel more like the elite-controlled cable television system?

For example, while we were in the conference, the House voted to block the FCC from protecting our right to access an open Internet. The mergers of Comcast and NBC-Universal and AT&T/T-Mobile loomed behind every passionate oration. And yet FSTV was there to document when FCC Commissioner Copps took the stage stating he would resist the denial of network neutrality and such monopolizing mergers.

Internationally, examples of the power and problems of the internet exist. The Egypt-based Facebook group â€œWe are all Khaled Saidâ€ had 80,000 members, many who amassed at Tahrir Square on January 26, instigating a wave of democratization that began in Tunisia â€“ also fueled by social media â€“ and hopefully continuing to Libya. Two days later, however, the Mubarak regime was able effectively to hit a â€œkill switchâ€ on the internet and target activists using Facebook for arrest, an activity that worked against the desires of the repressive regime. At the NCMR, Democracy Now! reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous said, â€œFacebook was down â€¦ so they hit the streets. It had the reverse desire and effect that the government wanted to happen.â€

In 2010, Reporters Without Borders compiled a list of 13 internet enemies â€“ countries that suppress free speech online. The U.S. wasnâ€™t on the list, but U.S. companies Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and Apple were pressured to cut digital and financial support for whistleblowing WikiLeaks. The point is obvious: A vigilant press aided by an open, uncensored and unprivatized internet are necessary yet threatened and are the focus of FSTVâ€™s coverage at NCMR.

FSTV embodies that ancient movement of ordinary people taking back power from entrenched elites. Today, every issue, from class inequality to ecological justice â€“ is a media issue. However, our media sources, from journalists to internet and television delivery systems, are being co-opted by monopolizing corporations and lobbyists. As an independent, open and interactive television network, FSTV is an antidote to the problems facing free speech and democracy as more media power is centralized in fewer hands. Thankfully, as we found out in Boston, FSTV is not alone in this dangerous and difficult operation of media liberation.

â€” Jenkins hyperbolically describes â€œcritical pessimistsâ€ as people who â€œopt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative pressesâ€ (2006: 248-249). This is a false exaggeration of a movement that is providing a necessary check on corporate power and mindfully working for greater civic, community, and citizen involvement in media production..

Libya Policy and Unrest, a non-political summary

2011-04-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

Over forty years ago, Muammar al Qadhafi led a revolt against the Libyan monarchy in the name of nationalism, self-determination, and popular sovereignty. Opposition groups citing the same principles are now revolting against Qadhafi to bring an end to the authoritarian political system he has controlled in Libya for the last four decades. The Libyan government’s use of force against civilians and opposition forces seeking Qadhafi’s overthrow sparked an international outcry in February and early March 2011, and a stalemate began to break in favor of the Qadhafi government, threatening civilians in opposition-held areas. The United States and other European and Arab states are now carrying out military operations in Libya to enforce United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which was adopted on March 17 and authorizes “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians. Qadhafi and his supporters have described the uprising as a foreign and Islamist conspiracy and are attempting to outlast their opponents. Qadhafi remains defiant amid the dismantling of his military by coalition air strikes. His supporters threatened to respond to attacks by striking civilian and military targets in the Mediterranean region.

Resolution 1973 calls for an immediate cease-fire and dialogue, declares a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace, and authorizes robust enforcement measures for the arms embargo on Libya established by Resolution 1970 of February 26, “while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” As of March 28, U.S. military officials reported that U.S. and coalition strikes on Libyan air defenses, air forces, and ground forces had neutralized the ability of Muammar al Qadhafi’s military to control the country’s airspace and were increasingly focused on targeting pro-Qadhafi ground forces found to be continuing to violate Resolution 1973 through attacks on Libyan civilians. President Obama has said the United States will not introduce ground forces and has called for Qadhafi to step down. The no-fly zone called for in Resolution 1973 is in place and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is assuming command of coalition operations. The United States and international partners are providing humanitarian assistance to displaced persons in temporary camps in Tunisia and Egypt.

Until recently, the United States government was pursuing a policy of reengagement toward Qadhafi after decades of confrontation, sanctions, and Libyan isolation. President Obama now has joined some leaders in asserting that Muammar al Qadhafi must ultimately give up power,although that outcome is not called for explicitly in Resolution 1973. Obama Administration officials highlight a number of non-military steps the U.S. government has taken to achieve that objective, while military operations to protect Libyan civilians continue. U.S. steps include new targeted sanctions established in Executive Order 13566. Some Members of Congress expressed support for U.S. military intervention prior to the adoption of Resolution 1973, while others disagreed or called for the President to seek explicit congressional authorization prior to any use of force. Some executive-legislative consultation occurred prior to the start of U.S. military operations, and, on March 21, President Obama sent a letter to Congress outlining U.S. military objectives and operations, but not explicitly seeking congressional authorization.

Many observers believe that Libya’s weak government institutions, potentially divisive political dynamics, and current conflict suggest that security challenges could follow the current uprising, regardless of its outcome. Some opposition figures have formed an Interim Transitional National Council which claims to represent all areas of the country and is seeking recognition and material support. In evaluating U.S. policy options, Congress may seek to better understand the roots and nature of the conflict in Libya, the views and interests of key players, and the potential consequences of the military action under way and other policy proposals under consideration.

KENYA: AIDS activists battle tax increase on medicines

2011-04-08T17:54:00.000-07:00

Kenyan AIDS activists are furious about a plan by the government to implement a 2 percent tax increase on medicines, which they say will hurt poor people living with HIV.

In November 2010, Kenya's Minister for Medical Services issued a gazette notice imposing the new tax on drugs to help fund the Pharmacy and Poisons Board, the government body mandated to regulate drugs in the country. The Kenya Revenue Authority already collects a 2.75 percent tax on medicines.

"When you increase taxes on essential drugs, it will push up their costs because manufacturers and importers will pass that extra burden to consumers," said James Kamau, coordinator of the Kenya Treatment Access Movement. "The government cannot even put everybody on HIV treatment because they can't afford it, yet they are putting more tax on the same drugs they are unable to buy."

While the government provides free antiretroviral drugs to an estimated 400,000 people living with HIV, patients are expected to pay for medication to treat opportunistic infections.

The activists have gone to court to block the government from effecting the new tax on the grounds that the minister lacks the authority to levy taxes. The High Court has stopped the government from putting the new tax into effect until the case is determined.

The Pharmacy and Poisons Board has offered to reduce the tax from 2 percent to 0.75 percent, a proposal the lobbyists have rejected.

There are many luxury commodities that can be taxed to get more money to fund the health sector without making life unnecessarily difficult for Kenyans

"We need money to fund certain operations within the Ministry of Health and other sectors of health, so we hope that those opposed to new taxes will understand the need for them," said Kazungu Kambi, Assistant Minister of Medical Services. "We are constantly looking for ways to get money to supplement what we get from the Ministry of Finance and what we get from donors. We have proposals for raising more money which are being discussed at various levels."

In 2009, the government came up with a Health Financing Strategy that proposed, among other things, the removal of user fees at government facilities. However, inadequate funding means the strategy has yet to be implemented.

While activists agree that the health sector needs to be better funded, they say raising the cost of medicines is not the way to do it. "There are many luxury commodities that can be taxed to get more money to fund the health sector without making life unnecessarily difficult for Kenyans who are already overburdened by the spending they have to incur to seek medical services," said Kamau.

"Instead of increased taxes on medicines which Kenyans so much need, the government should increase budgetary allocations to the health sector to cushion Kenyans from high costs of healthcare," he added.

Internet Censorship, Activism, Security, and Social Change--Literature

2011-04-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

This just a collection of articles I've gathered during the past few days, on this interwebz thing the kids are so into now

NEW INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND GRASSROOTS MOBILIZATION

In much of the recent literature on contemporary social movements there is call for a re-conceptualization of the definition and understanding of political struggle given the impact of new emerging information communication technologies (ICTs), and the Internet in particular, on social movement organizing, contentious politics, and the electoral political process. This paper undertakes an analysis of MoveOn within a critical theory framework and argues that electronic social movement organizations, such as MoveOn, are in many ways broadening public opinion and the public sphere. It draws on the work of Habermas and theories of the Internet to illustrate how ICTs can revitalize communicative action in the public sphere and thus enhance participatory democracy.

Temporal patterns of happiness and information in a global social network: Hedonometrics and Twitter

Peter Sheridan Dodds,1, Kameron Decker Harris,1 Isabel M.Kloumann,1 Catherine A. Bliss,1 and Christopher M. Danforth1,
1 Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Center for Complex Systems, & the Vermont Advanced Computing Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, 05401
(Dated: February 14, 2011)

Individual happiness is a fundamental societal metric. Normally measured through self-report, happiness has often been indirectly characterized and overshadowed by more readily quantifable economic indicators, such as gross domestic product. Here, we use a real-time, remote-sensing, noninvasive, text-based approach|a kind of hedonometer|to uncover collective dynamical patterns of happiness levels expressed by over 50 million users in the online, global social network Twitter. With a data set comprising nearly 2.8 billion expressions involving more than 28 billion words, we explore temporal variations in happiness, as well as information levels, over time scales of hours, days, and months. Among many observations, we nd a steady global happiness level, evidence of universal weekly and daily patterns of happiness and information, and that happiness and information levels are generally uncorrelated. We also extract and analyse a collection of happiness and information trends based on keywords, showing them to be both sensible and informative, and in elct generating opinion polls without asking questions. Finally, we develop and employ a graphical method that reveals how individual words contribute to changes in average happiness between any two texts.

Graffiti Networks: A Subversive, Internet-Scale File Sharing Model
Andrew Pavlo

Brown University
pavlo@cs.brown.edu
Ning Shi
Brown University
ning@cs.brown.edu
Abstract

The proliferation of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocols is due to their efficient and scalable methods for data dissemination to numerous users. But many of these networks have no provisions to provide users with long term access to files after the initial interest has diminished, nor are they able to guarantee protection for users from malicious clients that wish to implicate them in incriminating activities. As such, users may turn to supplementary measures for storing and transferring data in P2P systems. We present a new file sharing paradigm, called a Graffiti Network, which allows peers to harness the potentially unlimited storage of the Internet as a third-party intermediary. Our key contributions in this paper are (1) an overview of a distributed system based on this new threat model and (2) a measurement of its viability through a one-year deployment
study using a popular web-publishing platform. The results of this experiment motivate a discussion about the
challenges of mitigating this type of file sharing in a hostile network environment and how web site operators can protect their resources.

HOT NEWS MISAPPROPRIATION IN THE INTERNET AGE

Eric P. Schmidt*

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 313
I. THE CONTEXT AND LAW OF INS ........................................... 317
A. AHN and the Declining Newspaper Industry .................... 319
B. Theflyonthewall and New Challenges to the Hot News
Doctrine .............................................................................. 321
II. MISAPPROPRIATION AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO
STATUTORY IP LAW ................................................................ 324
A. Disadvantages of the Misappropriation Doctrine .............. 329
III. WHAT IS AT STAKE .................................................................. 335
IV. TOWARD A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF INDUSTRY
NORMS ...................................................................................... 339
CONCLUSION .......................................................................................

The Political Power of Social Media Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change
Clay Shirky

WORKING PAPER BEYOND CYBER-DOOM:
Cyberattack Scenarios and the Evidence of History

THE INTERPENETRATION OF TECHNICAL AND LEGAL DECISION-MAKING FOR THE INTERNET

Not long after computer scientists first began working on the technical design of the network that ultimately became known as the Internet, in 1969, they began to document their discussions, information shared, and decisions made in a series of documents known as the Internet requests for comments that is still being used
for this purpose 40 years later. A comprehensive inductive reading of these documents reveals that legal and policy issues were often raised or confronted in the course of resolving technical problems. In many of these instances, the technical decisions that resulted had law-like effects in the sense that they constrained or
enabled the ways in which users can communicate and can access and use information over the Internet, whether or not such decisions supported or subverted legal decision-making, and whether or not legal decision-makers understood the societal implications of the technical decisions that were being made. This is one of the two ways in which technical and legal decision-making have become interpenetrated.
The literature on legal engagement with problems generated by the technical features of the Internet is vast. This article appears within the nascent literature on technical engagement with legal problems. It does so in an effort to contribute to the building of a shared epistemic and decision-making space that involves both the technical and the legal communities.

Kaleidoscope, Information Security and Warfare

“Head's Up” Promoting Brain and Mind Health Using Twenty 3 foot tall fiberglass heads

2011-04-07T04:09:00.000-07:00

“Heads Up” addresses the critical role played by psychological components (behavior and emotions) in overall health and wellness. The project is a response to a challenge by the US Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) to market health education in creative ways, and focuses on the disorders that contribute most to the looming health care crisis in this country.

According to the CDC, chronic illnesses with strong behavioral and emotional components (i.e. heart disease, cancer, and diabetes) will account for two-thirds of all deaths this year, with millions more new cases diagnosed annually. In addition to the established role of diet and exercise, research clearly shows that psychological components, such as depression and stress, are important factors in the incidence and severity of chronic illnesses.

For example, we know that unchecked stress is implicated in the development of numerous diseases, and utilization of basic stress management techniques can have long-term beneficial health results. Research also tells us that individuals with chronic illness, not surprisingly, are more vulnerable to the development of depression.The appropriate diagnosis and treatment of depression in patients with illnesses such as heart disease and cancer can lead to improved medical status, reduced pain and disability, increased cooperation with treatment recommendations, and, in some cases, better survival outcomes.

Thus, raising community awareness of the behavioral and emotional factors in health can help individuals choose healthier lifestyles, seek effective treatment and reduce inappropriate utilization of limited health resources.

Heads up Alabama is a public health education project of the Alabama Psychological Association Foundation and the Public Education committee of the Alabama Psychological Association, on display at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Lister Hill Library Alabama Museum of Health Sciences.

The program's goals are to:

1. Promote Psychology

2. Educate the public about psychology and health

3. Raise the profile of the Alabama Psychological Association

4. Energize aPA members and attract new members

5. Develop new funding sources for public education

6. Create connections with community leaders

Some of the 20 heads on display

Sue Ellen Brown
Mental Blocks

Lillie Minnifield & Esther Levy
Put Your Brain in Gear

Christian Hamrick
The Blossom of Being

Sandra Holm
Diary of a Housewife Going Mad

Kevin Whitman

Escape

Ninth Book of the Al' Mansuri

2011-04-07T00:52:00.000-07:00

By Rhazes. Expounded and commented upon by Gerard de Solo. Translated into Hebrew by the physician Tobiel ben Samuel de Leiria of Portugal.

Hebrew manuscript on vellum and paper. Portugal, 1388.

Ff. [203], 20 x 13 cm.

Born in northeastern Persia, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi (ca. 854-925 or 935), better known as Rhazes, was a leading figure in the field of medicine, ranking with Hippocrates and Galen as one of the founders of clinical medicine. A true follower of the Hippocratic school in describing disease and giving a prognosis, Rhazes studied medicine at Baghdad, where he later became hospital director, teacher, and court physician. The Al-Mansuri, one of Rhazes' many writings, consists of ten parts (books) and is an encyclopedic review of medicine. Focused on pathology, the Ninth Book was most influential in the West, where it was often translated and became the standard source for teaching therapeutics until long after the Renaissance. Commentaries on the Ninth Book by leading Western scholars like Gerard de Solo, the expounder and commentator on the Reynolds' translation, added to its popularity and use as a practical guide for medical students.

The translator of the Library's Hebrew version from Latin was the Jewish physician Tobiel ben Samuel de Leiria (Portugal), who lived in the last half of the 14th century. The title page, headings of chapters, and various other prominent places of the manuscript are illuminated with fancifully intertwined arabesques and forms in various colors. Later illuminations in an Italian hand are found throughout the piece as well. Until the Reynolds' copy was properly identified, only two other Hebrew translations were known to exist (see Steinschneider, Hebraeischen uebersetzungen des mittelalters, 1893, p. 704 & 496). The Reynolds' copy is the only known version to have a title page.

Workshop on the Metaphysics of Microevolutionary Processes (MoMeP)

2011-04-07T00:38:00.000-07:00

UAB Department of Philosophy and The Center for Ethics and Values in the Sciences present

Workshop on the Metaphysics of

Microevolutionary Processes (MoMeP)

University of Alabama at Birmingham

April 8-9, 2011

Room 170, Bevill Biomedical Building

845 19th Street South, Birmingham, AL

Friday, April 8

1:00-2:05 Aidan Lyon (University of Maryland) “Why Normal Distributions are Normal”

2:10-3:15 Philippe Huneman (Université de Paris 1) “One Evolutionary Process, Two Causal Routes? Distinguishing and Articulating Selection and Drift”

3:30-4:35 Grant Ramsey (Notre Dame University) “Drift as an Individual-Level Process”

4:40-5:45 Denis Walsh (University of Toronto) “If Variance Doesn't Cause, How Can it Explain?”

Saturday, April 9

8:00-9:05 Robert Northcott (University of Missouri , St. Louis) “Fitness and Selective Explanation”

9:10-10:15 Peter Gildenhuys (Lafayette College) “How to Causally Interpret Drift for Dynamically Sufficient Models”

10:20-11:25 Marshall Abrams (UAB) “Some Say a Heart is Just Like a Wheel of Fortune: The Role of Causal Structure in Biological Probability”

1:30-2:35 Frédéric Bouchard (Université de Montréal) “On the Possible Fungibility of Ecological, Generational and Evolutionary T

Tractatus de magnete et operationibus eius

2011-04-07T00:32:00.000-07:00

Bound together in this volume are the Tractatus de Magnetate et Operationibus eius (the thirteenth-century letter on the magnet by Petrus Peregrinus); a university handbook on the theory of numbers, proportions and harmony; the seven signs of bad breeding; the seven signs of elegance; and household and medical recipes. Included is one of the oldest known surviving English mead recipes (folio 20r).The manuscript, written on vellum in brown ink with red chapter headings and red and blue initials, has 35 leaves and measures approximately 14.5 cm by 11 cm. Much of the text is in Latin, however the recipes are mostly in English.

C. Tidmarsh Major performed the original transcription, which was later revised by Peter Murray Jones Original spellings have been maintained; no corrections or improvements have been made.

Went to the Museum at the Medical Library Today--Iron Lung

2011-04-06T18:18:00.000-07:00

An Iron Lung in the Medical Library Museum, interesting piece coming up, stay tuned.

To the Major, about the Poor and their Learnin

2011-04-05T22:27:00.000-07:00

This is in response to some twittering

The Poverty Draft-

Let's say I will concede that the US Military is all volunteer, and saying so means that as opposed to a statutory term of compulsory service, where everyone serves a certain number of years in the military when they turn a certain age, every member of the United States armed forces consented without explicit legal obligation. This means that Army recruiters need to entice citizens to enlist. To do this, they rely on a number of tools.

Military recruiting in high schools has been a mainstay of the so-called all-volunteer armed forces from the start. High school kids are at an age when being a member of an identifiable group with a grand mission and a shared spirit — and never underestimate a distinctive uniform — is of exaggerated importance, something gang recruiters in big cities also note with interest and exploit with skill.

Kathy Dobie, quoting a military historian, notes:
“basic training has been essentially the same in every army in every age, because it works with the same raw material that’s always been there in teenage boys: a fair amount of aggression, a strong tendency to hang around in groups, and an absolute desperate desire to fit in.”

Add the need to prove oneself to be a macho, strong, tough, capable person, with pressure from family and or social group, and combine with an unrealistic calculus of vulnerability and a constricted sense of options specifically in poor and working-class communities.

Here, Major Granger, we seem to be misunderstanding one another somehow.

I concede readily that there are those who beat the odds, and succeed in spite of poverty or cultural isolation. What I mean when I say that you cannot separate socio-economic status from level of education is that the connection between the two, overall, is far too statistically compelling to be negated by the exceptional fortunate cases.

I do not know what you faced in order to achieve a position which you are comfortable regarding as a success, and I neither mean to impugn your personal ethics nor those of any group, under any blanket term.

The link between poverty and lack of educational success, not to mention poor health outcomes, under any casual observation, even, is presently an inescapable generality and very real. Especially if part of a particularly marginalized ethnic group, the challenges of low class include significant obstacles to getting a functional education.

Here’s a graph showing the correlation between poverty and lack of education in the 50 states of the U.S., 2005:

It speaks pretty clearly for itself. If we can't agree that socio-economic status is strongly linked to poor educational success, we are at a sad impasse. It's as close as social statistics gets to a categorical fact; and we've really got far from the point.

You're making a lot of argument from authority and failing to make arguments FOR that authority.

So you take a sample of the marginalized public: a black kid, a Hispanic kid, Italian kid, and a kid of some, for now just say indeterminate, ethnicity…and let’s say each of them, surprise, has meager pecuniary prospects. We’s in a regression, after all.

So…the undefined guy weighs his options and promptly enlists in the United States Marine Corps. The few, the proud, and all that. And now everyone in this kid’s family is applauding a decision to take this path.

The black kid weighs his options for survival, and decides to join the Bloods for protection and some cultural status. The Hispanic kid considers the field and decides to take his chances with the Latin Kings, to help feed his family (and, just for a Dickensian touch, say to bring his ailing mother up to the States from a cesspool south of Nogales).

The uneducated Italian kid weighs his options and promptly “enlists” in the Mafia (I'm so marked).

Just like in the military, the other three kids are also facing a stark choice—being poor or choosing a uniform/clan and gun—but no one hangs yellow ribbons for them, no one makes excuses for them when they kill innocents.

No one argues when these kids are called “criminals.”

Why?

Well, there’s one colossal difference between them and the men and women who volunteer to join the US military and get paid to wage illegal and immoral war:

Even though the US military is far more dangerous than any street gang or Mafia family, if you simply consider their recent record of collateral harm and unlawful invasions, the US military is considered legal.

I'll include my video, in case you would like to specifically address some of the light-hearted, pot-addled but sincere and defensible assertions I made. I simply cannot address the rationality of slogans.

The above is a rough transcript, in case my levity makes the video incomprehensible:

And my name is Kenneth, Major Granger, please.

I recommend

AWOL in America: When desertion is the only option, By Kathy Dobie (Harper's Magazine) -
Just Btw

The Girl Effect--The Clock is Ticking. This is Important.

2011-03-12T19:46:00.000-08:00

CARE is a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty. We place special focus on working alongside poor women because, equipped with the proper resources, women have the power to help whole families and entire communities escape poverty. Women are at the heart of CARE's community-based efforts to improve basic education, prevent the spread of HIV, increase access to clean water and sanitation, expand economic opportunity and protect natural resources. CARE also delivers emergency aid to survivors of war and natural disasters, and helps people rebuild their lives.

The clock is ticking...the time to act is now. When you help CARE reach a girl before adolescence, you help change the course of her life. Find out more by visiting http://www.care.org.

Scientific American Magazine »
November 2009

How Women Can Save the Planet

Empowering young women through education will help reduce overpopulation in areas that cannot support it and avoid extremism in the children they raise

By Lawrence M. Krauss | October 27, 2009 | 19

Image: Matt Collins

At six billion plus today, the earth’s human population will reach more than nine billion by 2050, according to estimates. If this many people consume energy at the current rate in the developed world, the planet will need more than double the amount of power it consumes today. But energy is just one issue that humankind will have to tackle to create a sustainable future. The root cause of the looming energy problem—and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health—is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.

High fertility rates in areas of the developing world that can least cope put tremendous pressure on freshwater and sanitation needs and fuel economic and religious tensions. In response, these countries ramp up their energy production via the only means available to them based on their resources—means that tend to either pollute the environment or contribute to global warming.

For instance, India, Somalia and Sudan have large positive birth rates. The latter two countries struggle to provide adequate food and water resources, and India increased its energy consumption by almost 50 percent between 1992 and 2001. (In contrast, Japan, France and Russia have negative birth rates, and the U.S. is slightly positive.) Indeed, a United Nations study published in August reported that Asia currently does not have the means to feed the extra 1.5 billion expected to live on that continent by 2050.

Empirical work indicating that providing schooling for women and girls will address these problems includes study after study showing that educated women have fewer children, are wealthier and are less likely to accept fundamentalist extremism. If we want a safer world, we should consider the utility of spending dollars on educating young people as an alternative to troops and weapons.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan today the Taliban have created thousands of madrassas, where children from poor families with no access to education can receive food and what passes for learning (but what is in fact quite the opposite). At the same time, they restrict access to education for women. In Gaza vulnerable young people are recruited early on to religious extremist training camps. I am not naive enough to believe that building schools and providing access to safe and secure environments for learning will alone solve our problems—we will need to create economic opportunities as well.

Moreover, in paternalistic societies where women have few rights, effecting change will be an uphill battle. For example, the government we are now supporting with troops and infrastructure in Afghanistan has recently passed legislation that food can be withheld from women who do not have sex with their husband and that women cannot go out of the house without their husband’s permission. In countries of this sort that now receive significant support from us, we need to make the empowerment of women a higher priority. As difficult and slow as the process might be, the education of women in such countries is a necessary first step to giving them the opportunity and motivation to begin to control their own destiny.

The long-term goal of reducing poverty, religious fundamentalism and overpopulation will be impossible to reach until we free women around the world from the enslavement of ignorance. More fundamental is the fact that education is a basic human right that has been systematically denied too many women for too long.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-women-can-save-the-planet

The Trojan Women, #Iran

2011-02-20T11:49:00.000-08:00

The name of our land has been wiped out.

Euripides, The Trojan Women

The towers of Troy are burning. All that is left of the once-proud city is a group of ragged women, bound for slavery, their husbands dead in battle, their sons murdered by the conquering Greeks, their daughters raped. Hecuba their queen invokes the king of the gods, using, remarkably, the language of democratic citizenship: "Son of Kronus, Council President [prytanis] of Troy, father who gave us birth, do you see these undeserved sufferings that your Trojan people bear?" The Chorus answers grimly,

"He sees, and yet the great city is no city. It has perished, and Troy exists no longer."

Hecuba and the Chorus conclude that the gods are not worth calling on, and that the very name of their land has been wiped out.

This ending is as bleak as any in the history of tragic drama - death, rape, slavery, fire destroying the towers, the city's very name effaced from the record of history by the acts of rapacious and

murderous Greeks.

'Cultural violence' refers to those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence - exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics) - that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence. Stars, crosses and crescents; flags, anthems and military parades; the ubiquitous portrait of the Leader; inflammatory speeches and posters - all these come to mind.

A person encouraging a potential killer, shouting 'Killing is self-realization!', may prove that the English language is capable of expressing such thoughts, but not that the English language as such is violent. Entire cultures can hardly be classified as violent; this is one reason for preferring the expression 'Aspect A of culture C is an example of cultural violence' to cultural stereotypes like 'culture C is violent'.

On the other hand, cultures could be imagined and even encountered with not only one but a set of aspects so violent, extensive and diverse, spanning all cultural domains, that the step from talking about cases of cultural violence to violent cultures may be warranted.

The Islamic Republic in Iran created two classes of citizen; the male, who benefits from the provisions of Islamic law and justice and the female, who does not.

'Marriage improves the psychology and physiology of the spouses and makes them physically and socially healthier' and 'those who marry accomplish two-thirds of their religious duties and gain comfort and solace'

~Zaneh Rouz 'Report on the Family Courts', Zaneh Rouz (Tehran), 14 July 1984.

The 'comfort' gained through marriage is that of the husband and the 'solace' is also his. Marriage is there to satisfy male sexual urges. Wives are there to quench the 'ever-blazing fire of lust' and placate the 'obsession' with 'sexual urges' which renders the youth 'desperate' and overrides all their dignity and better judgement. Ardour is the preserve of men, women are merely required to 'give themselves unquestioningly to their husband' and to 'obey their every command.'

With the sole exception of the right to vote, Iranian women are in all other respects formally recognised as second-class citizens who have no place in the public arena and no security in the domestic sphere.

The husband has become an absolute ruler, entitled to exercise the power of life and death in his home. Ironically, the effect of Islamic legislation has been to make women legitimate sex objects, excluded from most paid employment and chained with ever-increasing social and ideological ties to the uncertainties of Islamic marriage. Iranian women have little to lose and everything to gain by opposing the regime and its dicta concerning women. Thus despite the draconian measures, many women still refuse to don the veil, many others continue to fight for their jobs and some even try to initiate divorce proceedings and leave their homes.

Although cultural resistance is still fragmented, many intellectual women of the set that at inception welcomed the new regime are now forming secret societies and networks in Iran, publishing material and working to undermine the regime. They have been labelled as seditious, corrupt and servants of foreign powers and dealt with mercilessly when caught.

A substantial minority of women struggle against the Iranian theocracy. Many have joined the resistance groups, some are fighting alongside the Kurds and the Turkomans.

There are still, however, substantial groups of poorer women who have remained faithful to Ayatollah Khomeini. To some extent, their allegiance is bought by the regular provision of rations and modest food supplies. Even these women are growing impatient for the promised utopia which Iranian idealists watched recede ever further into the future and which has now been set and been doused in the murky and ever-more threatening horizon.

books and posts and mine be then the eloquence

2011-02-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

these media would exert

an enormously beneficial influence on the shaping of American culture. Americans of every class, most particularly

children,

would, many for the first time, be exposed to the correctly spoken word, to great literature,

great drama

…

The technological dream was more than realized … But the

cultural dream was cruelly mocked … magnificent technology … [an] exquisitely refined combination of some

of the human species’ highest intellectual achievements … delivering an occasional gem buried in immense avalanches of everything that is most banal or insipid or pathological

in our civilization.

Tillämpad teori och Naturalistic Felaktigheten:? Jag vänder ryggen till på facebook i två timmar och kaos. Det är en bra sak jag har varit att titta Twitter, skulle Bahrain vara en

2011-02-19T09:07:00.000-08:00

Tillämpad teori och Naturalistic Felaktigheten:? Jag vänder ryggen till på facebook i två timmar och kaos. Det är en bra sak jag har varit att titta Twitter, skulle Bahrain vara en

Niklas Plessing
simplicity#34 (watching)

krater.Av Kenneth Lipp

"En orubblig beslutsamhet att ta hela bevisning beaktas är den enda metoden för konservering mot fluktuerande extrem fashionabla yttrande."

- Alfred North Whitehead

jag nämnt mitt förslag och odling av "första praktik," ett nätverk av akademiker och forskare i strukturerade kommunikation, en process för att säkerställa trohet information fritt tillgänglig

Min vän och författareBrown.Barrett har först nu kunnat ta ett steg tillbaka från ständig övervakning och förmedling av information, och jag befinner mig aktiv, men mer som en åskådare, eller ett redskap. Jag kan också tänka mig en möjlighet sinne med utbildning anförtrott mig till stor del av skattebetalarna.

Jag har wracking min hjärna för vad jag ska skriva om. Jag är biolog. Jag skulle säga ett sociobiologist, men bland vissa kretsar är det fortfarande allmänt att minska mänskligheten för att biologi kommer att resultera i födseln av benlösa kattungar, eller några ohyggliga rashygieniska apokalypsen.

Jag lovar, jag är en stor mjukis. Jag säger inte att jag är helt mänsklig. Tänk Frankenstein, eller Steinbecks Lenny. Jag menar väl, men jag är en styggelse mot naturen som försöker svara på alla frågor han frågar med ett exakt svar. Och jag förmodar att jag shuffle min Mortal Coil off bäst när jag försöker förstå saker och ting av minsta användbara termer. Det är heuristik.

Precis som våra egna kognitiva processer, system för överföring av information har en att ha hjälpsamma fördomar. Information måste vara, oftast och framför allt ocensurerad, men det behöver också nekas befordran om vi anser det irrelevant, förvirrande eller stötande. Liksom hjärnan igen, som är född med fler nervceller i själva verket och utvecklar relation med världen genom purjinke cellens konstant beskärning.

Barrett-Jag tror att vi kanske kunde anordna lite mer ärendehantering-Jag menar inte detaljstyra, men fan, jag behöver ett uppdrag där jag kan vara till hjälp. Vi är skyldiga alla varandra, om vi ska arbeta tillsammans och att göra det i allmänhetens intresse måste vi vara medborgargarden. Jag vet Barrett kan betyda, och du bör höra Max tala om den ansedda amerikanska utrikesministern.

Arbetet med de som kastar sina två cent är att övervaka information. Vi vill inte censurera eller knäskål information vi diskvalificera, men vi hävda och försvara det som vi bedömer har sina förtjänster.

Jag ville skriva om Iran, men jag börjar undra om jag har ett säkert fotfäste. Jag inser att jag inte vet vad vi gör, hur vi fixar det, eller vad som fungerar, och jag är inte övertygad, eller som har succé med stående dömd när jag käften eller modigt när jag har förtroende för min bättre natur, och jag tror att min bättre natur bäst är representerad genom smittsamma identitet med världen omkring mig. Detta handlar om att utveckla ett språk.

Mycket bläck har spillt över vad "bra" är. De olika definitioner är alltför många för att nämna här, men några av de vanligaste är: naturlighet, lycka, normalness, dygd, och utför en uppgift. För varje vaguery vi har en personlig och immateriella bilden för vi ett har ett koncept eller namn som fungerar för att normalisera intersubjektiva relationer.

Historien om det moderna samhället ... är en bekräftelse av social kontroll över verksamheten efter att överlåtas till enskilda personer eller deras familjer. Under den första etappen av den industriella revolutionen tog kapitalister produktion ut ur hushållet och kollektiviserade det, under deras överinseende, i fabriken. Sedan gick man vidare och behov arbetstagarnas kompetens och teknisk kunskap genom "vetenskaplig ledning" och att föra dessa färdigheter tillsammans under ledning riktning. Slutligen de utökade sin kontroll över arbetstagarens privatliv också, som läkare, psykiatriker, lärare, barn-experter, av de unga domstolar och andra specialister började officerare att övervaka uppfostran, tidigare verksamhet i familjen.

Christopher Lasch

Vad är syftet med syntetisera och sprida för en bred publik

fenomen?Jag tror skolastisk observatörer av historiens lopp ofta kringgå frågan genom att helt enkelt publicering för sina kamrater i akademiska tidskrifter, och ibland be om några villiga upphävande av precision som ger byrå för att komplexa sociala; genom att enas om villkor i en materialistisk syn försöka förstå helheten av de delar som är större än summan.

Men arbetet sällan når denna en bredare publik. Istället historia tenderar populär mot biografi "stora" individer (presidenter i synnerhet)(Vadär en "stor" person? Låter som en 50's High School samhällskunskaptext)och historia av krig eller några krigiska sociokulturella agent.

Den som tittar på "History Channel" kan exempel på detta. Även om det kan hända ibland, verkar det sällsynt att en historiskt verk skrivet för en bred publik att hålla i själva verket medför någon relevans i uppbyggliga vår mall.

Människor som tittar på dussintals Pearl Harbour Docu-mini-epos är allvarligt tillbakabildades, drömmer om stunder som tillåter dem att rationalisera främlingsfientliga exceptionalism

Amerikansk kultur eller politik. Visst, "underhållning" etik som har invaderat publicering av böcker, står för mycket av detta. Men oavsett orsak, är det viktigt att ställa några bredare frågor.

Vad är egentligen syftet med att skriva och granska för en bredare publik? Det ökar kommunikationen mellan olika discipliner. Vilken roll bör detta finslipat och något snobbig välgörenhet spela i samtida diskussioner om aktuella problem i vårt samhälle och kultur?

Jag ser det förflutna som en politisk och psykologisk egna som vi drar reserver ... att vi måste klara av framtiden

-.Christopher Lasch

Utbildning behöver inte bara handla om underhållning. Om eftersträvas noga och eftertänksamt, akademisk utredning och upphäva till folket kan medföra allvarliga frågor som hjälper prompt kritisk självrannsakan hos läsarna som aktiva medborgare i stället för bara passiva mottagare av information.

Det kan uppmuntra människor att tänka bredare moraliska och politiska frågor och att tänka mer kritiskt om den nuvarande genom att bättre förstå lärdomar från det förflutna.

Vanliga människor utöva makt i västvärldens politik mest synligt och med uppriktiga engagemang på dessa ovanliga ögonblicken när de reser sig i ilska och hopp, trotsa de regler som normalt styr deras dagliga liv, och genom att göra detta, stör institutionernas funktionssätt i som de är insnärjd.

Dramat i sådana händelser, i kombination med sjukdom som orsakas, driver nya frågor i centrum för debatten, frågor som tidigare undertryckta av förvaltare av politiska partier som är beroende av sammansvetsning majoriteter.

Humanismen: upphöjelse av frihet, men en begränsad av vårt behov av att utöva det som en integrerad del av naturen och samhället. En

John Ralston Saul

Filosofen GE Moore menade att det är ett misstag att försöka definiera begreppet "bra" i termer av några naturliga rättigheter.

Han kallade detta misstag den naturalistiska felslut. Vi måste vara ödmjuka nog att sålla ut våra fantasifulla och FN-stödda föreställningar.

Utvärdering är enför process att fastställa meriter, värt, eller betydelse, en utvärdering är en produkt av denna process

lärande.Professionell utvärdering är utvärdering görs på ett systematiskt och objektivt sätt med en viss kompetens som kräver omfattande särskild utbildning eller. Logiken i utvärderingen handlar om hur, om alls, utvärdering är professionell möjligt, dess natur och dess placering i organisationen av kunskap, och, den logiska strukturen av dessslutsatser.

Vi argumenterar mycket om medlen. Processen. Detta är praxis.

Här är vad jag tror, och jag hoppas att alla som känner informerade att bidra med sin värdefulla insikter. Max Forte, och Barrett Brown, ochEmma Allanockså. Jag hoppas att du varje tar tid att skriva ett personligt svar, jag tror att vi är skyldiga dem som anförtror oss med sina kognitiva

Och Emma, du är mer kunnig och vältalig om islam än jag, men jag tror inte att islam är problemet. Teokrati är ett problem, men du kan inte utesluta muslimer mer än någon annan rationell icke-enhet. Du kan utesluta Islam, Koranen och Bibeln och andra övernaturliga moral från juridik.

Problemet är en endemisk i konflikten om ett folk mot ett som regleras de inte har någon lagstadgad bestämmelse att göra framställningar och åstadkomma förändring i sin regering.

Amadinijead och den administrativa Theobureaucracy (jag gjorde upp ett ord) är fiender till människor eftersom de avskaffas oliktänkande.

Alla, Max speciellt, eftersom han är misstänksam mot rally runt birdie och ge twitter krediten, jag delar skepsis, eftersom grogrund av information är IRC, men diskanter, speciellt sammanställare som <a href = "http://twitter.com / #! / BlogsofWar "> @ BlogsofWar </ a> kan vara bra källor till rådata om det behandlas korrekt och presenteras palatably.

Jag tror att vi är en ny modell för kapacitet fördel att manipulera information. Information växer exponentiellt, och den mobila nätet har lagt en mer regelbunden och fullständig (om full av fånig eller propagandist komage) tillhandahållande av uppgifter för oss att syntetisera, men jag är skeptisk till en messiansk behandling av någon orsak.

Valedictory Speech, {requisciat in pace?}

2011-02-19T08:42:00.000-08:00

An inoculation against Parthian Convictions

by Kenneth Lipp

That the Persians of old often outfought the best that anyone in the West could throw at them-including the Roman Empire-makes lingering chauvinism understandable. But those same Persians, and their successors in subsequent centuries, have had many downs to go along with the glorious ups. Some of the downs have been catastrophic. Ward estimates that the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for example, killed as much as three-fourths of Iran's population, which may not have recovered to preinvasion levels until the mid-twentieth century. The resulting outlook for today's Iranians is a keenly felt but curiously heterogeneous mixture of insecurity and distrust along with pride and perseverance.

The Parthians wrestled the Seleucid Empire from the Greeks and Romans. They were well-known for their horsemanship and the ability to ride forward while shooting arrows accurately behind them, just like the previous Scythians. They followed Zoroastrian-Mithraism as a religion.

A 'parting shot' is now a metaphorical term but it clearly alludes to the shooting of weapons. The first such literal reference that I've come across is in the writings of John McLeod, who was surgeon of His Majesty's Ship Alceste. McLeod includes this comment in A Narrative of a Voyage to The Yellow Sea, 1818:

The consort, firing a parting shot, bore up round the north end of the island, and escaped.

The figurative use of the phrase comes not much later, in the records of the Religious Society of Friends (The Quakers) - The Friend, or advocate of Truth, 1828:

I think it would be much more becoming..., if you could separate without giving each other a parting shot. If you could but use this short sentence, "we cannot agree and therefore we separate."
That derivation of 'parting shot' appears to be very simple and straightforward. Not so fast; enter the Parthians and their 'Parthian shots'. The Partians were an ancient race who lived in north-east Persia. They were renowned archers and horsemen and were known for their practice of confusing the enemy by pretending to flee and firing arrows backwards while retreating - not the easiest thing to do on a galloping horse. The tactic must have been successful as in first century B.C. Parthia stretched from the Euphrates to the Indus rivers, covering most of what is now Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Parthians' reputation was well known to English-speaking scholars in the 16th and 17th centuries. For example, Samuel Butler makes a specific reference to their battle tactic in An Heroical Epistle of Hudibras to His Lady, 1678:

You wound, like Parthians, while you fly, And kill with a retreating eye.

Categorically, the ways in which communication and dissemination have changed in the past 30 years or so have exacerbated this, and made remedial actions and overall management of communication far more complex and problematic.

The advent of digital technology has changed the scope, scale and speed of communication in ways that we are still only seeing above the water line. It is not surprising that the world of diplomacy, marked by tradition and trappings of the past, has been slow to appreciate the promises and the perils that come in the wake of these upheavals.

Diplomats themselves and the ways in which the FCO, the U.S. State Department and sundry mostly western but international State-labeled agents in general failed to get to grips with the promises and perils of an expanded, and less wieldy, communicative domain.

The breakdown in trust in those with statutory, economic, or, martial leverage over a more or less coherent State (up to the most "modern" stable" and stubbornly self-forgiving of eclipsing superpowers) and the people with whom they are contracted (in some symbiotic capacity)fuses an identity among cultural antipodes; and toward the end of effecting sufficient power of whole-state impeachment.

تطبيق نظرية ومغالطة طبيعي؟ أنتقل ظهري على فيس بوك لمدة ساعتين والفوضى. انه شيء جيد لقد كان يراقب التغريد ، وسوف تكون البحرين حفرة.

2011-02-19T08:20:00.000-08:00

تطبيق نظرية ومغالطة طبيعي؟ أنتقل ظهري على فيس بوك لمدة ساعتين والفوضى. انه شيء جيد لقد كان يراقب التغريد ، وسوف تكون البحرين حفرة.
بواسطة : Lipp كينيث
"إن تقرير الذي لا يتزعزع لاتخاذ الأدلة كلها في الاعتبار هو الأسلوب الوحيد للحفاظ ضد التطرف تقلب الرأي المألوف."

-- ألفريد وايتهيد الشمال
لقد ذكرت اقتراحي والبذر من "التطبيق العملي الأول" ، وهي شبكة من الأكاديميين والعلماء في مجال الاتصالات منظم ، وهي عملية لضمان الدقة في المعلومات المتاحة بحرية. صديقي الكاتب وباريت براون فقط وقد تم الآن قادرا على التراجع عن الاستمرار في الرصد والمعلومات ترحيل ، وأجد نفسي نشط ، ولكن أقرب إلى المتفرج ، أو إناء ل. يمكن أن أعتبر نفسي أيضا بعقل قادر على تعليم الموكلة لي من قبل في جزء كبير منه من قبل دافعي الضرائب. لقد كنت التدمير ذهني لماذا أكتب عنه. انا الأحياء. وأود أن أقول sociobiologist ، ولكن بين بعض الاوساط على نطاق واسع أنه لا يزال يعتقد أن البشرية إلى الحد من الأحياء سيؤدي إلى ولادة القطط بلا أرجل ، أو بعض نهاية العالم فظيعة تحسين النسل. أعدكم ، أنا softie كبيرة. أنا لا أقول أنا ابن الإنسان تماما. اعتقد فرانكنشتاين ، أو ليني شتاينبك. أعني بشكل جيد ، ولكن أنا رجس مضادة للطبيعة الذي يحاول الإجابة على كل سؤال يسأل مع إجابة دقيقة. واستشف بأن الملف الخاص بي أنا خلط بشري قبالة أفضل عندما أحاول فهم الأمور من جانب الأحكام أصغر مفيدة. انها الاستدلال. تماما مثل عملياتنا المعرفية الخاصة ، ونظام نقل المعلومات لا بد أن يكون التحيز مفيدة. ينبغي أن تكون المعلومات ، في معظم الأحيان وقبل كل شيء غير الخاضعة للرقابة ، ولكنها تحتاج أيضا إلى أن رفض تعزيز إذا كنا نرى أنه من غير ذي صلة ، مربكة ، أو اعتراض. مثل الدماغ مرة أخرى ، والتي ولدت مع مزيد من الخلايا العصبية ، في الواقع ، ويتطور انها العلاقة مع العالم من خلال تشذيب الخلية purjinke المستمر. باريت ، وأعتقد ربما نتمكن من تنظيم أكثر من ذلك بقليل إدارة المهام لا أقصد اجهاض ، ولكن الجحيم ، ولست بحاجة لمهمة حيث أنا يمكن أن تكون مفيدة هنا. ونحن ندين جميع بعضها البعض ، وإذا أردنا أن نعمل معا والقيام بذلك من أجل المصلحة العامة يجب أن نكون اهلية. وأنا أعلم باريت يمكن يعني ، ويجب أن يسمع الحديث عن ماكس وزيرة الخارجية الموقرة. وظيفة أولئك الذين لهم رمي اثنين سنتا إلى رصد المعلومات. نحن لا رقيب أو المعلومات التي ينحي الرضفة ، ولكن نؤكد والدفاع عن تلك التي نرى لها ما يبررها. أردت أن أكتب عن إيران ، ولكن أود أن أبدأ الى التساؤل اذا كان لدي قاعدة ثابتة. وأنا أدرك أنني لا أعرف ماذا نفعل ، وكيف نصلح ذلك ، أو ما عمل ، ولست أنا واقتناعا منها ، أو وجود نجاح الدائمة مع المدانين عندما يمارس الجنس مع أعلى أو الشجاعة عندما يكون لدي ثقة طبيعة بلدي أفضل ، وأعتقد أن أفضل ممثلة أفضل طبيعة بلدي من خلال الهوية السارية مع العالم من حولي. هذا هو عن تطوير اللغة. وقد تم الكثير من الحبر المسكوب على ما 'جيدة' هو. تعريفات مختلفة يتسع المجال لذكرها هنا ولكنها تشمل بعض من تلك الشائعة : طبيعية ، والسعادة ، normalness والفضيلة واجب واحد المنفذ. لكل vaguery لدينا صورة شخصية وغير الملموسة لدينا لديهم مفهوم أو الاسم الذي يعمل على تطبيع العلاقات intersubjective. تاريخ المجتمع الحديث... هو التأكيد من الرقابة الاجتماعية على أنشطة اليسار مرة واحدة لأفراد أو لأسرهم. خلال المرحلة الأولى من الثورة الصناعية ، اتخذ الرأسماليون من إنتاج الأسرة المعيشية وcollectivized ذلك ، تحت إشراف خاصة بهم ، في المصنع. وشرع بعد ذلك إلى مهارات العمال مناسبة والمعرفة التقنية ، عن طريق "الإدارة العلمية" ، وتقديم هذه المهارات معا في إطار التوجيه الإداري. مدد أخيرا أنها سيطرتها على حياة العامل الخاص كذلك ، والأطباء ، والأطباء النفسيين ، والمدرسين ، وخبراء توجيه الطفل ، وضباط من محاكم الأحداث ، وغيرهم من المتخصصين للإشراف بدأت تربية الأطفال ، سابقا أعمال الأسرة. كريستوفر لاستش ما هو الغرض من تجميع ونشر لجمهور واسع؟ اعتقد المراقبون الدراسية التاريخ تهرب غالبا في المسألة النشر ببساطة لأقرانهم في المجلات الأكاديمية ، وأحيانا تطلب بعض التعليق على استعداد من الدقة الذي يعطي الوكالة إلى الظواهر الاجتماعية المعقدة ؛ من خلال الموافقة على شروط في عرض المادي في محاولة لفهم مجمل الأجزاء قدر أكبر من المبلغ.
بيد أن هذا العمل نادرا ما تصل إلى جمهور أوسع. بدلا من ذلك ، والتاريخ الشعبي يميل نحو السيرة الذاتية للأفراد "الكبير" (الرؤساء خصوصا) (ما هو "العظمى" الفردية؟ يبدو وكأنه في 50 مدرسة ثانوية التربية المدنية للنص) وتاريخ الحرب أو وكيل الدفاع عن النفس بعض الاجتماعية والثقافية.
أي شخص يشاهد "قناة التاريخ" يمكن لهذا الشاهد. على الرغم من أنه يمكن أن يحدث في بعض الأحيان ، يبدو نادر لعمل التاريخ المكتوب لشعبي واسع النطاق لعقد فعلا تحمل أي أهمية في بنيان قالب لدينا.
وتراجعت بالغا الناس الذين يشاهدون عشرات ثائقية بيرل هاربر ، ملاحم صغيرة ، والحلم من اللحظات التي تسمح لهم لترشيد استثنائية كراهية الأجانب
الثقافة الأميركية أو السياسة. بالتأكيد ، غزت "الترفيه" أخلاقيات الذي نشر الكتب ، والحسابات لكثير من هذا. ولكن أيا كان السبب ، من المهم أن نسأل بعض المسائل الأوسع نطاقا. ما هو حقا الغرض من كتابة ومراجعة لجمهور أوسع؟ انه يزيد من التواصل بين التخصصات المختلفة. وما الدور الذي ينبغي شحذ هذه المسرحية الخيرية ومغرور بعض الشيء في المناقشات المعاصرة حول المشاكل الحالية في مجتمعنا وثقافتنا؟ أرى الماضي باعتباره وزير الخزانة السياسية والنفسية التي نرسم احتياطيات... أننا في حاجة للتعامل مع المستقبل. ، كريستوفر لاستش

التعليم لا يلزم أن يكون مجرد الترفيه. إذا ما اتبعت بدقة وبعناية ، والتحقيق الأكاديمي وإلغاء للشعب يمكن أن تشكل تساؤلات جدية تساعد على النقد الذاتي موجه النظر من جانب القراء كمواطنين أحدث بدلا من مجرد متلقين سلبيين للمعلومات.
ويمكن أن تشجع الناس على التفكير أوسع حول المسائل الأخلاقية والسياسية وإلى مزيد من التفكير بشكل نقدي حول الحاضر من فهم أفضل الدروس من الماضي.
الناس العاديين ممارسة السلطة في السياسة الغربية أكثر وضوحا والاشتباك مع خالص في تلك اللحظات الاستثنائية عندما ترتفع في الغضب والأمل ، وتحدي القواعد التي تحكم عادة حياتهم اليومية ، وبذلك ، تعطيل عمل مؤسسات في التي يخوضون فيها.
الدراما السورية مثل هذه الأحداث ، بالإضافة إلى أن اضطراب النتائج ، يدفع القضايا الجديدة للمركز للمناقشة ، والقضايا التي قمعت من قبل مديري الأحزاب السياسية التي تعتمد على الأغلبية لحام معا.
الإنسانية : لتمجيد الحرية ، ولكن واحدة محدودة من حاجتنا إلى ممارستها باعتبارها جزءا لا يتجزأ من الطبيعة والمجتمع. جون رالستون سول
قال الفيلسوف جنرال الكتريك مور أنه من الخطأ محاولة وتحديد مفهوم 'جيدة' من حيث بعض الممتلكات الطبيعية. ودعا هذا الخطأ والمغالطة طبيعي. علينا أن نكون متواضعين بما فيه الكفاية للتدقيق من أفكارنا خيالي والامم المتحدة التي تدعمها.
التقييم هو عملية تحديد الجدارة ، وقيمتها ، أو أهمية ؛ تقييم هو نتاج تلك العملية. المهنية التقييم التقييم يتم بطريقة منهجية وموضوعية مع درجة من الخبرة التي تتطلب تدريبا خاصا واسعة النطاق أو التعلم.وتشعر مع منطق تقييم كيف ، على كل حال ، وتقييم المهنية هو ممكن ؛ طبيعته وموقعه في تنظيم المعرفة ، والبنية المنطقية للاستدلالات لها.
نحن نجادل كثيرا عن الوسائل. هذه العملية. هذا هو التطبيق العملي.
وهنا ما أعتقد ، وأرجو من الجميع الذي يشعر أبلغ المساهمة بصيرتهم قيمة. ماكس فورت ، وبراون باريت ، وألان إيما كذلك. أتمنى أن تأخذ كل الوقت لكتابة ردا شخصيا ، أعتقد أننا مدينون لأولئك الذين يعهد لنا المعرفية الخاصة بهم
وإيما ، أنت أكثر كفاءة وبليغة حول الإسلام من الأول ، ولكن لا أعتقد أن الإسلام هو المشكلة. الثيوقراطية هي مشكلة ، ولكن لا يمكن استبعاد أي المسلمين أكثر من أي كيان غير عقلانية. يمكنك استبعاد الإسلام ، والقرآن والإنجيل وغيرها من الأخلاق أي خارق من الفقه.
المشكلة هي المستوطنة واحد للصراع شعب ضد حكم لديهم أي حكم قانوني لتغيير العريضة وتأثير في حكومتهم.
Amadinijead وTheobureaucracy الكتابية (الذي أدليت به عن كلمة) هم اعداء للشعب لأنها ألغت المعارضة.

كل شيء ، وخصوصا ماكس ، لأنه يشك في التفافه حول بيردي ومنح الائتمان التغريد ، وأنا الشكوك سهم ، وذلك لأن المعلومات هي معقل لجمعية الهلال الأحمر العراقي ، ولكن مكبرات الصوت ، وتجميع خاصة مثل <أ href = "http://twitter.com / #! / BlogsofWar "> @ BlogsofWar </ أ> ، يمكن أن تكون مصدرا كبيرا من البيانات الأولية اذا كان معالجتها بشكل صحيح وقدم بلذة.
اعتقد اننا في نموذج جديد للقدرة التلاعب معلومات مفيدة. المعلومات ينمو بشكل مطرد ، وشبكة المحمول ووضع أكثر ثباتا وأكثر اكتمالا (إذا تناثرت مع دعائي فارغ أو أمعاء) توفير البيانات بالنسبة لنا لتوليف ، ولكن أنا يشككون في علاج يهودي مسيحي من أي سبب.

Mark Twain on Healthy Habits

2011-02-17T10:09:00.001-08:00

Mark Twain had an acquaintance, a saintly woman, probably a Sunday School teacher, who was deathly ill. It seemed that nothing could save her. The doctors had given up. But Mark Twain knew just what she needed. Standing over her bed, he shared his good news and, as you can imagine, she was greatly relieved. Twain confessed to having had a similar problem and told her he beat it by giving up some of his bad habits... Pretty soon, he said, the starved illness left his body for more fertile ground.

“But I don’t have any bad habits,” the woman proclaimed.

“None?” Twain asked.

“None,” she assured him. “I don’t run around with men, smoke, drink, gamble, dip snuff, curse or bite my nails. I’ve been a good woman, almost without fault,” she insisted.

A frown came over Twain’s face and he bowed his head in resignation, saying “I’m afraid the doctors are right, there’s no hope.You’re a sinking ship with no ballast to throw overboard.”

Girls Decide, Put girls’ sexual health at the heart of development

2011-02-16T11:50:00.000-08:00

There is a growing global consensus that girls are central to global development. Yet issues relating to girls’ sexuality and their sexual and reproductive rights continue to be largely neglected.

Girls Decide, a new initiative from the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), highlights the importance of girls’ and young women’s sexual and reproductive lives for both individual and global development, and aims to ensure governments around the world to adopt policies that work for girls.

Complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, including unsafe abortion, are the most common causes of death among adolescent girls.

The Girls Decide initiative aims to reduce the risks related to girls’ pregnancy and to improve the health, well-being and development of girls and young women worldwide. Ensuring girls’ and young women have access to life-saving and life-enhancing SRH services and information is a human rights imperative and essential to tackle gender inequality and ill-health.

Girls Decide launches this week with six short films that share the stories of six girls from around the world and their journeys to make informed decisions about sex, pregnancy, abortion and relationships. The initiative will be launched at an event in London on 16 February attended by UK Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development, Stephen O’Brien, MP.

Stephen O’Brien, Minister for International Development, said:

"One thousand women die everyday in pregnancy or childbirth. They die not from incurable disease or chronic illness but from conditions and complications that we have the power to prevent.

"That is why the Coalition Government has put women and girls at the heart of our development plans. Our plans will double the number of lives saved in pregnancy and childbirth in the world’s poorest countries by 2015.

"We will train more midwives to ensure women give birth safely, provide access to quality healthcare and make contraception more readily available to help unintended pregnancies.

"Empowering adolescent girls so they can make healthy choices is at the centre of Britain’s development work and we join with the IPPF in urging others to do the same - today."

Gill Greer, Director General of IPPF, said: “The world needs to do more for girls and young women. Girls and young women are powerful agents of change and pivotal for the development of communities and nations.

However, around the world, girls are most affected by inequity and poverty. This is clearly seen in the neglected areas of girls’ sexuality and their sexual and reproductive rights. Withholding girls’ and young women’s right to decide and the means to act upon those decisions perpetuates inequality and ill-health.

“Young people account for forty per cent of IPPF’s 70 million health services each year, and the bottom line of IPPF’s work with young women and girls is that we are committed to their sexual rights and we are there to support them with their decisions, whatever their choice may be.”

Yet, with less than 2 cents of every dollar spent on international development directed specifically toward adolescent girls, greater mobilisation and sustained leadership is required to ensure that girls are recognized rights-holders and have expanded access to choices, opportunities, education, services and support.

Such efforts will not only have positive impacts on girls and young women, but are also essential to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and other development priorities.

The Phylogeny of Religious Behaviour

2011-02-13T19:24:00.000-08:00

A working PowerPoint for a class on Basic Ethology and Neuroanthropology. Would love feedback.

Darwin’s 1868 primate phylogeny

Recommend that you click the full screen button.

Zimbabwe, Lessons in HIV prevention

2011-02-12T07:43:00.000-08:00

A rise in AIDS-related deaths may have prompted many Zimbabweans to change their ways and reduce multiple concurrent partnerships

African countries struggling to contain HIV epidemics can learn a thing or two about HIV prevention from Zimbabwe, say the authors of a new study which found that a reduction in sexual partners drove a decrease in new HIV infections there.

Zimbabwe's HIV prevalence fell by 13 percent between 1997 and 2007, a decline too steep to be attributed solely to HIV's natural progression and a hint that something else was forming a crucial part of the HIV reduction equation, said lead author and Harvard University Public Health lecturer Daniel Halperin.

"The modelling showed it couldn't just be the natural curve [of the epidemic]; the decline was too dramatic. The modelling suggested it was also due to behaviour change and behavioural data also suggested a change, but what was missing was the all important 'why'."

According to Halperin, Zimbabwe's success story points to the power of social change and the need for more detailed analyses of HIV success stories in Africa. He compared it to the role of partner reduction in the fight against HIV in Uganda, which promoted a reduction in concurrent partnerships as the key focus of its HIV prevention campaigns in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

While many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Ethiopia and Kenya, have seen recent reductions in HIV prevalence, it remains difficult to understand exactly what has driven these drops.

Low pay and fear

To find the reasons behind Zimbabwe's steep decline, researchers drew on almost a decade of HIV data, including mathematical models, large-scale HIV prevention trials and national surveys. Researchers supplemented this research with in-depth expert interviews and focus group discussions with 200 participants nationwide.

From 1990 to 2000, AIDS-related deaths rose by 30 percent in Zimbabwe, and according to researchers, focus groups revealed that this spike in AIDS-related mortality scared many into behaviour change.

"In the focus groups, men said things like: 'Oh I used to have a lot of girl friends. I used to have lots of fun, then my uncle died of AIDS’," Halperin said. "A lot of these men said, 'I can't leave my kids orphaned'."

According to the paper, focus group discussions also reported that societal norms shifted during this time and that increasing stigma was attached to factors associated with HIV risk such as paying for sex, having sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and multiple concurrent partnerships.

Data from an HIV research site in Zimbabwe's Manicaland province showed that men who reported having MCPs fell by 40 percent between about 1998 and 2003 - roughly the same time period in which the number of new HIV infections was falling rapidly and salaries in the country fell by about 90 percent.

While men in focus groups said this decline in earnings made them less able to afford to pay for sex or sustain multiple sexual relationships, Halperin cautioned that economics probably only played a secondary role in reducing HIV, as new infections had began to decrease years before the effects of the recession were widely felt in about 2003.

The bigger picture for Africa

Halperin noted that when compared to other countries with well-funded HIV prevention programmes - such as Botswana - which have not charted such large gains in HIV prevention, Zimbabwe's success story may highlight that grass roots, social change is not necessarily a result of big spending.

"I think the donor-funded HIV programmes were probably useful in bringing down HIV prevalence but I think this shows you just can't pump money into a country, that things are only going to turn around once the communities get mobilized," he said. "[In Zimbabwe] the community sort of 'got it'; there was a change in norms and that became a part of popular culture."

"Many guys in a focus groups said that if you got STIs in the early 1990s, you were called a 'hero', then universally around 1999, you never heard that again. Something happened in societal norms and I don't think there was some donor-funded programme that told people that STIs were shameful," Halperin added.

"I think a lot of credit goes to the Zimbabwean people themselves."

As more success stories emerge, Halperin said that more detailed analyses that looked at behaviour; epidemiology and programme coverage would be needed to explain successes, and failures.

"MCPs were the answer here but they may not be the answer everywhere; we need to do this kind of study in different countries, different situations," he said. "The key is to triangulate HIV data with behaviour data, but we also need qualitative data... We need to ask people very specifically: 'What's going on in your community'."

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin

2011-02-11T17:27:00.000-08:00

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876)

Russian anarchist and political theorist.

God as an idea was deeply repulsive to Bakunin, it flew in the face of reason and rational thought.

God is very much a human creation, an "absolute abstraction without reality, content and determination", in other words it is absolute nothingness. God and religion are both human fantasies projected through a "crooked mirror", in fact a distortion of life on earth.

The belief in God destroys human "solidarity, liberty, co-operation and community".

Human love becomes transferred to the nonsense of love for something which does not exist and into religious charity. For Bakunin, God and religion were the enemies of all oppressed classes and indeed their role was to contribute to exploitation and oppression in concert with the ruling class. The acceptance of the idea of God was for Bakunin the denial of humanity, freedom and justice. He argued that if God is truth, justice and infinite life then humanity must be "falsehood, gross injustice and death". Furthermore, by accepting the existence of God, humanity becomes enslaved but since humanity is capable of intelligence, justice and freedom, then God does necessarily not exist.

Religions for Bakunin are the result of human fantasy in which heaven is a "mirage". Once installed, God naturally becomes the master in which people bow down before him and submit to obedience and slavery. Of course Bakunin recognized that God does not exist and that religion is a human form of organising and controlling the masses. He proposed that whoever takes it upon themselves to become prophet, revealer or priest (God's representative on earth) becomes the teacher and leader. From that role religious leaders end up "commanding, directing and governing over earthly existence."

So, slaves of God become slaves of the Church and State insofar as the latter is given the blessing of organised religion. The organised religions of the world, particularly Christianity, have always allied themselves with domination and even persecuted religions discipline their followers, laying the ground for a new tyranny. All religions but again especially Christianity were, states Bakunin, "founded on blood". How many innocent victims have been tortured and murdered in the name of the religion of love and forgiveness.

How many clerics, even today, asks Bakunin, support capital punishment. God does not exist. That is good enough reason for opposing religion.

However, religions also must be combated, says Bakunin, because they create an intellectual slavery which in alliance with the state results in political and social slavery. Religions demoralise and corrupt people. They destroy reason and "fill people's minds with absurdities".

Religion is an ancient form of ideology which, in alliance with the state can be reduced to a simple statement -

We fool you, we rule you.

Quotes by Bakunin:

All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers.

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.

God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.
Religion is a collective insanity.

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: "God and the liberty of man," "God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men" — regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty — by ceasing to exist.

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.

Living in the matrix, Sugar residues regulate growth and survival of nerve cells

2011-02-11T10:14:00.000-08:00

RUB researchers examine interaction of cells and extracellular matrix

The particular cells shown in this low-power electron micrograph are those in an embryonic chick limb bud. The cells have not yet acquired their specialized characteristics.

Researchers in Bochum have found out that certain sugar residues in the spinal cord regulate the growth and survival of nerve cells which control the movement of muscles. "We hope that our findings can improve regenerative treatment of nerve injuries", explains Prof. Dr. Stefan Wiese from the Molecular Cell Biology study group (Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology). The researchers report on these sugar residues in the environment of the cells, which is called the extracellular matrix, in the Journal of Neuroscience Research.

The vision of healing nerves

Brain and spinal cord comprise more than just nerve cells. The extracellular matrix, a complex scaffold of proteins with sugar residues, surrounds the cells and influences their well-being. Prof. Wiese's team is interested in the interaction of the matrix with a specific kind of nerve cells, which transmit signals from the brain to muscles (motoneurons). Because injured motoneurons lead to paralysis, clinicians have great interest in being able to influence the growth of these cells. "If we had a medication that could change the extracellular matrix so that it favours the growth and survival of nerve cells, that would be a large step in the treatment of nerve injuries after accidents or also for the treatment of diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis", says Prof. Wiese.

Growing muscle-controlling nerve cells

In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Andreas Faissner (Chair of Cell Morphology & Molecular Neurobiology, Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology), Dr. Alice Klausmeyer from Prof. Wiese's team cultivated motoneurons from the spinal cord of mice on various kinds of extracellular matrix, from which the researchers experimentally removed certain sugar residues (chondroitin sulfates). By comparing the cell cultures with and without sugar residues, they were able to show that the residues control the growth and survival of the motoneurons.

Staining, counting and measuring

To express the growth of the cells in understandable figures, the cell biologists in Bochum measured the longest process of the motoneurons under a microscope and counted the number of processes which the cells had formed. With the help of the processes, the cells communicate and transmit signals across large distances. Some of the chondroitin sulfate sugar residues examined had a positive effect on the length and number of the processes, others had an inhibiting influence. The question of whether the growth of the nerve cells was supported or inhibited also depended on the kind of extracellular matrix with which a certain sugar residue was combined. Furthermore, the researchers stained for an enzyme in the motoneurons which is a marker for cell death. This analysis showed that the chondroitin sulfate sugar residues not only regulate the growth of the motoneurons, but can also lead to survival of these cells. The experiments performed by Dr. Klausmeyer and her colleagues were supported, amongst other things, by the RUB Rector's Office programme for start-up funding of research projects of the next scientific generation.

Scanning electron micrograph of fibroblasts in connective tissue
The tissue is from the cornea of a rat. The extracellular matrix surrounding the fibroblasts is composed largely of collagen fibrils (there are no elastic fibers in the cornea). The glycoproteins, glycosaminoglycans, and proteoglycans, which normally form a hydrated gel filling the interstices of the fibrous network, have been removed by enzyme and

Study

Klausmeyer, A., Conrad, R., Faissner, A., Wiese, S.: Influence of glial-derived matrix molecules, especially chondroitin sulfates, on neurite growth and survival of cultured mouse embryonic motoneurons. In: J. Neurosci. Res. 89:127-41 (2011). DOI: 10.1002/jnr.22531 PubMed

Africa needs more systematic HIV drug resistance testing

2011-02-11T07:30:00.000-08:00

WHO recommends that countries develop strategies for regular surveillance of HIV drug resistance

HIV is a tough enough diagnosis, but when one contracts a strain of HIV resistant to some life-prolonging medicines, treatment options are limited. A new study has found that transmitted HIV drug resistance may be on the rise in Africa, and the authors warn that unless resistance surveillance is increased, the continent's treatment programmes could suffer.

The study, led by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) in five African countries, found that the prevalence of transmitted drug resistance in Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia was considerably higher than previously reported.

Of 408 people studied in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia, 19 had transmitted resistance mutations. Resistance prevalence rose considerably during the study in Zambia and remained high throughout the study in Entebbe (Uganda).

"The message to take away from this study is the urgent need for regular drug resistance surveillance, which we currently do not have," said Omu Anzala, head of the Kenya AIDS Vaccine Initiative. "If we can see transmitted resistance in such a small study then there could be much more going around."

"We saw what has happened with malaria over the years, with resistance developing against several drugs. We need to move quickly to ensure governments are aware and are implementing drug resistance surveillance to prevent the same thing happening with ARVs," he added.

In 2009 Kenya launched a five-year national plan on HIV drug resistance, prevention, monitoring and surveillance.

A separate study in 2010 by PharmAccess African Studies to Evaluate Resistance (PASER), a project of the PharmAccess Foundation, a Dutch health NGO, found that nearly 6 percent of patients about to start HIV treatment for the first time already had resistance to standard first-line ART.

Speaking at a workshop on HIV drug resistance in Uganda in December 2010, Christine Watera, coordinator of Uganda's National HIV Drug Resistance Working Group, stressed the need for more research to map the prevalence of HIV drug resistance on a nationwide scale.

The UN World Health Organization recommends that countries put in place strategies to assess and prevent drug resistance, including conducting surveys and developing early warning mechanisms based on indicators such as drug stock-outs and patients' adherence records.

"One of the major implications of transmitted drug resistance is that oftentimes the second choice drug regimen is more limited in some of these countries - for example, there may be issues with the cold chain... making treatment more challenging," said IAVI's Matt Price, lead author of the study.

"Governments should provide the appropriate support and ensure patients have adequate follow-up so if treatment begins to fail they can be put on new regimens," he added. "Early detection of patient failure is crucial, as is regular counselling and risk reduction behaviour."

Price noted that theoretically, the study findings could have an impact on treatment as prevention, which UNAIDS is promoting under its new 'Treatment 2.0' strategy.

"If I am taking PrEP [pre-exposure prophylaxis] and become exposed to a strain of HIV that is resistant to the drug I am taking, I could stand a better chance of becoming infected than if I were exposed to a non-resistant strain," he said. "But more research is required in this area... So far we do not know very much about resistance in treatment as prevention."

Anti-retroviral? No. Heroin. "Whoonga" in South Africa

2011-02-11T07:22:00.000-08:00

"Whoonga" has been around for a long time and does not contain ARVs

JOHANNESBURG, 10 February 2011 Media in South Africa recently erupted into a frenzy of coverage of an allegedly new illegal drug, 'whoonga', said to contain life-prolonging antiretrovirals (ARVs), but experts say the drug is actually an old foe, heroin, and does not include ARVs.

The South African AIDS lobby group, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), has expressed concern that misreporting in the media may fuel a craze of its own and put HIV patients and ARV drug stocks in jeopardy.

Traditionally, the term 'whoonga' in South Africa referred to low grade heroin, which was often mixed with substances like rat poison and detergent to increase its volume prior to sale. Recent media reports have alleged that 'whoonga' now contains crushed ARVs and that the use of the combination of heroin and HIV treatment is widespread among the country's townships, particularly those surrounding the port city of Durban in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal Province.

Don't believe the hype
While Anwar Jeewa, director of the Durban-based drug rehabilitation centre, Minds Alive, said a small percentage of drug users may indeed be crushing and smoking ARVs, tests conducted by the centre and by staff from South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) have found no traces of the life-saving drugs in 'whoonga' samples.

Jeewa collected and tested six 'whoonga' samples from six different Durban townships, while Thavendran Govender, with UKZN's School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, tested a further two samples for the South African investigative TV journalism programme Carte Blanche. None of the eight samples were found to include ARVs.

Vumami Gwala, coordinator for the small, Durban-based project, Whoonga Free, says not only are there no ARVs in 'whoonga' but that most people who do crush and smoke ARVs do so because they cannot afford 'whoonga' itself.

ARV smokers themselves remain a minority of drug users, according to Jeewa, who added that those who can afford 'whoonga' may have been led to believe they were buying ARV-laced heroin by dealers or by the media's recent misreporting.

"When [addicts] buy their drugs from dealers, it's not ARVs but they are not sure themselves whether they are smoking heroin or ARVs," he told IRIN/PlusNews. "The people who are smoking ARVs are a very small minority group, I would say not more than 5 percent of drug users."

'Whoonga' is a drug problem that has already been here for years and we really need to debunk this myth that it contains ARVs
The effects of smoking ARVs remain doubtful; according to UKZN's Govender, drugs like ARVs are more easily absorbed into the body when taken orally rather than when smoked.

When taken orally, the ARV Efavirenz does have initial side-effects including dizziness, double vision and vivid dreams, effects that have fuelled abuse of the drug in pill form in prisons. But Andy Gray, a senior lecturer at UKZN's department of therapeutics and medicines management, says it is unlikely smoking the drug would produce the same effects.

"'Whoonga' is a drug problem that has already been here for years and we really need to debunk this myth that it contains ARVs," he said.

New name, same drug

According to Jeewa, 'whoonga' was previously known as "sugars" in South Africa, a name short for the internationally better-known term for low-grade heroin, "brown sugar". The drug eventually became known by the name 'whoonga', which anecdotal evidence suggests is Tanzanian; Tanzania is an entry point for heroin into Africa.

But Jeewa said making people think ARVs are a good high - coupled with a new name for "sugars" - may be all part of the game; he likened it to rebranding and repackaging a product in order to boost sales.

It is the kind of marketing ploy that feeds into the minds of addicts, according to Shamin Garda, national executive director of the South African National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

"What happens with most addicts is that they feel the more they put into [their drugs], the better effect they have," she told IRIN/PlusNews. "If there's not even an effect [that comes with smoking ARVs], we need to educate them about the fact that it's not doing anything for them."

"The fact that they are using heroin and 'dagga' [marijuana]... those are the dependency-producing drugs and that's what we should be focusing on," she added.

With all the claims about ARVs' inclusion in 'whoonga' and not a lot of evidence to back them up, Caroline Nenguke, spokesperson for TAC, says the issue may create a dangerous situation for ARV patients and endanger drug stocks.

Incidents of ARV theft have been reported and the Department of Health has speculated that those behind some of these incidents may have intended to sell the drugs for recreational use. Nenguke says there are fears that continuing to incorrectly link ARVs to 'whoonga' could fuel more ARV thefts.

It's Dreams that Stuff be Made W/

2011-02-06T21:54:00.000-08:00

This morning I find that melancholy and fear descend unstrained in quality as of More, and lonely also find I bleating to be touched. Instead, I postulate, and overthink, and dream of you, and pretend we are speaking, and that your warmth has crowded out the vacuous darkness.

This may interest you:

General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in Five Dimensions pdf

Paul S. Wesson

(Submitted on 3 Feb 2011)

In 5D, I take the metric in canonical form and define causality by null-paths. Then spacetime is modulated by a factor equivalent to the wave function, and the 5D geodesic equation gives the 4D Klein-Gordon equation. These results effectively show how general relativity and quantum mechanics may be unified in 5D.

Now I have to seek some peace.

Solidity is an electrical illusion

These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; and like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV

Take a dime. Cut it in half with metal-snips. Look at one of the halves.

That's the amount of matter -- a 30th of an ounce -- that turned into energy one day in 1945 at Hiroshima, Japan.

It killed 140,000 people.

All the matter of our world contains this unthinkable power within its atoms. Your body, your clothes, your house, your car, the ground under your feet -- every substance has a cataclysm stored in its nuclei.

Your thumbnail could produce another Hiroshima.

Tightly coiled in the nucleus of every cell of your body is six feet of DNA bearing your genetic code. Since the body has around 10 trillion cells, there are about 10 billion miles of DNA inside you.

* * *

Look at a passenger train weighing many tons. What could make it float in the air?

The "spin'' of electrons -- that's what.

In most elements, the whirling electrons of each atom are in pairs spinning in opposite directions, balancing each other.

But iron is different. Of its 26 electrons, four spin the same way without reverse companions. This makes each atom a minuscule magnet. When a magnetic field causes all the atoms in a piece of iron to align their polarity, the iron becomes a magnet. (If two of iron's electrons reversed their spin, balancing the other two, iron magnetism wouldn't exist.)

Maglev (magnetic levitation) trains are running in Japan and Germany.

The Japanese one floats four inches above its track. A Ford experimental model in California in 1974 attained a suspension of 12 inches.

Electrons orbit atoms at nearly the speed of light -- billions of whirls in a millionth of a second. In this blur, how can so slight a thing as four uncompensated spins hold a train in mid-air?

Right now, as you remain "still,'' you're moving 400 times faster than a bullet. You are traveling

1,000 miles an hour with Earth's daily rotation,

67,000 mph with Earth's yearly journey around the sun,

550,000 mph with the solar system's revolution around the Milky Way, and

1.3 million mph with the galaxy's motion through the universe.

A bullet goes about 3,000 mph.

How odd that we are born and live and die on a ball hurtling forever at awesome speeds -- yet we wouldn't know we were moving, if scientists didn't tell us.

With your eyes, you can see the past. Look at the North Star and you are looking at 1300 A.D. Today's light left that star nearly 700 years ago.

In 1987, a supernova flared in the Magellanic Clouds outside the Milky Way. The explosion actually happened 163,000 years ago -- before the first human evolved.

Discoveries in the past few years have confirmed the quark theory. Thus virtually everything in our world is composed of just four particles: "up'' quarks, "down'' quarks, electrons and neutrinos.

How can a baby's eye, and a hydrogen bomb explosion, and the Atlantic Ocean, and a daisy, and Manhattan Island, and Beethoven's brain, and a spring breeze, all be concoctions of the same four units?

Why do quarks and electrons bind into bigger or smaller atoms with remarkably different properties?

If the quarks form 30 protons in the nucleus, it's zinc, essential to your body. If three more protons are added, it's arsenic -- which will kill you.

Why do atoms crave to have eight electrons in their outer orbits, which makes them link into molecules amazingly dissimilar? If carbon atoms lock onto each other in six-sided rings, they are sooty graphite. If they lock in tetrahedrons, they're a dazzling diamond.

How can carbon atoms string themselves into amino acids, which entwine into proteins, which compose living cells of great complexity -- and the cells form an algae, or a cricket, or a person?

How can a combination of amino acids write a symphony, or draft the Bill of Rights, or achieve a moon landing, or feel patriotism for a

segment of Earth's crust likewise made of atoms?

If you looked deep into any substance -- iron, for instance, or rock -- you couldn't find any solid parts. Nothing tangible is there. Approach an iron atom and you would detect only a whirring "cloud'' of electrons. The nucleus would be too small and distant to be seen.

In every atom, the nucleus is as far from the electrons as the sun is from planets of the solar system. It's all emptiness -- the same emptiness you see when you look into the night sky. If an atom were the size of a 14-story building, the nucleus would equal a grain of salt on the seventh floor.

Why does iron seem solid? Because the electron cloud of one atom, charged negative, repels the negative cloud of each adjoining atom with a "push'' that seems firm. Solidity is an electrical illusion.

Electrons seem to be nearly nothing. They account for only about 1 ounce of your body's weight. Yet they have terrible energy. When a violent lightning storm explodes around you, you're witnessing the power of detached electrons. When you put your finger in a light socket, you're feeling electrons. But what are they?

And what are the quark-composed denizens of the nucleus? And what are the ghostly neutrinos that fly by trillions through your body and through the whole Earth? Nobody knows the reality of these building blocks.

Sometimes they're waves. Sometimes they're particles. Sometimes they're energy. Sometimes they're mass. Formulas of quantum mechanics were devised to cover all qualities.

The mysterious bits remain unknowable. One physicist calls them "the dreams of which stuff is made.''

* * *

The unreality of matter can be seen in neutron stars and black holes.

When remains of a supernova collapse under colossal gravity, electrons of each atom are compressed into the nucleus, where they merge with protons to form a solid mass of neutrons. Nothing is lost except the void within the atom. The compacted neutrons weigh 10 million tons per cubic centimeter.

If a c.c. of actual matter, without its empty space, weighs more than the World Trade Center, how much real substance is in a human?

Virtually none. Too little to see with a microscope.

We are almost entirely vacuum.

And yet, bodies are real. Ask lovers in bed.

Even packed neutrons aren't solid. If a supernova's remains are three times greater than our sun, gravity's pull is too strong to stop at the neutron star level. The collapse continues past the point of no-return -- the Schwarzchild radius -- and a black hole occurs. Everything is compressed into an invisible pit of infinity.

If Earth were squeezed to its Schwarzchild radius, it would be the size of a pearl -- and a black hole only begins at that point.

If matter is real, how could the entire planet -- continents, oceans, mountains and all -- be compressed to the dimension of your fingernail? Can anyone grasp such a thing? And yet black holes exist, astrophysicists say.

Our tangible world must be a fiction, like Plato's shadows in the cave.

A historic double-slit experiment showed that light passing through two parallel slots casts an odd pattern on a wall behind the openings. Because of wave interference, the light makes bright stripes with darkness between them.

But when the test is done with a single photon of light, something eerie happens: If only one slit is open, the photon may go through it and land at a spot that would be dark in the wave pattern. But if both slits are open, the photon will not land in a dark zone.

How does a photon passing through a slit "know'' whether an adjoining slit is open or closed, and thus land accordingly?

No answer has been found to this enigma. I wonder if anyone has asked the quarks?

Another mystery: If two photons are emitted in opposite directions, and the polarization of one is altered in flight by a laboratory device, it automatically changes the polarization of the other. This puzzle, expressed in Bell's Theorem, implies that some mysterious connection links independent particles across space.

In a total vacuum, "virtual'' particles emerge out of nowhere, along with their anti-particles, and they annihilate each other, quantum physicists say.

This has led to the "vacuum genesis'' theory: that the whole universe sprang from nothing, following laws of physics.

I don't believe in the supernatural.

I don't think a heaven full of houri sex nymphs awaits dead Muslims.

I don't think that Jesus cast demons into pigs.

I don't think death angels passed over Jewish homes with blood on their doorposts.

I don't think there is a Shiva who wants Hindus to worship his penis.

And yet it is inescapable that there is magic deeper than any religious miracle. The world we inhabit isn't what we think it is. It is an illusion of electricity, a fabrication of force posing as matter.

There is a Hiroshima in every pebble

But the pebble really isn't there,

Earth could be shrunk to pebble size, and smaller.

When I discuss this with practical-minded friends, they get the uneasy look people display in the presence of loonies. You may ask:

"Are you trying to say that God is E=MC2 ?''

I don't know. Maybe I am.

Despite the fact that I AM NOT

Just want to be loved.....

The Triple Helix-They actually ASKED me to talk about sex! Prosit!

2011-02-06T02:33:00.000-08:00

To be published the first week of March. (click here to get a Google Docs copy of the pdf, if you like)

The Next Decade of Sexual Science: Synergy from Advance

Kenneth Lipp, Ph.D., Cognitive Ethology

Darwin College

Sexual science will advance in tandem with revolutionary methods and discoveries in primatology, behavioral neuroscience, and emotion research; and methodological advances in sex research, including interviewing by talking computers, combining qualitative and quantitative methods and sexual diaries. Theory from the humanities using the metaphor of geography and borderland encounters is also reviewed. Finally, technologies such as fMRl present new opportunities for research, and the new reproductive technologies create important new questions to answer

Like any other science, sexual science will advance the most in the next decade if scientists learn from our neighbors--pay attention to advances in related disciplines. I present here some snapshots of interesting research outside sexual science that I hope will inspire researchers to pursue these ideas and connect them with their own work.

Primatology: Monogamous Primates

If one listens to the sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, one definitely gets the impression that humans are an adulterous, promiscuous lot and that we are this way because of an evolutionary heritage of promiscuity in all other species. These tales make for luscious, lusty reading, but they typically overlook exceptions to the patterns they claim. What follows is one of those exceptions.

Snowdon (2001) studies cotton-top tamarins small monkeys that are native to the forests of South America.

This species is interesting because they are socially monogamous that is, an adult male and female form a lifelong pair bond. They are upset when separated from the partner and engage in an explosion of sexual activity when reunited with the partner. They spend much time in close proximity to their partner and grooming the partner. Most sexual behavior is non-conceptive-- that is, it occurs at a time when the female is not ovulating. Mating with someone other than the partner is rare. Males participate fully in the care of infants and show an elevation in their levels of prolactin during their mate's gestation. I provide the example of the cotton-top tamarins not because I want to convince you that humans are inherently monogamous, but rather to stimulate critical thinking about overgeneralizations found in evolutionary theorizing, and to stress the need for more, and more careful, research on the sexual behavior of other species, particularly before we make sweeping generalizations to "human nature." In addition, we should note that primate research is one area where researchers can make direct observations of sexual behavior, something that has proven to be difficult if not impossible in human sex research. Having begun my study of biology exclusively as an anthropologist, now having spent some years researching macaques and presently engaged in prosimian study, I find primatology is a great discipline for interdisciplinary synergy with sexual science.

Behavioral Neuroscience: Impact of Behavior and Experience on Biology

A traditional model throughout the behavioral sciences has been that biology influences or even determines behavior. Some scientists, of course, are critical of this model and instead prefer the model that environment influences behavior. My focus is not on either of those models, but rather on a new one emerging from behavioural neuroscience in the last few years, and that is that behavior and experience influence biology, specifically neuroanatomy—we have affective neural plasticity.

Marler and her colleagues study social behavior in two species of mice (Peromyscas) the monogamous California mouse and the polygamous white-footed mouse native to Wisconsin. In the monogamous California mouse, males engage in care of their young and are more aggressive toward intruders than are white-footed male mice Bester-Meredith and Marler (2001) did a cross-fostering experiment with these two species. Half of the California mouse pups were raised by California mouse parents and half were raised by white-footed mouse parents. White-footed pups were similarly fostered. Male California mice raised by white-footed parents were significantly less aggressive than California mice raised by California parents.

Arginine vasopressin (AVP) is a neurotransmitter. It has been found, over several species, that AVP is associated with both aggressive behavior and parental behavior. Under normal rearing conditions, California mice, the more aggressive species, show more AVP-releasing neurons in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis than white-footed mice do (Bester-Meredith et al., 1999). And, to complete this picture to perfection, the California mice raised by white-footed parents had significantly fewer AVP-releasing neurons in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis than California mice raised by California parents. Essentially, then, the early parental-rearing environment influenced the biology-the very neurons-of the California mice. Social inter- actions influence biology. It is also worth noting that AVP is the neurotransmitter associated with testosterone. In this research, however, testosterone levels were not altered by cross fostering (Bester-Meredith & Marler, 2001).

This phenomenon-that social experience modifies biology-has been replicated with other species and with other social interactions as the influences on biology (e.g., dominance in golden hamsters; for a review of data with humans, see Cacioppo, Berntson, Sheridan, & McClintock, 2000; for a more general introduction to the history and promise of behavioral neuroscience, see Kandel & Squire, 2000).

What are the implications for sex research? We need to know what kinds of sexual experiences or other social experiences influence neuroanatomy and modify the levels of relevant neurotransmitters and hormones and, in turn, modify later sexual behavior. In addition, we should not be limited by old models that specify that biology influences or determines behavior. Rather, we should examine the reverse process.

Emotions

A cognitive revolution struck psychology beginning around 1970 and continues to the present. The cognitive revolution was a welcome antidote to the prevailing behaviorism of the time, which insisted on looking at behavior only-- never thoughts-and how reinforcements and punishments could modify it.

Cognitive models have been productive in sex research and therapy. Helen Singer Kaplan's Triphasic Model is one example; she added sexual desire to Masters and Johnsons' entirely physiological model of sexual response (Kaplan, 1979). A second example is Susan Walen and David Roth's (1987) cognitive model of the sexual response cycle, which goes miles beyond Masters and Johnson's purely physiological model. What these models have to say about sex, in brief, is that how you think about what's happening (cognition) is often a lot more important than what's happening (behavior). In turn, these models open up new phenomena to study in sex research. In the realm of therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy has become dominant in psychology, replacing simpler models of behavior therapy. This transformation has been applied in sex therapy, with cognitive-behavioral approaches replacing or becoming adjuncts to the behavioral exercises pioneered by Masters and Johnson (Masters & Johnson, 1970 Wincze & Carey, 1991).

Lost, however, in the cognitive revolution was emotion, and the l990s saw a vigorous uprising of emotion research ranging from neuroscience to cross-cultural approaches. The best theories in the next decade will incorporate both cognition and affect.

The loss of emotion during the cognitive revolution may have been particularly serious for sex research. Sex involves more than behavior; it involves thoughts, but it also evokes the most profound and intense emotions- love, anger, jealousy. Some of my own research has explored gender stereotypes of emotions and I offer it as an example of some of the possible research on emotions with the goal of stimulating your thoughts on how these approaches might be imported into sex research. With my colleague As by Plant we investigated gender stereotypes of emotions (Plant, Hyde, Keltner, & Devine, 2000). In a comprehensive list of 19 emotions, we found that most emotions are stereotyped as more characteristic of women, including distress, embarrassment, fear, guilt, happiness, love, sadness, and sympathy. A few emotions are gender neutral: amusement, disgust, jealousy. And only two emotions are consistently stereotyped as more characteristic of men: anger and pride. The implication of these stereotypes is enormous. Men do not receive much permission to express fear, sadness, or love.

Perhaps of even more concern, these stereotypes may lead people to misread or misinterpret another person's emotions. In an experiment reported in this same article, we showed participants standardized slides of people displaying a planned mixture of emotion, specifically a mixture of anger and sadness. When people saw this ambiguous mixture on a man, they interpreted it as anger, whereas when people saw it on a woman, they interpreted it as sadness. How we "read" the emotions of other people in our everyday interactions is profoundly influenced by the gender of the person whose emotions we are reading.

Now, can we import these and other techniques used to study emotions into studying emotion in relation to sexuality? For example, most research on prejudice against gays and lesbians has been based on cognitive theoretical framework (or no theoretical framework), reflecting the dominance of social cognition as an approach within social psychology

Yet if one interacts with a person afflicted with strong anti-gay prejudice, it is completely obvious that what is activated for this person is not only thoughts, but emotions as well. Can we begin to understand these emotions? Is it anger, or is it fear?

The advances I have reviewed so far have to do with theory and the findings of research. Yet advances in research come not only in the form of content, but also in the form of methods. Next I provide three examples of methodological advances that, I think, can very profitably be used in sex research. In fact, they are taken from recent sex research, so that I don't convey the message that all the advances are occurring outside sexology. Integration of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods Over the last decade, qualitative methods which have always been popular with anthropologists have surfaced increasingly in the work of sociologists and psychologists. At the same times an oppositional relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods has arisen. Proponents of qualitative methods decry the sterile unreality of numbers and proclaim that truth can be found only through qualitative methods, and quantitative researchers respond in kind. In my view, the most progress will be made by sex researchers who integrate the two methods.

Our discussion is bereft of a discourse of desire in talk about and research on female sexuality, particularly adolescent female sexuality.

In most discussions, adolescent girls seem only to engage in too-early intercourse, to suffer unwanted pregnancy and infection with chlamydia and herpes, and to be raped. Adolescent boys, in contrast, are erupting volcanoes of laval sexual desire. Do adolescent girls ever experience desire? If so, how do they experience it?

Tolman and Szalacha (1999) took on these questions by interviewing a sample of 30 girls between the ages of 15 and 19, half of them from an urban public high school and half from a suburban public high school. In one part of the interview, the girls told a story about an experience of sexual desire. The interview in itself was a radical act, because it asked girls to talk about topics that are generally regarded as unspeakable. The interviews were transcribed. Each narrative about desire was then coded using a technique called The Listening Guide, originated by Carol Gilligan and her colleagues (e.g., Brown et al. 1991). The notion is that as a girl tells a story, multiple layers or multiple voices emerge for example a voice of the self, an erotic voice, a voice of the body, and a voice of response to one's own desire. The coder or reader reads the transcript once focusing on one of the voices let's say the voice of the self-marking all instances of it and reaching a conclusion about what that voice is saying. She then reads the narrative again, focusing on a different voice- say the erotic voice and marks all instances of it. The erotic voice is the voice of desire.

These qualitative analyses can then be combined with quantitative analyses. For example, two thirds of the sample said they felt desire. The remainder said they did not experience desire or were confused about whether they did. Differences between the urban and suburban girls were analyzed quantitatively as well as qualitatively. The urban girls, who were working class or poor and the majority of whom were African American and Hispanic, spoke about the desire emanating from their bodies, which is in conflict with the voices of caution and self-control emanating from their minds, based on their knowledge of their real vulnerability to AIDS, pregnancy, and getting a bad reputation. Most of these girls made a conscious choice to sacrifice pleasure in order to protect themselves from danger.

The suburban girls, in contrast, spoke of sexual desire as sexual curiosity. Rather than worrying about their physical vulnerability, they worry about the discrepancy between their desire and the cultural messages about appropriate female sexuality that they had internalized. One suburban girl said, “I don't like to think of myself as feeling really sexual . . . I don’t like to think of myself as being like someone who needs to have their desires fulfilled . . . I mean I understand that it's wrong and that everybody has needs, but I just feel like self-conscious when I think about it, and I don't feel self-conscious when I say that we do these things, but I feel self-conscious about saying I need this kind of thing.”

Having conducted the qualitative analyses, the researchers designed quantitative analyses that would answer quantitative questions while still keeping the focus on sexual desire. Tolman and her colleagues found first that no girls talked about desire exclusively as pleasure, nor did any talk about desire exclusively as vulnerability. All girls talked about desire as a combination of pleasure and vulnerability. Statistical analyses, however showed that the urban girls were more likely to tell a narrative that emphasized vulnerability but the difference was not significant whereas suburban girls were significantly more likely than urban girls to produce a narrative that emphasized pleasure. Other statistical analyses compared girls who reported some form of sexual violation with those who reported no such violation. Logistic regression analysis showed that suburban girls who had not experienced sexual violation were the most likely to tell narratives that emphasized pleasure.

To summarize, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was crucial in discovering how adolescent girls think and talk about desire while also allowing for systematic tests for variations among girls.

Talking Computers

Sex research has been plagued with the methodological problems associated with the use of self-reports Direct observations of sexual behavior would have many methodological advantages, but it has generally not proven to be feasible in terms of human subjects approvals or recruitment of willing participants, and direct observations introduce a different set of methodological worries, particularly in regard to representative sampling of the general population. We must vigorously pursue methods to improve the quality of self-report data on sexuality.

The method of talking computers, especially for use with children, is proving to be a major advance. Children can listen to questions read to them through headphones, and respond using computer keys so that no one else knows their answers, and the questionnaire can be administered even to children who do not read well. Research indicates that marked increases in the accuracy of reporting may be achieved using this method. In one study of low-income children between the ages of 9 and 15, 50% of the 13-year- old boys said that they had "had sex" in a face-to-face interview, compared with 76% reporting that they had had sex when interviewed by computer (Romer et al., 1997). This method can, of course, be used with adults as well.

The "talking" aspect will be very useful for respondents with limited or no reading skills and for reports of highly sensitive behaviors.

Sexual Diaries

Perhaps the most daring innovation in obtaining more accurate self-reports is Coxon's work with sexual dianes, reported in his book Between the Sheets: Sexual Diaries and Gay Men 's Sex in the Era of AIDS (1996). This British project is called SIGMA, for Socio-sexual Investigations of Gay Men and AIDS. In one phase of the study, 262 gay men kept a daily sexual diary for a month. The result is a much richer, more contextualized account of gay men's sex.

Methodological benefits presumably include more accuracy in reporting (no distortions from memory), the context of sexual activity is revealed, and the time sequence of acts is recorded (e.g., fellatio before or after anal intercourse). As with any method, of course, there are disadvantages: The sample who agree to participate is selective (the response rate was only 28 No), and how can one be sure that the diary reports are entirely accurate? As for results, the interview portion of the study indicated that only about 40% of the men reported always using a condom for anal intercourse, justifying worries that safe sex is far from universal among gay men. The diaries revealed that the numbers are actually even lower. That is, among those who said in the interview that they always used a condom, the diaries revealed that they were not completely consistent over a month's time. It is important to note some additional benefits of this method that don't fall within the usual list of methodological brownie points. The method allowed the participants to be true participants they told their own stories in their own words, with only minimal constraints imposed by the researchers.

And, as Coxon says so vividly, the diaries allow the pleasure and playfulness of gay sex to be manifested.

Mappings

I must admit that I was more than stoked that I was asked to write about sex; it’s a subject I am not ashamed to say I enjoy. In preparation, I found a fascinating book by a University of Wisconsin professor of English, Susan Stanford Friedman, entitled Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998).

Friedman presents a new vision for feminist theory, which transcends the current trend toward identity politics and multiple feminisms: Black feminism, Chicana feminism, and so on. To speak of difference and identity, she uses the metaphor of geography, and with it the concept of borders. As she says, Borders have a way of insisting on separation at the same time as they acknowledge connection. Like bridges. Bridges signify the possibility of passing over. They also mark the fact of separation and the distance that has to be crossed. Borders between individuals, genders, groups, and nations erect categorical and material walls between identities. Identity is in fact unthinkable without some sort of imagined or literal boundary. But borders also specify the liminal space in between, the interstitial site of interaction, interconnection, and exchange. Borders enforce silence, miscommunication, misrecognition. They also invite transgression, dissolution, reconciliation, and mixing. (Friedman, 1998, p. 3) Friedman goes on to write about intercultural encounters in which people form a connection across difference.

We can see this in regard to ethnicity in feature films such as Driving Miss Daisy and Dances with Wolves (to step back), and contrast such with shows of relatively ethnically bland composition, like One Tree Hill.

Considerations of ethnicity and culture are at the frontier of sex research right now, so the notions of borders and intercultural encounters have direct relevance. Can meaningful intercultural encounters occur between Euro-American researchers and African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and American Indian sex researchers, and with researchers from other nations, to generate profound new understandings of sexuality? And what about interracial sex, that is, intimate sexual encounters between two persons of different racial/ethnic groups, in what must surely be the most powerful form of borderland contact.

It seems to me that this metaphor of geographical borders and intercultural encounters is a wonderful one for other issues in sexuality. Sexual identities are viewed, at least by Americans, as categorical for example, gay or straight, possibly with bi tacked on. The borders between these identities and people are not physical, but they are psychological and no less tangible. Thus we have miscommunication and misrecognition across those borders.

Can we dissolve those borders and encourage recognition?

And in research, can we traverse those borders-for example, can straights conduct excellent research on gays, or can collaborations between straight and gay researchers produce synergy that would be absent without this intercultural encounter? The borderlands are places of tensions, but at the same time they are capable of generating sizzling new energy that we must harness for sex research (for an example, see Nagel, 2000).

Technological Advances

Technological advances are occurring at dizzying speed these days. I can't begin to catalog all of the new technologies that are relevant to sexuality and to sex research, so I will highlight two that are especially signiE1cant in my view. FMRI, or Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, allows the researcher to scan soft tissues such as the brain in an alive, awake, behaving human. It is an unimaginable advance over old methods of dissection of the bran taken from a cadaver. Certainly the machines available today have their limitations. For example, they cannot give a very successful image in the center of the brain right now, and I want to be able to see what the hypothalamus is doing for sex. Just as fMRI can provide an image of the soft tissue of the brain and blood flow in various regions, it can provide an image of the soft tissue of the genitals and their blood flow; for example, during sexual arousal (Schultz, van Andel, Sabelis, & Mooyaart, 1999).

The new reproductive technologies represent another kind of technological advance, not in the technological methods for research but in the topics we must study. We must understand the sexual experiences of couples who are infertile and are desperately straining for a conception, first in the sexual way and then in the nonsexual way, with men masturbating and sowing their seed into plastic containers and women being stuck with needles to produce perfect ovulation. What does this do to the couple's sexual relationship, not to mention their individual sense of themselves as sexual beings?

It's been quite a ride primatology and monogamous primates, neuroscience research showing that behavior influences biology, emotions, integrating qualitative and quantitative methods, talking computers, sexual diaries, the humanities and geography as a metaphor for sexual divisions and encounters across borderlands, fMRIs, and new reproductive technologies.

In conclusion: I would say that we need more sex research. LOTS.

That is a trite conclusion, of course. But I hope that it has a very different meaning, not at all trite, in the context of the research I have reviewed. The need for sex research, in combination with sex education and sex therapy, is desperate, because sexual ignorance causes far too much harm in our society. And the possibilities for advances in sex research are vast and thrilling when we consider the synergy we can achieve with our neighbor disciplines.

REFERENCES

Bester-Meredith, J. K., & Marler, C. A. (2001). Vasopressin and aggression in cross-fostered California mice. (Peromyscus californicus) and white-footed mice (Peromyscus leucopus). Hormones and Behavior, 40(1), 51-64.

Bester-Meredith, J. K., Young, L. J., & Marler, C. A. (1999). Species differences in paternal behavior and aggression in Peromyscus and their associations with vasopression immunoreactivity and receptors.

Hormones and Behavior; 36, 25-38. Birkhead, T. (2000). Promiscuity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press. Brown, L., Debold, E., Gilligan, C., & Tappan, M. (1991). Reading narratives of conflict and choice for self and moral voice: A relational method. In W. Kurtines & J. Gewirtz (Eds.),

Handbook of moral behavior and development (pp. 25-61). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Cacioppo, J. T., Berntson, G. G., Sheridan, J. F., & McClintock, M. K. (2000). Multilevel integrative analyses of human behavior: Social neu- Manuscript accepted March 7, 2001

Big Fat Quotes "Consciousness"

2011-02-05T12:07:00.000-08:00

“Given ... an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces of which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis ... nothing would be uncertain and the future, the past, would be present to its eyes”

Laplace, 1814, Essai Philosophique

" Consciousness "

Most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler that it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve - - they require very complicated neural circuitry.

You are not, and cannot become, consciously aware of most of your brain's ongoing activities. The only things you become aware of are a few high level conclusions passed on by thousands and thousands of specialized mechanisms: some that are gathering sensory information from the world, others that are analyzing and evaluating that information, checking for inconsistencies, filling in the blanks, figuring out what it all means.

In figuring out how the mind works, your conscious experience of yourself and the world can suggest some valuable hypotheses. But these same intuitions can seriously mislead you as well. They can fool you into thinking that our neural circuitry is simpler that it really is.

Consider vision.

Your conscious experience tells you that seeing is simple: You open your eyes, light hits your retina, and -- voila! -- you see. It is effortless, automatic, reliable, fast, unconscious and requires no explicit instruction -- no one has to go to school to learn how to see. But this apparent simplicity is deceptive.

Your retina is a two-dimensional sheet of light sensitive cells covering the inside back of your eyeball. Figuring out what three-dimensional objects exist in the world based only on the light-dependent chemical reactions occurring in this two dimensional array of cells poses enormously complex problems --so complex, in fact, that no computer programmer has yet been able to create a robot that can see the way we do.

You see with your brain, not your eyes, and your brain contains a vast array of dedicated, special purpose circuits -- each set specialized for solving a different component of the problem.

You need all kinds of circuits just to see your mother walk, for example. You have circuits that are specialized for, of others-

(1)analyzing the shape of objects;

(2) detecting the presence of motion;

(3) detecting the direction of motion;

(4) judging distance;

(5) analyzing color;

(6) identifying an object as human;

(7) recognizing that the face you see is Mum's face, rather than someone else's.

Each individual circuit is shouting its information to higher level circuits, which check the "facts" generated by one circuit against the "facts" generated by the others, resolving contradictions.

STUDY BREAK

The Action Potential

What is a nerve impulse?

A nerve impulse, or an action potential, is a series of electrical responses that occur in the cell. With the appropriate stimulation, the voltage in the dendrite of the neuron will become somewhat less negative. This change in the membrane potential, called depolarization, will cause the voltage-gated sodium channels to open. Sodium ions will rush in, resulting in a rapid change in the charge.

At the peak of the action potential, that area of the voltage of the neuron is about 40 mV positive. As the voltage becomes positive, the sodium channels close, or inactivate, and the voltage-gated potassium channels open. These potassium channels let potassium ions rush out of the cell, causing the voltage to become negative again. The potassium channels remain open until the membrane potential becomes at least as negative as the resting potential. In many cases, the membrane potential becomes even more negative than the resting potential for a brief period; this is called hyperpolarization. An action potential typically lasts a few milliseconds.

When the sodium channels are opened, sodium ions rush in; once inside they cause nearby regions of the neuron to become depolarized by moving laterally through the axon. This, in turn, causes the opening of more voltage-gated sodium channels in those regions. Thus, the sodium channel activation moves in a wave-like fashion: the action potential is propagated down the length of the neuron, from its input source at the dendrites, to the cell body, and then down the axon to the synaptic terminals.

The sodium channels have a mechanism that avoids “back propagation” of the action potential, which would result in a confused signal. After opening, the sodium channels become inactivated as the potential becomes more positive, and they cannot open again until they are “reset” by hyperpolarization at the end of an action potential. This brief period of sodium channel inactivation, called a refractory period, prevents bidirectional propagation of the action potential, constraining it to go in only one direction.

OVER

As we were

Primary conclusions are handed over to even higher level circuits, which piece them all together and hand the final report to the President -- your consciousness. But all this "president" ever becomes aware of is the sight of Mom walking. Although each circuit is specialized for solving a delimited task, they work together to produce a coordinated functional outcome -- in this case, your conscious experience of the visual world. Seeing is effortless, automatic, reliable, and fast precisely because we have all this complicated, dedicated machinery.

Intuitions can deceive. Our conscious experience of an activity as "easy" or "natural"can lead us to grossly underestimate the complexity of the circuits that make it possible. Doing what comes "naturally", effortlessly, or automatically is rarely simple from an engineering point of view.

To find someone beautiful, to fall in love, to feel jealous -- all can seem as simple and automatic and effortless as opening your eyes and seeing. So simple that it seems like there is nothing much to explain. But these activities feel effortless only because there is a vast array of complex neural circuitry supporting and regulating them.

Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.

A basic engineering principle is that the same machine is rarely capable of solving two different problems equally well. We have both screw drivers and saws because each solves a particular problem better than the other. Just imagine trying to cut planks of wood with a screw driver or to turn screws with a saw.

Our body is divided into organs, like the heart and the liver, for exactly this reason. Pumping blood throughout the body and detoxifying poisons are two very different problems. Consequently, your body has a different machine for solving each of them. The design of the heart is specialized for pumping blood; the design of the liver is specialized for detoxifying poisons. Your liver can't function as a pump, and your heart isn't any good at detoxifying poisons.

For the same reason, our minds consist of a large number of circuits that are functionally specialized. For example, we have some neural circuits whose design is specialized for vision. All they do is help you see. The design of other neural circuits is specialized for hearing. All they do is detect changes in air pressure, and extract information from it. They do not participate in vision, vomiting, vanity, vengeance, or anything else. Still other neural circuits are specialized for sexual attraction -- i.e., they govern what you find sexually arousing, what you regard as beautiful, who you'd like to date, and so on.

We have all these specialized neural circuits because the same mechanism is rarely capable of solving different adaptive problems. For example, we all have neural circuitry designed to choose nutritious food on the basis of taste and smell -- circuitry that governs our food choice. But imagine a woman who used this same neural circuitry to choose a mate. She would choose a strange mate indeed (perhaps a huge chocolate bar?). To solve the adaptive problem of finding the right mate, our choices must be guided by qualitatively different standards than when choosing the right food, or the right habitat. Consequently, the brain must be composed of a large collection of circuits, with different circuits specialized for solving different problems.

You can think of each of these specialized circuits as a mini-computer that is dedicated to solving one problem. Such dedicated mini-computers are sometimes called modules. There is, then, a sense in which you can view the brain as a collection of dedicated mini-computers -- a collection of modules.

There must, of course, be circuits whose design is specialized for integrating the output of all these dedicated minicomputers to produce behavior. So, more precisely, one can view the brain as a collection of dedicated mini-computers whose operations are functionally integrated to produce behavior.

"Rational" algorithms: ones that implement formal methods for inductive and deductive reasoning, such as Bayes's rule or the propositional calculus (a formal logic). "General intelligence" – a hypothetical faculty composed of simple reasoning circuits that are few in number, content-independent, and general purpose -- was thought to be the engine that generates solutions to reasoning problems. The flexibility of human reasoning -- that is, our ability to solve many different kinds of problems – was thought to be evidence for the generality of the circuits that generate it.

However, an evolutionary perspective suggests otherwise.

Biological machines are calibrated to the environments in which they evolved, and they embody information about the stably recurring properties of these ancestral worlds. (E.g., human color constancy mechanisms are calibrated to natural changes in terrestrial illumination; as a result, grass looks green at both high noon and sunset, even though the spectral properties of the light it reflects have changed dramatically.) Rational algorithms do not, because they are content-independent.

Bayes's rule, an equation for computing the probability of a hypothesis given data, is also content-independent. It can be applied indiscriminately to medical diagnosis, card games, hunting success, or any other subject matter. It contains no domain-specific knowledge, so it cannot support inferences that would apply to mate choice, for example, but not to hunting.

(C'est le price de content-independence.)

Evolved problem-solvers, however, are equipped with "crib sheets": that is, they come to a problem already "knowing" a lot about it. For example, a newborn's brain has response systems that "expect" faces to be present in the environment: babies less than 10 minutes old turn their eyes and head in response to face-like patterns, but not to scrambled versions of the same pattern with identical spatial frequencies.

Infants make strong ontological assumptions about how the world works and what kinds of things it contains -- even at 2 1/2 months (the point at which they can see well enough to be tested). They assume, for example, that it will contain rigid objects that are continuous in space and time, and they have perfered ways of parsing the world into separate objects. Ignoring shape, color, and texture, they treat any surface that is cohesive, bounded, and moves as a unit as a single object.

I don't know

When one solid object appears to pass through another, these infants are surprised. Yet a system with no "privileged" hypotheses -- a truly "open-minded" system -- would be undisturbed by such displays. In watching objects interact, babies less than a year old distinguish causal events from non-causal ones that have similar spatio-temporal properties; they distinguish objects that move only when acted upon from ones that are capable of self-generated motion (the inanimate/animate distinction); they assume that the self-propelled movement of animate objects is caused by invisible internal states -- goals and intentions -- whose presence must be inferred, since internal states cannot be seen (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1988; 1994).

Toddlers have a well-developed "mind-reading" system, which uses eye direction and movement to infer what other people want, know, and believe (Baron-Cohen, 1995). (When this system is impaired, as in autism, the child cannot infer what others believe.) When an adult utters a word-like sound while pointing to a novel object, toddlers assume the word refers to the whole object, rather than one of its parts (Markman, 1989).

Without these privileged hypotheses -- about faces, objects, physical causality, other minds, word meanings, and so on -- a developing child could learn very little about its environment. For example, a child with autism who has a normal IQ and intact perceptual systems is, nevertheless, unable to make simple inferences about mental states (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Children with Williams syndrome are profoundly retarded and have difficulty learning even very simple spatial tasks, yet they are good at inferring other people's mental states. Some of their reasoning mechanisms are damaged, but their mind-reading system is intact.

Different problems require different crib sheets. For example, knowledge about intentions, beliefs, and desires, which allows one to infer the behavior of persons, will be misleading if applied to inanimate objects. Two machines are better than one when the crib sheet that helps solve problems in one domain is misleading in another. This suggests that many evolved computational mechanisms will be domain-specific: they will be activated in some domains but not others.

Some of these will embody rational methods, but others will have special purpose inference procedures that respond not to logical form but to content-types - - procedures that work well within the stable ecological structure of a particular domain, even though they might lead to false or contradictory inferences if they were activated outside of that domain.

The more crib sheets a system has, the more problems it can solve. A brain equipped with a multiplicity of specialized inference engines will be able to generate sophisticated behavior that is sensitively tuned to its environment. In this view, the flexibility and power often attributed to content-independent algorithms is

illusory. All else equal, a content-rich system will be able to infer more than a content-poor one. Machines limited to executing Bayes's rule, modus ponens, and other "rational" procedures derived from mathematics or logic are computationally weak compared to the system outlined above (Tooby and Cosmides, 1992).

The theories of rationality they embody are "environment-free" -- they were designed to produce valid inferences in all domains. They can be applied to a wide variety of domains, however, only because they lack any information that would be helpful in one domain but not in another. Having no crib sheets, there is little they can deduce about a domain; having no privileged hypotheses, there is little they can induce before their operation is hijacked by combinatorial explosion. The difference between domain-specific methods and domain-independent ones is akin to the difference between experts and novices: experts can solve problems faster and more efficiently than novices because they already know a lot about the problem domain.

William James's view of the mind, which was ignored for much of the 20th century, is being vindicated today.

There is now evidence for the existence of circuits that are specialized for reasoning about objects, physical causality, number, the biological world, the beliefs and motivations of other individuals, and social interactions.

It is now known that the learning mechanisms that govern the acquisition of language are different from those that govern the acquisition of food aversions, and both of these are different from the learning mechanisms that govern the acquisition of snake phobias (Garcia, 1990; Pinker, 1994; Mineka & Cooke, 1985, Examples abound.)

"Instincts" are often thought of as the polar opposite of "reasoning" and "learning". Homo sapiens are thought of as the "rational animal", a species whose instincts, obviated by culture, were erased by evolution.

But waitaminnit ......

(1) they are complexly structured for solving a specific type of adaptive problem,

(2) they reliably develop in all normal human beings,

(3) they develop without any conscious effort and in the absence of any formal instruction,

(4) they are applied without any conscious awareness of their underlying logic, and

(5) they are distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.

Freud came to the conclusion that humans have not one but two primary instincts. He called the life-favoring instinct Eros, one of the Greek words from Greece.

Sigmund Freud claimed each human had a death instinct, called Thanatos, the Greek word for "death." This Greek relief sculpture shows Thanatos positioned between Aphrodite and Persephone, who are thought to be competing for the soul of Adonis.

One can think of these special purpose computational systems as reasoning instincts and learning instincts. They make certain kinds of inferences just as easy, effortless, and "natural" to us as humans, as spinning a web is to a spider or dead-reckoning is to a desert ant.